by Dan White
As a Jewish man, I knew that pagan worship was an offense serious enough to merit inclusion in the Ten Commandments. God, in a quote from the Torah, reports that he is God, and that there is “none else.” That statement provides no wiggle room to worship Buddha, Krishna, or the sprites that inhabit twigs. And yet, as we marched, I thought it might be smart to diversify my belief system. Maybe if I prayed hard enough to all of the spirits, I could get Allison, and the wilderness, back on my side again. At the same time, I was scared to pray to the one and true God of my Jewish beliefs. After all, why would a God who self-identifies as “awesome” care about our walk to Canada? Why not appeal to something lower and more accessible? It would be hyperbolic for me to say that I became an actual pagan out there, but I certainly flirted with this belief system. While I didn’t entirely believe in the wraiths and faeries of the wilderness, I wasn’t about to discount them, either. After making sure that Allison was too far behind me to see me throwing food away, I reached into my fanny pack and removed the best of my remaining snacks: a small stick of Dove Bar dark chocolate. I unwrapped the chocolate and rolled it around between my thumb and forefinger, until I had formed a glob. Though I wanted, desperately, to eat it, I chucked it off a sandstone cliff as a sacrifice to whoever was listening.
“Oh, spirits,” I cried. “If you are out there, I call upon you from the rocks, the sand, the creek’s sandy bottom. Take this snack and enjoy it. I offer this food to you with the following beseechment. No more sun, no more bugs, no more uphill. Please show mercy on us, O spirits, for we have had enough.”
I threw the snack over the cliff, watching it bounce into a shrub with a “plop.” This strategy did not work. I prayed for downhill but got uphill. I prayed for shade and got sun.
A few miles later, Allison and I found ourselves at a spur trail mentioned in the guidebook as a route toward fresh water. We took the uphill turn, climbing a path full of dried-mud hummocks, and a few oak trees drooping along the sides of us, until we reached a trough of reasonably potable water. I decided to filter and purify a few liters to drink on the spot, but when I set myself up, and put the filter intake valve in the water, I heard a splash. Allison had sat down beside me, taken off her boots and socks, and plunked her black-bottomed feet in the water I was trying to purify. She sat with a beatific expression, massaging her calves. I threw her a look, but she did not notice. She sighed and swabbed her feet, and palmed the cold water all over her toes and heels. Soon her feet were as white as frog bellies. They left a film on the water. “This does not augur well for us,” I said to myself as I continued to filter the water. “This does not speak of our ability to compromise.”
Late that afternoon, we descended along the steppelike rock formations known as St. John Ridge, a rolling set of bowls and humps. The ridge overlooked a valley strewn with mining debris. Here among the bitterbrush were boulders shaped like human molars. Some of them had cavities so wide I could have placed my fist inside them. The land looked like the aftermath of a fight between giants. I was daydreaming, walking way out in front of Allison, empty of thought, floating, when I heard a sound like a hundred maracas, so clamorous that I leaped. Ten feet in front of me, a rattlesnake coiled. Only the tongue and rattle moved. The serpent was fat in the middle, suggesting it had just eaten or was in the family way. My fear was like a mild form of electrocution, and yet the serpent was beautiful: the diamond pattern of its skin, the parallel segments of its rattle, the languorous curves of its coils. In my diary I would note that my fear of the snake was “undeniably primal, pulled straight from the unconsciousness of my ancestry,” though that observation, in retrospect, was peculiar, considering my ancestry lies in Eastern Europe, where my forbearers were bakers, butchers, and rabbis who lived in Cossack-haunted shtetls where Jews beyond the pale were shot for no reason, and where the absence of rattlesnakes must have been cold comfort.
And yet the noise triggered something buried—dare I say, primitive—in me. Allison finally caught up and saw the snake. She looked nervous but restrained, taking a step back and then freezing. The effect on me was much more powerful. I was scared and yet I had an unexplainable urge to jump on the snake, wrestle with it, maybe even fling it around my shoulders like a feather boa. I did not know it at the time, but my reaction was perfectly normal and reasonable for a man. A snake researcher at the University of California at Berkeley told me later that rattlesnakes often trigger an aggressive behavioral response in men, but not so much in women. Most female snakebite victims get chomped on the ankle or foot because they stumble across the creature. But scores of men get bites on the neck and the hand, the elbow and shoulder, because they pick up the snakes, dance around with them, toss them in the air, or start throttling them. I restrained myself from embracing or strangling the snake, but the adrenaline stole through me with no release. In a few moments the snake became tired of us and poured itself into a hole in the ground. With slow steps, we passed its hiding place and continued on our way. But the uncomfortable feeling would not go away. We hiked almost nonstop that day, until the sun was all but gone.
It would have been smart to search for a campsite before dark, but hunger for Canada made us push on. We found ourselves high on a windblown ridge long after sunset, watching the tops of distant peaks turn to fins in the twilight, floating over the cloud banks. Soon we could not see where we were going at all. Even our flashlight did nothing but poke holes in the black. Allison chose the surface of a flat, cliffhanging boulder as our emergency camp. Instead of protesting, I just went on autopilot, knowing I was still in trouble and should keep my mouth closed. I started pitching the tent, throwing down my gear. Allison chose the left side of the flat rock, and unrolled her sleeping bag, her foam pad, her trail pillow. Somehow I got the side with the bump, which smushed against my face, even when I plumped and fluffed my Therm-a-Rest pillow, and set it on top of the protruding rock.
That evening, during a flashlight-assisted bathroom break, I made a few other discoveries about Allison’s chosen camp. Allison had selected a spot near a hole in the ground overflowing with ants. The boulder seemed unstable. I could not tell if our rock was anchored to the cliff. For all I knew, if we fidgeted too much, or crawled to the end of the boulder, the rock might unfasten itself and drop into the black, taking me, Allison, the lump, and the ants with it. I woke up several times that night. Allison’s stomach made cracking sounds, like a boulder loosening itself from a mountainside. Morning came after an eternity. Allison woke up long after I did. She crawled out of the tent. Through the tent’s open vestibule I could see ants in our stockpot, nibbling the cremains of our pilaf supper. I had no idea how the ants had worked up the appetite to eat our food. Along with our communication skills, our cooking prowess had deteriorated over the past few weeks. I drowned our meals in too much water, while Allison sometimes scorched them. In my diary, I noted that she was becoming “more of an arsonist than a chef.” Irritation rose inside me. Adrenaline from the snake encounter still pumped through my bloodstream. After days of near-silence and monosyllabic grunts, spiteful sentences came out of my mouth.
“Wow,” my mouth said. “What an unbelievable camp that was, on the edge of a cliff face, with a big rock sticking into my head. That’s what I would call a desperation campsite, when there’s no other option, even though there were a hundred other spots where we could have camped.” I said a lot of other things about the ridiculousness of our tent spot, and how a thousand other places would have been more suitable. I also accused her of being a slowpoke, of “always wanting to take it easy,” of dragging down the expedition. I said all these things in a sarcastic tone that reflected my exhaustion and irritation. I knew full well that these accusations would hurt her pride, and yet I couldn’t stop myself.
Even as I muttered these things, I blamed the snake. If we hadn’t encountered the serpent, I wouldn’t have been so agitated. The snake hadn’t bitten me, and yet I was in the throes of its psychic venom. But it was impossible to explain thi
s to her, so I didn’t even try. Her face had already gone blank, and she turned her back on me. She squashed a bunch of things into her pack, tossed the pack on her shoulders, tightened her support strap, straightened her back, and starting running northward, away from me, down the trail, toward Canada. I could not believe what I was seeing. Yes, I had spoken out of line, but Allison was overreacting. Besides, she had taken some of the best snacks. “I am sorry, I take it back!” I shouted to the wind, but she could not hear.
Working as fast as I could, I took down the tent, mashed the tent poles together, grabbed the rest of our camp, and stuffed it into the pack. Without even buckling the support pad, with the pack hanging off my right shoulder, I started running after her, hollering for her to wait up a bit. “All-lisss-onnn!” I roared, but she was tearing down the ridge, kicking dust, knocking over stones. I hollered for her to stop or at least slow it up a bit. She did neither. Now, since there was no way she could hear me, I could say exactly what was on my mind. “You’re not being rational!” I screamed. “Come on! You can stop running now!” She merely accelerated. Insects ticked in my ears. Down I jogged under Pinyon Mountain. She was out of sight now.
Plants threw fork-shaped shadows at me. A desert owl swooped above me, wings spread, its head a tufted discus. Down I ran, on a trail crisscrossed with dirt bike tread, to a place where the Pacific Crest Trail met a dirt road. There, at the bottom, was Allison, in a crouch, laughing inexplicably. She was resting there, hands on her knees. I took a step forward to see if she would retreat, but she acted as if she did not notice me. She was smiling at a note that seemed to be addressed to her. I got close enough to read over her shoulder. The note was scribbled on a torn-out page from a Gary Larson Far Side desk calendar. The cartoon showed a man, bearded and thin, clawing his way over sand dunes, tongue lolling, his body dragging. A billboard taunts from a distance. It shows a picture of a canteen, sloshing with water. “Hey, Lois and Clark Expedition,” the note read. “I miss you guys. Hey, Clark, I miss your stories of newsroom life in Connecticut. Lois, I miss your pathetic blister walk. If you guys need water, tank up at the seeping spring. Take a left on the dirt road and walk down canyon for half a mile. The spring flows just under the road near the first tree you will see. To get to the water you’ll need to push aside the cow chips.”
I knew we could use the water. I hadn’t filtered much at the water source, and we’d consumed most of it. The two of us said nothing as we pushed our way down the path to a lone tree. Though Allison did not look at me, and though she walked close to me, but separate from me, I was grateful to the Gingerbread Man. He’d created a distraction, forced Allison to stop, made her laugh, disarmed her, and told her where the water could be found. Perhaps she was biding her time, or she’d used up her rage on the run, but she spoke not a word against me as we walked.
We hadn’t gone for very long when we saw two sun-blackened towers of black dried cow patties, four feet high. Each pile was a feat of construction, the larger pieces anchoring the structure, the smaller and svelter pieces of crap adding a tapering effect, reminding me of the towers on Antonio Gaudi’s Church of the Holy Family. Beneath one of the larger and fatter cow chips, the Gingerbread Man had placed yet another note addressed to us: this one had a drawing of an arrow, and one word: Water! We walked in the direction of the arrow. There, just a few feet from the note, fresh water shone through the invasive thistles. We laughed at the sight of it. We did not say much for the rest of the day, but I thought we were on the road to making up, until late that night in our tent, when Allison was writing in the pages of her diary, pressing down so hard I could hear her pen tearing the paper. “Can’t we get along? Can’t we?” I asked myself before I nodded off.
When we rose up the next morning and continued our trek through hard, hot country, we were too tired to keep fighting or make up in earnest. The days continued like this. At last, we reached a strained détente. I knew we would be fine, that the insanity and magic thinking and weirdness should be over soon.
But one afternoon, on a spit of sand along a creek, Allison stopped to cook a meal in the middle of the trail. She sat on the hard-packed dirt and sand. She removed the cooking unit, pumped the fuel with a hand crank, twisted the intake valve, reached down, dropped a match, and watched the orange flames rise. She lowered a pan of water onto the flames and covered it with foil to trap the heat. There, in the half shade, she started to cook a packet of vacuum-packed gnocchi. She sat there, rocking in contentment, watching pasta bob and pitch. As she studied the bubbles, a swarm of meat bees descended, cumbersome creatures with a green cast to their wings. Allison ripped them from the sky, making a popping noise, like bubble-package wrapping, as she crushed them one by one. She did this in an angry but graceful way, reminding me of King Kong’s final scene, when he’s standing on the Empire State Building tearing biplanes out of the sky. Allison took three dead bugs and arranged them facedown in the dirt on the creek’s bank. The backs of their wings, and their rear legs, pointed toward Heaven. “I put those bees there as a warning to the other meat bees,” she said. She smiled, as if it were obvious. “See,” she continued, “the other meat bees are gonna fly over us and see the bodies of their friends. They’ll be so scared they won’t want to bite us anymore.”
She may very well have been joking around, but in the state of mind I was in, my first reaction was, “Wow. Way to go, Allison. What a smart idea!” In fact, I helped her, killing five meat bees and arranging them in the dirt, in a rough pentagram. It seemed perfectly rational, even necessary at the time. I thought, “We’re sending a clear message that we will not tolerate being attacked by meat bees for one minute longer.”
Chapter 17
Betty the Whore
Out on the Pacific Crest Trail, I gave a personal name to every piece of our backpacking gear. This was necessary for the Lois and Clark Expedition’s survival. My flirtation with paganism had gotten me only so far, while my spells and incantations wore off quickly. Even the meat bees eventually figured out our ruse and began to attack again, sucking more blood as if to make up for lost time. I decided to try a different strategy. It was time to make our gadgets human, so we could communicate with them more effectively. By giving each gizmo a personal moniker, I could coo at it and cajole it into doing its job well and never stabbing us in the back when we needed it on our side.
Each piece of gear had grown into its name as we hiked along. Odie was our odometer. R2-D2 was our “rolling resupply bucket,” which we mailed ahead to ourselves at every post office along the trail route. An emptied-out frosting container liberated from a Safeway supermarket in Prunedale, California, R2-D2 carried the Excedrin, foot ointment, powdered Gatorade, sanitary napkins, guidebook chunks, and condoms we needed for each section of the trail. Even my backpack had a name: Big Motherfucker, or Big Mofo, for short. He got his name because he had 5,925 cubic inches of manly packing space. Big Mofo was so damned big you could stick a toaster oven, two photo albums, a Sparkletts bottle, and a Waring blender in his belly and still have room for seven sacks of Cooler Ranch Doritos. My special favorite was Betty, a leakproof fabric water container, able to hold as much as four king-size canteens. After I bought her at an outdoors store, I took her home and filled her with tap water. She puffed up, getting big out in front and sticking out in the back in a way that somehow reminded me of Betty Boop. I always knew we could rely on Betty. Her manufacturers said she was 100 percent guaranteed. I trusted her so much that I filled her to the brim and let her ride inside Big Mofo, right on the top, above our food bags and clothes.
It happened one late afternoon while Allison and I were walking on a trench on the bottom of the ocean. That is what it looked like on the flats south of the Scodie Mountains. Sand bars branched into the bushes. Wiry plants waved on the sides of the path. Lizards darted from rock to rock like sculpins. I was feeling pretty good about the trail that day, joking around, and Allison seemed to have forgiven me for the snake-induced “this campsite sucks an
d why are you so goddamned slow” incident from earlier in the week. In fact, we were throwing around the terms of endearment we used only when on very good terms. I called her Ratface. She called me Fishbody. To us, these were encrypted declarations of true intimacy and affection, made more meaningful by the fact that an outsider would have thought these names degrading.
The foreign environment entranced me. We did not belong here. Without sunscreen, survival hats, or water, we would have perished soon. Betty, our water bag, was our diving bell, a ballast to stop us from floating up into the sun. It amazed me to think we could travel unscathed through a place like this as long as our bottles stayed full. Since our water crises were over for good, I could now enjoy the beauty of this place on its own terms. Swallows knifed the air for insects. Piñon pines formed islands of green. As we rose up a hill, Allison noticed a stain of clear water on the back of Big Motherfucker.
“Hey, Fishbody, you’re sweating like a pig,” she said as we made our way up a steep trail on a mule-colored foothill, a featureless hump that looked just like the entrance to a municipal landfill. I smiled at her “pig” reference. Our first date just so happened to be at an agricultural fair in Goshen, Connecticut, where the two of us spent the afternoon watching the greased pig races, eating funnel cakes, and riding the pukers. Allison was so beautiful at the fair, with her glowing eyes and her blond hair blowing all over the place, that I could not look her in the face. I had to excuse myself a half-dozen times and visit the Porta-Cans because my heart was pounding and my nervous bladder kept filling. Who would have guessed that two years later I’d be walking up a steep ridge with the same woman, our breath smelling just like the Goshen Fair poultry enclosure, our shirts looking as though we’d used them to swab down the contestants in the 4-H heifer exhibition? Allison, as usual, was right. I was sweating to an unusual degree. I stopped and took off Big Mofo, who was sopping wet and strangely light. I looked inside. Water covered our food bags and our clothes. Water dripped on my sleeping bag compartment. Somehow, that morning, Betty’s screw-on cap had popped off. Now it would not screw back on again. Two thirds of our water was gone, and the next reliable water was fifteen miles away. It was late in the day, so we would have to bed down for the night, conserve water, then make a push for it next morning. Besides, everything was soaked. I grabbed Betty by the neck, lifted her out of Big Mofo, and started to throttle her.