“Angela, wait! Stop! Snake!” Hearing my screams and the snake’s rattle simultaneously, she came to an abrupt and startled halt.
“I hear him, but where is he?”
“He’s behind the boulders . . . you’ll be okay. Walk on the outside of the trail.”
She hesitated as the rattling resonated. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, of course!” I realized that I sounded frantic and tried to calm my voice. “Just walk to . . . the edge . . . of the trail.”
Angela paused for a moment and then scampered over to me, looking back at the reptilian rascal. She clung to my elbow as we walked a few yards down trail and far out of the snake’s striking range. I dropped my pack and with quivering hands removed our camera from its case. A couple photos later, I relaxed and started to feel mischievous. I picked up a grapefruit-size rock and tossed it against the boulders above our slithery nemesis. As the missile struck, the snake rotated with incredible speed, lifted his head, and cranked up the rattling. It was an impressive display of quickness—but also a sign of vulnerability.
“I don’t think it would be too hard to kill that sucker,” I said.
“Duffy, no!”
“Do you remember reading about the hiker who’d kill snakes with a slingshot, then cook them over a fire? That guy looks big ‘n’ meaty. I bet barbecued rattler would be pretty good . . . remember, Bob said they taste like chicken.” What better way to overcome my childhood nightmares than with a Pacific rattlesnake feast?
“Duffy, no! Don’t you dare.”
“Oh, I won’t hurt him,” I said, heaving another rock. He spun again.
“Let’s go, Duffy! Come on.”
I thought about launching a final bomb, but felt a pang of pity. I turned back to the trail and, with the rattling still reverberating between my ears, we continued north.
As we walked, Angela and I excitedly discussed the encounter. She’d never heard a rattler before and described her reaction as a “spine-tingling primeval alarm.” I agreed, and despite my newfound bravado soon resumed nervously scanning the trail in front of me.
Within an hour, though, the rising temperature began to dull my reptile detection system. By midmorning the thermometer on my watch read 105 degrees and the trail had descended out of conifer protection and into unshaded chaparral. Our late-morning snack of peanut butter crackers and dried fruit required a good deal of water to wash it down, and when we finished we were left with just over a liter for the two of us. A couple hours later, and ten miles into the sixteen-mile waterless section, we polished off the last tepid drops of our supply. Soon, our hike became a pulsating, parched stumble. Following a seemingly never-ending series of gradual switchbacks, we made our way through boulder-studded chaparral. With each step I kicked up clouds of dust that seeped into my nose and mouth. Far below I spied Snow Canyon Road, where there was supposed to be a water fountain. To the west of the road, dark speckles represented the small village of Snow Creek. It looked both tantalizingly reachable and painfully far away.
As we continued our indirect descent, I glanced periodically at my watch, noting the temperature as it creeped up to 119 degrees. The heat of the midday sun radiated off everything—rocks, manzanita bark, the reflective pattern of my boots, even the dirt in front of me. Worst of all, a serious thirst had set in; my mouth was drier than a case of saltines.
We stopped several times to rest under oddly shaped boulders that cast smidgens of shade, but without water, even sitting was torture. Finally, we passed a spacious and invitingly dark cave, but it was already occupied. Marshmallow, head resting on her Kelty Cloud, snoozed alongside her equally somnolent pole-dragging friend. I desperately wanted to wake them up and ask for water, but they looked much too comfortable to bother. Angela thought dried peaches would help (she often suggested food to remedy unpleasant circumstances), but instead of taking my mind off my thirst, they sucked up all remaining saliva, increasing cottonmouth production to an all-time high. Half an hour later, Angela began to decompensate. Her steps and breath became labored and her face turned an unhealthy shade of red. She was on the verge of tears. I was starting to get scared—scared for myself and very scared for Angela. I’d never seen her look this exhausted, not even after finishing the Philadelphia half-marathon in humid 95-degree weather. She was tough, but not infinitely tough, and in these conditions I had no idea how long it would take for her to completely break down. And what if we didn’t find water at Snow Canyon Road?
Angela’s trekking poles balanced nearly motionless in her hands and she barely bothered to look up from the trail. I stopped her under a slice of boulder shade and told her to sit.
“Stay here,” I said, “and I’ll come back with water.”
She didn’t like that idea. I could tell she was petrified at the thought of being left alone. I explained that I still had some energy left and it would be best for both of us if I used it to find water as fast as possible. It couldn’t be more than a couple miles to Snow Canyon Road. I didn’t bother to mention the horrible possibility that I might not find water there. Reluctantly she agreed, softly nodding her head. I told her I loved her and promised that I would be back soon, and then took off at a trot. I was afraid to leave her, afraid that by the time I returned she’d be as dried and wrinkled as a dehydrated peach, but nevertheless I sped forward with singular purpose. Thoughts of rattlesnakes dissipated and were replaced with visions of frosty Oranginas. I wound down more switchbacks and then more switchbacks; they seemed to go on forever. Was I switchbacking into the depths of hell? Just when I had become convinced of the inevitability of my fiery demise, I passed through a forest of huge boulders and saw it. . . .
A metal spigot rose four feet out of the sandy ground. Judging from the pool of liquid sitting in its well, it was in working order. I sprinted the last twenty yards, turned its squeaky handle, and ducked my head. Scalding hot! I violently spat out the mouthful and let the faucet flow for a few seconds before trying again. Heavenly! I drank long and deep, but not to complete satisfaction. I needed to get back to Angela before she withered away.
I filled two liter containers and started running back up the trail. I rounded several switchbacks and then I saw her. She was spent—hyperventilating, with eyes deeply sunken and brimming with tears—but walking. Before even uttering a meek “Hello,” she gulped down a liter of water. Later, she told me that after I’d left, she’d cowered under a boulder and cried in desperation. After several minutes of hysteria she’d decided that it was better to push on and hope I would be around the next corner. In her quest to find me, she’d sped up with each passing switchback until she was trailing only half a mile or so behind.
Those six miles were the most difficult and painful of our trip thus far. In retrospect, the distance seems insignificant. What is six miles without water during a twenty-mile day? I later got some perspective while reading The Long Walk, the story of Polish cavalry officer Slavomir Rawicz. Rawicz, after escaping from a World War II Soviet work camp in Siberia, walked four thousand miles to find freedom in India. Along the way, Slavomir and seven companions crossed the Mongolian border into China by way of the “burning wastes” of the great Gobi Desert. For twelve days they walked without water, losing two of their party to hyperthermia along the way. I didn’t believe it was possible for anyone to survive twelve days without water, but somehow Rawicz did. He describes the torture of moving in “throbbing discomfort, mouths open, gasping in the warm desert air over enlarged, dust-covered tongues. I eased the sticky pebble round my sore gums to create a trickle of saliva so that I could swallow.” Finally, they found an “oasis.” It wasn’t a river, lake, or metal water spigot, but “no more than a slimy ooze,” an “almost dried-out creek, the moisture compounded with mud at the bottom of the channel not more than a couple of yards wide.” Rawicz and his friends pushed down the mud to collect small handfuls of murky water. They drank it, “sand and mud and all, in ecstasy.”
Compared to Slavomir Rawicz, our
six miles were supremely wimpy and our water faucet an abundant oasis. Knowing this, however, does not make the memory of that day any less painful or any less scary.
After drinking two liters of water each, we started to feel human again and became anxious to find a crack of shade. After several minutes of searching we discovered a slim, sandy cave between two giant boulders. We collapsed inside of it and over the next few hours took turns braving the inferno to procure more water. As we rested and rehydrated, Zach, a Cal-Berkeley student we’d met in Idyllwild, ambled by. Zach looked beaten down by the elements, but I’m sure we looked worse—stretched out and motionless on our ground cloth, faces flush with defeat. He joined us in the cave and sat cross-legged, writing in his journal. We were too tired to provide much conversation. After an hour, Zach left to brave the heat again; he wanted to get to the Pink Motel before dark. That seemed sensible to me, but returning to the merciless sunshine was just not an option for us. Finally, as the sun sank lower on the horizon, we emerged from our lair and began the five-mile trudge to the Pink Motel.
The Pink Motel is not a motel—at least not in the “bed, bath, clean towel, and fresh linen” sense. It’s really more of a “Motel 6 Lite,” an abandoned two-room house about a mile from where the PCT intersects Interstate 10 in the nearly deserted town of West Palm Springs. The Pink Motel features unique landscaping: It’s surrounded by a junkyard, a cemetery of blown and bald tires, stripped-down cars born before the days of the Ford Administration, and an assortment of other relics—a VW Bus, a Winnebago, and a two-person speed boat that looks sad to be so far from home. From its appearance, few would guess that the Pink Motel is a hospitality establishment, but its name is not all that misleading—it’s a dirt-washed, pink stucco hiker asylum. A retired couple, Don and Helen, own the partially abandoned structure and garden of scrap metal and, since 1988, have opened the “second home” to PCT hikers seeking shelter from this nasty section of trail.
When we finally arrived, we couldn’t see much of the Pink Motel. It was 9:30 at night, quite dark, and there were no neon “Vacancy” billboards to guide us. Instead we passed several “Keep Out” warnings. Our ears became saturated with the sound of wind roaring through rusted metal. We contoured around this eerily noisy junkyard to a small, one-story house. I entered through the creaky screen door and came to an abrupt halt. A whitened, bony man, naked but for a pair of grungy, once-white undies, rose off a couch directly in front of me. “Oh no,” I thought, “this isn’t the Pink Motel, it’s an old hick’s junkyard paradise. I hope he doesn’t own a sawed-off.” I took a step back and prepared to turn and run, but then caught a glimpse of familiar faces crashed out on several adjacent couches—Chris, Stacey, and Zach. My tension melted.
Chris gave us a brief verbal tour of the place before sinking back into his couch. The bony old man was asleep again and snoring loudly. The next morning I learned that this old-timer was actually an accomplished thru-hiker, a veteran of both the AT and the PCT.
Due to our late check-in, we missed out on the Pink Motel’s couch suites. They were all booked, so we spent my birthday night on a soft if not completely clean carpet. Two weeks and 212 miles from Campo, a night on a floor seemed like a fantastic luxury to me. I slept soundly, confident that we’d survived the worst this desert could dish out.
Ultimatum at
Vasquez Rocks
THE HOSE HELPED. I stood in the moonlight, balancing on my right leg as I tried to wash the dirt out from between the toes of my left foot. Zach, Chris, and Stacey, were inside. I could hear the murmurings of conversation and an occasional snore. Standing in quickly muddying sand, watching tiny head- and taillights stream along Interstate 10 in the pass below, I held the hose high over my head. Water ran down my back and buttocks. Coyotes yip, yip, yip, yowrooooo’d in the distance.
Finally, I dragged myself away from the starscape and the cool running water to take my place on the Pink Motel’s living room floor with Duffy. The old toothless man snored and gasped on the couch nearest us while occasional rustles indicated our roommates were restless. Duffy, on the other hand, was out cold.
We set off at seven the next morning. We hiked two miles and then veered off-trail to refill our water bottles at the Mesa Wind Farm, home to many of the 4,900 wind turbines in the area. Annually, each turbine produces the energy equivalent of a thousand barrels of oil.
The temperature was already rising precipitously, and after hiking for only forty-five minutes we’d put a serious dent in our water supply. I remembered reading that seventy-five percent of the human brain is composed of water and took that to mean that if I felt like my brain was boiling in the desert heat, it probably was.
We’d each gulped down several liters of water the previous evening, but dehydration still lingered. Our blood had thickened and was moving slowly through our circulatory systems, a phenomenon Duffy called “he-mo-concentration.” Staring at the blue-green yarn-like veins in my wrists, I could almost see the lethargic “he-mo-concentration” within. I was all dried up. Even my joints seemed crackly and stiff.
Both Duffy and I knew that it could take two or three days to recover from deep dehydration and heat exposure such as we’d just experienced. We also knew that we were at the greatest risk of succumbing to heat-related illness two to four days into a heat wave. But medical knowledge be damned—there we were, back in the desert sun. In our one-track thru-hiker minds, it was our only choice. We had a limited amount of time to get to Canada, and we weren’t going to let a minor setback like nearly passing out from lack of water delay our progress.
In ambient temperatures greater than 110 degrees, the average human can survive for three weeks without food but only three days without water. (Slavomir Rawicz and his companions in the Gobi were clearly not average.) In such extreme heat, a person risks not only dehydration but also hyperthermia and heat exhaustion. Heat exhaustion can strike in a matter of minutes, causing symptoms such as shallow breathing, vomiting, dizziness, weakness, dry throat, confusion, flushing, and racing heartbeat. Remain in hot conditions long enough, and heat exhaustion may progress to heat stroke, a serious condition that, if not rapidly remedied, causes virtually all of the body’s major organ systems to shut down. In the words of Robert Young Pelton in Come Back Alive: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Disasters, Kidnappings, Animal Attacks, and other Nasty Perils of Modern Travel, “Your body is similar to an automobile. Just as an engine has an operating temperature range, a coolant, and a fuel system, so does your body. . . . The problem is that when you overheat, you don’t pop a hose, you die.”
To avoid reaching such a fatal malfunction, the body puts its approximately four million sweat glands to work. Sweat contains sugars, sodium, and potassium—a concoction known as electrolytes. Electrolytes keep the nerves and muscles functioning properly. Lose too many electrolytes through excessive sweating and you can suffer muscle spasms, cramps, and extreme fatigue. Yup, that all sounded familiar.
Exercise physiologists say that, on average, the body requires two to three liters of fluid each day. On a normal day, that’s enough to recover losses. But if your days aren’t so normal—let’s say you’re hiking twenty miles over rough terrain—your water requirement doubles, to four to six liters. If you (perhaps inexplicably) attempt to do this in extreme heat, the total jumps to seven to eleven liters of water per person per day. Between us, Duffy and I were carrying six liters of water. Duffy didn’t seem overly concerned, stating that we’d pick up more along the way, but I wasn’t sure if he really had any idea how much we were supposed to be drinking. Had he really paid attention in medical school?
I’d heard that the combination of heat and lack of water can drive a man (or woman) insane but never really believed it until those couple days in the desert. Tears (precious, water-wasting tears) were my constant companions, and a handful of miles became seemingly insurmountable obstacles. At least, though, I wasn’t mentally fried enough to consider drinking my own urine (said only to work if you
boil it first) or worse, the poisonous fluids from the machines in the Pink Motel’s junkyard. And I definitely wasn’t crazy enough to kill. Other desert adventurers have not remained as levelheaded.
On August 4 of 1999, Raffi Kodikian of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and his buddy, David Coughlin of Millis, Massachusets, drove into Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, for a night of camping. The ranger who issued them a backcountry permit advised them to take one gallon of water per person per day. Instead, they hiked into Rattlesnake Canyon with three pints of water and a bottle of Gatorade. The next day, when they tried to hike back to their car, they got lost. Much of what happened over the next four days remains a mystery.
On August 8, park rangers, after just a ten-minute search, found Raffi Kodikian. He was lying on his back in a tattered tent. He wore nothing but a pair of bloody shorts. Heavy rocks were strewn about, evidence of an SOS signal. An unopened can of baked beans sat nearby. A few yards from the tent was a mound of stones. Underneath laid the dead body of David Coughlin. He was twenty-six. “I killed him,” Raffi told the rangers.
Later, police discovered Raffi’s journal. “I killed + buried my best friend today,” wrote Raffi. “David had been in pain all night. At around 5 or 6, he turned to me + begged that I put my knife through his chest. I did. . . .” Raffi went on trial for murder in New Mexico on May 8, 2000—the same day we began our hike from Mexico to Canada.
At the time of the trial, David’s family said they were choosing to believe Raffi’s story as it was laid out in his journal entries. “We have no reason why Raffi would have wished David harm or pain,” a Coughlin family statement said. “Moreover, we cannot presume to know what transpired, or the thoughts and emotions the two experienced during the days before David’s death. To be sure, we have questions. However, we find it difficult to believe there was any malicious intent.”
Blistered Kind Of Love Page 9