The Cactus Eaters
Page 21
Allison, it seemed to me, said that last line with an unnecessary amount of relish.
“Cuts off his dick?” I said. “Did you just say cuts off his dick? And that’s the end of the story?”
“There is no more,” she said.
I knew she was a big joker. I knew she had a morbid sense of humor that could surface all of a sudden, in the darnedest of places. But it was dark outside. And there was no one around but the two of us, and somewhere in the back of my mind was the suspicion that Allison, perhaps, was one truly sick individual, and now I was going camping with her. And it made me worry. Between bears and Allison, there was nowhere to run. Allison’s imagination was a fertile crescent of disgusting images. She was a Scheherazade of horror. The scary stories just kept popping up out of her, fully formed.
That night, as we first started thinking about a potential campsite, I was pondering, in particular, the dirty basement and screaming brother, the flashing razor, the severed penis lying in the basement dust. I was pondering the rats that the pale brother ate for dinner. Suddenly a hairy shape broke from the bushes near the Pacific Crest Trail, a rolling shape, low, fat, ungainly, but moving with great speed toward Allison and me at first, then whirling away, so fast, in a blur of pine needles and dust. Its hair was black, but not all of it. On the tips of its back I spied a flash of cinnamon and a shade of murky gray near its wet muzzle. It took me a moment to realize this was not a figment from Allison’s sick mind.
“Oh my God,” I shouted. “Bear! Bear!”
And then it was gone. Quiet again. How big was it? I couldn’t say. I caught only a suggestion of haunches, a trace of shoulder, but I’d seen my first wild bear, moving among us, a pair of eyes, a well of dark brown as deep as our ancestral past. It’s just not the same when you see a bear in a zoo, bored, fast asleep, pacing, or sitting there belching and yawning. When you see one in the woods, it somehow makes the forest revert from background to foreground. The forest seems to rise and engulf you. Was he there all along, watching? As we hiked farther into the dark, we came to a campground with a bear-proof food storage locker for campers. We shuddered, for it was padlocked to a thick tree and covered with nasty scratches, top to bottom. Something big and hairy and hungry had really wanted that food. Should we stop here for the night? Should we call it a day? But somehow, when you’re hiking a 2,650-mile trail, the greed for mile-bagging can get the best of you. You forget to stop when you really should. You press on and on.
And all the while, I kept thinking about the Hairy Other, the watcher in the woods. For as long as there have been humans in America, there have been bears in the forest. In the course of those fifteen millennia in which people of one sort or other have occupied this landmass, men and women have reduced our monsters and our wilderness with spear, repeating rifle, shotgun, ax, and bulldozer. The great forests are gone. The mega fauna are extinct. But the woods still had the power to resurrect a strange, almost supernatural fear. It must have been a familiar feeling to the cavemen equivalent of Dan and Allison, traipsing through these woods in the Pleistocene era in loincloths, while clutching bone-frame tents and spears made from flaked-off rock points. Cave-Dan and Proto-Allison must have been fucking terrified. Back then, the two-thousand-pound short-faced bear roamed freely across the United States. When it reared up on its hind legs and roared to the sky, the beast was 11.5 feet tall from his hind legs to his skull. That’s twice the size of a modern Kodiak bear. Think of a carnivore at the pointy end of the food pyramid, a beast so powerful that nothing, except a mastodon, would stand up to him. There was something direct about these creatures. Unlike black bears or grizzlies, they were not pigeon-toed, which meant they didn’t waddle. No, they just came right at you in a straight line, and they didn’t mess around with nuts, roots, and berries, either. The short-faced bear ate nothing but bloody meat. A black bear would be no match for one of these goliaths, which could have popped one into its mouth like a petit four. But a black bear could still weigh six hundred pounds and climb a hundred-foot pine tree in thirty seconds flat. We had to keep our wits about us out here.
Every night in the Sierra Nevada we hoped to find another camp with a bear box. But on some nights we miscalculated. On one such night we wound up camped beside a creek beneath a high cliff. We built a fire. Bats hurtled through the twilight. We debated tying our food stash to a tree, so high up that no blackie could get at it. But then we thought about those two airheads back in Cedar Grove who did the same thing and got screwed. There is a documented case in Yosemite National Park in which a bear climbed a tree, jumped off one of the branches, grabbed a bear bag on the way down in midair, and then came to a rolling stop on the ground twenty feet below. For all these reasons, I did something you’re never supposed to do: In open defiance of the scary ranger at Cedar Grove, I stuck the food bag between Allison and me and slept with my ice ax near the opening of the tent, with the following idea: if a bear stuck its greasy filthy maw inside our tent and tried to get at our food I would stand and fight, to the death if I had to. I got the idea from reading a section of The PCT Hiker’s Handbook, by hikers’ guru Ray Jardine, who said he slept with his food, though he was extremely cautious to stay well away from designated campsites that would attract bears. “In PCT environs,” Jardine writes, “I sleep with my food, prepared to guard it without compromise. At night I keep my flashlight near at hand, lest I take a blind swat at porkie…. And I do not suffer the misconception that my nocturnal bliss is inviolate. I fall asleep prepared to rise and assert my position.”
The branches blew and scratched at the tent that night. Out of the enfolding woods came the sounds of padding on bumpy feet. Pad pad pad pad. Gurgling stomachs waiting. Snoring sounds. Wet snurfling and belching. Watching us. Digestive noises, then something large, so close I could hear the sloshing juices in its gut, or was it Allison? Stomachs growling somewhere. Long shadows again. “Never again, no, never,” I said to myself. “Never again.” A pressing snout, a depression in the top of the tent, a scratch, and a distinct black shape—don’t scream—then nothing. Just wind. A dent, a scratch, a thump that woke me up, though I was barely sleeping. Just a pine cone. Something sniffing again. Where’s the flashlight? I pick it up, a Maglite, black and shiny, stuck between my front teeth and lit full blast. Is anything really there? Should I bop it over the head? Spaces compressed and expanded at night in camp on the trail. The flashlight seemed only to flatten the darkness. Then quiet. Nothing.
This pattern continued for some time: I kept hearing—or thinking I was hearing—gurgles, snorts, and scratchings. Allison’s stomach would make a frightening sound in the dark at three in the morning. Then morning came, in the smallest possible increments of lightness. On one such morning, deep in the woods, we were just getting under way when we came to a steep, steep cliff, practically vertical, off to one side of the trail. We saw a scraggly deer charge straight up the face of the cliff, bursting out of the forest, scaring the shit out of us, then up, up, up, rocks skidding beneath its hooves but it just kept going, going, apparently not caring if it broke its little neck. I gasped as we watched it vanish up the wall. Then I turned to Allison.
“If the deer out here are this cocky, the bears out here must be tough bastards.”
The two of us turned to face the granite wall. We climbed all day. Between Allison’s stories and the valleys and shadow, the clouds and streams and days blurring into one another, I cannot pinpoint the day, the time, the week, or the exact spot that it happened. I can only say that a bear, some days later, burst from the trees to the side of the trail, about a hundred feet in front of us, making us both leap forward in surprise. It had the look in its eye. It saw and smelled us. The bear froze for a moment. I knew what would happen. It would chuff. It would paw. It would make a charge for our food. To my relief, the bear turned its back on us and started sniffing at the ground.
And then Allison ran right for it.
“What?” I screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”
The bear looked like it didn’t even have a chance. It tore off through the woods so quickly that it hip-checked a sapling, making the tree shake like crazy.
The bear made a break for it, and melted like a ghost in the thicket.
* List derived from Edward Hoagland’s “Bears, Bears, Bears,” from Heart’s Desire, Tempe, Ariz.: Summit Books, 1988.
Chapter 21
Macho Me
We were almost through with our first month on the trail, and making headway, aiming north toward Yosemite National Park. We hiked through creek-soaked meadows and corn lily fields, on soft ground. I felt entitled, comfortable, smug, and a little bit macho now. After all, we’d just walked four hundred miles into the High Sierra from Southern California in spite of all the dire predictions about us. Allison looked even more scrumptious than before; the trail had sculpted her body, firming up her buttocks so much they looked like oversized fists. Her back was strong, and her legs were steel pinions. I was skinny and strapping for the first time ever, and starting to understand what Eddie meant when he said my body would get so trail-hard I could hold a Bic lighter to my feet and feel no pain.
The footpath in this section was remote; Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite national parks made up the largest road-free open-space expanse in the lower forty-eight states. Walking through the seemingly endless forest gave rise to the illusion that America was untamed, although a mere 2 percent of the United States fit the category of “wildlands.” Since we traveled cross-country on foot in the rawboned country, I felt a kinship with the snaggletooth mountain men of the nineteenth century. I’m talking about the first Anglo-Americans to reach this area in the 1820s, men with flintlock rifles as long as their arms, buckskin jackets, skinning knives, and hair that fell down their backs in braids. To the pelt-seeking profiteers of the western mountains, a balanced breakfast might include a root, a snail, leg of cougar, and a fine roasted dog. In these days of MapQuest, it’s strange to think that most lands between Missouri and the Pacific Coast were considered undiscovered country in the early nineteenth century, at least as far as white people were concerned. Travelers who ventured west of the Midwest were said to be “jumping off,” as if leaping from the far cliffs of the earth. Never mind that hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were pretty well settled in after millennia of living there, and never mind the leaky Spanish ships that had explored the coast of California as far north as Point Reyes, near present-day San Francisco, more than two and a half centuries earlier. As far as the Eastern establishment was concerned, the area where Allison and I were walking right now, and much of the Midwest, might as well have been on another planet. Thomas Jefferson, before the Lewis and Clark Expedition, speculated that woolly mammoths still tromped through the forests of Missouri, and no one thought he was insane when he wrote this in a popular book. Now there’s no place left for a mammoth to hide. Everything has been pinpointed, explored, duly noted. Still, I liked to pretend I was a pathfinder, a mountain man, and gritty. The frontier had been closed for more than a century. There were no more empty places on the American map, but that didn’t matter to me, not when there were so many empty places in the map of my brain.
I sometimes forgot that there was life outside the Pacific Crest Trail. I had everything I needed right here: female companionship, trees, stories, and even music. In the deepest woods, Allison entertained me with atonal renditions of death metal songs. One of her favorites was a Covenant song about Lucifer:
“Satan is his name,” she screeched as she hiked through a waterfall’s refreshing mist. “Across the bridge of death. There he waits in flames!”
Then she made a scary face. Sometimes she would bang her head, toss around her hair, or flash the sign of the Beast. Those were the good old times. In the midst of all this scenery and interesting music, I was starting to lose sight of the civilized world. But Allison sometimes ruined the spell by trying to engage me in serious discussions about our future in this “other” world, the one I could no longer picture. Lately, she could not stop thinking about jobs and other unmentionables.
“I miss the city sometimes,” she said. “I get so bored. Where do you think we’ll live when this is over? What do you think we’ll do? I’m thinking it might be cool to live near Boston. I’m thinking we might get jobs at the Quincy Patriot Ledger. It’s supposed to be a really good newspaper.”
“The Quincy Patriot Ledger?” I shot back. “Why do you want to talk about that stuff now out here, where it’s beautiful?”
“Whatever,” she said. “You shouldn’t make fun of me just because I know what I want to do with my life when this is over. I just want to go out and do things, you know?” We’d had this conversation many times before. “It’s okay to have ambitions,” she often told me. “I have a classmate from J-school, a friend of mine, who went to Germany to be a newsman and almost got blown up in a car bomb. The secret to that kind of success is drive.” Sometimes her work ethic baffled me. Before we left on the trail, I eavesdropped on her having a phone conversation in which she scolded a friend for whining about working occasional twelve-hour days. “Working twelve hours is not that bad,” she told the person on the end of the line. “It’s not that much more than eight.”
Unwanted talks about jobs and the future reminded me of a life I didn’t want to think about. Worst of all, Allison intimated several times that we would probably have to get off the trail for an extended period in the next couple of weeks. Her anthology was about to be published. The book editors had warned her that she must be available off the trail to go over the final edits. This meant we would have to leave the PCT for at least a week. Never mind that we were running late, never mind that winter storms would crush us if we dallied. But I blocked out all she said. As far as I was concerned, the world of jobs and responsibilities was becoming an abstraction. She might as well have been talking about lizards on the moon. The journey, and Allison, were the only things I could picture. There was nothing to do but walk the trail.
We spent one morning climbing to Glen Pass. After slipping and sliding on loose pebbles and ice, we reached the top, where the pale blue sky faded to pastel-pink above the mountains. Hundreds of feet below, spyglass lakes gleamed from a hundred sockets. Loose bits of rock gave way to snowfields and sentinel rocks stacked on top of one another, forming an ominous ridge. It was hard to fix my gaze on any object. My eyes moved back and forth from scattered forests to white cones, and ink-dark ponds between them.
Climbing down the other side, Allison and I saw a few hikers slouching uphill. One man was painfully alone. On his face was a look of total resentment. Though Allison gave him a supportive nod, I could not help but judge him. Clearly he did not know the rules of the backcountry, I thought, and now the trail was taking a switch to his velvety-soft behind. A few minutes later, several Brownie-age girls tromped past us with exterior-frame packs on their backs and genocide in their eyes. No one smiled. In a shady glen, we met a sweet and aging couple carrying a gadget that emitted a shrill sound similar to the “voice” of a male mosquito. “Somehow it drives the pregnant girl mosquitoes away before they can bite us,” the man said. “It cost eight bucks and it works just great.” Allison and I were impressed, though I can’t say the same for the mosquitoes, which crawled all over the man and his wife.
After meeting these other hikers, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the age of access was such a good thing. Now that highways girdle America, it’s easier than ever to get yourself killed in the backcountry. Sometimes I feared for the safety and well-being of my fellow travelers, but I also laughed at them. After all, the Lois and Clark Expedition had walked here all the way from Los Angeles. Though it pains me to say this now, I felt supe
rior to the rubes who drove in their minivans. Since I’d already gone through what they were experiencing then, I thought I’d earned the right to snigger at their travails. I assumed my own initiation was over.
Meanwhile, we kept meeting unlucky and credulous people who transformed John Muir’s Range of Light into their personal Mordor, a purgatory in the pines. One day, we met a sufferer who trumped all the rest.
We’d stopped for the evening in Woods Creek Camp, with several cleared tent spots close to the rushing waters. The camp was shady, under tall trees, with a view of the Woods Creek Suspension Bridge, which shimmied every time a hiker walked across it. The camp had bear boxes, so we didn’t have to worry about a marauding Ursus americanus for one night. We were hanging out by our tent, tying the rain flap down over the top of it, when we heard moaning sounds emanating from a nearby tent. The panting got faster. The fellow, I assumed, was spending some quality time with himself, but when he emerged from the tent, it was clear that he was grunting out of misery, not pleasure. He was shaking all over.
“Is something wrong?” Allison asked him.
“It’s not a question of something being wrong,” said the man we would come to call Oedipus Rex, behind his back of course. Brown bangs winged into his eyes. “It’s a question of everything going wrong that can go wrong, and some things going wrong that could not go wrong.”
“Do you need any help?” Allison said. “We’ve got extra food. We were thinking of making s’mores.”