The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  “I’m sorry,” I said to all of them. “I thought you were somebody else.”

  “What are you doing out here?” the old man said in halting English.

  “I’m a Pacific Crest Trail hiker,” I said.

  There was a long and ponderous silence. Finally the old man started barking orders at the kids in back. “Give him a refresca,” he demanded. “Right now.” A skinny arm reached out and handed me a Coke. I grabbed for the can, brushing the kid’s hand by accident, and he yanked back the hand so fast, as if by electric shock, that he dropped the unopened Coke in the dirt on the ground. The can rolled as the car lurched past me. The wheels crunched up the hill, just as Allison came stumbling out from between two yucca plants. “Are you okay?” she said, kicking up dirt as she moved toward me. “What the hell happened? I heard a noise. I thought those guys came back and got you. What did you say to them?”

  Her voice trailed off when she saw the can of Coke. She fixed me with that gaze of hers, the one that never missed anything.

  I handed her the Coke. She opened it. It made a sound just like a gunshot.

  Chapter 10

  Mojave Crossing

  The Pacific Crest Trail guidebook warned us all about it on page 157. “That part of the Mojave traversed by the PCT is now tamed by crisscrossing roads and dotted with homes and ranches, eliminating dangers of dying like French Legionnaires with parched throats and watery dreams. Still the Mojave Desert stretch of the PCT can broil your mind, blister your feet, and turn your mouth to dust.”

  On mile 62, about a week after we set out from Agua Dulce, we came to the shimmering grid. Ahead of us was a flat outback with dirt roads running through it and no one driving on them. One of those dirt roads was the Pacific Crest Trail. On either side of the road, creosote plants grew in evenly spaced clumps. Their sweet smell hung in the air. Creosote had an eerie symmetry, an evenly spaced emptiness between each clump of leaves and branches. Their tap roots secreted poisons. Rain washed the toxins into hard soil, killing every other plant that tried to get a toehold. Something about the grid, the spaces between plants, the barbed wire and broken fence posts, made us lose perspective. We walked on, arriving at ghost streets with names like “270th Street,” heading in an unwavering direction toward limbo. Behind us, nothing receded. In front of us, nothing got bigger. Foothills would not budge. Mountains held fast to their position. Traffic lights were red and green votives in the distance. Allison limped. Her shadow dragged like a black anchor.

  In the Mojave, moving things, like us, were reduced to stillness, while inanimate objects ran loose and wild. Tumbleweeds moved of their own volition, blocking the path, chasing us down. They leapt over fences and piled on top of us. They were as full of mischief as vegetable matter could ever be. Allison drop-kicked one and it shattered in the wind. Her blood was up that day. She was in a fighting mood. The landscape was teasing us here. Goading us. Fast-moving water, bound for Los Angeles, flowed tightrope straight beside the road. Here was the Los Angeles Reservoir, its water out of reach beneath a concrete slope behind barbed wire and warning signs: NO TRESPASSING–DANGER–DO NOT ENTER. After a while, we couldn’t see the water anymore; it was locked in a pipe across the desert, and then the pipe itself slipped underground, a sandworm returning to its burrow. Millions of gallons of cold Sierra water moved beneath our boots, every gallon sealed away.

  In the middle of the road, a dirt hump rose three feet up like an allergic reaction. Allison kicked dirt clods and broke the quiet by naming the tallest peaks with me. “That’s Mount Fatso. And that one must be Mount Kilimanjaro,” she said. The mountains moved in closer. Their white-sediment tops formed a chalk line in the sky. Allison was full of hyperkinetic energy. She’d often told me the trip would be an escape, a pause from her life of ambitions and journalistic responsibilities. She was here for the ecology, for the chance to squash wildflowers in her journal, but there were no flowers here, no rivers to cross. They called this place Antelope Valley, but we saw no antelopes. She held her ski-pole walking stick like a club as she stomped, her hair blowing beneath her solar-reflective survival hat. Her war march drew me forward. In civilization she kept a tidy apartment, was particular about her appearance, and had lists of every little thing. I liked the entropy that was setting in now. I liked not knowing how far she might devolve. Women rarely realize that their men find displays of primitivism and aggression endlessly alluring, so long as they aren’t directed at them.

  We walked the road until we saw a geodesic house on the edge of a settlement. A middle-aged man with a stained shirt stood behind a fence. He had a wizard’s beard, a dreadlock swinging from his chin. When he smiled, I couldn’t tell if it was from sympathy or if he was making fun of us. His dog, the size of a small rhinoceros, stuck his head through a hole in the fence and barked. When I asked if we might make it to Canada, the man smiled and said, “You’re last. You’re too late.” He filled our bottles and drained our hopes, or tried to. “Yes, we were too late,” I thought. Too late to stop, too late to go home. A Los Angeles Water and Power truck rolled toward us. The heavyset driver, his collar soaked in sweat, his eyes half closed to the sun, shouted for us to get in.

  Allison threw me a pained look, for it was more than 30 miles over steep terrain before we would arrive at the turnoff to Tehachapi, our first supply city, 111 miles from Agua Dulce.

  “We’re not getting in,” she said.

  “No rides,” I said.

  No cheating. No shortcuts. We knew how much that hitchhike would cost. It was a question of merit, of needing to earn and deserve the satisfaction we’d have when we finished this thing. If we missed one bit of the trail, we might miss out on that “something golden” that Kirk and Eddie had promised, whatever the hell it was. We waved the driver away. He made a “you must be crazy” gesture, but we pressed on, beneath a trestle of dripping pipes. Rust-tinted water spilled on piles of garbage. The plastic receiver of a toy phone lay in the dust.

  Allison wanted to hear some music to break the quiet. She asked me to scat like Louis Armstrong and grunt like Conway Twitty. She bellowed out a few dance hits. In the lower registers she sounded like a moose or a dying dugong. In the middle range, her voice was mechanical and screechy, metal on metal, car engines dying slow deaths on desert highways. Sometimes on the trail, Allison and I let loose with a little gangsta rap to enliven things. We sang selections from NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, trading verses. On some occasions, Allison would be Ice Cube and I would be Eazy-E. Other times I’d be Doctor Dre or one of NWA’s pathetic second bananas, MC Ren or DJ Yella. If I timed it properly, and picked the right parts of the songs when we alternated verses, I could trick Allison, an ardent feminist, into reciting the most appalling and misogynist lines.

  DAN: When me and my posse stepped in the house All the punk-ass hikahs start breaking out! ’Cause you know, they know what’s up!

  ALLISON: So we started looking for the bitches with the big butts!

  Then she’d get mad and laugh and try to make it clear that her reaction was ironic in a feminist way. It was amusing for a while, but no amount of singing and scatting could compensate for our utter dislocation. Along the rock-strewn trail, pit bulls ran loops around mobile homes behind concrete and barbed wire. A Confederate flag flapped in the wind. The owners, by living there, had realized their dreams of secession.

  It was hard to believe this place was only an hour’s drive north from downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Universal Studios, and for that matter, Compton. It was late June, and we were seventy miles closer to Canada now, which seemed like progress, until we remembered the Pacific Crest Trail was 2,650 miles long. Each subsection, which hikers refer to as a “leg,” is elephantine: Southern California is 648 miles; Central California is 505 miles; northern California, 567; Oregon, 450; Washington, 500. Of all those sections, the Mojave is the most blown-out and haunted-looking. Even the cows seemed possessed, staring at us with bovine menace while drooling from both sides of their mouth
s. We never saw anyone tend them. The bulls had horns as long as your forearm, and pointy penises, big as Wiffle ball bats, flopping in the cross breeze.

  The way was straight and hypnotic. As we trekked, Allison limping, my sunglasses rattling, it made me wonder what some borax prospector’s ghost, his skin the color of roast salmon, might think to see us wandering out here with no weapons, one compact kit, twelve king-size Snickers bars, and no definable sense of purpose. Passing through the landscape, I thought about all the other explorers who had come this way. We were about to intersect with the ghostly tracks of John Charles Fremont, whose expeditions and travel writings set off an avalanche of emigration into the West. He made his way to the Antelope Valley in 1844. Fremont claimed he was out west to study geography, wildlife, and plants. Actually, his journey had much more to do with dreams of conquest. One dead giveaway was the fact that most flower-sniffing nature expeditions don’t require a Howitzer, four pistols, 33 carbines, forty men, five kegs of gunpowder, and five hundred pounds of ammo.

  Two years before President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico, Fremont was doing his part to drum up support for seizing California, calling attention to its fertile soil, hospitable temperatures, and fetching flora. But in spite of all his firepower, Fremont felt edgy in the Mojave. He sugarcoated many of his travelogues, but even he couldn’t spin the wasteland before him. He was disgusted and nervous to see horse skeletons picked clean by buzzards, and human bodies in the dirt. The Mojave was, he declared, “the most sterile and repulsive desert I have ever seen.”

  His fearful entries about the desert made me wonder about the myth of the self-made conquering hero. Although he cultivated a lone-wolf image, Fremont was dependent on his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, arguably braver than he was. As a young woman, Jessie shocked her prim Missouri family by butchering her tresses and dressing as an army officer. After marrying Fremont, she grew her hair out again, but she found an outlet for her he-man fantasies by rewriting her husband’s memoirs, turning them into swashbuckling adventure stories that would appeal to the masses. Her gambit paid off: Fremont’s travelogues were bestsellers.* I could understand Fremont’s attraction to Jessie, and his reliance on her. Allison started out as hapless on this trail, vomiting her guts out, threatening to delay our trip indefinitely. Now she was becoming my surrogate backbone, my prosthetic brain. I hated to think about what might happen if Allison up and quit this trail and left me alone out here. I knew it was a ridiculous notion. She was in it for the duration. Still, this place put me on edge, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d fare out here by myself.

  In most sections of the trail, you are days from the nearest town, and all on your own if anything goes wrong. This section was in the middle of nowhere, and yet there were outposts scattered along the desert floor. If we needed help we could have walked into the brush and pounded on the door of someone’s aluminum home. But our safety net was about to end. The Pacific Crest Trail route is ever-changing. The guidebook publishers try to compensate for this by sending out annual revision pamphlets, giving backpackers the latest instructions for changes and diversions. But Allison and I, for some reason, did not have the most updated directions through the nearly waterless territory that lay just to the north of us. The Tehachapi Mountains, row upon row of coffee-stained wisdom teeth in the distance, were our problem now. Essentially, we would be walking blind into those foothills.

  With no reliable signs to guide us, we took some comfort in the form of the Joshua trees, which Fremont unfairly maligned as “stiff and ungraceful…The most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.” Each Joshua tree had layer upon layer of spiked growths peeled back as if unseen hands were trying to reach something deep inside them. At the end of each branch were foot-long bayonets in clusters, the spines folded down the trunk to make armor. Allison and I took snapshots of each other and tried to find shade beneath the Joshua trees’ arms when the sun cut out through the cloud layers and burst into flame. The Joshuas enchanted us with their pretzel-logic shapes, even as they counted our steps, for Joshua trees define the borders of the Mojave. When you no longer see them, you know you’ve found your way out of the desert. In fact, I’m surprised Fremont, “The Pathfinder,” wasn’t more grateful to Joshua trees for guiding him out of the wasteland.

  But the Joshua trees couldn’t tell us whether we were still on the PCT or not. Trail markers were becoming rare. Some were shot through with bullet holes or decapitated. Most, it seemed, had been stolen. For all we knew, we were the last hikers of the season. We were about to leave this dirt road for a path into the foothills. No one would find us staggering around up there.

  The next reliable water was more than seven miles away, at Cottonwood Creek, according to my best calculations. Given our track record for screwing up out here, I knew we would overshoot that water. If we wound up lost in the Tehachapis, it could take us days to fight our way to the other side. Why not turn back this instant? What about the goal was stronger than fear? I wanted to ask Allison this question but could not bring myself to say the words. Allison looked up at the dry Tehachapis, which were just ahead of us. She pointed at them with her thumb and remarked that we were going “straight up that” with no way of knowing if we were heading the right way, which meant we wouldn’t know where to find water or how to reach the highway on the other side. The trail was not even a trail anymore; we followed plastic markers sticking feebly out of the ground.

  In the early afternoon we arrived at a wall, the concrete surface covered with graffiti, including a red-and-black helmeted racer, his front wheel pointed to the sky. And just when I thought the Mojave could not throw out any more riddles, I heard crunching footsteps in the bushes. I whirled to see a thin man, six feet tall, dirty and limping, coming straight for us. Dust clouds rose behind him. He moved with speed and determination, though he dragged one leg behind him like a branch.

  And he was laughing.

  * This passage is a riff on ideas presented in Rebecca Solnit’s As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Pandscape, Gender, and Art, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2001, pp. 70–71.

  Chapter 11

  The Gingerbread Man

  How did he find us here, in the spot where our path vanished in a twist of rabbit brush, a spool of concertina wire to my left, a culvert to my right? He must have been following for some time, hiding in the shadows. He slowed as he advanced. A light-refracting patina of sunburn and crud had turned him orange. In his right hand he carried a ski pole, in the other, a tattered plastic sack. I braced myself for what would happen next. He’d beg for loose change, come at us with a knife he’d whittled from a spoon, or try to drink our stove fuel. I straightened up and looked him dead on in the face. Out here, in the desert, I had to keep my chin high, push my chest out, and never show the slightest fear.

  “Dan and Allison!” the hobo roared. I almost wet my pants.

  How the hell did he know our names? Evasive action came to mind, but I deliberately muddied my thoughts—when your antagonist might be psychic, you dare not reveal the plan, not even to yourself—but what to do? He was getting closer. “Dan and Allison” he yowled. “I’ve been waiting seventy miles to say those words.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought to myself. Seventy miles? So it was true, he’d been following us. I turned to Allison to corroborate my fear, but her facial expression drifted somewhere between amusement and torpor. I took another close look at the stranger, and slowly, gradually, came the realization, like waking from a nightmare. The man was not a beggar, drunk, or hobo. He was a Pacific Crest Trail hiker. Still, he was an odd one, even for my subgroup. He wore a blue bandanna around his head, babushka-style, and wraparound shades, the kind you see on cataract patients at the beach. His pack leaned to one side. He had a filthy foam-rubber sleeping pad and a bunched-up sleeping bag strapped to it. The man had a constant smile, as if delighted at his odor and his entourage of gnats. With no prompting, he announced, “I am the Gingerbread Man.”

  “A
nd we are lost,” Allison said.

  “Yeeee-haw!” the Gingerbread Man said, as if our being lost were the funniest joke he’d heard in a while. He had a Texas accent, thick as Karo syrup. “Mark the postman told me all about you.”

  “Oh no,” Allison said. “What did Mark say?”

  “Too bad you guys didn’t hike the Appalachian Trail first. It passes through towns. Lots of water sources. Great training trail. Very forgiving. They’ve got piped-in water and shelters. The Pacific Crest Trail’s very unforgiving. It doesn’t let you make mistakes.”

  “We only make mistakes,” Allison said. “This is way more hardship than we thought.”

  “Hardship,” said the Gingerbread Man, saying the word slowly, savoring it. “Hardship is what it’s all about.”

  He offered to be our guide through the mountains. When I asked if this would inconvenience him, or exhaust him if we ended up hiking until sundown, he let out another deafening yee-haw. “I could hike all day and all night if you want!”

  Without waiting for us to announce our decision, the Gingerbread Man began to move at a fast pace up a hill leading into the Tehachapis, with Allison tagging close behind him. I fell behind. A wind picked up. I could see them talking but could not hear them. I felt a surge of surprising jealousy as Allison raced forward to keep up with him, her head cocked close to his as he shared a revelation. She giggled. And yet, as I hurried, I couldn’t tell which one of them was making me more jealous: Allison, for her school-girl enthusiasm, or the Gingerbread Man, for sharing some tidbit with her. I was relieved when we stopped to filter water at Cottonwood Creek, a pipe-fed trough. We headed up treeless switchbacks. The tread grew faint as we walked ever higher into the hills above the Mojave, now an expanse of white glare to the east.