The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  “Yes. That is precisely what I’m saying.”

  “Save yourself.”

  “You must save me,” I said, more harshly than I intended.

  “I’ve got a pile of paperwork like you wouldn’t believe,” the voice said.

  “But if you’re so busy, why are you taking the time to talk to me right now? Why don’t you just wave your hand and make some fucking water?”

  “Don’t make me put the phone down!” the voice said.

  “PLEASE!”

  There was silence and a dial tone, and that’s when I first saw the puddle. It appeared through a clearing in the trees, a lake of muck three feet in diameter. This would be my water source. The mud was the consistency of a very runny milkshake. There was no way my filter could handle it without breaking down, so why bother? Then it struck me. Allison had told me her brother once drank standing mud from a hole in the ground during a survival training class, and though it was foul, he lived. I reached in the puddle and scooped a handful of the goo into my mouth. The taste was chalky-sour, with notes of beagle’s breath, terracotta, and soiled diapers. It brought tears to my eyes. There was no way I could drink the mud, not to save my life. It was time to try the water filter.

  I pulled out my new pocket filter, a different brand than the ones that let me down. It came highly recommended by the Gingerbread Man and was rumored to be unbreakable, a warhorse in the desert. Now it was my last hope. I scooped a trench in the mud hole with a piece of bark and let the water press up from the ground. I waited for some of the brackish crud to recede, and then I inserted the intake tube. “This will not work,” I thought. After two powerful squirts of water, the filter seized up as I predicted. I took off my brand-new RESPECT MOTHER EARTH T-shirt with howling wolves and chirping eagles on it. I unscrewed the filter, took out the filth-frosted cylinder, and swabbed it clean with the T-shirt. I pumped. The Katadyn yielded a few strong squirts and clogged once more. I repeated the process. Swab. Pump. Clog. Mosquitoes feathered my arms, but now I didn’t care. Two hours later, the filter was still pumping away, filling my bottles bit by bit, refusing to break down. “Saved,” I said. “Thank you. Thanks for this!” to myself, the filter, and whomever else was listening.

  And since no one was there to tell me otherwise, I took that mud-soaked shirt and put it on me, wearing it until the mud dried. Laden with fresh water, I hauled myself up Spitler Mountain, and marched into a sunset over Idyllwild. I let my water filter sit at a place of honor on the boulder where I ate my dinner. Backlit climbers hung from the rocks. I watched from above, and set my tent on the steep drop. Bats wheeled. Somewhere north, through an orange haze, the end of California was waiting for me. The Devil’s Slide Trail took me up the San Jacinto Mountains to an intersection with the white fir–lined Fuller Ride Trail, which made a staggering number of switchbacks down to San Gorgonio Pass.

  With reluctance I took the first steps down from the high country, for the San Jacinto range had been my haven from the heat. To the east and far below lay land so desolate that movie companies used the landscape to duplicate the Sahara in early silent pictures. The path plunged downhill, beneath a bridge and past concrete pinions under Interstate 10, which crossed California from east to west. An abandoned condo complex lay in ruins. Eighty miles to the finish line. I crossed close to Palm Desert and the sun-white jaw of some animal, white to match the stones. Up I went, past an electricity farm, and fat rocks stacked in a staircase. A dirt road bumped along a brook. The water, when I dipped my hands in, was warm enough to brew tea. The heat hit me hard then. I had to rest. Once I found a shade tree near the creek, I could barely move. The hot air took my breath away. Sometimes branches of leafless trees pulsed red and black like retinal flashes. I worked up enough energy to take a picture of myself right then. I snapped it right at the time when a wave of exhaustion hit me so hard that I came close to blacking out. I can’t say why I took the picture. Maybe I just wanted to remember exactly what it looked like at the moment when the trees started flashing in my eyes. Puffy face. Empty expression. Survival hat mushed into my hair. A pickup approached on the rough road. A trailer swayed behind it. I sank hard against a rock and propped my pack against a tree. Two cowboys rode side by side in the cab.

  “Nothing’s supposed to move out here,” one said. “Don’t you know it’s a hundred degrees out?”

  I could barely respond.

  “Hey,” one of the men said. “I got a mad bull inside this trailer, his name is Tyler, and he’s pissed off at me ’cause I’ve been chasing him around all day. I’m going to let Tyler out right where you’re standing. I’d appreciate it if you hiked on ’cause he won’t like it if he sees you.”

  Before I knew it, it was happening. The cowboy was out of the truck. He unlocked the trailer. Tyler trundled out, balls jangling. He was coming for me with eyes so empty they might as well have been floating in the stewpot already. He was only twenty-odd feet away from me, but I didn’t get out of his way. The sun was overhead now, and it hung me up; impossible to move. The heat hung him up, too. Beyond caring, the bull wobbled past me without so much as a glance. He lowered his anvil head, walked to the warm stream, and drank. No rest for a bull. The sun dried the shade right out from under him.

  It had been a week and a half now. Thirty miles to go, and I’d eaten my food down, except for the crumbs in a Planter’s bag. I was running on water alone. Deep in the San Bernardinos, day-trippers camped near me. One of them hacked down a sapling with an axe right there as I watched. I asked one of them for a bit of water, seeing that he had two huge containers of Sparkletts. “No,” was all he said. Keep moving.

  On the last day, a long valley appeared. Two fish struggled in an isolated tributary of Deep Creek, in water the color of an untended terrarium. A third fish floated belly-up in murk. Cracks filigreed the dried mud near the tributary. Their outlet was gone. Trapped. None of those fish was going to make it out of there alive. None of my business, though. I kept on moving. The creek rushed far below me, then closer, with a few nudist guys with SlimJim phalluses and sunburned knees taking cat baths. I wanted to bathe, too, but heeded the guidebook’s warnings about Deep Creek amoebic encephalitis, a condition that can crawl up your nose underwater and turn your brain into head cheese. Walk on. The creeks dripped beneath me. Lower down in the valley, I tried to ignore the spray-painted graffiti on the rocks: CARLOS LOVES LINDA. CRIPS FOUR EVER. KIL MOTHER FOKKERS. Ahead were a reservoir’s sloping walls, resembling the mount of a stolen pyramid. The berm overlooked an expanse of sand so fine that it covered me when I spread my tent on it. A stream flowed past, full of reeds and dark brush. Beavers left V-shaped wakes in fading lines. They pushed offshore with paddle tails and nosed their snouts above the water. The sky grew dark. All night beavers cannonballed off the banks. Rain fell in streaks. The sky turned the color of old canvas. Clouds threw forks of light that shone on the beavers for fractions of a second. The air turned cold as the night winds picked up.

  I woke to a flooded tent but did not care. I leaned my head out and let the water wash me down. At that moment, less than two miles from the end of my California trail, my home state belonged to me for the first time. Just ahead in the mist to the north lay the San Gabriel Mountains, the mountains I’d crossed already. The blue-ridge outline was as sharp and clear as a paper cutout. As I thought back on eating a cactus, the good times and rages with Allison, the tortured stories of Doctor John, the lipstick sunsets, arthropods, and all those bottles of Tylenol, I knew that every one of those memories had led straight up to this. At that moment, it all seemed well worth the effort. “Now the whole state lies trussed up and salted like a pig in a freezer,” I said to my journal.

  Allison was not there to see this happen. At my moment of triumph and self-realization, she was still stuck in the Midwest doing boring things, trying to find work, experiencing drudgery. In her most recent letter to me, which I carried in my backpack, she told me that she’d scraped up her car because she “spazzed out
trying to get it into the garage because my dad had set up this barricade of toxic chemical containers, so now part of the bumpers came loose in the front. He knows this wastrel drunk who has a body shop in a bad part of town who’s going to fix it for cheap.”

  Her absence was the only hole in that moment. Standing next to a barbed-wire fence, I knew there was no more California left to walk.

  This she would have liked.

  She should have been there to see it all.

  Chapter 31

  The Dark Divide

  Acloud, its belly full of thunder, followed me down the Devil’s Peak Trail. I had been alone on the trail in southern Oregon for two weeks, starting my push toward the Canadian border, and my mind was making figments, fooling me with visions and shapes in the underbrush and through openings in the trees. For the past few nights, something, perhaps a spirit, had been calling out of the black. I’d heard a cry in the woods, familiar but not quite human. It’s strange how fast you can get onto the Pacific Crest Trail and lose yourself in its world. After finishing up California, I’d taken a long bus ride from Southern California to Ashland, Oregon, begged a hitchhike ride to the trail head, and set out north on red volcanic soil, past the upraised fist of Pilot Rock. And here I was on the Devil’s Peak in Bigfoot country, trying to outrun a cloud, the dark shape above me holding steady, letting loose. Thunder made the foothills tremble. Out in the South Cascades, rainstorms can sneak up on you. How many times did I see shapes in the periphery, and nameless things move through the woods at night?

  I started to wonder if the spirits were following me here, and whether all this solitude was turning my brain into pudding. With no one to talk to, I talked to whatever was on hand. Lodgepole pines. Shelf mushrooms. Rock formations. Every once in a while I’d pass a small herd of hikers out walking for the weekend, but for the most part it was me, alone, my boots sinking in five inches of pumice ash in the Oregon Desert, fending off the Clark’s nutcrackers who begged for food, and staring down at the mirror-flat expanse of Crater Lake with Wizard Island rising like a skullcap from the center of it. The lake lay in the deep hole that was once Mount Mazama, one of Oregon’s tallest mountains until a volcanic explosion caused it to collapse and fold into itself. Tourists, when I saw them, frightened me. One of them, near Crater Lake, wanted to take my picture, perhaps because I looked like a common ancestor, bent over and hollow-eyed, at a loss for words. It’s not that I was unhappy there or even lonely. On the contrary, most days were comfortable, the tread soft, the hills forgiving, the nights dreamless and short. The local peepers would lull me to sleep with their soft cries: “Tree-ark! Scree, scree, scree!” Sometimes these hidden beings would peep too loudly for my liking, and I’d scream for them to “shut up, please,” and they would do as I told them, zipping their little mouths—or mandibles, or whatever they had. Out in the Cascades, these unseen frogs and insects were the majority, and yet they respected me. I had no real complaints. It’s just that I wanted nothing to do with other humans anymore.

  The scenery was so odd, I wondered if I was seeing things, making it all up. In Oregon I crossed creeks full of mineral sediments that stained the water white, making it look like lowfat milk. I climbed Mount Thielsen, “the lightning rod of the Cascades,” zapped so many times that electrical charges had fused the rock crystals on its summit, forming a murky glass. I was starting to camp in places that were peculiar, even for me. On top of bushes, for example. I’d hoist the tent atop some piece of shrubbery and lie inside it, looking down at the world six feet below me. And there was no one there to tell me this was wrong. Even my gait was protosimian now, a lurch from side to side because of my awkward load. For the past couple of weeks, I’d been plopping sticks, rocks, and other heavy things into my backpack. Feeling bereft, missing my girlfriend, I decided to pack out representative samples of each trail section, including leaves and pebbles. I did this so I could stick these sundry objects into a box at the next trail junction and send them back home to Allison, so she could assemble her own miniature version of the trail. Maybe that’s not normal. In fact, Allison was starting to worry about my sanity. In her most recent missives—which I also carried around with me in my backpack—she told me to take a few deep breaths and center myself, and to fight all irrational impulses.

  Dear Fishbody,

  I talked to you a couple of days ago, it sounded like you were losing your marbles a bit out there. I got sort of worried. I know it must be so hard to cope with being alone with your thoughts all the time, especially when so many confusing things are going on in our lives. But Fishbody, you are strong. Here’s my perspective on it. Because I can’t do it, the trail has become that much more precious to me. I really caution you not to take this experience for granted. The things you are worrying about cannot be resolved until this fall when you get off the trail. Then you can start exploring your career options and your feelings about me. Set them aside until you can actually do something about them. Right now your job is just to stomp your way to Canada. That’s the top priority. Along the way you can soak up funny anecdotes and details. You are well on your way to bagging Oregon!

  But her warnings could not stop me from crafting dolls from yellow-green moss that hung from hemlock branches or smearing huckleberry juice all over my hair, body, and T-shirt, for reasons that did not make sense even to me. She could not stop me from inventing imaginary hiking partners, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg. Up in the Cascades, they’ve got a strange little mountain called Three Fingered Jack. It looks like an upright glove with some digits snipped off. The spires are so slender and delicate that climbers who’ve stood on the top say they shivered underfoot. That afternoon I tried to engage Three Fingered Jack in a long conversation about a friend of mine who had poor dating judgment. I don’t know why this subject entered my head, but I found myself shouting into the nothingness. “Why does she have to be such a slut?” I screamed. “Why is she so stupid? Why doesn’t she realize these dirtbags are just using her? Why, why, why?”

  I paused for a while, giving my throat a rest, and when I turned around, some guy was just sitting there on a rock smirking and listening. He held a thick leash fastened to the neck of a fat dog. The fat dog was impatient, wanting to continue the walk, but the guy was waiting for me to say more, as if this were some Off-Off-Broadway show and the intermission was over. “Go on,” he said. “This is cool.”

  “I didn’t know anyone was listening to me!” I said.

  I ran into the forest alone and embarrassed. Socialization is a series of corrective electric shocks administered for bad behavior. You learn from experience not to babble to yourself or say idiotic things that will bring cocktail parties to a standstill or make your girlfriend bar the door to her bedroom. In the woods, all corrections cease, and peculiar tendencies grow thick as kudzu. On the rare occasions when I saw people out on the trail, they hurried out of my way, as if I exuded a psychic smell they didn’t like. It wasn’t that I was lonely, exactly. Most of the time, the walking and the views filled me up just as much as human companionship. But the more I hiked, the more adrift I felt. Once, I was standing murmuring on a hillside affording marvelous views of Mount Jefferson and other crags while taking a lengthy and seemingly solitary piss against a rock. A backpacker came up out of nowhere and said hi very loudly. The shock of his voice made me pull up my shorts while I was in the midst of peeing, leaving an enormous wet blotch on them while he started talking to me, on and on, as if nothing amiss had taken place. That day, I ran into several other southbound hikers, who talked to me so nonchalantly, as if they didn’t notice the enormous Africa-shaped stain on the crotch of my shorts, but I knew they were spreading rumors about me. I knew they were telling all passersby about the Crotch-stained Man heading north. And so I finally decided to hide from other hikers altogether. I would sit for hours by the sides of creeks watching the spasmodic motions of river otters. Sometimes I’d search the bushes for a river’s tributary and find it pulsing from the ground, then imagine
swimming against the current until I reached the center of the earth. I pushed north. South Sister sagged with snow. Lava rocks rose in black tunnels, looking hot and moist in the sun, like fresh horseshit. It was as if the Belknap Crater, the cinder cone to the north, had disgorged this mess last week, not three millennia ago. I saw no vegetation on the lava field, only the occasional spider, laden with eggs, rappelling down a lava knob.

  And all the while, I remembered Allison’s fears for my sanity, and remembered that in our phone conversations, I simply did not know what to say to her, that my mind was lost in the wilds of Oregon, that it was impossible to tell her about my experiences in a way that she could understand. And so she came to the conclusion that I was unglued, detaching myself from my life before and after the trail. On I hiked, toward Santiam Pass and its own history of detachment. It was originally named Hogg Pass, for Colonel E. T. Hogg, who tried to turn the small Oregon town of Newport into a thriving metropolis. He claimed he would do so by running a railway line over the Cascades and across North America. The trouble was Mr. Hogg couldn’t stir up investor interest, so he tried to do the thing himself, hiring cheap Chinese labor to build eleven miles of track across the Cascade summit. When the task was over, Hogg told would-be investors that his railroad line had finally breached the Cascades. It was no lie—but what Hogg failed to tell them was that the line wasn’t connected to anything on either side. He never built the rest of his railway. Sharp-eyed walkers can still see those eleven miles of rails to nowhere rotting in the hills.

  That, sometimes, is what my own trail felt like, a phantom rail, bound to strand me. Imagine feeling the most loneliness and most rapture you have ever felt, but the feelings are inseparable. It’s not that there was anything unpleasant about being in the Northwest alone. Quite the contrary. In truth, I will always remember those days as some of the happiest and most relaxing of my life. All the while I kept Allison’s letters in my pocket, each one of them a reminder. Sometimes she urged me to be as present as I could be on the trail. “You must…consecrate yourself wholly to each day as though a fire were raging in your hair,” she wrote, quoting the “Zen Master Dashimaru.” But then, in the same letter, she urged me to move to a big city with her.