by Dan White
I hid this blast of poetic fury from Allison. All told, we were off the trail for about a week. Thank God for Allison’s cousin Tom, who lived in a nearby town and gave us an unexpected gift before we returned to the trail: two Day-Glo orange vests and baseball caps saying LOIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION with stick-on black letters. My hat said CLARK. If only the Gingerbread Man could see us now! It’s one thing to get a trail name. It’s another thing to accessorize. For a shining moment I felt famous, the vest and hats’ loud colors shouting our greatness and glory. But Tom warned us that the clothes would serve as more than fashion statements. Bear hunting season was almost upon us. He didn’t want some drunken hunter with a sporting rifle blowing us all to hell.
Actual Diary Entry
After taking a bus from Sacramento back to South Lake Tahoe and hitchhiking back to Echo Lake, we returned to the trail, wearing our bright orange outfits with pride. We were part of a team again as we passed into the Desolation Wilderness, hiking past Aloha Lake, a flooded valley with lodgepole pines protruding from the middle. The wind made the bare snags tremble. Once more I thought of the pioneers and what it must have been like to roll through a landscape that seemed to laugh at human ambitions and dreams. But we were beating that landscape now. After going this far on the trail, nothing seemed undoable. Near Blackwood Creek, we were in an expansive mood, feeling giddy and determined. We decided that someday we would open a bookstore together and name it for a literary suicide. We agreed, after much consideration, to call it Sylvia Plath’s Oven. There would be a sign out front saying, EVERYBODY, STICK YOUR HEAD IN HERE. There is something about a mountain setting that makes such ideas seem good at the time. As we entered the Granite Chief Wilderness, my calm, and hopes of success, returned in full. It was August 25. By my best calculations, we had two months to walk a thousand miles—and no more interruptions. As the trail reached a mountain crest, we looked above the clear-cut slopes of the Squaw Valley ski area and saw a pair of eagles launch themselves off a pine bough. They looked clumsy at first but found their momentum and rose up weightless.
The trail followed a rock spine on jumbled crags with granite spokes. Just north of where Allison and I were walking that day, an emigrant party steered their wagons across a treacherous pass. They were the first such group to cross the Sierra Nevada. The leader was a fellow I’d never heard of, named Elisha Stephens, forty years old and ugly as a possum. His neck was crooked and his beard was a tangled mess of tufts. You could hang your hat on his nose. In spite of his looks and lack of leadership experience, he’d been voted the captain of twenty-five men, eight women, nine girls and eight boys, all in eleven wagons that left from Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the spring of 1844. His destination was Sutter’s Fort, in New Helvetia, California. Why did he set off on this journey? It’s hard to say. A taciturn man, Stephens left no diary behind. He must have had strong reasons to take a journey to the West when such ventures were considered insane or at least stupid. Maps of America stopped dead at a blank space from the Rockies to the one hundredth meridian, an expanse so empty there were no railroad tracks or roads, not even a telegraph wire.
What, then, was the appeal? Perhaps he wanted to get rich, but the gold rush was five years off. Maybe he craved free land or was as sick of his old life as we were when we ditched our jobs and left for the trail. As he headed west, Stephens suppressed a mutiny, drove footsore cattle through creeks, and felt the sun burn down on the misnamed Forty-Mile Desert, which was twice that long. After all that hardship, Stephens and his party entered the Sierra Nevada. They arrived at a granite ledge very close to where Allison and I were hiking that day. The ten-foot rocky barrier blocked the way. The Stephens party could have panicked or given up. Instead they emptied their wagons and hoisted each one up the ledge, using a rope pulley chained to the backs of their oxen. This emigrant party was resourceful as well as lucky; the group lost no members on its journey westward. In fact, it increased as it went along because of two babies born en route. Stephens and his crew opened up a mountain pass that became indispensable for thousands of other emigrants, including the forty-niners, not to mention the railroad and freeway that would both breach the pass, sending millions more people through the mountain notch.
I wonder if Stephens fantasized about fame and glory when he made it through this stretch. I, certainly, had such fantasies. Sometimes, at the end of a trail day, I pictured Allison and me finishing the trail and becoming highly paid motivational speakers, teaching self-esteem to addicts and fatties. But Stephens, if he had such notions, was in for a jolt. After his trek, he lived in obscurity in what is now Cupertino, California, and ended his days as a reclusive beekeeper and chicken farmer in Kern County. In the late 1860s, after thousands of Chinese and Irish laborers finished laying out the Central Pacific Railway route across the mountain pass, no one thought to invite poor Stephens to the ribbon-cutting ceremony. He became the town grump, bitter and grumbling. One day, he had a stroke and ended up paralyzed in a local hospital. Soon after, he dropped dead. Gravediggers planted him in a potter’s field in Bakersfield, with no headstone. The cemetery lost his internment records. Silicon Valley landmarks perpetuate but misspell Stephens’s last name—among them, Stevens Creek Boulevard and Stevens Creek Auto Mall.* But when you drive on Interstate 80 from Reno to Sacramento, you will not see Stephens’s name on the signs along the pass he opened. Instead, the signs pay tribute to another group of emigrants who crossed the pass two years after Stephens rolled through. Their western journey would have little historical significance if not for some of the emigrants’ unprecedented barbarism and savagery.
The name of that group is the Donner Party.
On August 27, three days after we returned from our Tahoe interlude, we hiked on a rocky hump on the Sierra Nevada’s northern tip. The trail, a foot-wide strip, approached Tinker Ridge, a hatchet-shaped rock overlooking Donner Pass. Old Highway 40 was a short way downhill from us, so we were only slightly startled to see a family approach from nowhere, a man, woman, their young daughter, and two coiffed Afghan hounds. The dogs walked close enough for me to smell their rosy perfume and admire their bright ribbons. The girl gave us a hateful wince, perhaps because of our Day-Glo reflective outfits. Down we walked through fir and pine as we crossed the flanks of Mount Judah, the crag the pioneers spied from Nevada to the east as they neared California. We dropped to the highway near Donner Summit, on a strip of black gravel under tall trees. Here, the south-to-north Pacific Crest Trail came within screaming distance of the Donner Party’s east-west route, though it is hard to pinpoint where the wagons crossed; earthmovers have widened the pass so much that the Donners might not even recognize it now. Standing near a DONNER PASS sign, Allison placed her right wrist in her mouth and chomped down hard enough to leave pink marks in her skin. I photographed this. Then we traded places, and I pretended to eat my left forearm. In the trail journal, I jotted the lyrics of a spontaneous song we sang there in honor of our arrival that day. It’s sung to the tune of “Yesterday” by the Beatles.
Pity me
I had to eat my friends so violently.
They’re not half the men they used to be…
My amusement faded when the singing stopped. In my diary I recorded an “inexplicable sadness and irritability that rose out of nowhere, as if the grave past of the place made me feel that way.” At the time I wondered if these emotions were something received, as if the thoughts were floating in the air above the highway long before we got there. While the feelings were real enough, I now wonder if the word Donner, emblazoned on the highway signs, was enough to set off an emotional depth charge. Perhaps my brain was responding to a name that forces travelers to remember when most of North America was a trackless expanse of trees and mountains, so vast and hidden that devils and serpents could conceal themselves there. A man passing through this terrain would fear for his life and sanity. The forces there might kill him or turn him into something less than human.
The Donner Party—actually, s
everal families traveling together—rolled west from Little Sandy River in July 1846. Their starting place was present-day Wyoming. Not all of the emigrants fit the stereotype of cash-strapped pioneers hoping to improve their fortunes. Some rode in wagons bulging with silks and mahogany cabinets. One wagon was pimped out with a sheet-iron stove, a browsing library, a full-length mirror, and a second story containing a bedroom. Most wagons needed two or three oxen to pull them across the prairie, but this “Palace Car,” a kind of Big Motherfucker on wheels, required four. Tamsen Donner, the family matriarch, stowed a ten-thousand-dollar nest egg in her quilt. She wanted to use the money to found a school in California. Patrick Breen, a well-to-do farmer, rolled with an entourage of fine horses, cows, and Towser, the family dog. Poor Towser! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Though Allison and I had laughed at the emigrants in our song, the more I learned about them later on, the more my giggles became stifled. The Donner Party tests the theorem that tragedy plus time equals comedy. Consider that they were credulous and overpacked small-town dwellers who had no outdoor survival training. They left too late in the year and yet they took long rest stops and tried to make up for this by taking an unproven “shortcut” that wasted even more time. They fought needlessly and thuggishly, exploding into rages when they should have stayed calm. All I can say is, “Sounds familiar.” Historians believe the Donner Party was doomed the moment they decided to follow the advice of Lansford Hastings—a lawyer, naturally—who told them they could chop out three hundred miles, nearly a month of travel time, by taking a “cutoff” that would route them through the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings wasn’t rolling with the party, so he wasn’t there when the emigrants were hacking their way through the trackless and damned-near-impenetrable Wasatch Mountains, cursing his name all the while. Pushing west, they left the Palace Wagon to rot in the sand, but it was too late. By the time they reached present-day Reno, it was late October, and the emigrants looked up with foreboding at the Sierra Nevada massif, and the ominous gray clouds above it. Instead of rushing west to stay ahead of winter, they rested for five days at Truckee Meadows, then headed up into the mountains, running into an unseasonable storm that forced them back from the summit where Allison and I now stood. Up to their shoulders in white, the travelers decided to bivouac for the winter, not as one unit but in squabbling factions camped along an eight-mile stretch of forest. Hunger gnawed at them as they settled into shanties and lean-tos left by the Stephens party. To hold off hunger, they devoured pack mules, oxen, grass, pine twig soup, shoe leather, wagon axle grease, and ox hides boiled down to a nauseating paste. They consumed all the dogs, including poor Towser.
Strange, how infamy is such a prodigious diarist. The Stephens party left behind scant records of its exploits, but the Donner Party members either kept journals or submitted to extensive interviews about their ordeal later on. That is how we know that the trapped emigrants first entertained the notion of cannibalism on, of all dates, Christmas Eve. In late December a group of pioneers sliced the meat off the arms and legs of Patrick Dolan, already dead of exposure and hunger. As they ate him for supper, they held their gazes away from one another and cried in the firelight. Cabins turned into charnel houses. Human brains boiled in a cauldron. Two Miwok Indians named Luis and Salvador were part of a relief party sent out to help the stranded emigrants; they were shot at close range and devoured. Only thirty-nine of the eighty-seven party members survived the six-month ordeal. The rest perished en route on the trail, in the frozen mountains, or on the way out of the wilderness.
I found it hard to get the Donners out of my mind in northern California, not because they were monsters but because they were not. For the most part they were ordinary people. In the words of California historian Kevin Starr, “Taken collectively, the Donner party was Everyman in a morality play of frontier disintegration.”* Unlike Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and other cannibals who haunt our popular culture, the Donner Party members weren’t crazy. If they were capable of atrocities, any one of us is capable of those same atrocities, under the right circumstances. “Cannibalism is not a psychology that erupts in psychotic individuals but is a universal adaptive strategy that is evolutionarily sound,” writes Lewis Petrinovich, UC Riverside professor emeritus of psychology. “The cannibal is within all of us.”
Allison and I were weary and grouchy after leaving Donner Summit. Seven miles later we arrived at a clearing beneath a steep and wooded hill. There we found an unlocked and unmanned Sierra Club hut, set aside for long-distance hikers and cross-country skiers. The windows of this A-frame had a baleful look, as if they had borne witness to tragedy. We had to enter the hut on a staircase that bypassed the first floor and rose straight up to the second story; I later found out that the builders added this unusual design feature because of harsh winters, when snows almost always swallow the whole first floor. Shelters are rare on the trail; the elements are so harsh out there that most shacks would get knocked down in a year or two. But this one had strong bones. It was thick and sturdy, though the inside was dingy and uncomfortable; previous occupants had trashed the place and left graffiti, or dopy self-affirmations, on most of the walls. Cans and squirrel baffles dangled from ropes nailed to the roof.
Soon it was dark out. There were no lights in the hut, so we bumbled about with our Maglites, constantly bumping our shins into things. Allison sat for a while in front of a latticed window staring at Cassiopeia, the star formation named for a treacherous queen. She insulted Neptune when she claimed her daughter, Andromeda, was more beautiful than the Sea Nymphs. The gods tied Andromeda to a rock and sent out a sea monster to devour her. Perseus showed up just in time to kill the monster, but the gods weren’t finished with Cassiopeia. When she died, they flung her up in the sky and turned her into stars—but with a catch. Sometimes when you see her, she’s upright and proper in a chair. Other times, the chair is upside down. In those moments, Cassiopeia is in disgrace, with the blood rushing to her head. She’s remembered, but for the wrong reasons.
While Allison stared at the stars, I went downstairs to check out the basement. I found more graffiti, a long table, and a dog-eared Bible. My fingers settled on the following passage: “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of things which he possesses, for what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?” I kept my finger on the passage for a while. The quote struck me as relevant but for murky reasons. It applied to me, but I did not yet know how or why.
That night we slept in bunks pressed close to the roof. We killed our flashlights and lay there in the darkness on wooden platforms in our sleeping bags, our heads lying inches away from the rooftop. “To lose his soul.” The words kept repeating as the night went from dark to black and the sounds began. I heard rumbling, scratching, rustles. Sometimes I thought I heard footsteps. I sat up on the cot while Allison kept on sleeping. Ghosts to me are not an abstraction. I don’t believe in them, but I fear them. As a boy on vacation in the High Sierra, I once stole a rock from an abandoned mine near Mammoth Lakes. From then on, twice a month for a year, miners visited me in my sleep, and even in my daydreams. Their eyes were rotted out. I shut my eyes to block them out, but I still heard their bones clank. This kept happening until I actually returned to Mammoth, the very next summer, and put the rock back where it belonged. The visions stopped. They say ghosts want our attention. Ghosts are like stars. The light source died long ago, and yet you can still see them glowing. Chances are it was probably just squirrels, raccoons, or opossums moving through the hut that evening. My rational mind knew this. It was just varmints, nothing more, and yet I kept thinking there was a person outside, or what used to be a person, standing there, just a few feet away from where we were sleeping that night, fiddling with the knobs, trying to get in.
* Admittedly, I wrote the acrticle “Showdown: Who Smells the Worst?,” Backpacker, May 2005, p. 44.
* Phil Sexton, interpretive specialist/Web manager and Elisha Stephens aficionado
, Tahoe National Forest, provided me with the details on Stephens’s post–Donner Pass life. Other materials are from Fradkin, The Seven States of California.
* Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Chapter 24
The Hairy Other, Part Two
The Lois and Clark Expedition was on the move. We splashed through streams, made our way through a clearcut forest, and entered a land that smelled like rotten eggs. In Lassen Volcanic National Park, steam rose from vents in the banks of Boiling Springs Lake. It was the second week of September, and time to celebrate. We had walked just under a thousand miles together, in seventy days, since leaving Agua Dulce. A butterfly lit on Allison’s head and rolled out its tongue like a party streamer. “I love it here,” she said.
Some tourists stood next to us, gagging on fumes, putting hankies over their faces, but we didn’t mind the smell. We couldn’t believe that our feet alone had brought us here. Now we had nine supply towns behind us: Agua Dulce. Tehachapi. Kennedy Meadows. Reds Meadow. Tuolomne Meadows. Echo Lake. Sierra City. Old Station. Belden Town. Next on the list was Castella, close to Mount Shasta. Allison wanted to linger in Lassen, but there wasn’t time. Though we were making great progress, it was early fall, and we had good reason to move fast. The weather was just starting to turn. By the time we crossed into the South Cascades, it was late September, and the sky had a gray pall. And we weren’t the only ones hurrying. Bears were out there, getting ready for winter. Everywhere we went, I sensed them watching.
Out in a desolate part of the Modoc Plateau, in a place called Hat Creek Rim, the water tasted of cinders. We walked among the stilt-legged ruins of a fire tower. We were hurrying toward Canada, taking shorter breaks. Once, that week, we were walking through a meadow; wild onions splashed pink and red, giving off a strong odor. Allison picked a sprig to save for our mac-and-cheese that night. That’s when we saw a bear in repose, two hundred feet across the field, head down, back arched, a cinnamon stripe on its fur. I stepped on a twig. The bear whirled and ran away. We followed to get a glimpse. He ran up the nearest tree, hook-climbing it with his two-inch claws. After making his way thirty feet up, he stopped dead, all three hundred pounds of him. The bear held fast to the trunk and bundled his rump against the air. Allison stepped into his shadow. The bear could have dropped down and squashed her then, but he did not move. I aimed the telephoto lens at him and clicked, again and again. When I was finished, we left him hanging in the tree.