The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  Back at the lodge I drowned in burgers, and though we clinked glasses of skunky Moosehead, and licked the foam from the top, and ordered shovelfuls of fries, incorrect thoughts flickered between each bite. I was thinking about Allison, and how she couldn’t be my drinking buddy anymore. Or my hiking buddy, either. What the hell would we do all day long, then? And what about all these damned calories? No miles to burn off the calories anymore. And everything cost money all of a sudden. Every goddamned thing cost money now. Allison filled up the rental car with princely priced gasoline. So expensive. Did they start rationing gas while I was out in the woods? I found myself feeling crowded out, even in that small, practically deserted settlement of Manning Park, longing for the emptiness of the forests. Back at the lodge, Allison sat on the bed. She threw a passel of multicolored leaflets on the bedspread. At first I wondered if it was another construction-paper flag she’d made to celebrate my walk. But when I looked closely, I saw that they were FAQ lists with information about her rheumatoid arthritis. “Could you please just take a quick scan at these when you get a chance?” she said. “They won’t take long to read. I just wanted to give you the basics.”

  I picked them up and, absently, without thinking very much about what I was doing, began to fan my face with the pile. I stopped myself, set them back on the bed, and stared at the leaflets but not at the words printed on them.

  “Could you please just read one of them?” she said.

  “Now? I want to give these things my full attention, but I can’t now. I’m just not in that place right now. I guess it’s what they call a trail high.”

  “Just take a look, for one moment.”

  “No slack at all?” I said. “No slack time at all for a guy who just got off a national scenic trail?”

  We left Manning Park and drove on out to Vancouver, walking around the rainy towns with one-way streets and salt air blowing thick off the Pacific. We were out near Gas Town one night, heading toward a restaurant. Allison was trying to talk to me. She said something about going fishing with her dad, about how they walked into cold rivers that wrapped around them to their waists and how the two of them had played Dolly Parton’s hits on a ghetto blaster. I listened in a glaze, enough for the words to register in my memory but not enough to react while she was saying them. The trail had stopped dead but I couldn’t see that then. I was still searching for the rest of it. You’d think the trail, after all those miles, could find some way to keep going north out of sheer will, if not inertia. I wondered what it would be like if I could find some northward spur of the trail and just keep going. And I thought of all those Civil War veterans who lost their context after the final battle, and sat around in their underwear all day, doing nothing, until they finally decided to recreate what they’d barely survived, dressing up in period uniforms with brass buttons cured in their own urine, then going out into a field and recreating Pickett’s Charge. Was that my future? Was my life’s sole event really over?

  And what about us after the trail? I used to think of our wilderness march as a proving ground before we stood at the altar, in the synagogue or church, before a group of well-wishers. It still amazed me that we’d walked for five months without turning on each other. But now I wondered if the Lois and Clark Expedition could survive a life of normalcy, after what we’d done and seen. After all, it was extraordinary to walk a national scenic trail, but any old schmuck could get married. Between two hundred and three hundred people attempt a through-hike of the PCT on any given year. Only a fraction of them succeed. In comparison, 2.3 million couples get hitched in the United States every year. If you break this down, it means that six thousand couples get married every day, a statistic that brings to mind H. L. Mencken’s observation that “no man [is] so repulsive that he can’t find a wife. Midgets, cripples, dirty men, hideous men, idiots—they are all dragged to the altar.”

  We drove on to Seattle. Allison was hungry. She found an impressive bakery with a glass case over Napoleons, cream horns, and French-style doughnuts baked with real eggs. Allison bought a fat éclair and took a sharky bite from it before we were out the door. Without thinking, I blurted, “We’re not on the trail anymore. Do you know how many calories they put in one éclair?” I felt like an outside observer, listening to what I’d just said, and feeling put off, because I didn’t know who was talking anymore. Words were spoken, but not by me. Allison looked up at me, and then she looked down at the grease-flecked little doily that had held the éclair and now held only traces of its crème and the bitten-down chunk still remaining.

  “Thanks for that,” she said. “Thank you very much.” She stuffed the remaining piece of éclair into the nearest garbage can.

  Every would-be celebration felt like conspicuous consumption now, and Allison had to drag me everywhere. She took me to a “splurge” celebration meal in the kind of sushi restaurant where raw fish rides little boats in a miniature canal, like the passengers on the “It’s a Small World” ride. Every time you unburden the boat of a passenger—an ebi, a California roll, a slab of maguro—the bill goes up, up, up. She tried to talk to me in the hotel that night, her back to the door as if I might make a break for it. “Okay,” she said. “We need to go over a few things. We need to stop putting off these conversations just because every stressful subject makes you uncomfortable. I just need to figure out what we’re going to do, Dan. I can’t just sit here in limbo and hope everything works out all by itself.”

  But we didn’t have The Talk that night, at my insistence.

  I convinced her to go dancing instead.

  Allison figured that a change of venue might do us some good. Get out of the city. Camp for a while. That way we could be closer together, and have a nice experience, and still save money, like I wanted. She drove the rental car along a fogbound freeway and out to the coast, straight up the on-ramp of a ferry that sailed us out to sea, past a pod of seals. Seagulls wheeled in our wake. When the boat reached Orcas Island, we drove off the ferry and onto a blacktop road past a breakwater and up to a wooded campsite in the hills. But when we crawled into the tent, I remembered all the downsizing I’d done on the trail. I’d replaced our spacious two-man Bullfrog nylon shelter with a single-man Northface survival tent. It was so cramped in there we barely slept, waking each other up, our faces smooshed against the mesh siding. The next morning, exhausted, we shoved our things into the trunk of the rental car. Allison still wanted to talk. We sat in the front seat of the rental. She was staring at me.

  “I know what you want,” I said. “I know. And I’m still not ready to decide what we should do. I just have no idea. I don’t even know where the hell I want to live right now. My head is in too many places right now. I mean, I just got off a national scenic trail. I feel completely overwhelmed, like my brain’s back on the PCT somehow. Don’t you remember how it was when we got off the trail down near Mexico? Hanging out in San Diego? Starbucks everywhere, and all that concrete?”

  “We can’t just keep putting off the conversation forever.”

  “But we don’t have to talk about it here, where it’s beautiful. Why don’t we wait until we’re off the island to have the big old knock-down-drag-out, ‘where the hell are we going in our future’ conversation?”

  “You know what, Dan? I’ve been sitting around for two years waiting for you to just get your shit together. I need you to step up. This isn’t funny anymore. I’m sick of you just blanking out every time we talk about an unpleasant subject. You think it’s a ‘difficult’ situation, you think I’m being a ‘difficult’ girlfriend, now? Well, I can’t help it. Things are difficult. I need the best of you right now. You’re a pretty funny guy. So why don’t you cheer me up right now? Why can’t you be strong for me? Be funny for me.”

  “I’m sick of things always being hard.”

  “And you’ve been off the trail for all of one week.”

  “I don’t want to move on just yet.”

  “There’s no more trail.”

  “Bu
t I don’t know what I want to do.”

  “You’re gonna have to start figuring that out.”

  “But I’m really scared.”

  “You’re a coward,” she said.

  We drove the car back on the ferry and wound up in Seattle, where Allison had booked a flight to take her home. I didn’t book a flight, though. I still did not know where I wanted to live, even for the next few weeks. I said I’d tell her very soon, when I was less confused, when I wasn’t “in transition” anymore. I couldn’t think properly, couldn’t will my mouth to say one thing to comfort her. That week, in Seattle, Allison was sitting in the next room, reading a freebie magazine we’d picked from a display case near a supermarket. I picked up the phone and made plans to have lunch with an ex-girlfriend in Seattle, hardly even realizing what I was doing or why. I flirted on the phone. Talked loudly. Couldn’t control the volume. My larynx was set on “speakerphone.” Allison heard the whole thing. “How could you?” she said. “When I’m sitting right there, bored, in the next room? Have you lost your mind, Dan? This isn’t even mean anymore. It’s just crazy. It feels like you’re doing everything you can think of to drive me away.”

  “It’s just lunch,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  The next night, we booked ourselves into yet another cheapskate motel, this one just outside the Seattle airport, on the free-shuttle route. This was the time for me to “step up” and say all the right things, but I couldn’t do it. The sheets were overstarched. They felt like concrete. I hate it when maids overstarch the sheets. You’d think they would give them a good rinse or something, soften them up a bit so a man could get some decent sleep. Allison left on a shuttle to her terminal the next morning, when the sun was barely up.

  It didn’t seem right just to get on a plane after all that walking, so I hung around town awhile. I had lunch with my smart and pretty ex-girlfriend, who was finding herself, working in a bookstore. Same light blond hair, thick glasses, high cheekbones. She still favored natural cotton fabrics. We ate cheap pad Thai, mine with shrimp, hers with tumescent clots of tofu, because she was still a vegetarian. I thought I’d try to flirt with her a little. See how far I might get. Who knows? I’d never really gotten over her. Our relationship had always felt unfinished to me. I talked to her in some detail about the Pacific Crest Trail. Told her all the good anecdotes, but with Allison clipped out of every scene. It occurred to me that all my best stories were on the damned trail, and that Allison figured in a great many of them, and yet I didn’t say one word about her. My ex-girlfriend smiled at me in a familiar way.

  “What’s funny?” I said.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I never would have known that you got through with finishing this national trail unless you’d told me. There’s nothing about your face, or anything about you, that looks different. You look like the same Dan I knew from before. Only older.”

  Chapter 34

  Striking Pyrex

  I decided to head back down to California for a while, just to clear the mental fog. It didn’t seem right to jump on a plane after walking the trail, so I got on Green Tortoise, the counterculture’s bus line. These buses have mattresses, so you can watch the woods and cities slip past while you’re on your back with your feet in some ponytailed Earth Firster’s face. The bus line’s motto: “Arrive inspired, not dog-tired.”

  We made our way down south, stopping for a naked sweat-lodge ceremony and a vegetable barbecue, then on through the violet dark beneath the streetlights of nameless towns, and finally to the Safeway supermarket in Santa Cruz, California. A teenage girl in a rainbow batik dress peered into the bus. “Love the bus, killer scene,” she said. “Anyone have a pipe?” The driver scolded her. “Believe it or not,” he said, “we’re substance-free.” As the girl wiggled back toward the grocery store, the driver turned to us, smiled, and said, “A lot of heads live in Santa Cruz. If you’re confused, move there. I guarantee it’ll fuck you up even worse.”

  I moved to Santa Cruz shortly thereafter.

  I immediately got my job back as a substitute teacher. “We’re desperate,” the human resources woman at the school said.

  I missed Allison in Santa Cruz. I didn’t miss Allison in Santa Cruz. I wanted Allison in my life, and yet I wanted freedom. Santa Cruz is the kind of place where you can have it both ways, or at least think that you can. It all seemed so easy there. They’ve got banjo pluckers and skateboarders sitting around on city benches in the middle of a Monday afternoon. They’ve got a farmers market every Wednesday, with people selling nectarines and fennel and doling out free copies of the Socialist Worker. I would miss Allison every few days, check in with her, and she was cordial, even flirty, on the phone, and then I’d hang up and dream up strategies to entice the ladies of Santa Cruz onto my jet-black futon, where they would recline against my natural-fiber pillow covers. I could not commit to flying out and moving in with Allison, nor could I abide the thought of our breaking up, and so I kept her in an in-between state, tied to the hemp lanyard of uncertainty, never knowing where she stood.

  About a month had passed since I finished the trail and hung out with Allison in Canada. I thought nothing was amiss, that we were in a pleasant state of stasis, when I called her up on her twenty-seventh birthday.

  “I’ve been sleeping all day,” she said when she answered the phone. The abrupt tone surprised me, and so did the way she bit off the ends off of every word she spoke.

  “But that’s silly, sweetie. You should be out enjoying your big day.”

  Silence followed.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “I don’t think we should be together anymore.”

  “What? It’s not…I mean, it hasn’t come to that yet. I don’t see why you’d jump to something so extreme without…”

  “I’m not going through this again. If you want to talk about this later on, we can, I guess, but I really don’t think there’s anything to talk about.”

  The conversation limped along for a while, and then we hung up. This talk did not bother me because I sensed, even then, that it wasn’t real. She was merely confused. No problem. I was confused, too. I’d already decided that the only way to gain some clarity was to play the field for a while, weigh the situation and see if we could work our shit out. Allison had to understand that the trail had made me cool. How could I sort out what I needed out of life when there were so many beautiful women waiting for me? How could I act like nothing had changed when the trail had turned me into a viable person for the first time in my life? In a word, I was lost. On the trail, I’d convinced myself that The Goal was all that stood between me and the rest of life. But the trail was over, and the rest of life was more nebulous than ever. I missed Allison, always, yet the thought of flying out there and being with her paralyzed me.

  I couldn’t figure out what I wanted, and so I got into yoga for a while, ostensibly to center myself, but really just to meet hot hippie women. There was a swishy-rumped girl in my class, in her early twenties. Her Danskins could hardly contain her vegan, carb-enforced curves. “Okay,” the yoga instructor said. “Time to pair up with someone else. Don’t be a stranger! We’re all friends here. What I want you to do is pick a partner, and help them with the first stretch. Grab your partner’s thigh, and we’ll see just how far they can bend.” Score, I thought. I loved yoga classes. The women in yoga classes will assume poses you really couldn’t pay them to do in any other context. So I took a couple of giant steps toward the holistic nubile, perched like an egret on her cerulean yoga mat. But when she saw me, she froze. If you’ve watched the Discovery Channel’s footage about wildebeest mothers protecting their young, you have a good idea of this girl’s facial expression. She saw me coming, and she retreated, straight through the wall of vertical beads marking the entrance to the women’s changing room. I was waiting her out, waiting, waiting, when it became clear that she was just not coming back. And then, at that moment, I heard a male voice, a plummy German acc
ent, and turned to see a thin man with mousy hair and huge glasses standing behind me. “I’ll be your partner, if you like,” he said. “In fact, you can stretch first. It’s no problem at all.” Before I could say one word, he’d already grabbed my thigh and lifted up the end of my right leg and started to grind my bare and horrified foot straight into the bulge in the groin of his leotard. For three minutes I stood there on one foot, flash-frozen in repulsion, my toes being dragged repeatedly against my yoga partner’s seemingly stiffening knob. “You’re all doing great,” the yoga teacher said in a chirpy voice, as my partner softly moaned.

  I tried not to let this minor act of yogic molestation get me down. I persevered. I even got set up on a hot blind date with an attractive young Bay Area journalista. We flirted like mad on the phone. “You’re funny,” she told me. She came to my house; we’d plotted out a day on the beach. When I answered the door, she was even more gorgeous and perky than I expected, and when she saw me, and after she’d looked me up and down, she said, “Is Dan White here?”

  Allison had been out there waiting for me, so I assumed that all these other women were waiting for me, too. Now it occurred to me: perhaps I was wrong. Maybe all these women were just signposts directing me back toward the only woman in the world who had ever put up with me for more than seven months running. Maybe “Dirty Dan” was never real, except in my mind. Perhaps I wanted my old identity back, my old shape, my being, my erstwhile purpose. And maybe Allison was the only woman in the world who could give me back my shape. Allison and I did quite a lot of baking together—brownies, turnovers, pies, you name it—so you will forgive me if I indulge in an extended baking metaphor. Perhaps Allison was the ramekin, while I was the pudding. I occupied her center, and weighed her down in a way that gave her comfort and happiness, at least for a while. You might even say I filled her ramekin, while she shaped me and baked me as best she could. But when we broke up, perhaps I was not fully baked. The oven setting was too low, and the timing was wrong. When the ramekin dumped me out, I splattered out like a blob of cheesy, eggy custard goo.