The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  “S’mores?” The man grunted. “All I’ve got is ramen crumbs—and I’m almost out.”

  Still shivering, he told us his sad story. He was from New York City. He wasn’t much into hiking or survivalism, but he’d heard about the glorious John Muir Trail and was curious. A few months ago, he’d won a round-trip first-class ticket to California. “I figured it was my chance to see something pretty,” he said, “so I decided to fly here and hike the JMT. The thing is I forgot my sunglasses. On Muir Pass, there’s snow on either side for over a mile and a half, and if you stare at the glare it’ll burn out your cornea. And that’s what I did. I got snow-blinded temporarily, seeing white. I finally got the idea to hold a piece of paper in front of my face with a slit in it to see through, but it’s hard to walk with a piece of paper in front of your face.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Allison said.

  “Anyways, I also realized that I’d forgotten my sunscreen, and another hiker gave me an extra bottle, but by that point I’d burned my hand so bad it got infected. After my hand got burned, I knew that things could not get worse, but guess what, they did. One night I forgot to stake my tent down. The wind swooped it up like a kite, and I had to chase it for a mile cross-country, over some steep shit, and then I scraped the fuck out of my knees.”

  “Um,” I said, “we’ve got some disinfectant in a tube if you want…”

  “Also, I didn’t bring a goddamned ice ax, so I had to climb Donahue Pass on my hands and knees, barehanded, in ice and snow, ’cause I wasn’t wearing any gloves. And then it turned out to be the wrong fucking pass.”

  “Well,” Allison said, nodding her head in a sweet and encouraging way, while smiling and pointing to the man’s fancy-looking bait-and-tackle stash. Nothing brought out the gentle side of her like someone suffering. She couldn’t bear to see anyone in pain. “At least you’re getting fresh fish for dinner every night.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, annoyed. “I never learned to fish”

  “Isn’t there anybody who can help you?” Allison said. “Don’t you have a hiking partner?”

  “Nobody,” he said. “Ten days in the wild and I’ve lost my mind. I’ve started talking to squirrels. And the worst part of it, they’ve started talking back.”

  I stood there for a while. For just a fraction of a second, I wondered what might happen to me if Allison left me behind and forced me to walk in the woods alone. Would I start hallucinating and singing with marsupials? America’s first Caucasian settlers thought the woods were a scary place where demons dwelled. Devils hid in the rocks. But I shook the thought out of my mind, reminding myself that it was this guy’s fault for being here alone, having a bad attitude, and being so unprepared.

  The conversation petered out, and Allison and I took our leave of Oedipus Rex. For a while we sat outside our tent in stunned silence. We wondered to ourselves: How much effort would it take to transform this gentle garden into someone’s personal hell? Seeing Oedipus Rex made me redouble my efforts to enjoy every second of this experience.

  The next day I felt sad that Oedipus Rex wasn’t enjoying his adventure the way we were. Thinking of his sad example made me revel in every rock cornice, every diamond of scattered light. The Lois and Clark Expedition pushed on, over slopes without trees, past boulders and a troop of marmots in the sun. The marmots looked like guinea pigs but were the size of small dogs, with russet-colored fur and the ability to stand on their hind legs while whistling through O-shaped mouths. At the time I was sure they were greeting us, offering up the forest’s good tidings, but who knows what they were thinking? After all, marmots are inscrutable, and capable of rampages. They love to attack parked cars, gnaw holes in the cars’ tubing, and drink the coolant and brake fluid. The deadly chemicals do not harm them. I didn’t know this then.

  As we continued our nature walk, Allison spied two Belding’s ground squirrels, living Beanie Babies chickering in the bushes, playing tag. They were cute, with their sniffy noses, furry bodies, and little arms bent forward in repose. I wished I could be one of them, so free and happy, cavorting in the bushes. I did not know at the time that they were furry sociopaths who practiced infanticide just for the protein and whose females would sometimes take the nurslings of other ground squirrels and murder them on the spot.* I moved through the lives of animals and the forests that contained them like a stranger who knew nothing of the language. My ignorance was pleasant. The hiking was steep and strenuous, but the living was easy. We watched a rabbit-eared mule deer in a field at sunset, and walked along the slow waters that wormed through the meadow at dusk. The air was as cool and dry as John Muir had promised in his diaries. Even when Allison slipped and fell on a muddy bank, the land reached up to receive her body like a cradle; her landing was soft. Our lives were an indulgent fantasy.

  Below Muir Pass, a rock bowl held our own lake. It had no name that I knew of, so I named it after the Lois and Clark Expedition. Clouds got caught in the bowl. They misted themselves across our tent. That night we discussed only our silliest dreams. “You have a gift for baking,” Allison said. “You could make pies.” She wondered if we might one day open up a bed-and-breakfast-brewery-bakeshop-bookstore and call it a B and B and B and B and B. I talked about dusting off a silly science fiction novel I wrote at sixteen, some dreadful Narnia–Lord of the Rings hybrid about a collection of magic books that control the Earth’s elements. The evil Umglots steal the books and plot world destruction. “Why not go back and rewrite that book and sell it?” Allison said. “It could be huge.”

  Night bled into day, day into night, and before we knew it we had scrambled up and over most of the passes on the John Muir Trail. We were heading through the soft loam of a forest when we ran into two women with short-cropped hair and slender packs. They seemed to be in their forties. One stopped us. “Watch out for Bear Creek,” she said. “It’s fast and cold. It almost knocked us off our feet. Somebody told me there’s supposed to be a bridge, but it’s gone.”

  The warning unsettled me, although the idea of too much water seemed fantastical after all our dehydration crises in our first few weeks of the trail. Down in the hot country, I would have laughed in the face of anyone who warned me that rushing water could ever imperil us on the PCT. Danger from water? That would have sounded like dying of luxury, like choking to death on a Kobe beef and foie gras sandwich. When we got there, Bear Creek made a hollow sound like storm water through a drainpipe. The creek was fast, dark, and fifty feet across; leaves and twigs shot across its surface. Allison stood on the shore while I scooted my boots in the water to try it out. The creek was shallow near its banks, but when I took two steps forward, the bottom dropped until the water covered my ankles, my knees, my thighs. Soon I couldn’t see the lower half of my body anymore.

  The creek’s bottom was a slick rock mantle. I tottered. Bear Creek smelled like algae, and Big Motherfucker bore down on me, shifting his weight from one shoulder to the other. I now knew it was foolish to lash my pack so tightly to my back. Now if I fell face-first, Big Mofo would pin me to the bottom of the creek. The water tried to pull me down, but I grabbed tight to a boulder. When I at last worked up the nerve, I made a break for it, pushing myself off from the rock, taking ten giant steps toward the shore, and falling to my knees in the shallows on the other side. Now it was Allison’s turn.

  I shouted at her to loosen her straps, but she couldn’t hear me. Soon, deep green water covered her up to the waist. The creek was drinking her. She was teetering and starting to cry. I shouted at her to hold still. Throwing off my pack and wading into the water, I kept wondering what the hell I would tell her father and mother if she went down and her pack held her under and I couldn’t lift her out of there. What would be the reason for her drowning? What, exactly, was in Canada? Without my pack, it was easier to fight the current. I splashed out to her, held out my arms, and she sloughed her pack off, right on top of me. I took hold of the bulky pack while she let go of the rock she was holding, swam with the cu
rrent, and dogpaddled, in thrashing motions, toward the opposite shore. Without the ridiculous pack, she was buoyant, and crossed the creek without much trouble. In an instant, she was crawling up the bank, soaked and still crying. I put my arms around her back onshore.

  “You saved my life,” Allison said later on.

  I did not know what to say. As she continued to cry, I told her that Bear Creek was not a reasonable test, that it was damned hard. Those women had warned us about it for a reason. There ought to be a sign posted about the place. Just then, two young hikers with chisel chins and stripped-down backpacks approached from the other side. They were heading straight for the creek. I bellowed at them. “Be careful!” but they stomped on in, waded in the water, and cut straight through Bear Creek as if it were a municipal kiddie pool. In a flash, they were finished, and marched right past us. “You’re right, that was tricky,” said the man in front.

  Allison and I looked at each other in puzzlement as the cold sank into our skin and made us shiver. Was it just us, I wondered, turning every little inconvenience into a tragedy narrowly averted? If Bear Creek was so easy, why did those two women make such a fuss about it? We rested together awhile, and when Allison had dried herself, changed clothes, and thrown her garments in a fabric bag, we got as far from the sound of Bear Creek as we could.

  On we walked, past nightfall. In our tent later, I could not help wondering if there was a tape-stop reality at work here, if Allison really had drowned and my unconsciousness, unable to process the truth, had manufactured a ghost-cloth Allison, quilted from memory. It occurred to me that my “knowing” of her was scattershot at best, that there were blanks. In a pinch I couldn’t say very much about her. I knew she had a temper, and was neat, and that most of our fights were about dishes on the floor, mold on the walls, my losing the keys. I could say she loved Chianti Ruffino and brown Italian sodas that scorched your tongue. I knew she wanted babies someday but I’d never asked if she wanted a boy or a girl, or more than one, or if she wanted them with me. I knew exactly how to amuse her, to the extent that she once almost laughed herself to death because of me. I once did a crazy dance on her kitchen floor, making her choke on a melon wedge, which required me to practice the Heimlich maneuver on her. So I guessed I’d saved her life twice, though I’d instigated both scenarios that made me have to save her life in the first place. I might also say that I regretted the times when I yelled at her so much that I made tears fall down her face, like that time in Albany, when we were crisscrossing the country in a caravan to reach this trail and she was in the car in front, speeding through rain, and because I did not want to lose sight of her, I sped, too, and the cop stopped both of us, her first, then me. He gave us each eighty-dollar tickets, and I stood there in the rain, the water running down my face, yelling through Allison’s open window until she shook and cried, and now I wanted to tell the real Allison, or the ghost one, that this was shameful and that I would never yell at her like that again.

  But when the first stroke of sun hit the tent the next morning, and she did not vanish like a ghost, I could no longer remember what it was that I wanted to say to her. I remembered the gist of it, but the words were in the wrong order. I tried very hard to piece them together, but it would have sounded silly or ham-fisted and wrong.

  I wanted to get it exactly right.

  I decided, once again, to let it wait.

  * Allan A. Schoenherr, A Natural History of California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p. 217. Sociopath and murder are my words, not Schoenherr’s.

  Chapter 22

  Smedberg Lake

  We stomped down to Reds Meadow and took a shuttle up to the condo village of Mammoth Lakes, a scruffy enclave eight thousand feet above sea level in the eastern Sierra Nevada. My father, a burly, strapping man of sixty-eight, greeted us at the Sunshine Village condo with his bald pate and gap-toothed smile. He was dressed in a oversize red T-shirt that read PICASSO in cursive lettering. My mother and father were still skeptical of the trip. “We’re very proud of you,” my mother said. “But, really, you’ve done enough. You don’t have to do anymore of this to impress us.” In spite of their trepidations, they stuffed us with wine and ribs, took us to the movies, and to my surprise, boasted about us to every waiter and waitress. “Can you believe what my son has done?” my father said to hostesses, gear-shop employees, and even random people in the street.

  At a fancy restaurant, Allison lost thirty dollars in a bet with my father. I can’t recall the subject of the bet, but my father told Allison that she would “never have to pay that money as long as you stick with my son forever.” It was the first intimation that my family wanted us to get married. I could not help but look at Allison in a new light that weekend. I noticed the solicitous way she hiked up dusty switchbacks to Shadow Lake with my slow-moving father, staying close to him to make sure he did not topple—my father, like me, is rather top-heavy—and the gentle way she dealt with my nephews when they played roughhouse games with her, including Smell My Feet and No Mercy.

  That week, wherever we went, everyone treated my girlfriend as if she were a part of the family. My sister-in-law winked and made rapid pointing gestures at Allison’s ring finger.

  I was only twenty-six, and the thought of getting married still petrified me, but perhaps my family was right to put the idea in my head. Allison was more than my girlfriend. She wasn’t afraid of saying and doing most anything that came to her mind. She often did what I only thought of doing. It was like having a bullhorn attached to my head, trumpeting my interior thoughts to the world. Before we left Mammoth Lakes and returned to the trail, we stopped by the local KFC to fortify ourselves on lipids and rubbery meat. When we ordered up a bucket to go, the teenage cashier smirked. She said, “It’s dumb to eat this stuff. It’s full of saturated fats.” Allison looked at her, smiled, and said, “Yum. Saturated fats. Bring it on.” The teenager winced. The strange thing is I was thinking those words at the same time Allison said them. It felt as if the speech had started in my brain and come out of her mouth.

  After we said our good-byes to my mother, father, and nephews, we marched north toward Sonora Pass, moving through a dappled valley full of lakes, snowfields, and painted-rock caves. Below us was a highway in shadow and the frozen form of Orphan Lake, black and blue with no creeks running in or out of it. Buzzards rode the thermals. They barely moved their wings as they wobbled above us. We pitched camp early and woke up the next day near Ebbetts Pass in a field of volcanic rubble forming outlandish shapes. Bat wings. Gorgon heads. Dream castles. All the while, she told me stomach-churning tales full of so much gore that I wondered where she came up with all of this stuff. Perhaps she was a Viking in her previous life. Allison got a fiery look as she recounted the story of a Nantucket serial killer/journalist who dressed up like a whaler’s ghost so he could slaughter guests at a bed-and-breakfast with a rusty old harpoon and write about his own exploits for the local newspaper. At one point he impales a girl and boy in a claw-foot tub. Naturally, the journalist was never caught for his crimes. “In fact,” Allison said, “he even finagled a job at The Boston Globe, on the police beat.”

  I could tell she’d made that story up on the spot. She never did any advanced scribbling. Maybe that’s what drew me to her in the first place—the power of improvisation. I always have to chart everything out. Diagram it. Draw myself a map. She seemed to have the ready answers to every threat to her comfort, whether it was boredom, shyster mechanics, or bullies at work. But that week we ran into a situation so disagreeable that it tested her powers to respond.

  We were enjoying ourselves in the wind, high on a set of bumpy peaks, where I was telling her some halfhearted story about a goat-eating giant, when a storm snuck up on us, a drooling dark one with tendrils draping down. The wind picked up behind the clouds, shoving them forward, and then the weather started blowing sideways, speeding our steps as we rushed down the path toward Lost Lake. The rain cloud’s streamers were upon us now
. Soaked straight through, we pitched an emergency camp at the edge of a parking lot on a dirt road near the whitecapped water. We knew it was stupid thing, to spend the night near a jeep track. If you camp near an access road, you’re in striking distance of off-road vehicle enthusiasts, who are usually shit-faced and bearing small-bore firearms. But the rain was thrumming, and our exhaustion left us with no other option. A few campers were there already, quite drunk, blasting oldies. They sang along to the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” and Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love.” A red-faced man altered the words as he went along. Actually, he augmented them, by inserting the words you bitch at odd intervals. For example, he sang, “Don’t worry, baby! Everything’s gonna be all right…YOU BITCH!” Someone on the other side of the lake popped off three gunshots and hollered after each speeding bullet. The rounds made a metallic whoosh as they cut across the water.

  “We should just pack our stuff and leave,” said Allison, in our tent. “Nothing is worth this. We might as well hike in the rain.”

  “I think it’s too late for us to move,” I said. It was four, and I worried the path would shove us up onto the shoulders of some big mountain with no adequate flat spots. “I’m too tired to go anywhere.”

  The evening wore on. Much to our surprise, the revelers settled. By nine, it was quiet. The rain stopped. I stepped outside the tent. A young man and his father were gathering their drenched supplies, bunching them into their arms and walking toward their pickup truck. “It’s about to get worse,” the father said. “We’re heading out.”

  “We’re staying,” I said.

  “I think you should leave, too.”

  “There’s room enough for all of us,” I said.

  The soft oldies continued, but the bitch-shouting man’s voice gave out. Allison and I went to sleep, and soon the water, lapping against itself, was the only sound. I was glad we’d ignored the advice of the young dad.