The Cactus Eaters
Page 36
Acknowledgments
With love and gratitude to my wife, Amy. My Cactus diaries and rough drafts would be sprouting poisonous mushrooms under my desk without your unflagging support. Thank you for encouraging me to follow my dreams and crisscrossing this country with me twice. (Not on foot!)
With love and appreciation to Mom and Dad.
With love and gratitude to Doug and Edie Achterman: You were our cheering section throughout the Manhattan Project and beyond.
I would like to extend an enormous “thank you” to Patricia O’Toole for her invaluable friendship, insight, and wisdom, and for convincing me to take a worthwhile risk. I am extremely lucky to have such a mentor. (Also, thanks for the helmet!)
Many thanks to my agent, Kris Dahl, at ICM for her work on Cactus, and to Michael Signorelli at HarperCollins for his attention and care (and to John Williams for believing in this project). Thanks to all of my talented fellow workshoppers (and while they are too numerous to mention by name), I want to give a shout-out to Bronwen Dickey for being the first to read through the completed version and offering “instant feedback” suggestions. Thanks to Paul Douglass, coordinator of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, and to Martha Heasley Cox for her generous endow-ment of the Steinbeck Fellowship, which helped me finish this book and nail down the P.S. materials. I’m grateful for the shaping hand of Richard Locke, for the first-rate workshops of Michael Scammell and Leslie Sharpe, and to Phillip Lopate for his unvarnished feedback. (An additional thanks to professors Locke and O’Toole for cheering on our class at the School of the Arts thesis readings; both of your enthusiastic presences made a huge difference for all of us. It was much appreciated!) Thanks to Dave Howard for brotherhood, friendship, and guidance, to James Shiffer for coming up with this crazy plan in the first place (and for saving the correspondence that I used in several sections of the text), to Peggy Townsend and Shmuel Thaler, who took a gander at the “rough cut,” to Didi Dayton, Will Zilliacus, Shawn Parker, and Whitney Grummon for their friendship and encouragement, and to Scott Williamson, uber-hiker, for his sound advice. I am grateful to Phil Sexton for information pertaining to the unfortunate Elisha Stephens (see the P.S. for additional readings and information sources on Stephens), and to all of the hard-working, boundlessly creative students in my Fall 2006 undergraduate writing class at Columbia. That class turned into a kind of “laboratory of ideas” that helped inspire this book’s deep ecology and man-in-relation-to-nature themes. Many thanks to the staff at the California history room at the Martin Luther King Library at SJSU, and to all the real-life heroes who helped with my expedition—in particular, the tireless Wolf and the endlessly inventive Gingerbread Man. While writing this, I found inspiration in the writings of Ray Jardine (I hope some day to live up to his lightpacking example). Many thanks to Angela Ballard and the Pacific Crest Trail Association, and all the Trail Angels—in particular, the late Mily Kenney of Castella, California, the “mayor” of the Pacific Crest Trail.
About the Author
DAN WHITE is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Backpacker magazine. He received his MFA from Columbia University, and he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
www.cactuseaters.blogspot.com
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Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by Matthias Clamer/Getty Images
Copyright
THE CACTUS EATERS. Copyright © 2008 by Dan White. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition April 2008 ISBN 9780061739859
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