The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  Pick a spot on the map where you could be happy and stay there (with me) until you make the dream job work out, even if it takes doing a few shitty, useless jobs first. What do you say? Otherwise, it’s like saying my job or career is the single most important thing in my life and I’ll sacrifice everything for it. That’s not for me. I think Boston or near there sounds good. With Boston or New York we could both have a lot of job or school options. I know you’re not supposed to think about this stuff yet but we’re going to have to talk about these things.

  I liked the fact that she wanted to think about location more than a dream job. And yet I could not bear the thought of a job. In the woods, it occurred to me for the first time that Allison was entering into settling-down mode, and that marriage and children were looming and inevitable. To my surprise, I realized that this thought did not appeal to me. I wasn’t ready to follow her to a nesting place. In fact, the more I walked alone into the woods, the more I became curious about screwing around, literally and figuratively. As much as I loved her, I couldn’t face the fact that my wild times were going to end. The closer I came to Canada, the more I longed for callow promiscuity.

  My eye had started to wander a bit in the past year; during my break from the trail in central California, I’d flirted with attractive baristas and flaky female substitute teachers. I found myself drawn to women who were the anti-Allison. If Allison was forthright, curvy, and ambitious and was willing to eat any kind of food, then I longed for independently wealthy hippie girls with food allergies. If she represented stability, then I wanted someone unreliable, a woman who would get me into trouble. I loved Allison, but at the same time I sometimes wondered what it would be like to be “free,” whatever that meant.

  When at last I reached Mount Hood, robed in glaciers and belching sulfur, I had been walking through Oregon for almost a month. Sometimes I would walk with loose, disorganized bands of walkers, usually a group out doing a small chunk of trail. In one of these humble collectives, I walked down the Columbia River Gorge on the Eagle Creek Trail, waterfalls smashing off the side, the trail routing me through a dark tunnel behind a cataract, alongside a drop so sheer I grabbed hold of wet rusty chains to keep from falling. I stomped to the town of Cascade Locks, the lowest point of the trail, near sea level, and marched across the Bridge of the Gods, once a land bridge, now a steel span across the Columbia River, which rushed beneath my boots at eighty-eight million gallons an hour. From there I plunged ever deeper into the Cascades of southern Washington. Though I would like to rhapsodize about them, they hid themselves in fog, except for the broken remnants of Mount St. Helens, to the west, an obscene-looking thing, like a disembodied chicken claw. For the most part when I think of the Cascades, I think of things that I didn’t have to strain my eyes to see: horny toads, hemlock forests, buttes, lightning fires, sumps, ponds, fishermen on piers on backcountry lakes with gut buckets and cans of cheese bait, the watery flavor of a salmon berry, Clark’s nutcrackers grabbing Doritos from my hand, the puzzle-piece bark of a ponderosa pine, and the way brown mushrooms cupped rainwater like chalices. I think of elk, big as draught horses, flattening the bear grass in their rush up a canyon wall. One early evening, I sat in the shade of a madrone, behind a rhododendron stalk, and watched a pine marten slink across the trail. Mount Rainier rose up shining. I scaled the Goat Rocks, all that remained of another wrecked mountain, once as glorious as Mount Hood. There I watched white-bearded mountain goats a hundred feet away on talus blocks above the tree line. Something startled the goats. They turned and ran up an eighty-degree wall. Even the kids charged up it. I did not know that mountain goats have suction cups for feet, or that they make use of tiny toeholds in the rock. It looked to me like they were floating up that cliff face. They slipped one by one through a crack in the mountain.

  I expected to walk the rest of the trail alone. Certainly, I never expected to run into any through-hikers who had started that year down in Mexico, more than two thousand miles to the south. I’d given myself too much of a head start, in Ashland, Oregon, for that to happen. But it happened one day while I slumped over my afternoon pancakes in the Summit House Restaurant in White Pass, a don’t-blink-and-you’ll-still-miss-it outpost with a ski resort and highway breaching the Cascades at a low notch. I was snarfing the last flapjack when the two of them walked in. The man was all bones. The woman was hardier, with sleek muscles on her legs. Uphill Bill of Hoover, Alabama, was six foot three and weighed just 140 pounds. He had high cheekbones and a precise military politeness from seven years in the U.S. Army. One could guess he was handsome before the trail wrung the fat from his frame, but long walks make hikers look old and sickly. He was twenty-eight, but the trail had aged him. He looked twenty-eight in dog years. His companion, Jayne, from Houston, Alabama, had the kind of beauty that bug bites, wind burn, and sweat lines could not diminish. Her face was calm, with high cheekbones. Jayne was thirty-three, five foot four, with a splotchy tan. In her pack, she carried a tarp instead of a tent. Her only indulgence was a battered hound-dog plush toy, its head sticking out the back of her pack. You could tell these two were through-hikers. Veins traced their temples. They had the sort of leg muscle tone that made you shudder with vicarious pain.

  I invited them to sit down beside me. They ordered endless piles of food. The way they ate was unbelievable, portions going down the hatch without a pause: spaghetti platters with fist-sized meatballs on top, French dip sandwiches dripping with au jus, two pieces of bumbleberry pie à la mode, all sloshed down with enough ice water to rinse the dirt off a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler. When at last they were done, they told me that the next section would have striking beauty but also a dreaded “clearcut zone,” forty miles of stumps from logging operations that had left hillsides bare. This ugly stuff was under the nose of Mount Rainier, king of the Cascade peaks. Knowing this section would be hideous made me want to race through it. That’s why it was hard to resist when Jayne asked me if I wanted to join up. They were going to clear a hundred miles in four days—twenty-five miles a day, compared to my sorry sixteeners.

  “All you’ve got to do, to stay with us, is get up really early and go to sleep really late, and you’ve got it down,” Jayne said. “Your butt is gonna hurt, but it’s just pain.”

  This was what I’d always wanted—hiking with actual Jardi-Nazis. I’d teamed up with Wolf in the High Sierra, but back then, with my hefty pack weight, it wasn’t a fair fight. Now I was in much better shape. Still, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. “Don’t you wear yourself out at that pace?” I said.

  Jayne laughed. “Naw. You’ll love it. We’ll get you up to Canada before you know it.”

  We rested, and lit out the very next day. The path crossed a parking area that gave way to meadows, then ponds, mucky furrows and hills that Bill ran up. In the William O. Douglas Wilderness, we reached a plateau containing ink-dark ponds, each one of them a logical rest stop, but Bill kept going. The path vanished, at times, beneath pink and white bedspreads of mountain heather and huckleberry bushes. There was no catching Bill unless I ran.

  His stamina startled me, though the PCT tends to attract this variety of athlete, who performs great feats of endurance with no audience. Another that comes to mind is the legendary Bob Holtel, who literally ran the PCT in the 1980s, throwing down the near-equivalent of a marathon every damned day for months at a time. Somehow I managed to keep pace with Bill long enough to hear some of his story. He led a tank platoon during an Operation Desert Storm ground strike in the Persian Gulf but refused to elaborate. He took part in the U.S. Army’s prestigious Ranger training program, an initiation involving sleep deprivation, loneliness, and humping through mud. Bill was holding up just fine until his knee gave out on him one day and forced him to quit the program. It reminded me of what had happened to Allison. Bill insisted the memory didn’t bother him all that much anymore. “Really, it’s just one of life’s monkey wrenches,” he said. “You can never tell who will fail or succeed, in Ranger t
raining or anything else, even a trail. Sometimes the people you least expect to make it are the ones who finish up. On the Appalachian Trail, my first day, I was with this guy who was overweight and on his last cigarette. We were going uphill, and he had a really hard time of it. He said, ‘God, I think I just shat myself.’ He had to stop and change his underwear. I thought, ‘Oh, no, this guy’s never going to do it. It’s over for him.’ A few months later, I ran into him. He was hiking southbound, I was hiking north, he was doing great, looking great. You never know.”

  Still, I had never seen someone walk quite so relentlessly as Bill. I wondered if the Ranger experience ever weighed on or prodded him, and if he ever rubbed the memory like a charm bracelet. After a while, he changed the subject, talking in vivid detail about the suicides of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, analyzing the flaws of the Anzio beachhead battle in World War II, and trying to convince me that amphibious assaults are a great tactical maneuver in contemporary warfare. “After all, you can’t drop a lot of heavy equipment with parachutes,” he explained.

  After a while, I had to fall back with Jayne, which was somewhat easier than hiking with Bill. She had no trail name that ever stuck, but as we marched toward Canada, I decided to give her one, Wormwoman Jayne, based on a story she told me about her early days on the trail with Bill. One day, while Bill was watching, she drained the contents of a water bottle even though she saw a black worm floating three inches from the top. “Yeah, I saw the worm,” she said. “But I figured I’d drunk half the water anyhow. You should have seen Bill, all retchin’ and gaggin’ when he saw me drink that water. Bill’s tough but he’s real sensitive. I tell him these John Steinbeck stories, the really sad ones, and he says they make him want to jump off a cliff and kill himself.” She could spook him, too. She once told him, in camp, in a grove of cedars at midnight, that if you plant a cedar and it grows tall enough to shade your grave, you’ll die.

  The two of them met on the trail in Southern California and had been together ever since. It crossed my mind that they would have made a cute couple. But apparently they were not, in the romantic sense of the word. True, Bill sometimes called her his lovely lady, and she’d call him William in the quasi-parental way people sometimes use to greet lovers. But there was no sign of that itchy codependency you get from being boyfriend/girlfriend on a trail together, mingled with that look of dopey expectation of shacking up when the day was through. They were most definitely platonic. They had separate tents. They also had a clear understanding; Bill would rush ahead, sometimes all day, but he always made sure Jayne knew just where he was, leaving her notes at intersections. Still I wondered if one-sided crushes ever sprang up on the trail. Jayne, after all, was quite pretty. If there was no Bill here, and no Allison at home, I would have been quite smitten with her. The trail itself demands the release of infatuation, if not outright lust. But for Bill and Jayne, the walk itself was the only context for togetherness. They had known only sweat and adversity. Strange to think the trail can almost pull one couple apart, and almost put another one together.

  Every idyll has to end. In short order, the three of us entered Stump Land National Forest, our name for the forty miles of bald-pated hills, the dirt roads winding up them, and, in the air, the dust, the smell of fresh timber, the tinny screech of chainsaws, and the rumble of Caterpillar earthmovers. Huckleberries, a sun-loving plant, grew in sweet profusion. Most hikers despise this area, and in their diaries write tearful journal entries about the pillage of Gaiea. But for me, this was a necessary display of reality. Walking through this ripped-down forest reminded me that the PCT is a temporary refuge at best. Like all retreats, it is not permanent. Mining claims, logging, home building, and ski area expansion intrude on the Washington PCT every year. Though a healthy chunk of the trail is public land, the private parts are open to developers’ whims. Besides, this land, so painful to the eye, was hurting my body, too; all the jarring ups and downs had left me with shin splints so savage I had to gulp Jayne’s Motrin to keep up with them.

  “It’s just pain,” Jayne said. “Pain isn’t real,” but it was clear that the shin splints, or “sheen splee-ints,” as Jayne called them, were getting worse. My pace kept dragging.

  I didn’t want to burden Bill and Jayne anymore. We spent our last night together at Lizard Lake, black with silt and arguably the ugliest water body on the trail, with strewn-about chunks of wrecked cars and dirt as fine as flour. The dust didn’t stop me from dropping my gear on the ground in exhaustion, releasing a cloud that rose to blacken my face, blow grit into my hair, and baste my legs in dark powder. I transformed before Jayne’s eyes into the Pigpen of the Pacific Crest Trail. She saw me and laughed. “Look at you, you’ve got dirt all over you. You look so forlorn!” she said. “In fact, you’re the filthiest hiker I’ve ever seen.” When she said this, I got self-conscious and tried to rub the dirt off, but that just spread it around.

  She asked if I had a trail name.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Clark. As in ‘Lois and Clark Expedition.’”

  “Oh yeah?” Jayne said. “Well, it’s time for a new name. From now on, you’re Dirty Dan.”

  I said good-bye to Uphill Bill and Jayne. I would miss them, but it felt right to be on my own again. Still, I was grateful for the new moniker. “Dirty Dan” sounded savage and independent, like a soap-shunning privateer. With a new attitude, and a new identity, I headed up the trail through the North Cascades, so covered in grainy fog that I can’t begin to describe them. I emerged, unwashed, in Stevens Pass, and hitched to the town of Skykomish, where I camped Vietcong-style in a clutch of trees on a highway divider. I haunted the town for a couple of days, bought a nickel’s worth of unleaded gas for my stove at the only filling station in town, and drank cold Rainier ales with the people at the bar in the old Skykomish Hotel, built in 1904. It was raining when I got back to camp. Big-rig headlights strafed the tent, and there was nothing for supper but Cadbury White Chocolate Fingers and a sack of Spud Delites. “This here is the crazy life,” I thought to myself between oily bites of fried potato. It had taken me this long to live every moment of the trail, to eliminate all distractions and just be there. In the course of 2,500 miles, I’d unlearned all the ways I’d superimposed my old fears onto a new landscape. Very soon, I’d have to unlearn the unlearning, and return to my “old self,” whatever that meant. Funny how long-distance hiking, when you start, feels like an accumulation. You hoard miles like doubloons. Then toward the end, it becomes an act of depletion, miles draining away from you.

  When the trail ran out, there would be no more Dirty Dan. All the rules were going to change. I’d find myself back in the world of showers and soap, responsibility, compromise, and Allison. It’s not that I didn’t want those things. It’s just that I was happy enough right here, on this median divider on a Pacific Northwest highway, in this gritty little outpost near the Pacific Crest Trail.

  The next day, back on the trail, in deep woods, I met a stranger with a familiar face. I found him at Valhalla Lake, a reflecting pool beneath the pines and rock debris under Lichtenburg Mountain. The man was on his back, sticking his big feet in the lake. He was hanging with two hiking friends in their mid-thirties, both tan and stocky with slender packs and walking sticks. With a twinge of surprise, I realized the man looked like Todd the Sasquatch, the hiker Allison and I had met back in Agua Dulce at Mark the postman’s house. Back then he’d shaken my hand so painfully hard I thought my arm would pop right off. Back in Agua Dulce, he’d asked us how far we thought we’d make it on the trail, and had given us a hard time for carrying so much gear. He was boastful, loud, braying like Tarzan on the vine. But this couldn’t be the same Todd. For one thing, this man seemed quiet and gentle and unassuming. Besides, the man’s pack looked enormous and bulging, far heavier than anything I’d lugged. The Todd I’d known carried a svelte pack with hardly anything in it. And yet it was the same man.

  “Todd?” I said.

  He looked up, startled. He smiled and
leapt to his feet. I was surprised at how good it felt to see him, this man I’d cursed behind his back.

  “Dan,” he said, taking my hand with a much softer squeeze than I’d remembered. “Look at you!” he said. “You’re a real hiker now.”

  It was good to see him. But why on earth was he still here now, when I’d first met him on the PCT a year before? At the rate he was traveling then, he should have finished up last September at the latest. I was about to ask him about this but he cut me off.

  “Hey, Dan,” he said. “I heard some rumor that you’ve been spreading this nickname about me, Sasquatch, all around the PCT, and it wasn’t necessarily complimentary.”

  He smiled. I blushed, and to my relief he let the matter drop. We were ready to accept each other as different people now and let old grudges lie. The two of us got to talking about our past year. I told him what had happened with Allison and her knee. I told him she wasn’t doing the trail with me anymore. He looked concerned. Perhaps to make me feel better, he shared his own story.

  “Last year everything changed for me,” he said. “It hit me all at once. I’d been speedwalking through California. I hit Oregon and was headed for Washington. And suddenly, two realizations hit me. First of all, I was not having a good time, and second, I was hiking so fast I couldn’t absorb anything. I knew I’d finish the trail that fall, my friends would throw me a big party, then what? The trip seemed so empty to me. I couldn’t go on after a while.”