The Cactus Eaters Read online

  My prediction came true a few minutes later. Just off the trail we saw the first fresh, lush thing we had seen in many miles, a prickly pear cactus with fat lobes growing from a thin stalk. Pink flowers caught the sun. The skin was shiny as a Granny Smith apple.

  “Did you know,” Allison said, in a measured tone, “that you can get water out of a prickly pear cactus?”

  I wanted to believe. But when you are as desperate as I was, it’s important to play devil’s advocate. I looked Allison in the eye and said, “Well, yes. I’ve heard you can get water from a cactus. But aren’t prickly pears…poisonous?”

  “Prickly pears aren’t poisonous,” she said.

  That was it. I was convinced.

  I reached in my shorts and found the Swiss Army knife. I took the blade out and used my bandanna to wipe it clean. I knelt down in front of the prickly pear, my heart beating with excitement. I was about to be a survivalist. Even better, I was about to have a great story to tell my grandchildren, the one about the time when old grandpa was sucking his tongue in a desert, came across a cactus, and got a hell of a good drink out of it. Giddy with thirst, mad with expectation, I hacked off the fattest, juiciest lobe. Good-bye, torment. Farewell, misery. Today I would prove my self-sufficiency to the world. Today I would get the last laugh on nature. It felt so good to be king of the desert, to know for sure that I was doing the right thing, and that all the people who ever doubted me were full of crap. I laughed in triumph as I popped the cactus morsel into my mouth.

  If I close my eyes and take deep breaths, the memories return to me—memories separate from each other, yet connected, like flash cards. The first thing I remember was Allison. She was talking to me. No. She was shouting. The second thing I remember was the cactus. Its flavor reminded me of Green Giant green beans with a jicama aftertaste. The next thing I remember is the texture of the prickly pear. I thought it would be luscious, filling my throat with desert nectar, but the cactus had the limp consistency of a cucumber left to wilt overnight in a salad bar. Finally, I remember the pain, as hundreds of needles, known to plant lovers as glochids, plunged themselves like Zulu spears into my mouth, tongue, and gums. The spikes were tiny and translucent, very hard to see when you’re sleepy and dehydrated. Some were half buried beneath the cactus’s flesh. That’s why it surprised me so much when they rose up to penetrate my mouth, slamming into my inner cheeks as if someone had shoveled a small porcupine in my maw. I spat out my spiny food, fell to the ground, and howled. Allison burst into tears. “I guess she isn’t all that dehydrated after all,” I thought to myself between throbs of pain as the water poured freely from her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry!” she said. “I tried to stop you. Didn’t you hear me? You’re supposed to remove the spines first, Dan! You’re supposed to remove the fucking spines!”

  At that moment, I felt as if I were watching myself from a crane hanging several dozen feet in the air, and I was a director of a documentary, looking down on the ground and watching a stranger writhe, making sand angels on the desert dirt. I remember Allison’s screams, too, and hearing myself scream, our mouths yawping together, until I could no longer separate the screams. It seemed to me that our screams were echoing through the canyon, until it sounded like a chorus of people screaming, a tabernacle choir covered in boiling oil. I did not know, at the time, that the prickly pear comes from the genus Opuntia, which distinguishes itself from its spiny brethren by having not one but two kinds of prickers, “minute bundles of hairlike spines at the base of larger spines.”* Often invisible to the naked eye, the spines are “almost impossible to remove. The only way to avoid painful encounters is to treat all of them with great respect.” I did not know this, nor did I know that southwestern homeowners use prickly pear hedges for security buffers instead of concertina wire, or that you’re supposed to handle them only with “metal salad or barbecue tongs with the tips wrapped in duct tape,” according to Maureen Gilmer in her article about eating cactuses safely. She also advocates using a blowtorch to sear off the spines. It would also have helped, immensely, to know that you would need a whole acre of these “beverage plants” to get one quart of liquid. Aside from this, the plant has a long history of causing grievous bodily harm to human beings. Take, for example, Aztec priests. As part of a bloodletting ritual, they used the prickly pear’s spines to puncture their tongues—and their penises! Ignorant of this secret history, I bit the plant, and it bit me back.

  Allison was supposed to be the calm one, but you should have seen her then, tearing into her blue backpack, emptying and throwing things everywhere, trying to find items that might help her injured boyfriend. My lips bled. Pink saliva dripped from my mouth. I could barely speak. “I may require medical attention,” I tried to say, but the words came out sounding more like “Moogah boogah boof.”

  In a blur of motion, Allison, who was still crying, delved into her fanny pack and dug out her plastic compact, a one-inch-by-one-inch beauty mirror with a small powder puff still attached, and then she stumbled toward me like a zombie beautician, reaching for me, eyes glazed. I had no idea what she was planning, and it made me cringe. I became even more afraid when I saw that in her other hand she held my Swiss Army knife. “Listen, Dan,” she said. “You’re gonna have to stay calm. Please. Stick your tongue out as far as it can go. No, farther.” I did as best I could as she reached into the Swiss Army knife, her fingers making their way past the nail file, the saw, the reusable toothpick, the curly wine opener, the scissors, the standard screwdriver, the Phillips head screwdriver.

  At last she came to the tweezers, which she removed, with some difficulty, for her hands were shaking. She held my tongue in her hand. She picked at it, poked at it, scraping away at the thorns while I cried out. In spite of her shaking, she worked with precision, until she’d yanked out ten spines, then thirty, but there were many more. Allison had a look of fierce determination. Through sheer will, she stopped crying and became steady and calm. She guided her hand, using the beauty mirror to get a better view of my mouth. In a half hour she must have plucked fifty spines. My mouth felt raw. Talking and swallowing were painful.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” she kept saying. “But we must press on.” We had to find the spring. “The longer we stay here, the more we sweat, and the thirstier we get. You can’t give up now, Dan. You’ve got to hold yourself together.”

  I stood up. We walked, with Allison cooing encouragements all the way. My whole mouth was on fire. We left behind the nibbled cactus blob and walked up a hill through a forest of spindly trees. “You’ve got to keep going,” Allison said.

  Her voice trailed off. She stopped, and she gasped. For there, not five minutes away from where I’d been attacked by the cactus, Golden Oak Spring poured freely down the side of a canyon. I should have been grateful, but to my ears at that moment, the sound of the water sounded like the spirits of the desert, the gods of the twigs, the gods of the cacti, the gods of the jackrabbits, the gods of the spadefoot toads.

  And they were laughing.

  * Details about various desert fauna come from A Natural History of California, by Allan A. Schoenherr, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

  * According to the Sierra Club’s desert guidebook.

  Chapter 15

  Golden Oak

  The water came through a pipe running into a trough twenty feet up a hill from the Pacific Crest Trail. Though I was almost devoid of energy, I sprinted for the spring. I purified the water, filled my bottles, and drank in goldfish gulps, downing bottlefuls like tequila shots, filling the bottles again, downing them until my stomach inflated, until I felt drunk on water. Allison gulped until her abdomen poofed and she looked pregnant. We sat together in the shade in dried mud, mad with thirst no matter how much we drank, ignoring the bugs that buzzed, the heat that burned. I kept on drinking, even when my stomach wanted to pop. Soon I passed out in the oak shade, drifting away, leaving the ache behind. For a while I floated through an ocean kingdom where I
could breathe underwater. Starfish, mussels, and anemones clung to the tidal rocks. The surface of my body was coated in and out with cool bubbles, floating me in and out of consciousness. And I might have gone on snoozing for hours if not for a distinct but familiar voice, like nails screeching down a chalkboard.

  “Hello,” the voice said. “I can’t believe it took so long to catch you, Dan and Allison! You don’t look so good. Are you drinking enough water? You really need to be drinking more water. I think I’ll stop and have a sip myself. I must say, my pee has that reddish sort of tint I warned you about, it’s getting thicker, kind of syrupy, and if I don’t drink water soon, it’s going to turn redder and then I fear I won’t be able to pee at all. By the way, where do you think you’ll be camping for the night?”

  It was 3:45 P.M. in late June in the southern California desert, 568 miles from Mexico and 6 feet from an excrement-obsessed math lecturer. Doctor John stood above me, knees bent, moss beard drooping. Allison lay to the right of me, bare legs on a rock. She leaned on the bottom of her pack and pulled a thread of blond hair from her half-open mouth. Her face was flushed, her cheeks like roasted plums. She stared in my direction but not at me; it was as if she were looking through a Dan-shaped hole in the scenery. I’d been cropped out of the picture and Stalinized from the foothills. Why did she not acknowledge me? Was she mad, dehydrated, or just numb?

  Black flies circled. My shirt and Allison’s shirt were indescribably filthy but Dr. John’s was clean. Even dirt wanted nothing to do with him. He adjusted his telescoping walking stick and waited for my answer. He pulled off his boots and socks and massaged each toe. He sighed repeatedly, increasing the loudness and pitch of each sigh until he sounded like a hydraulic bus door. “Well,” Doctor John said, “I’m still wondering where you’re going to camp tonight, Dan and Allison. Also, I’m wondering why you aren’t wearing your sunglasses, Dan. The sun is going to burn your cornea if you’re not careful. I’m also wondering if you dropped an orange peel a mile and a half ago. I saw it on the trail.”

  “Yes, yes,” I admitted, trading down, because it was better to confess littering than tell Doctor John where we were going to camp.

  “Do you want to guess how long it takes for an orange peel to biodegrade in a desert?” he said.

  “A week?”

  “Try a hundred years,” Doctor John said.

  It was now 4:00 P.M. The sun was lazy-hot; its heat stirred and thickened the air around the trough holding runoff from Golden Oak Spring. Hills the color of pumpernickel rose above Doctor John, with fuzzy plants and oaks on the tops. “I’m still wondering where you’re stopping for the night,” Doctor John said.

  The truth is I didn’t know where we were going to camp. At the moment, I wasn’t even sure where we were. Technically speaking, though, I knew the answer: 5,480 feet above sea level, 22 miles from the Tehachapi turnoff, and still within 2 hours’ driving distance of downtown L.A. I even knew where we were relative to the rest of California; imagine the Golden State as your left arm raised up, elbow slightly bent, palm opened forward in surrender. Picture a vein or tendon from the center of the wrist to the base of the arm. Now picture a pair of moles or freckles halfway between the shoulder blade and the elbow. That was our exact location, and yet I’d never felt so lost, unable to find my bearings.

  Doctor John snorted with impatience, bringing me back to reality. “Where are you camping?” he said in a remedial algebra voice.

  I looked up at him. My tongue was still swollen, my mouth puckered from remnant spines, but I forced my lips to enunciate.

  “I don’t know where we’re camping. I don’t know how long we’re gonna go. I have no idea…”

  “It’s true,” Allison said, roused from her nap, looking back and forth between me and Doctor John. “We have no idea.” If Allison was angry with me for trying to eat the cactus, she showed no sign of it then. Perhaps her annoyance with Doctor John trumped all other concerns. At least for now.

  Ignoring Allison, Doctor John gazed intently at the man who had risked heat prostration to escape from him, at the man who had gotten out of a motel bed at four in the morning, dragged his girlfriend along with him, hitched a ride with a near-total stranger, dumped his water on the hard parched ground, and then staggered through gulches and hibachi-hot canyons just to stay away from him. Doctor John stared down at that man, and he said, “Dan? I’m starting to think that you don’t want to hike with me.”

  “That isn’t true,” I said.

  I don’t know what possessed me to lie now, with nothing left to lose. I don’t know why, just once, I could not be frank and earnest with a math Ph.D. who had taken forty-eight hours to put two and two together. I suppose I just couldn’t bear the idea of making somebody feel bad about himself, no matter how obnoxious he might be. Allison piped in, trying to flummox him. It’s a tag-team skill we’d honed together.

  “It’s not that we don’t want to hike with you,” she said.

  “It’s just that we have…such different hiking styles,” I said.

  “Oh, come on,” Doctor John said. He looked stricken. Then his eyelids drooped. For a moment he just stood there, slouching, and I felt terrible. But then he shrugged, and a wicked grin creased his face. “It’s really fine, Dan and Allison,” he said. “I’ll go on without you. But…I thought it would be a good idea that we all stick together because, as I’ve said before, we’re such slow walkers.”

  The words slow walkers might not seem like a slap in the face to people who have never tried to hike a 2,650-mile trail where speed and endurance are the most important skills. But it’s one of the worst things you can call a through-hiker. It’s like calling a surfer a “barney” or a “kook.” You just don’t say it, or even think it. Ever.

  “It’s true,” he said again, “we’re the slowest walkers, Dan. That’s why we’re last in the season. But never mind! I’m gonna fill my bottles here. And maybe I’ll see you all later.” He filtered his water, ignoring us. Allison and I watched, dazed. Then he cinched up his pack, loaded his bottles, and shuffled north, toward the bald-faced forms of the Piute Mountains and the scrub oak. But just as he was starting to go, he turned back at us, smiled, and said, “Oh Lois and Clark Expedition? Be sure to prepare a report to Congress.”

  “Prepare a what?” I snapped.

  “A report to Congress. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Didn’t you study them in high school? Lewis and Clark? Crossing the wilderness? They sent a report back to Congress. A joke isn’t funny anymore when you have to explain it.”

  He took one look back at us. He wished us well and headed north.

  After he left, I sat there staring at the dust. I could feel Allison looking at me as if she didn’t know me. Nothing felt the same. It changes you when you bite your first cactus. Foothills sneer. Vultures smirk. Quails ask unanswerable questions. Lizards take their measure of you, appraising you like little insurance adjusters. Something shifted when I chewed that prickly pear lobe. I’d thought an impermeable bubble of safety had formed around me and Allison after we met the Gingerbread Man. Now I was beginning to have serious doubts. The Gingerbread Man had told us that nature wasn’t so mean. He had chanted about the desert’s benefits, about how you could dry your clothes out here so quickly and didn’t have to carry a tent. Now I wondered if it was all a big lie. The desert had turned on me, just when I had started to trust it. The trail, and the desert, had drawn first blood. In that moment of pain, it never occurred to me that I might be responsible for biting the cactus. As far as I was concerned, the cactus had ambushed me. Out of sheer maliciousness, the plant had uprooted itself from the ground and taken a flying leap into my mouth. I thought that Allison should be ashamed of herself. She had failed to stop a sneak attack by an angry and embittered plant.

  Of course I blamed her. Wasn’t it her idea to get water from a prickly pear? Considering she was a plant enthusiast who knew all kinds of arcane information about herbs and weeds and could go into detail about the
“fairy ring” root systems of mushrooms and redwoods, she should have known better. I felt misled. At her prompting, I’d fallen from the garden. It may sound obvious to make an analogy between us and Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise, but the similarities are uncanny. We lost our innocence when I ate that prickly pear. Here is an exact quote from God, straight out of Genesis: “Because you did as your woman said, and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. All the days of your life, thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you.”

  I wanted to talk to her about my resentment, but right then she was not in a receptive mood. In fact, she was looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. That afternoon, she accused me of being fuddle-headed, of misplacing the compass and dropping our headlamp and shit shovel into a ditch. “Why are you always losing everything?” she snapped. “Why can’t you get it together? When you do crazy things like that, it makes me not feel comfortable around you. It makes me feel like I can’t trust you.”

  “Crazy things like what?” I said.

  We were so sick of each other, so fried and frazzled, that part of me even regretted my decision not to hike with Doctor John. He drove me out of my mind, and yet he provided a distraction for the Lois and Clark Expedition. As long as we had to think about Doctor John, we didn’t have to think about us. So much of our relationship was built around opposition. Many of our best memories had some element of us against everyone else. One of our first dates was a performance of Macbeth by a group of novice actors—including a police detective—at a local community college. Macduff was played by an enormous man whose oaken performance, his meter-and-a-half-wide rear end, and his Miles Davis–like habit of performing with his back to the crowd provoked shrieks of laugher that Allison and I had to repress by stuffing our hands into our mouths. The venue was small. The pressure to be polite was maddening. I was trying so hard to stifle my spasms when Allison pointed to Macduff, nodded gravely, and said, “He’s very talented.” We fell out of our chairs and had to run from the auditorium. Now whom did we have to laugh at, to resist, criticize, and conspire against?