The Cactus Eaters Page 11
At last she opened her eyes. She pulled the strands of blond hair out of her face, and I saw the blue eyes that had pulled me in so deeply when we worked in the newsroom together. Allison had a lopsided smile, perhaps left over from a dream she’d had. As I predicted, the smile turned to a wince when she saw me stumble in and out of the bathroom, my hands stuffed with gear, my face grave. She got up, and through the open bathroom door, I could see her make a war face to the mirror as she flossed, working her gum line, massaging each incisor. Allison was thorough and careful. She often talked to me about the importance of rationality and not panicking, and how our expedition was a Democracy of Two, founded on respect and reason, not guesswork and silly craziness. That week, she expressed her desire to have no more fuckups involving water and getting thirsty and walking in circles. All that rational thinking irked me. I believed that real expeditions should be built on improvisation, bravery, and flights of fancy, not caution. All this planning was bringing me down. I wanted to break away from our constant caution. I wanted to be more spontaneous, free, and inventive, like the Gingerbread Man. I wanted to be bold and unconventional, like the Jardi-Nazis. Allison told me that the next reliable water source, Golden Oak Spring, would be a hot twenty-two miles away. She very carefully filled every water bottle, and our fabric canteen.
She had left nothing to chance, and that’s what made me edgy. Nature has a way of turning best-laid plans into goulash. I’d seen Allison’s emergency contingency plans for the trail. She thought of everything. On four pieces of notepaper, she’d drawn up a list of all possible things that could go awry, from bear attacks to seizures to “if no pulse and is not breathing at all,” and the solutions to all these problems. In a spidery scrawl, she’d written, “If lightning should strike, get off the steep peaks. Crouch on an insulator. Keep clear of ski poles. Caves are dangerous. Treatment if struck? Mouth-to-mouth cardiac massage.” As a precaution against getting hypothermia, she advised that we should “not get chilled.” If we got bitten by a deadly rattlesnake in a remote corner of the backcountry, the solution, she wrote, would be to “go to the hospital.” In a pinch, she wrote, you should “sterilize your blade, make two small cuts by either fang mark, avoid major arteries, and use a suction cup.” This frightened me. We did not even have a suction cup. If I had a choice between letting poison dribble through my veins or letting my girlfriend slice me open, I wasn’t sure what I would do.
She tried to caution me against irrational thinking. She told me that she didn’t want to hike with Doctor John, either, but she continued to insist I was making far too big a deal of it. But her moderation was no match for my obsession. What if Doctor John woke up? Every blinking security lamp in the motel, every distant dog bark, seemed to conspire against us then. “Don’t make a squeak,” I said to Allison as we walked past Doctor John’s room, its Venetian blinds half open, the room still dark. I rushed her so hard we left our walking sticks behind.
Dave stood on the sidewalk in the half-light with his ruddy cheeks and kangaroo boots. Between slurps of thermos coffee, he muttered something about it being “real early, even for a cowboy.” Allison and I shoved our things in his truck, which roared into the night toward Tehachapi Pass. Safety dots caught the high beams. Something sleek and marble-eyed crossed the highway. Coyote. I glanced back at its receding form, and the lights of Tehachapi. Good-bye, Doctor John, I said. Have a good life. Fare thee well. See you later, but not if I see you first.
I remember the purple-lumped mountains and the sagebrush lining the road, and behind it, the starlight twinkle of trailer-park lights and the gray clouds above us like the insides of a stuffed animal. Dave’s tires rasped on the gravel as he spoke, with Allison, about Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and horses while I only pretended to listen. It’s a skill I’ve perfected, nodding like a bobble-head, inserting a “yup” and an “mmm-hmm-mmm” in all the right places so you never suspect I’m not paying attention. But something was getting on my nerves, a hollow slop sound coming from inside our backpacks. Slip, slap, slop, what the hell was it?
Water, that’s what it was. Gallons and gallons of Tehachapi tap water, bouncing in our Nalgene containers. Our packs, which were bulging with water, would be unbelievably heavy, at the very time I was trying to flee from Doctor John. I resented having to carry so much of it. I knew full well that water is quite precious, but it was an indisputable fact that water weighs more than 8.3 pounds to the gallon. Eight point three pounds! Because of the hot terrain, and the 22-mile haul until the next water, we’d agreed to carry two and a half gallons of it just to be safe. It now seemed insane to me. That was 20.75 pounds of water weight. The more I thought about this, and Doctor John’s droopy countenance and descriptions of bodily functions, the worse I felt. Suddenly a plan rose to the surface of my thoughts. It burst fully formed from my head. And it was pure genius.
True, most of the water in the human body is concentrated in the bloodstream, which means that if we lost even 10 percent of it, we would probably perish. But what would be the harm if I waited for Allison to turn her back for a moment, and I secretly dumped out, let’s say, only 40 percent of our water, or maybe even 50 percent? It would not be that big a deal. It would just mean that we’d have to hike a little faster to Golden Oak Spring. But wouldn’t it be easier for us to hike much faster, considering we would be carrying less pack weight, which should mean that we’d walk 40 to 50 percent faster than before? Lord, what a brilliant idea. At that moment, I felt wily and free. Now, at last, I’d have my chance to be like Ray Jardine, unencumbered by useless weight, traveling faster than I ever had before, and improving my comfort with pure ingenuity, with Allison racing by my side toward Canada. We’d stay so far ahead of Doctor John that he’d never even glimpse us on the horizon. We’d make love every night, rhapsodize about the desert sunsets, sweat our way into the High Sierras and pass, without incident, through one of the most arduous sections of the trail. And the most beautiful part of all was this: Allison would never even know I was a hero whose improvisation had saved our adventure.
Chapter 14
Golden Oak Spring
The moon was still up and blazing, and there was the barest trace of sun forcing its way up the side of an eroded cliff. Dave’s truck bounced along the dirt road. “Lots of chaparral in these parts,” he said. “Steep country here. If you like, I’ll drive you north a ways, where the hiking is easier, and you can hike from there.” Allison and I shook our heads forcefully. If you’re going to hike 2,650 miles, there is no point in cutting out four of them and having the missing piece nag you for the rest of your life. “Whatever you say,” Dave said, shrugging. He let us off at Oak Creek Canyon, just off the Tehachapi Willow Springs Road. In a short while it was light enough to hike without a flashlight. The air was cool, and the sky was tinged with violet, as I took the lead, with Allison scooting close behind me. I was smiling like mad about what was about to happen.
The water in my pack bore down on me, and the excessive weight made me sweat, but I didn’t let it get me down. I’d get rid of all that extra weight soon enough. Sure, we’d struggled with our first section of trail. Sure, we’d been clumsy and made a few silly mistakes we could have avoided if we’d been thinking clearly. But that was then. All we had to do was make it through this one last section. Soon we’d be in the High Sierra, an unbroken mountain range four hundred miles long, full of rivers that poured through the fingers of granite boulders, rocks flecked with light, hard and sparkling like stardust. An impermeable bubble of safety had formed around us in the Tehachapis. The Gingerbread Man had given us his blessing, and a name, and now it protected us like an amulet. There was no need to be scared anymore.
The Pacific Crest Trail ran into a tangle of wicked plants, Italian thistle, pink fleshy stalks with oval heads and needles pointed in all directions. I braced myself, knowing from experience that these weeds could inflict painful pricks, like yellow-jacket stings. But just when we felt trapped, Allison spied a handwritten note f
rom the Gingerbread Man, stuck beneath a rock, urging us to take his “alternate route” around the thistles. Sure enough, we found a trail of stones rising up a ledge above the plants. We made a victory whoop, for it seemed that the Gingerbread Man, though dozens of miles away, was a guardian angel watching over the Lois and Clark Expedition.
It must have taken him hours to make that rock trail. Something about this act of selflessness made me reconsider my water-dump plan for a moment. “Am I being extreme?” I thought. “Why do I want to dump out our water? Is it just because I want to stay ahead of Doctor John? Am I possibly overreacting? What if something goes wrong with my plan? Even worse, what if Allison found out?”
In tall grass near a spreading oak, we took a snack break. The arms of the tree crisscrossed above our heads to block the sun. I took deep breaths and tried to relax. When our short break was over, we walked on, at a leisurely pace, because it was still nice and cool. I felt so happy and clear-headed at that moment. Something snapped me out of my trance. I decided that it was probably a bad idea to dump the water. Why take such a risk? It was time for me to stop ruminating about every little thing and just walk. Time for me to stop and appreciate the outdoors and slow down the pace, not think about the goal and stop worrying about Doctor John catching up to us. I kissed Allison. I told her I loved her. It was a wonderful feeling, and it lasted about two and a half seconds.
The trail came to an intersection with a dirt road. In fact, the place looked familiar. Dave had tried to persuade us to get out here so we could shave a few miles off our hike. We were walking along the road when a black Range Rover with tinted windows pulled up beside us. I couldn’t see the passenger, but the elderly female driver, through the open window, had that look you see on lizards in terrariums: rueful and grasping, wanting to escape. The passenger door slid open and out stepped Doctor John. I could feel the smile on my face reverse itself, as if unseen hands were pulling down the sides of my lips.
“You’re only just getting here now?” Doctor John said. “At eight A.M.? You got a four-hour jump on me, and this is how far you’ve gone?” He smiled and winked, perhaps to let us know that his ridicule was only part of an unspoken esprit de corps, an assumed intimacy that suggested he was already part of our expedition.
I wanted to scream. At first I was worried that he would join us immediately, giving us no escape opportunity. But like us, Doctor John was a purist who would not skip even a small portion of the trail. The place where he stopped to greet us was six miles north of where Allison and I started out that day, at Oak Creek Canyon Road. But Doctor John stuck to the rules—he was going to have the driver take him all the way down to Oak Creek, but he had a plan to make his day easier. “I’ll stash my backpack here behind a bush,” he said. “That way, for the first few miles, I’ll bring only my water and my camera. I’ll take some pictures of windmills. And I’ll catch up to you by nightfall!”
Doctor John stuffed his pack behind a sun-beaten snag. He got in the car and waved good-bye. We waved back. I smiled through clenched teeth, grinning and friendly on the outside, caterwauling on the inside.
No turning back now. Operation Water Dump was in full effect. Moments later, Allison turned her back to me, heading behind a tree to pee. The time to act was now. I took out Betty, our trusty black water bag, which held several gallons, and spilled some of her contents on the desert floor. I can’t say exactly how much I spilled; all I know is that Betty was quite a bit lighter when I was through. The water made a choking sound, and then an accusing snarl, as it burbled into the cracks of the earth. Allison returned, much more quickly than I’d expected, and caught the tail end of what I was doing.
“What are you doing over there?” she said.
“Uh,” I said. “I only got rid of a very small amount of water.”
In reality, it was no “small” amount. If I had to guess, I dumped out two or three quarts at least. But I didn’t tell her this. Instead, I pointed out, correctly, that we still had about a gallon of water between the two of us for sixteen miles. Allison seemed baffled, but not particularly upset, and my backpack was lighter now. In fact, I was quite comfortable. Allison eyed me warily for a moment but said nothing as we kept walking through the still-mild morning landscape. I had no second thoughts about my admittedly unusual plan. I supposed, on second thought, that I could have just dumped the excess water down my throat instead of on the ground. Aside from this, I had no regrets. And for the next quarter of a mile, the plan worked like a dream. The ground was flat, the rich desert dirt serving as a shock absorber for my knees. Allison led the way.
But just when I was starting to fall into bliss, and wondering whether I should dump out even more water when I got the chance, something happened that gave me pause. The sun got hot, the land got steep, and the sweat started pouring out of me as if through a spigot. A waterfall of perspiration gathered in the brim of my survival hat. Sweat ran down my shirt, and it would not stop, as the trail went from kind and squishy to hard and punishing. We hiked up an expanse of red rocks that slid out from under us as we climbed a mountain above an empty valley with the Mojave sands just beyond it. Edwards Air Force Base, immense squares on a dry lake bed, lay in the middle distance on the desert floor. As I stared across the playa, the flaw in my plan revealed itself. Allison, who had no idea how much water I’d thrown away, did not know that we had to hurry to reach the spring. She saw no reason to quicken the pace. I hiked behind her, making broad flourishes with my arms and hands, trying to make her walk faster through telepathy and voodoo. It didn’t work. Instead, she kept borrowing my water bottles, taking hot wet smacks out of them. There was nothing I could do.
“What’s wrong?” she asked when she saw my sour face. Scared to be caught in a lie, I kept silent. The land spread out in accordion folds, brown and dusty. Pines hung their heads. Their crisp brown needles lay in piles at our feet. Five hours into our journey, I rounded yet another bend in the trail, and saw nothing but moon rocks and black canyons. It was time to pray. “Please, God, get us out of this. Don’t let us die of thirst. Please God. Let me revise what I said. First of all, please don’t let Allison find out that this is my fault. Secondly, please don’t let us die of thirst.”
“I’m getting thirsty,” Allison said an hour later.
I pretended, at first, not to hear her request for water. Finally I handed her one of the bottles slowly. She downed a quarter of it on the spot. “Ahhhhh!” she said, and handed the bottle back to me. I was just about to put the bottle back in my pack when she extended her hand again and smiled. “More,” she said, and took a second gulp.
I couldn’t bear any more of this. I winced. I blinked. I kept leaning back and forth, squashing my face into my left shoulder and grimacing.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Um. I…We don’t have as much water as you think.”
Hours later, when the sun set, we camped beneath a slowly turning windmill rising over a clearing in the tall trees. We rationed every sip we had left. We even skipped dinner, because it would have taken too much water to boil up our freeze-dried meal. Even then, I did a good job of hiding my treachery. She knew I’d dumped some water, but she still had no idea how much. We ate dinner. Twilight, then cool darkness, covered us. Next morning we decided to gun it as hard as we could for Golden Oak Spring. I revealed to Allison that the state of our water supplies was now truly dire and that I had “gotten rid” of more water than she might have thought. But even then I didn’t tell her the extent of what I’d done. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
For a while we walked without talking. Freight trains moaned their way up Tehachapi Pass in the distance. Nothing grew but the lumpen forms of juniper trees. We passed through a piñon forest for half a mile and dropped to a dirt road that reached to the bottom of a scabby little mountain with no name. Far to the east was Soledad Peak, a pinheaded king in repose, arms outstretched, a road running up its torso. In her hands Allison held a Nalgene bottle with
the last sips of our tap water. The drops plinked when she shook the bottle. She would not take a sip. Instead she handed me the bottle.
“Drink,” she said. “You’re sweating more than I am. You need it more than I do.”
Something about the gesture caught me by the throat. I wanted to weep, but my tear ducts were jammed from the dry heat. Allison tried to distract me as we walked into the haze. She wondered if she could find a job as a journalist and I could be a ranger or adjunct professor. But she was trying to flummox me with false joy. She was trying to reassure me with stories of our bright future, but her reassurances had the opposite effect. When you know you’ve imperiled yourself and your lover, and your lover should be white hot with fury but instead is calm and goofy, you know that things are even worse than you surmised. The desert commented on its own dryness. The wind rushed like water. A mirage washed up against a pile of rocks. To get technical about it, this part of the PCT wasn’t true desert, in the strictest sense. The trail passes through only about twenty miles of real desert. But the fact that there were some trees out here just made it worse. The trees knew how to find water, but they weren’t saying.
My thoughts traveled back to a book I once loved, The Big Book of Desert Adaptations, or something like that. The book’s undisputed stars were the kangaroo rats, who never drink water in all their lives but manage to survive in the desert, no problem. Kangaroo rats take in moisture by gnawing on seed pods, collecting vapor in their nasal membranes, and—are you listening, Doctor John?—chewing their own turds. Oh to be a spadefoot toad, able to concentrate liquid wastes into 40 percent urea, conserving water while forming a greasy layer that coats the skin like Armor All and seals moisture inside. How I envied the legless lizard, shy and ugly in his burrow. He uses his tongue to grab droplets suspended like jewels between grains of sand.* Without the walking stick I’d left behind in the motel, it was hard for me to prop myself up. I tripped into a thorn bush and fell to the ground in the dust as Allison exhorted me to be brave, to stay calm, to cowboy up. She gave me a weak smile. I smiled back. I knew, in my heart, that my clever girlfriend would find some way out of the misery I had created for us.