The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  From how he described it, it was more of a reconfiguration than a nervous breakdown. He quit the trail for the year and ended his relationship with Sweet Elaine. Todd would not elaborate on why they broke up, and I did not press him. He rented a Forest Service hut near Mount Adams, just off the trail in southern Washington. There he holed up with cans of food and skis while the snowdrifts walled him in. While stuck in that cabin, he changed his mind-set, transforming himself from mile-bagging Jardi-Nazi to Zenlike slack-packer, slowing the pace, exploring glaciers en route, refusing to do the big miles that were once his trademark. He urged me to hang back with him for a couple of days, and hike at an eight-or ten-mile-a-day pace for a while. “What’s the big rush?” he said. “When will you ever be back on the PCT again?” It pained me; by then I was accustomed to going as fast as Todd did in his mile-bagging days. Besides, I’d sacrificed so much time to come this far. Suppose unseasonable snowstorms swooped down on me, and my margin of error was the amount of time it took to “catch up” with Todd for two or three days? But it seemed churlish to say no, so I agreed.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take it easy with you for a little bit.”

  The next morning, Todd and I and his two buddies were walking away from the misted lake, through Union Gap. “It’s pure insanity to run through a place like this,” Todd said. “Don’t you think so? I mean, what the hell’s the point? What would that prove? To rush through a place like this, and then it’s all gone. Who knows what the future will bring? Who knows if you’ll even be in this place again?” I agreed—it was really very nice here, but it struck me that Todd hadn’t changed. It seemed he’d merely shifted, refocusing that same old fervor 180 degrees. As we walked on, at an inchworm’s pace, Todd stared at a distant summit and his eyes started watering. “Holy shit,” he said, his cheeks turning red. “That’s just unbelievable. Goddamn it, holy shit, it is almost…it’s almost fucking unbearable.” I remember thinking, why yes, it is a very pretty place, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “unbearable.”

  But Todd wasn’t talking mountains. He was talking about his crotch. “I’ve got this weird pain,” he said, bending down, clutching his groin. He folded his hands on his belly. “I’ll tell you what this is, Dan. It’s a fucking hernia. It’s been acting up for a while, but never this badly. I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much, because it’s so goddamned funny, the fact that this has to happen now, after all this time, when I’m almost done with the trail.”

  One of his friends stopped him then. “I hate to say it,” the man said, “but I think it’s time to get real. I don’t think you’re gonna finish the trail this year.”

  Todd looked stricken at the thought of going home. But he seemed to know it was inevitable. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. He was in no state to walk that day so we pitched an emergency camp in a clearing. In the evening Todd saw me struggle with a large food bag packed with candy treats. I had been splurging on sugar, with several pounds of Hershey’s Cookies and Mint, Snicker’s bars, and Mounds. Todd looked at my grub bag, with strewn-about junk-food wrappers, and grimaced. “Why did you want to bring all that junk on the trail, Dan?” he said. “Haven’t you learned anything?”

  For just a second, the old boastful Todd had returned, and so had the old peevish Dan, the envious one who spread unkind nicknames around. His eyes flashed at me, my eyes flashed on his, and for just a moment, the meanness came back, and with it, a gleeful sense of schadenfreude. But then he softened, and I softened, and we both backed off, and we smiled at each other. He pulled himself back into his tent. I wished him farewell, and the best of luck, and I really meant it.

  But I was gone, heading north at first light, before they were even awake.

  Chapter 32

  Monument 78

  My 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail hike began in a desert and ended with a flood. A downpour came, and rarely let up for four days. Even the garter snakes and slugs dove for cover. Rain clouds sealed the mountains. I spent the night in a car camp, and watched the campers dig canals in the mud around their tents to channel the falling water into a lake below us. The muddy dikes burst, and the water spread out, washing over tents and people. A man tried to cook a meal in his tent that night to stay dry, but the flames seared a hole through the roof. The tent went up, and the man scrambled out of his miniature Hindenburg. The next morning I hiked on, and in rare moments when the rain stopped, I ran through the fields in search of large rocks in patches of sun. When I found one, I flung my tent and clothes across the boulders to dry.

  One afternoon, the fog spilled from the mountains in a slow gravy, so thick you couldn’t see the treetops. Frogs flumped from puddle to puddle. Cold dampness sank into my shirt. The guidebook raved about Glacier Peak, known to Native Americans as Da Kobad, the Great White Mother Mountain. The mountain was just above the trail, according to the book, but there was nothing to see. The mist was so thick the trail could have led me straight through the streets of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I’d have been none the wiser. In a clearing with the clouds close on, I’d had enough. I had no more dry clothes to wear, and every inch of me was mud-spattered. Such a waste, I thought, to pass through God’s country and find myself stuck in a cloud bank. I started bellowing to God, or whoever was listening. “Come on. This is a waste of my time. I’ve been through a lot to be here, and I’ve come all this way. I could have quit a thousand times but I didn’t, and the least you could do is give me one little lousy glimpse of the North Cascades. I don’t see why that’s so much to ask. Why don’t you do me a favor and make these fucking clouds lift, just for one second, so I can see something.”

  I sighed at the futility of my tantrum, and regretted my use of the F bomb in a petition to God. I sat down on a boulder to rest my thoughts. And suddenly, the sky changed. The sun came out, and it looked as if someone had pulled the plug on the fog chamber. The rainstorm stopped, not incrementally, but dead. Clouds broke like smoke around Glacier Peak until the mountain lifted its head up high and assembled itself in patches of brightness, starting with the base, then rising to the middle, and tapering, until the whole mountain flashed like fire. Glacier Peak made a burning crown with the sun behind it. A pine forest spread across its base. As the sun came down on the trees below the mountain, the forest looked as if it were burning. As I stared at the peak, I could barely move or even breathe. After several minutes, when I’d regained my senses, I managed to reach in my pack and remove the lens of my monstrous Pentax K1000 camera, but an even coat of mist had pressed itself into the glass like a ghostly thumbprint. This moment wasn’t meant to be photographed.

  I didn’t hike the rest of the day. I just staggered, and could not get the vision out of my mind, even when I sank in the fizz of Kennedy Hot Springs, which smelled like the Devil cooking breakfast, but I felt safe, in spite of the scent of eggs and rot around me. I was warm enough, though the rain was coming down hard again. Glacier Peak’s thermal vents heated the springs around me. The waters fizzed, and lulled me into semiconsciousness. My face was cold, and so were my shoulders, but the rest of me sank in warm murk. I slept in the water for hours.

  My old life waited over the next horizon. I could not—would not—think about it. It would just happen, and I would deal with it then. For now, all I could think about was Dirty Dan, and the fact that his habitat was damned-near gone. Up ahead of me, the 2,650 miles of Pacific Crest Trail suddenly turned into fifteen miles, then ten, then nine, and before I knew it, it was the last day ever on the trail, in a meadow with the rain fly lying limp across my tent. Two mule deer stood in a clearing before me, ignoring the rain, ignoring me, chewing devil’s club thorns.

  On the last day of the trail, I don’t remember the landscape, the trees, or even the quality of the trail tread. All I can remember was flying across that trail, unable to stop myself from running to the end, my backpack bashing against me as if trying to slow me down as I pushed myself faster. I wanted to be mindful of all this, savor the moment, an
d think about what it meant, but for some reason I could do none of those things, so I sprinted down the rows of final switchbacks, never slowing no matter how much my knees ached. And when I’d used up the last hairpin curve, the trail shot me out toward a clear-cut gap in the trees, marking the border between America and Canada. I found myself in a clearing, and there in the clearing was Monument 78, scraped-up, battleship gray, only four and a half feet tall and shaped like the Washington Monument.

  Though I tried to restrain myself, I ran screaming toward the monument, while wondering who might try to stop me now, and why this was easy after everything before it had been so hard. I half-expected a self-repatriated grizzly from British Columbia to sideswipe me at the last second. I accelerated, even faster, until I was only twenty feet from the monument, then fifteen feet, than five feet, then no feet at all. I reached out and touched that monument—in fact, I whapped it with my fist so it made a hollow plong! And then, for reasons that weren’t clear to me then, I burst into a loud Hebrew prayer, the Shma.

  Shma Yisrael Adonai Elocheynu Adonai Echad

  Baruch Shem kevod Malchuto Le O’lam Vaed.

  Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

  Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.

  I must have sung the Shma fifty times before my voice quit. I threw down my pack and began to dance around Monument 78, shaking my shoulders, doing a rough jig. Think of the jitterbugging apes circling the black obelisk in the first scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Beyond reason, I unscrewed my Nalgene bottle and dumped my last container of filtered spring water all over the monument, as if to consecrate it. I had no witnesses, no one to snap my picture. Instead of bemoaning this fact, I lifted off the obelisk’s detachable top to glance at the notes in the hollow base. Such was my exhaustion that I could barely lift the top. It nearly gave me groin-pull. Finally I set the top on the ground, and there in a hollow were hundreds of notes from hikers who had made it this far. Some were fresh. Others bore the smudges of a hundred thumbings.

  Far up in the pile I found a note from Uphill Bill, the speed demon who’d traveled with me and Jayne through the clear-cuts south of Snoqualmie Pass.

  “I finished the trail today as I started it: alone and uncertain,” Uphill Bill had written, in a note dated September 9. “I learned much along the way about stamina, about mental toughness required for 20-plus mile days, about the beauty of the forest and the kindness of strangers. The most important and terrible lesson I learned too late. When one shows weakness before one’s inner demons, one pays a terrible price, as do those one professes to love. Happy trails and inner peace.”

  Inner demons? I swallowed heavily. Why on earth had he finished the trail alone? Why wasn’t Jayne with him? I would find out, much later, secondhand, that Jayne and Bill were seen finishing the trail separately, and that Jayne was spotted all alone, crying, near Manning Park lodge. I also heard that the two of them boarded a bus together out of town. That’s all I ever got. I never found out what had caused the falling-out. A dozen other notes had similar existential anguish. “I’ve tried this wilderness lifestyle,” one read, “and I knew that in a perfect world it is all that would be asked of me, but the world is not perfect, so now I will be thrust back to a world that doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, and doesn’t care.”

  “Wow,” I thought. “That was one sorry-ass hiker.” I looked around to see if he’d strung himself up in sight of Monument 78. Thank God, then, for the Gingerbread Man, who had left an open letter to all the hikers who came after him:

  “I don’t get all this ‘hate to leave the trail’ mail,” he said. “People’s lives must really suck in the cities but if it wasn’t for civilization churning out dry food, light equipment, money, and the trail itself, we couldn’t even be here.” He ended his note with a poem.

  I’ve been a through hiker for many a day

  Living on berries and pine nuts, oy vay.

  They don’t have many calories, they make you go fast.

  But unfortunately, many poor hikers got gassed.

  Oh, PCT. Oh, PCT. How I love thee.

  You killed most of the Donner Party, but ah, yeah, try me.

  I reread his note and snickered, while still waiting against hope for someone to come along and take my picture. Nothing doing. At last I sat down and left a little note of my own.

  Hello!

  Oy vay I made it, and no one thought I’d even make it to Tehachapi alive. It’s September 20 at 9 a.m. and I’ve just finished my two-season walk from Mexico to Canada. I made it here only to get a near-hernia lifting up Monument 78. This is the adventure of a lifetime. I arrive in good health. The PCT brochure says, “find yourself on the PCT.” Not exactly true. I think the biggest change comes when we first decide to do something this strange and ambitious. I dedicate my hike to Allison, who could not finish because of a severe knee problem. The lesson I learned is, don’t postpone adventure because you never know what will happen. As Erma Bombeck said, think of the fat ladies who waved away the dessert cart on the Titanic.

  Thanks. God bless.

  In retrospect, the note strikes me as glib. The truth is I had no idea what the moment meant then. When you cross a finish line, there is supposed to be that “Zap!” feeling, when the significance whams into you, knocking you over with its profundity. That did not happen at Monument 78. It would take months, years even, before I began to digest the moment. It was too big to see. I felt something there but couldn’t put a name to it. Nevertheless, I stuffed the note in the hollows of Monument 78, as if I’d figured it out already, as if I’d said all there was to say about it.

  And I was just about to walk back in the woods when I remembered to lift the detachable top and put it back on the monument. Perhaps my hands were too sweaty from excitement, or maybe my arm strength failed me, but when I tried to raise it back up, the top of the monument slipped from my hands and fell to earth with a great bonk. “Dammit!” I said. I seemed to have left quite a scrape and a dent, though it’s possible they were there already. Dropping a part of Monument 78 felt like a minor act of unintentional sacrilege. I vowed to make penance, perhaps by donating my time to the Pacific Crest Trail Association. But first I had to put the goddamned top back on the obelisk. This time, with every last strength in my legs and back, I hoisted the top in place. I circled the monument another time, partially to savor the moment, partially to search for additional damage.

  Then my business with the Pacific Crest Trail was over. I pulled my pack onto my shoulders, drank the last drop from my almost-empty Nalgene bottle, and headed for civilization.

  Chapter 33

  Reunion

  Allison had wanted to meet me at Monument 78, but her knee now hurt so much she didn’t want to hike the eight miles into the forest to greet me. Instead we decided to meet at the Manning Park Lodge, where we’d booked a room for two nights. I’d arrived there well before she did, talking up the female clerks about my hike and converting some traveler’s checks to funny money with Queen Elizabeth’s pinched-nostril face on the bills. I loved the way the young ladies at the lodge gathered around me. It seemed to me that “Dirty Dan” exuded an irresistible psychic musk. When Allison pulled up to the lodge in her rented car, I practically mauled her, lifting her off the ground, kissing her, almost smothering her. Having her there beside me in the hotel room threw a light switch in my head. It seemed I hadn’t killed the Lois and Clark Expedition after all. Perhaps we were just on hold. When she pulled out a cool bottle of Korbel, I felt like a man who wanted for nothing.

  When we filled the glasses and were getting ready to guzzle, she turned to me and said, “Just one glass for me. That’s all I get today.”

  “Say what?” I said, for we’d laid waste to armies of bottles in our time, lining up empties like toy soldiers.

  “I’m on medication, remember?” she said. “I’ve got to choose my drinks carefully from now on.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I forgot
all about it.”

  Allison sat on the bed, still smiling but arching her eyebrows at me. She turned away from me. Took a deep breath. “I’ve got something for you,” she said. She reached into her suitcase and pulled out construction paper flags of all three countries spanned by the Pacific Crest Trail: Mexico, America, and Canada. The eagle on the Mexican flag was bent over and slouching, like a vulture. I teased her about this. “Eagle?” I said. “That’s nothing but a buzzard.”

  I expected her to bust up at this. This was innocent teasing, Lois and Clark style. She smiled but didn’t laugh. “I did the best I could,” she said. “At least it’s a raptor.”

  This was minor stuff, I knew. A paper flag was nothing worth fighting over. But my words sounded funny to me that afternoon. Every sentence came out sharper, snarkier than I’d intended. I wasn’t Clark anymore. I wasn’t Dirty Dan, either. Now I was turning into an unnamed third party who existed outside the trail, and I had no idea what the hell this man was supposed to say or do or how he was supposed to behave when other people were around. Allison unrolled a T-shirt she’d had custom-made for me, showing the Pacific Crest Trail map in the front, and DIRTY DAN in bold letters on the back. I loved it, though it was a size too small, even for my trail-attenuated frame. I wore it anyhow, as not to hurt her feelings, but it squeezed me so tight it shrank my shoulders and pushed out the breasts I never knew I had. I forced myself to keep the shirt on me while we drove all around Manning Park in the rental car, blasting Green Day, Jimmy Buffett, and Sheryl Crow. We headed out to the PCT trailhead one last time. Allison took a picture of me standing next to the turnoff sign. Limping badly, she even managed to lope a short way onto the access path leading to the trail that she would probably never finish in her lifetime. She managed a stiff smile. I clicked the shutter.