Blistered Kind Of Love

by Angela Ballard

  We decided to head to our favorite fast-food establishment, Jack in the Box, and piled into the car. Over burgers, fries, and strawberry shakes, Bob told us about a hiker he’d dropped off just a few days earlier, Ricky Rose. Ricky carried a sixty-pound pack containing a cell phone and global positioning system (GPS), as well as a bulletproof, rubberized laptop. I’d worked hard to get my pack down to thirty-five pounds and still winced under its weight.

  “You’ll catch up to Ricky in no time,” said Bob. “Can’t miss him. Skinny, bushy beard, big pack.” I wasn’t sure that such a description was going to be much help. It seemed like that’s what all male thru-hikers might end up looking like.

  During dessert, Bob advised us to also keep a lookout for Bruce, a middle-aged gentleman who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Bruce’s goal was to hike the length of the California Pacific Crest Trail, a distance of more than seventeen hundred miles. This despite the fact that he’d been suffering from Parkinson’s for fifteen years and was receiving progressively less relief from his medicine. To prolong the pills’ benefits over the long-term, Bruce took them only twice a day. On the trail, this meant he’d have an hour and a half in the morning to break camp, put on his pack, and get going before the onset of incapacitating tremors, slowness, and clumsiness. After his evening dose, he’d have another symptom-limited hour and a half to set up camp, cook, and get into bed. In between, he would lack the dexterity to perform simple maneuvers such as adjusting his pack straps, unwrapping a Power Bar, or tying his shoes. By comparison, my worries seemed minuscule.

  Following dinner we returned to Bob’s house for an early night. Lying on a twin bed in Bob’s teenage son’s room, I listened to Duffy’s rhythmic breathing. Our last few days at home had been hectic and I knew I had to sleep, but my mind was racing. Had I packed enough dried milk for the three or four days it would take us to reach Mount Laguna, the first town along the trail? What if the seasonal creeks dried up? When would we see our first rattler? How did illegal immigrants survive out there without maps and gear? What were my parents doing? Tears welled in my eyes, as they often did when I thought about my mom and dad. Guilt weighed on me heavier than a freshly loaded pack. “Soon,” I thought, as I drifted into a tumultuous, shallow sleep, “just a few more hours and then I’ll disappear into the wilderness.”

  Meadow Ed

  I’VE BEEN TOLD that when breaking in a pair of leather hiking boots, it’s best to proceed with caution. Wear them around the house a couple of times, then maybe wear them for a day in the office, and finally take them out for a series of three- to five-mile hikes. In theory, the leather should slowly soften and mold to your feet for the perfect fit. Sure sounds comfortable, but I’ve never met or heard of anyone who has successfully bent the will of a pair of new leather boots. On the contrary, boots typically bend the will of feet by inflicting torturous hot spots and blisters. Perhaps it’s this fortitude of spirit that warrants their status as expensive retail items.

  Similarly, the southern PCT doesn’t break thru-hikers in easily; instead, it begins with fifteen dry, waterless miles through high desert. But heat and lack of water aren’t hikers’ only concerns—there are also rattlesnakes, mountain lions, killer bees, and illegal immigrants to worry about. Thirst, fear, and pain will greet you on the PCT, and like a good ol’ pair of leather boots stuffed with callused, hoof-like feet, they’ll stay with you until you’ve been thoroughly broken in.

  On the morning of May 8, we traveled east toward the small California border town of Campo. For weeks I’d been preoccupied with trail worries, but on this morning fear took a backseat to grogginess. It was 4:45 in the morning and we were whipping along the dark curves of Highway 94 in Bob’s Dodge van, feeling slightly ill from breakfast sandwiches and frequent stomach-revolving shifts in direction. We’d had a short, fitful night of sleep; excitement, nerves, and strange surroundings made us fidgety, so much so in Angela’s case that she sat bolt upright in bed at about 12:30 in the morning and chirped at me to get moving. She chirped and chirped, despite my pleas for her to consult her watch. At last, after a dozen or so chirpies, she checked the time and reluctantly lay back down.

  Angela and I weren’t the only ones on the groggy side. Bob was making the pre-dawn trip to Campo for the twenty-second time that spring (we were his thirtieth and thirty-first hikers), and the cumulative effects had made him a little sleepy—sleepy enough to disregard a sharp curve in the road and take the Dodge screeching into the oncoming lane. Luckily, Campo to San Diego isn’t a big commuter route, and there wasn’t any westbound traffic to collide with. Our only fatality was Bob’s mug of coffee.

  Fifteen minutes later, Bob pulled the van up next to the wooden PCT monument, which stands twenty feet from a corrugated steel fence marking the Mexican border. Running alongside the fence is a well-maintained dirt road used nightly by Border Patrol officers to scout for footprints. The monument itself was a cluster of five rectangular pillars of varying height with a series of inscriptions that read, “Southern Terminus Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail,” “Established by Act of Congress on Oct. 2, 1968,” “Mexico to Canada 2627 Miles 1988 A.D.,” and “Elevation 2915 ft.”

  It was cold and windy and we were anxious to get started, so we snapped a couple of photos, said our good-byes to Bob, and then were off toward Canada—a mere 2,655 miles away (the trail has grown by twenty-eight miles since 1988). As we set out from the border, I wore a pack containing our tent and ThermaRests, five days’ worth of food, a gallon of water, and an assortment of personal items. It had weighed in at fifty-three pounds that morning on Bob’s scale. Fifty-three pounds of pressure on my shoulders and hips wasn’t so comfortable—about as comfortable as sitting next to an eight-hundred-pound dairy cow for a twelve-hour Greyhound ride. But for the time being, the discomfort of a heavy pack was superseded by the excitement of starting our great adventure.

  We moved at a steady pace over undulating trail in the face of blustery winds, which stirred up clouds of caramel-colored dust. My nose caught an occasional whiff of sweet sagebrush. Every so often, I glimpsed suspicious pieces of litter—juice cans and candy bar wrappers with Spanish lettering, ragged blue jeans, an Oakland Raiders baseball hat. There were no signs of those who had discarded these treasures, but I assumed they weren’t fellow hikers. I’d done enough research to know that very few long-distance hikers wear blue jeans or Raiders paraphernalia.

  A week before our departure from Philadelphia, I’d read an account of a hiker who, while walking at night, was chased by a gang of men. He avoided capture by locking himself in a small shed. The assailants didn’t give up, however, and spent an hour attempting to break in while the frightened hiker (who happened to be an ex-marine) braced himself against the door. As morning broke, he burst from the shed, brandishing a knife whittled from wood and raced away from his tormentors. Despite the fact that this assault occurred in Chariot Canyon, some sixty miles north and a three-day hike away, I was fearful of a similar confrontation. Bob had asserted that the Chariot Canyon attack had been perpetrated by local “yahoos” rather than illegal immigrants, whom he thought were “much more interested in avoiding hikers than in stealing their stuff.” That didn’t help much. Illegals and yahoos? I didn’t want to try my luck with either of them.

  The United States and Mexico share a two-thousand-mile border, and while estimates vary widely as to the number of illegal immigrants that attempt to cross this border each year, they run as high as seven and a half million. By comparison, the number of legal Mexican immigrants is currently capped at seventy-five thousand per year. A significant percentage of the illegal U.S–Mexico border-crossers, probably in the range of sixty to eighty percent, attempt to cross into either San Diego or neighboring Imperial Counties. Approximately 400,000 of these are picked up by U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) each year and shuttled back over the border, where many will make plans to try again. Within San Diego County, there are more than two thousand Border Patrol agents for sixty-six mil
es of border, enough for one per every two hundred feet or so. In addition, the USBP has at its disposal high-tech infrared equipment that can pinpoint the location of a jack rabbit down to a centimeter. Despite the large work force and cutting-edge technology, evidence seems to support the claim that, even in San Diego County, the USBP carries a batting average around the Mendoza line (.200 or so), meaning that only one out of every five border-crossers is caught. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), while long acknowledging the difficulty of estimating the flow of illegal immigrants, has generally publicized a higher apprehension rate than this. But information from the U.S. census of 2000 showing higher than expected numbers for total population and particularly for the Hispanic population, seems to refute these claims.

  Compounding the illegal immigrant problem is the illegal cargo some carry. Approximately seventy-five percent of illicit drugs in the U.S. enter via transport across the U.S.–Mexico border. Drug cartels often “mule” their cocaine and other recreational pharmaceuticals across within the stomachs and intestines of those dreaming of a better life. “Mules” are people who smuggle drugs by ingesting securely wrapped containers of extremely pure substances. These poor folks, already risking capture by Border Patrol, assault by anti-alien vigilantes, exposure, dehydration, and starvation, take on the further peril (not to mention discomfort) of passing latex-coated cocaine through the behind. Consider that in the year 2000 alone, there were five hundred documented border-crossing deaths, most of them from environmental exposure. Who knows how many died and weren’t found? Drug “mules” are willing to risk all of this for $1,000 and the chance for a new life in America—quite a gamble to take to enter a country that goes out of its way to punish both illegal drug distribution and illegal immigrants.

  As midday approached, the wind abated and sunshine bore down. We completed a gradual traverse of Hauser Mountain and then a steamy, knee-rocking canyon descent. By one in the afternoon we’d reached the canyon floor and Hauser Creek. It was the first water supply of the day, and a remarkably unimpressive one at that—a stagnating pool swarming with gnats and surrounded by mud pocketed with cattle hoof marks. Our lunch consisted of raisins, energy bars, and dried meat sticks. I’d soon discover that a meat stick is the perfect protein bolus for a ravenous hiker. At first, the contents of the dried meat stick were a mystery to me, but after a summer of these tasty and wholesome treats I think I finally figured out the secret recipe—eight parts beef, four parts pork, two parts rat brain, and one part human foot. After a treat like that you can’t help but feel sleepy, and on that afternoon, under live oak and sycamore trees, we took a peaceful nap.

  A couple of hours later, we began the last leg of the day’s hike to Lake Morena. Several steps into a 1,000-foot vertical ascent of Morena Butte, I abruptly halted. Placed neatly at the edge of the trail were two D batteries, a tube of aloe, and a brand-new pair of wool socks. These were not south-of-the-border possessions; no, they were evidence of another Canada-bound hiker, most likely one trying to remedy decisions that had led to a very heavy backpack. Perhaps these were signs of Ricky and his sixty-pound load? I chuckled, picked up the aloe, and set off up Morena Butte.

  It was our first real climb and I attacked it with gusto, plowing forward with the aid of forceful trekking-pole lunges. Every thirty seconds or so I’d glance at my watch altimeter to gauge our progress and yell the update to Angela behind me. By the time we reached the apex of the butte I was huffing and Angela was wheezing.

  A brisk interchange ensued. Angela was upset at the pace of our climb and my disregard for her shorter and slower stride. I tried to explain that I was merely climbing the hill at my own comfortable rate and that she needn’t feel obligated to keep up with me. This explanation didn’t help. Angela felt strongly that she shouldn’t ever fall outside of trekking-pole range of me while on the trail. But this just wasn’t going to be possible. One of the first rules of long-distance hiking is that you must hike at your own pace. Unfortunately, my (long-legged) pace was rarely going to be Angela’s (short-legged) pace. Angela wasn’t satisfied and pleaded with me to slow down. “I’ll always wait for you to catch up,” I said. It was the best she was going to get.

  This was our first on-trail spat, and I knew there would be many to follow. I hoped, however, that we could quickly reconcile our divergent hiking styles. If not, we might soon be taking diverging paths back to Philadelphia. These thoughts spun around in my head as my legs carried me down to Lake Morena, an expanse of refreshment within the thirsty hills. The Lake Morena campground offered luxuries that we would find at few other camping spots along the trail—soda machines, picnic tables, bathrooms, and hot showers.

  Soon after arriving, we received a visit from Ricky. Fortyish, with dark black hair and a toothpick-inspired frame, Ricky limped up to us on a knee tightly bound with an ACE bandage. Ricky then rapidly filled us in on the compelling story of . . . Ricky. He started with his charity effort, B2B (Border 2 Border) 2000, which was designed to raise money for the Krusty Burgers for Kids Fund and had already garnered many, many sponsors—forty-four in all. These included NASA, AlpineAire Foods, Outfitters Jerky, AloeUp Skin-care Products, Crescent Moon Snowshoes . . . Ricky seemed intent on naming all forty-four of them and probably would have if I hadn’t interrupted to ask about his computer.

  “Yup” he responded, “I’ve got a six-pound, solar-powered, bulletproof laptop. You can drop the beast from eight feet onto granite and it will still purr like a kitten.” And the D batteries and aloe left on the trail?

  “Well, had to ditch that stuff once my knee started acting up. I thought another hiker might want ‘em.”

  “Who wants to carry D batteries?” Angela whispered to herself as much as to me. I wondered how AloeUp Skincare would feel if they knew that their aloe had been jettisoned just fifteen miles into the PCT. Apparently, Ricky’s unpacking had been too little, too late, because he was planning to rest a day or so at Lake Morena to let his knee settle down. Satisfied that he’d thoroughly filled us in on his operation, Ricky turned a critical eye to our gear.

  “So, MSR stove, huh?”

  “Yup, Internationale,” I said.

  “Good choice. That’s what I have, too. It’s the best choice, it really is. You can use any sort of fuel. Titanium pot? That’s a necessity. But the fuel bottle . . . no titanium? What, couldn’t afford the few extra bucks for titanium? Come on, really should have titanium.” Rick apparently wanted us to apologize for the oversight, but I wasn’t in the mood to beg forgiveness for a few extra ounces of fuel bottle, certainly not from a guy who was carrying a six-pound laptop.

  “Yeah,” was all I could muster.

  Angela looked stressed. “Maybe we do need a titanium bottle.”

  “What are you guys carrying for grub? I have more freeze-dried meals than I know what to do with. You should have seen the day that AlpineAire dropped them off—we had to clear out a large area on the driveway. I am eating nothing but freeze-dried. Well, nothing but freeze-dried for dinner, beef jerky for lunch.”

  “We have a mix of stuff—some from Mountain House, some instant potatoes, some MREs,” I reported.

  “MREs? Meals-Ready-to-Eat? Those military rations are heavy, man, real heavy. Freeze-dried is the way to go. You should dump the MREs and pick up some freeze-dried.” Angela was looking pale but Ricky didn’t notice and continued.

  “You know, by my GPS calculations, the distance from Campo to Lake Morena was really only eighteen point one miles, not twenty point three.”

  I noted a slump in Angela’s shoulders.

  “We didn’t really need to hear that, Ricky.” I was wishing he would hand me a titanium fuel bottle so I could hit him over the head with it.

  “Well, you know that guidebook is always getting it wrong. I bet you could find a mistake on every single page.” He was referring to the definitive guide to the PCT, Schaffer’s The Pacific Crest Trail. Only the most brazen hiked without it. We’d painstakingly divided its tw
o thick volumes into nine sections, which we taped into colorful poster board covers. I thought of these sections as our lifeline and, no matter what Ricky said, wasn’t prepared to admit that they might be inaccurate.

  Later, standing around a campfire with a couple of other hikers, Ricky regaled us with more about Ricky. The fire was comforting on a cool night, but eventually we had enough of his pontification about routefinding and snowshoeing in the Sierra snowfields and excused ourselves.

  Fog moved off the reservoir and settled over the campground. I could see moisture developing on the roof of our tent, but I was too tired to put on the rain fly. I awoke in the middle of the night to see prominent beads of water suspended on the nylon ceiling. “Maybe I can flick the water off,” I thought, and tapped the tent with my middle finger. Drip, drip, drip. Mutters and rustling next to me. Several hours later, there was movement in the nearby trees. I sat bolt upright and accidentally smacked the ceiling with my head. A shower of moisture descended. The rustling outside stopped, so I dropped back onto my now-soggy fleece pillow. Angela chirped twice in displeasure and then the night was quiet.

  When morning finally emerged, we moved deliberately. Packing up our fog-moistened gear was both slow and unpleasant. It took us an hour and a half to break camp. Once we finally got hiking, things got dryer, but not much better. Heat descended on us early and rapidly escalated. But while our morning hike was miserable, there was one stroke of good fortune: In leaving Lake Morena, we left behind NASA’s finest PCT hiker, Mr. Ricky Rose.

  With sore and reluctant legs, we suffered through ten miles and ninety-plus-degree heat on a shadeless and overgrown trail. We took a midday break at Kitchen Creek, a short walk down Kitchen Creek Canyon Road, laying out our space blanket footprint under an aged black oak. Kitchen Creek, unlike Hauser, was running well, forming cool, inviting pools. Our initial plan had been to hike another four miles to Cibbets Flat Campground that evening, but several hikers had advised us that the Border Patrol considered this to be a popular layover spot for drug-trafficking mules. Sleeping with mules seemed risky, so after several hours of relaxation under the oak it wasn’t difficult for us to rationalize staying put for the night.