The Cactus Eaters

by Dan White

  After the Pacific Crest Trail, I settled into the sort of ego-flattening funk you can only have in Santa Cruz, that funky little beach town, that gentrified catch basin of the unhinged. It’s not that people were mean to me for acting crazy. Quite the contrary. In Santa Cruz, people are serious when it comes to letting you follow your bliss, even if your bliss is really a form of depression. I began to walk aimlessly around the town, wearing hemp vests with purple paramecium, vests with puffy elephants, vests with dreadful spangles on the shoulders, reversible vests that were black on one side, red on the other, so people could dig my mood. I became a lounge lizard with no lounge, and it was becoming clear that I must have Allison back, that without her there would be no girl, no adventure, no purpose, no mojo, just existential horniness and confusion. We still talked on the phone, as friends. It seems to me that we were close. She confessed she was still “fond” of me, that she liked the sound of my voice. I held out hope. I would look through our boxes of shared things and take comfort in the fact that I still had so much of her Pacific Crest Trail gear, and all those lovers’ coupons she’d given me for Valentine’s Day long ago, good for a free yoghurt, good for a dozen doughnuts. I had tangible things, in boxes under my bed, and these things meant I still had a connection to her. But the link was still tenuous, so I had to make a plan. I began to write an irresistible letter to get her back. I was in the later, revision, stage, contemplating when I might actually finish the thing and put it in the mail. There was no hurry. Drafting takes time. But one day, about four months after I last saw her, I opened up the mailbox just after New Year’s Day and found a letter from her. I tore it open.

  The intention of the letter was clear.

  She wanted all her gear back.

  So anyway, I made a list of all the stuff I could find of yours, including the infamous kite. I was wondering if you could look for a few things that were missing from my pack: one of the compasses, a Maglite, my knife, an orange whistle, the snakebite kit and First Aid stuff, a couple of Nalgene [bottles] and a pair of leather mittens with white fleece inside. It seems unfair for me to pay for half the Katadyn filter when I never got to use it. I think you should buy out my share of it and I should buy my share of the tent. Let’s say Dan pays Allison $125 and keeps the water filter. Allison pays Dan $150 and keeps the tent. Does that work out right in your opinion? Do you think we need a trial lawyer? You let me know what you think. Say hi to everyone out there for me!

  It was over then. Undeniably over.

  A year passed, and in that time I gained and lost a job, gained and did not lose thirty pounds, went on unemployment, and moved into an attic in downtown Santa Cruz. When the checks ran out, I entered my third tour of duty as a substitute teacher.

  In every relationship, attraction is the lure, but maybe it’s only the entry point to an intimacy that counteracts silliness, superstition, awkwardness, and loony behavior. Allison and the trail were no longer there to hold these things back like a dam, and soon they ruled over me. My long walk provided me with the time and the space to develop strange thinking patterns. The forest had given rise to a dog’s breakfast of superstitions, animism, and pantheistic piffle that dominated me now. In Santa Cruz, a year and a half after returning home from the trail, I still hadn’t adjusted. In fact, I had become irrational, or at least more irrational than usual. Santa Cruz’s cultist and New Age emporiums were the ready recipients of the dollar bills I doled out in exchange for the restorative voodoo candles, amulets, plastic knockoffs of Zuni bear fetishes, poorly carved Ganesh figurines, herbal snake-oil ointments, and fakir-blessed trinkets that crowded my apartment and turned my bedroom into a stinking, incense-choked ashram. But none of these elephant brooches or herbal rescue remedies could fill me up like Allison and the trail had. No amount of sorcerer-blessed gewgaws could put my noggin to rights or make me sleep at night. And so I spouted inanities and wore hideous pants made of sustainable materials. I wrote zany affirmations on bits of paper that I rolled into scrolls and stuffed in my pockets to carry around all day when I was subbing for some kindergarten class, in the vain hope that the the affirmations’ enthusiasms would leach into me. “Free the body!” they said. “Cave in to pleasure! Inner space, flow, one, one, one! There is peace in every day, perfect moments, the cool of morning, and moments of stillness. Man, in his natural state, is calm and centered.” These affirmations were desperate and untrue. After walking the trail, I knew full well that calm centeredness was not mankind’s natural state. Mankind had evolved over millions of years on the African plains. They had hyenas out there the size of school buses. “Peace out,” and you will be ripped in half.

  I began to suffer nervous attacks that went on for days at a time. After a while, I started showing up late to my teaching assignments. Then I stopped showing up altogether. The phone would ring and I’d let it go. Friends became alarmed.

  One day, when things were feeling especially chaotic, and I hadn’t held a job for months, I tried to do a self-intervention. On that day I paused and declared that this was the absolute bottom, and that there was no lower level of muck in which to mire myself. In Santa Cruz, it’s never a good idea to make such a proclamation. In this town, where marginalia can become more marginal, you should never tell yourself you’ve hit bottom, because the bottom will move to a lower elevation. There is always some other substrata of bottomness you have not considered. In Santa Cruz, you can wind up in a tape loop of backsliding and recovery that folds back on itself like an Escher staircase. Your life can turn into a bottomless Stouffer’s lasagna; no matter how far down you reach with your plastic fork, there’s another layer of nasty noodles and cheese before you hit Pyrex.

  I became an insomniac, thoughts circling my head until they screwed me right into the ground. Thoughts twisted so fast I could not control them, slow them, or even separate them after a while. I was up for eight days straight, rarely nodding off for five to ten minutes at a time, even when I gulped a bottle of melatonin or took an herbal sleep aid or, on one memorable occasion, whole bottles of sleep aids. My eyes bugged out as I hid from friends and daylight, peering Boo Radley fashion from the blinds of my attic hideaway. And then, on the eighth day, I tore my room apart, in between guzzling organic Chenin Blanc and an unholy mixture of other substances, bouncing all about that place, ripping posters off the walls.

  I suppose I would have gone on spiraling forever, if not for the fact that I ran out of energy, and spirals, and places to spiral to. And when there was no more spiral, I collapsed. Perhaps it would be overstating matters to call this a Pacific Crest breakdown. All I know is that my rational mind went on an extended backpacking trip somewhere in the North Cascades while my body remained in Santa Cruz. I did not realize this at the time, but my little spinout was, quite possibly, an example of post-trail withdrawal. I have heard about other hikers who returned too abruptly from the wilderness and experienced the psychic equivalent of the bends, the condition deep-sea divers face when yanked too abruptly out of the ocean. I have heard about fresh-off-the-trail hikers breaking down and sobbing on city streets.

  It took a considerable amount of debt, boredom, and unemployment to bring me back from my long daze. My recovery was far from smooth. In the months after my Pacific Crest Meltdown, I found ungainful employment at temp agencies, which tried to slot me into corporate offices. I tried hard, but my behavior got in the way. I filled out time cards with a large black crayon, pilfered office supplies, and hit on a sleepy-eyed, bosomy coworker named Genevieve. I tried to woo her by giving her Bigfoot sculptures I’d fashioned out of faux fur, Coke bottles, doll’s eyes, and oversize paper clips. They fired me quickly; the supervisor asked me to stay away from the office.

  “But what about the mess on the desk?” I said.

  “We’ll take care of it,” she assured me.

  Adapting to my old life was a struggle for Dirty Dan. The disassociations, and social blunders, kept creeping up. One of my friends took me to a sushi bar on Pacific Avenue, wh
ere I placed a large glop of wasabi into my mouth, forgetting that it wasn’t pistachio sorbet. I sprinted for the washroom, with magma-hot horseradish drooling from my mouth. Afterward, we took a wild ride in my car, driving around downtown Santa Cruz. When she asked me what the hell I was doing, I told her that I was “looking for my car.”

  “You’re in it,” she said.

  As soon as I was feeling more reasonable, I launched a bid to get my sanity back. I started by laying siege to the ridiculous gewgaws and tinctures I’d amassed since washing up in Santa Cruz. I uncorked every accursed tincture of St. John’s Wort, milk thistle, and melatonin and dumped it down the toilet where it belonged. I loaded my voodoo candles and smiling Buddha onyxes into the nearest Dumpster. I filled out a job application, this time without a crayon in my hand. I cleaned up the room I’d trashed and apologized to the friends I’d freaked out. And one summer day, I even worked up the nerve to call Allison, not to get her back, plead for sympathy, or even apologize, but just to let her know how I was doing.

  “It’s nice to hear your voice,” she said, and I unloaded on her, giving her the unexpurgated version of my post-trail spinout. It was an easy talk, no motive or quest.

  “All I can say is, I’m not surprised,” she said, in reference to my confession about my 192-hour sleeplessness. “You always had so much energy.” We talked about everything and nothing, her freelancing, her reporting gig out in the Midwest, what it was like to be off the trail. And then, very casually, around the halfway point of our talk, she dropped in the name of a man she’d met. Somewhere between the beginning and ending of my temporary lunacy, she’d fallen in love. “We get along really well,” she said. “You and I had some good times, but it just wasn’t worth it.” We hung up after a while. The conversation had dribbled away. It didn’t even feel like two exes talking. It felt like easy friends who had parted company and were probably not going to speak again, not out of rancor but from circumstance, distance, and sheer inertia. When I hung up the phone, our conversation left no residue. It was all done now.

  I moved on, at least from Allison. The trail never really left my head—it’s still there—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The trail did not bring about all of the behaviors that some people clump together when they think of “Dan White”: my loud monologues when I think no one is around, or my occasional bouts of vigilance, as if every street corner might conceal a cactus waiting to stick it to me. But the trail at least reinforced these behaviors. For six years after the trail, I even toted a gallon bottle of water for fear of dehydration, even in cities. Sometimes I still do.

  But the trail didn’t just turn me into an occasional head case. The trail also gave me my first story, and exposed me to something larger than myself. I now have a certain kind of “hardship” as a frame of reference, along with a willingness to admit that most of the hardships I encountered on and off the trail were self-inflicted. It had been my decision to be there. I could have quit any time. The fact that I did not quit means something to me. I’m not suggesting that I’m brave. After all, a lot of people have hiked the same trail without significant problems. You might even say that I went with much trepidation where hundreds had gone before. I’m not suggesting that I’m a competent outdoorsman, either. A couple of years ago, after I wrote an article about hiking through a remote section of Maine without a map, a woman wrote me a letter assuring me that I was a “disgrace to the national backpacking community.” She had a point, but perhaps getting lost is the final frontier. If I had known what the hell I was doing upon embarking on the PCT, my finishing the trail would not have been significant. The fact that I winged it but did not die still moves me. I’ll never be as fast or as light as a Jardi-Nazi, but I’m tenacious as the ticks that bit me in the Laguna Mountains. More than ten years have passed since I set foot out of Agua Dulce with Allison and Big Motherfucker. Since then, I fell in love again. My wife and I have been married for three years now. Big Motherfucker is with me still. I’ve resisted the impulse to send him out to Gregory Backpacks to have him fixed up. He retains all the scars, mouse bites, and duct-tape patch jobs he sustained on the trail. Though I’ve washed him twice since then, Big Motherfucker still bears the rank aroma of the PCT.

  The odor reminds me of what I learned. The trail was a harsh teacher, and most of the lessons had nothing to do with backpacking. Now I have a yardstick to measure beauty, all ugliness, slack times, good times, and privation. When a snowdrift buries my car on the streets of Manhattan, or my wife and I are squawking about a bill or a misunderstanding, or my writing students are panicking about their essays, or my upstairs neighbor wakes me up at 4:15 A.M., pounding away at his girlfriend on the hardwood floor while emitting nasal quacking noises, I think to myself, “Well, yeah, but I drank mud. I ate a fuckin’ cactus.” Most people, upon meeting me, would never suspect I come from an ultrawealthy suburb. I don’t expect black-truffle shavings on my chocolate sundaes. In fact, I expect all worthwhile things to be a slog, whether we’re talking about marriage, trying to get published, moving my car back and forth across the street to stay ahead of the sweeper, looking for jobs in academia, searching for aircon units on Craigslist, or doing battle with Manhattan’s parking police.

  While the PCT provided me with a framework for my life, the trail did not improve my hiking style. I still get lost constantly, even at the mall. I visit the woods almost every week. But every walk I take is the un-trail. I no longer freight each walk with grand expectations. I would never hike a national scenic trail again—nor do I have any desire to make up the piece I missed, near Seiad Valley, when I accepted a hitchhike just south of town. If I tried to walk another long trail, I would most likely die. My backcountry luck ran out a long time ago. These days, I’m less likely to moon over the PCT or try to sneak it into every conversation. And yet the PCT left me with nostalgia I’ve never felt for, say, college or high school. When I look out the window at a set of low-lying mountains twenty miles off, I remember what it was like to stand in a valley and stare off at some distant escarpment and know I’d be walking around up there, looking for a campsite, by the time the sun went down. Sometimes I find myself falling backward until I’m on it again. For a long while after the trail, I had a dream with variations, sometimes twice a week. The setup was always the same. I’m out on a trail that passes through a cleft in a granite ridge, so high up only dwarf trees and krummholz grow there. There’s a young couple out on the trail just north of me, hiking slowly. There are scattered clouds, but now they’re bunching together, making a storm, and so I walk faster, even though experience tells me I can’t outrun a storm. I catch up to the couple without even trying. For some reason, they can’t see me. They look right through me as if I were made out of Saran Wrap. The man and woman make their way to a rocky bowl containing a lake. The lake has no name, so they name it after themselves, for a laugh. Now the couple has stopped for the night. They sit down cross-legged and cook supper: protein chunks bobbing around in a slippery liquid. Their meal smells nasty, and yet they slurp it up. My eyes settle on the woman. She’s pretty, with blond hair and burnished skin. The man grunts as he tends the stove. His beard is full of dirt and gunk, but the woman doesn’t seem to care. She’s looking at him as if he’s handsome. It’s getting cold out here. She leads him into the tent. After a while I hear muttering and murmurs, and I watch the motions and silhouettes of their sleeping bags clumped together. After a while, the tent goes still, the sky turns black, and when it becomes too cold for me to stay out here any longer, I leave them be, and retreat down the ridge alone.

  No moon is out, but the trail announces itself in a ribbon of light that takes me down the valley.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of narrative nonfiction. I have tried to recapture my mind-set and Pacific Crest Trail experiences as accurately as I could, with the help from my often comprehensive, sometimes less than comprehensive, and sometimes threadbare diary entries. I have had to contend with the fact that s
ome of the diary entries are exhaustive and chronological (such as the cactus-biting scene), while others are scattered pieces, written in a hurry and out of sequence. I consulted my boxes of slides, post-trail interviews, and an early “Vomit Draft,” in which I attempted (perhaps unwisely) to fill in the blanks in the diaries and “narrativize” an otherwise random-seeming bunch of strange events. The early draft has been helpful in the sense that it caulked a few cracks in my diary—it’s strange how one can remember items that aren’t in any journal, and how a journal can “remember” forgotten anecdotes—and frustrating in the sense that I wrote the rough version so quickly after coming home from the trail that it suffered from tunnel-vision, instant-replay contextualization attempts, and storytelling bluster. In the past few years I’ve had to triangulate between memory, images, the PCT guidebooks, and various (and sometimes conflicting) versions of the written record, including diaries, the “rough-cut” version, and a peculiar comic book/graphic novel version of the trek, which I crafted in order to frame events in time and space. This “final” version is an attempt to square this draft with other versions. In many instances the dialogue is close to verbatim—for example, the disturbing exchange with Oedipus Rex in the High Sierra section, the back-and-forth with Milt Kenney (reinforced by subsequent interviews), and my Tehachapi crossing with the Gingerbread Man. In other instances I am relying only on the power (such as it is) of memory while consulting correspondence and memories of habitual conversation topics, conversational tics, speech patterns, mannerisms, and so on. Where possible, I’ve tried to square my memories of various lakes and cloud formations and volcanic protuberances with slides, pictures, and YouTube images while filling in a few gaps of ignorance (e.g., biography, natural history) with book reading and databases. If I’ve misdescribed any of the personages here, or if any shrub, arthropod, woodland mammal, or lizard feels misrepresented here, or if I’ve transported any creatures to the wrong ecosystem or life zone, the fault lies with the author, not the sources. In some cases I have identified trail “characters” only by their trail names. In some instances I have changed names for reasons of privacy. Above all else, this is my vision of the trail. If you hike it, you will most likely not eat a cactus or watch in horror as your water filter is violated by a bunch of amphibians. Consider yourself lucky.