The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  We passed an afternoon in an ancient forest of limber pines, among the Earth’s oldest life forms. They grew in a riot of shapes, some skinny and doubled-over, others plump in the middle and tapered off on both sides like birdfeeder gourds. Tufts of green needles puffed into the sky. Roots, clearly visible, anchored the trees to earth in thick coils. It’s hard not to maintain a hushed silence in the presence of these beings. Christ was in kindergarten, and the Roman Empire dominated a quarter of the world’s population, when the oldest of the pines began to grow. But the sky was a most peculiar gray up here, and thick clouds obscured the mountains to the south, toward Mexico. Out here, in mid-November, a chill settled on the landscape. Later, after a long descent on a narrow path, we found ourselves blocked by a stink beetle, two inches long with black armor, its pointy ass aimed at us like a cannon. Entomologists call this a defensive strike posture; the beetle emits dissuasive stenches from its rear to ward off predators. I smelt nothing, but its posture made me feel unwelcome. He might have been trying to warn us. Soon afterward, two burly clouds, real bruisers, filled the sky. They moved in clumsy motions, elbowing each other out of the way.

  “What the hell are those?’ ’I said to Allison, pointing heavenward.

  A midwesterner, Allison knew from storm clouds, and she thought that snow was coming.

  “No way,” I said. “Snow clouds?” It was too weird to be true, not when there were scratchy desert plants, stink beetles scuttling, and rattlesnakes slithering. Besides, it wasn’t winter yet. And after all, wasn’t this Southern California? Allison got out the weather radio her father had given her. “I’m gonna fuck around with this for a while,” she said, twiddling the knobs. It hissed and popped, but she couldn’t catch a signal. The wind picked up. The mountains were close now, almost on top of us, but the mist blotted them out. We were camped at three thousand feet above sea level, near a few desultory stands of meager scrub, waxy succulents, and no shade cover. The landscape looked like it ought to be hot, but it was freezing. Allison and I cuddled for warmth in our sleeping bags. She pressed her face into my shoulder. From a deep sleep, I woke to hear a plop-plop-thunk-plump sound against the tent. The weight of something, like white sand, made the tent’s roof sag against our heads. My watch said quarter past three, yet the night glowed bright with a false morning; I opened the tent flap, stuck my head out, and felt a cold powder on my hair, my face, my nose, and my tongue. Snow plumped up the hills, gathered on the arms of a cactus, and lit on the backs of two stink beetles. When morning broke, we pondered the seriousness of the situation. With thick snow obscuring the trail, could we make it any closer to the Mexican border? Would the trail soon be impassible? The PCT often rises up sharp ridges, close to the edge of perilous drops. We didn’t want to slip off a vertical slope. Allison crawled outside and drew a big frowning face on the side of the tent. She tried to cheer me up with odd observations about nothing much: “Isn’t it fascinating,” she said, “that a human being can poop in all types of weather, even snow?”

  She was trying hard to distract me, but we both understood the gravity of the situation. Somehow the same foul weather that had forced us off the trail in the distant north had followed us here. Now that we’d blown our chance to reach Canada that year, we’d hoped to bag the rest of California as a consolation prize. But now, even that secondary goal was in question. The trail came close to a small access road, and we could see cars skidding down the ice and powder, losing control. Allison and I attempted to walk uphill a little farther, but blowing snow made it impossible for us to see. Our boots refused to bite the ground; the snow obscured a shelf of ice, and we slipped often, sometimes falling on our asses, or sinking in white slush.

  After struggling for hours, we stumbled into two hunters, one wiry and lean with a black cap and camouflage, the other with a friendly, broad face and sweaty hair. The first man, who called himself Billy, was crouched on his hands and knees while cooing and clucking in a fruitless effort to lure quail and shoot them. When he saw us, he stood up and stopped the birdcalls. He had some dispiriting news. He’d heard from radio reports that parts of the nearby mountains along the PCT were impassible now. He said that venturing out into the fast-freezing rain, now falling on top of the snow, would be treacherous at best and maybe suicidal. We took the news hard. Billy and his friend, Oscar, gave us hard-boiled eggs and cold bean burritos wrapped in tinfoil.

  “Shame,” Billy said. “Snow never happens out here this early. We usually don’t get it til Christmas, and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. You guys sure picked a freak year.”

  Billy and Oscar gave us a ride in their truck to Cajon Pass, where we found a motel room. I called a few rangers in nearby stations, looking for second opinions about trail conditions. Each said that proceeding any farther south would be hazardous. We took a vote. We refused, even then, to give up the trail altogether, but we had no choice but to skip the next two hundred miles, including the San Jacinto and San Bernardino ranges. This decision was excruciating for us, but smart in retrospect. We could have gotten killed out there. In 1984, Jodi Lynn Zaitchick, twenty, and her companion, Gerald Duran, thirty-five, attempted the first winter-season through-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. They started in Mexico and made it to the San Gabriel Mountains—the range that lay just behind us to the northwest. Zaitchick told her mother she would call her on Christmas Day, most likely from Wrightwood, a supply stop off the trail. Christmas came and went. Five days later, Zaitchick’s mother called the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. On New Year’s Eve, a search team found an empty tent under a tree, and a fresh diary entry, saying Zaitchick and Duran were hiking down to Wrightwood to buy some goodies. They never made it to town. While descending on the Acorn Trail, Zaitchick and Duran slipped on a tongue of ice hidden under a thin powder of freshly fallen snow. They fell fifteen hundred feet into a ravine below.

  Instead of taking on the next piece of trail, we took buses and hitchhikes to the next accessible part of the trail, where the storms had not yet struck. But when we set out south from Warner Springs, a veldtlike expanse of soft hills and high grass, thunderheads gathered. They shadowed us as we pressed on, crossing through history. Juan Bautista De Anza drove his troops northward here through the San Felipe Valley in 1774. The Butterfield Overland Mail Line’s first stagecoach trundled through this valley in 1858. It was the first cross-country mail coach, traveling 2,700 miles from Missouri and rolling triumphantly into San Francisco.

  But the weather seemed determined to deprive us of our own Big Moment in history. Man-o-war clouds dragged their arms over low peaks. On went our ponchos and pack covers. “Cowboy up!” I roared to Allison. At one point, she turned to me and delivered a speech that was pure gospel truth: “Well, at least we’ve got some good stories to tell now. And a bad day on the trail’s a lot better than kissing your boss’s fat ass, isn’t it?”

  She had me there. The way I saw it then, a bad day on the trail was like shooting heroin with Buddha compared to most days at work. Out on the trail, even your torments are exquisite. So why, then, would anyone grouse about a trail? Sure, it’s rough sometimes. It’s not so great to have blood blisters explode in your socks, or to be cold at night and eat Big Bill’s Beans and Rice until you blow out your colon like Mount Stromboli. But it’s heaven compared to even a mildly unpleasant day at work. If people knew what the trail was really like, rain and all, they would move here by any means necessary. The U.S. economy would come to a standstill.

  And so the rain thrummed our faces and necks and filled our boots while I smiled like a moron. Each drop raised welts in the mud. Each cascade brought down a river of black ooze, and yet it made me feel so clean and lightheaded. “Goody-goody!” I shouted to the skies. “Do worse! How about some lightning? How about more rain! Come on. Send in a hurricane.” We pressed forward into the wind. Rain fingers plucked at the seams of our garments, searching for spots where we’d been lazy with the Seam Seal. Allison and I kept singing and smiling because
the rain could not stop us. We were, after all, the Lois and Clark Expedition, who had beaten down the desert, stalked a bear, and gone head to head with giardia. Do worse, I said to the sky.

  The rain stopped. Allison and I lifted our red nylon hoods and smiled at each other. The near-silence after a storm on the trail is a sound you don’t forget. All you hear is the wet slosh of boots and the trees shaking their heads to dry. We’d entered the Lagunas, the fairest mountains I’d seen, impossibly green, and deserted except for us. The land was a lullaby of mist, valleys with no bottoms, and soft leaves that pressed into us as we passed by. The bushes were not scratchy like chaparral. The leaves were wet flaps that cleaned our packs and legs until they shined. A bite of chocolate restored my vitality. We paused in a clearing, under foothills, and looked at the tendrils of storm clouds retreating. I laughed. The rain had given up on us.

  “Hey, Allison,” I said. “I found some extra peanuts in a bag at the bottom of my pack. They’re still good. Do you want some?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “And I found one of those cashew chews you like, if you want a piece of…”

  Out of nowhere, I felt a warm and insistent trickle move across my back. At first I thought it was an errant droplet of sweat beneath my T-shirt. It certainly seemed like perspiration traveling in an erratic pattern, bubbling beneath the cotton fibers. But there was just one problem. The sweat droplet was flowing up my body, in arrogant defiance of gravity’s rules. When I pressed down on the droplet, instead of dissipating against my finger, the water drop resisted my touch. In fact, the droplet was as hard as a lentil. And now I could feel that the thing had legs, and was scuttling across me.

  “Oh no,” I said to Allison. “It can’t be. Anything but that.”

  “What is it?”

  A thumbtack of pain shot into my right calf, then my left, and a spot close to my groin. They were all over me now—my legs, my chest, my crotch, the sides of my arms, up my back, down my back. Oh, God, no, no, no, it couldn’t be. Ticks.

  There were dozens of them, some flat and moving, others neck-deep in my skin, plumping on plasma. The fullest ones had a fleshy, plucked appearance, like raw Tom turkeys. A tick rolled itself into the fibers of my sweater, its thorax trapped, legs thrashing. Another caught itself in the hairs of my chest. Get the fuck off me. I went mad. I smooshed them, stepped on them, decapitated them with rocks, and bashed in their brains with pebbles. For a while I felt like Grendel laying siege to Hrothgar’s mead hall, crushing the ticks to bits, pulling their little legs off, but there was just one of me and so many of them, I could barely count them all. Within the next two hours, after pressing through more bushes, I counted a total of sixty. Allison was writhing and taking her clothes off. Every leaf crawled with the little bastards. If you looked closely enough, you could see the bushes tremble with them. An army of ticks had gathered on the farthest edges of every leaf, on every plant, by the side of the trail, all of them standing at the ready, waving their forelegs like mad. I shivered. Entomologists call this the “questing position.” Ticks sense your presence and wave at the air like suckling babies grasping for their mothers. They steady themselves, lean forward, and wait, positioning themselves to crawl on top of you.

  Allison and I explored each other’s bodies, plucking away, examining every crevice. “Get them all, Dan,” she cried. “They carry Lyme disease!”

  To an outside observer we might have looked like a couple of apes exhibiting “grooming behavior,” lovingly plucking at every square millimeter of skin we could find. I tried very hard to leave no inch of Allison unsearched. She did the same for me. But that night in our tent, a burning sensation manifested itself in a remote and delicate feature of my lower groin.

  “What the hell?” I said, sitting up in my sleeping bag.

  I reached into my shorts and tried to get at the tick but couldn’t grab hold; he was too damned slippery. Allison reached for the Swiss Army knife. Calm as a cat, she stuck our black, battery-powered Maglite between her teeth and extracted, from the knife, the same tweezers she’d used to pluck all those cactus spines from my lips and tongue half a year before. She leaned over me. I closed my eyes. I felt a pinch, a pull, and heard a popping sound, then a stomach-churning crunch. “I got a hold of him,” she said as she clamped onto the creature’s gravy-colored thorax. A tug-of-war ensued. Allison clung to the tick’s tight little body while the tick seemed to bite harder into my skin. She tightened her grip. The tick tightened his. She wiggled and jiggled. The tick did the same. She grimaced and took a deep breath. The tick, I imagine, also grimaced and took a deep breath. Allison pulled back with all her might. The pain was sharp and bright. The tick still fought her. Allison had a plan. She reached into her kit bag and removed a book of matches. She struck one, and held it straight up to the tick’s body, letting the flames lick against it. The tick, at last, gave up. With one mighty tug, Allison pulled it out of me. “Thwock!” She showed me the tick stuck in the tweezers for proof.

  “Give him to me,” I said, hoping the victim was alive so I could torture him to death. But he was stone dead already. In fact, he was missing his head. I grabbed the Maglite, and shone the beam down to the small black hole Allison, and the tick, had left in my crotch. It occurred to me that the hole still contained the nasty little head of the tick, beady eyes, mandibles, and all.

  I fell back in a swoon.

  The next morning, I knew we had to leave the trail as soon as we could. The ticks and rain made the PCT feel like a haunted house, with ghosts shaking the foundations. I knew I had to get checked for Lyme disease. Besides, we were scraped up and run down. No choice. We practically ran toward the Mexican border. My Vasque Sundowner boots had cost more $175, but now they looked like someone had set off a cherry bomb inside them: the heels had rotted apart, the soles hung open, and the tongues dragged on the ground. I’d globbed the boots back together with Shoe Goo, and tied a web of black duct tape across them, but now my repair jobs were coming undone. We pressed on, jogging through eroded gullies, up and over a railroad track, and into a ravine; there, I walked right into a spool of barbed wire, which released a thread of dark blood from my right leg, just above my calf. The scar is still there. By the time we got close to the California-Mexico border, it was Thanksgiving Day.

  That day we passed Morena Lake and ate our meal in the foothills overlooking the barbed wire, patrol roads, border guards, and watch towers. We chuckled ruefully as we dined on dehydrated matzo balls, instant pudding, chicken soup, and fettuccine. Allison beefed up the agony by imagining all the Thanksgiving meals we were missing. “Turkey, stuffing, biscuits, and all the trimmings,” she said with a taunting smile.

  And so we said good-bye, for now, to the Pacific Crest Trail, taking in our harsh food as evening fell and softened the landscape’s features. Somehow the night made me forget the rains and the predatory arthropods. I leaned back and tried to drink in the night from the black bowls of the foothills. This would be our last night together on the Pacific Crest Trail, at least for the foreseeable future. I knew we’d be back on the trail together, sooner or later, but who knew what might happen between now and then?

  I wanted to savor every moment of this, no matter how my tick bites scratched and my muscles throbbed. I tried to stay up as late as I could, but sleep took me in no time at all.

  Chapter 29

  Subhuman

  We spent the winter in my sister and brother-in-law’s house in Prunedale, California, overlooking a eucalyptus grove a quick drive away from a slough full of otters, seals, and egrets. Together we worked as substitute teachers at a high school that bordered a field of cows, with a swamp beyond it. Some students were the scions of middle-and upper-middle-class San Jose bedroom commuters. Others were the sons and daughters of migrant workers who labored in chemical-laden strawberry, Brussels sprouts, and artichoke fields. I was a bit frightened of the job. I feared karmic justice, considering that I had laughed so hard at dithering subs when I was in m
iddle school. Then again, it was the best way to earn eighty dollars a day with no training or know-how whatsoever. To get an “emergency credential” for the job, we only had to pay $150 to the state and take a test that a Rhesus monkey could have passed, no problem. We needed money to get back on the trail. Allison and I signed up to sub at elementary, middle, and high schools in California’s Central Coast. How terrible could it be?

  My friend James, the fellow who’d suggested that we hike the trail in the first place, suggested I’d lost my mind when I told him of our latest plan. “Have you ever worked with high school kids before?” he wrote to me in a postcard. “They’re bastards, astonishingly immature, even though they look like they should know better. Be firm and don’t hesitate to shoot them if they act up in class. That way the rest of the kids will respect you. They’ll make a movie about you…starring Dan and Allison as two wild people who teach California school-kids about gorp and burning turds in the wilderness.”