The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind-and Almost Found Myself-on the Pacific Crest Trail Read online

  “This is our dream,” she says. “But I think it’s too hard. I think it might be the wrong dream. But we told everybody about this. Everyone knows. I mean, we must have told a hundred people, and now there’s all this expectation. And a lot of those people already think we’re gonna fail.”

  She has a valid point. A couple of people were actually making bets about when we’d quit.

  “You know what?” Allison says. “It’s almost as if we’re shamed into not quitting.”

  We bat the issue around in the sun for a while. I will my brain to come up with a definitive answer, but nothing bubbles to the surface except the pasta, which is now boiling. The disabled filter lies on its side. A black fly stands in repose, his eyes blank and pitiless. No, on second thought, perhaps the fly is a she, for a second fly lands on the first fly and begins to make vigorous love to him or her from behind. It occurs to me that this is silly, that I don’t care if we are “shamed into it” or not. We just can’t go on. Quitting is the only responsible option. If we keep going, we’re going to die. We have no survival training whatsoever. This trail is going to kill us. We must give up. “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this,” I say. “But I really, truly, deeply want to go home. I don’t care what we’ll do for work. I don’t even care where we live.”

  But Allison is right as usual. How can we quit at a time like this, with nothing to go back to? Besides, every time I tell myself that we should quit, the words failure and wimp and lame-o and pusillanimous flash through my mind, and these words are so much worse than the sun, worse than the Velveeta, worse than the horseflies and our petting zoo smell. There is no “home” now. Even our old apartment is gone. Our lives are gone. The future is a blank, an empty page except for the trail. The trail is our only future. All else has been wiped away. When I look around at the scenery to collect my thoughts, I notice another lizard. He’s standing there regarding me at eye level from his perch on a boulder, across from the camp stove. Watching me with beady-eyed intent.

  Patient as a mountain. Waiting to see what we’ll do next.

  Smirking.

  Chapter 2

  Devil’s Island

  The year I found out about the Pacific Crest Trail, I was twenty-five. I had been working for three years at a fourteen-thousand-circulation daily newspaper in Torrington, on the northwestern edge of Connecticut. My workplace was a bleak turn-of-the-century printing factory with an ominous brick tower over the parking lot. A set of narrow stairs rose steeply to the second floor, where trussed-up newspapers moldered in the corner. Upstairs, a cracked window offered views of abandoned railroad tracks and derelict buses without wheels. The newsroom smelled of sweat and onions, especially in summer. Shoes squeaked on pigeon-colored floors. Editors stared like lemurs at their terminals, moving only when the lunch truck arrived laden with soups and stale rolls. They chewed their food while reading somniferous accounts of dump-board meetings and church-group bake sales. Holes appeared in the ceiling. One January night, snow fell on the desk and computer of our court reporter, who had been there for decades. Every time I whispered to him about leaving the paper someday, he’d lean forward, smile, and say, “This newspaper is Devil’s Island. No one escapes.” In the printing room, someone had left a pair of leather shoes that stayed under a table for three years, gathering dust.

  The paper had a hate/hate relationship with its readers. People in town never said they “subscribed” to the paper. Instead they said they “took” the newspaper, as if it were a pill or a suppository. We were overworked, there were rumors of the paper getting sold, and strange errors showed up in the newspaper all the time. One of the fruits of our efforts was an above-the-fold headline asking people to remember the bombing of PEAR HARBOR. The headline was especially unfortunate, considering the town was jam-packed with World War II veterans. We ran a story about a fire that gutted a house on the edge of town. According to our report, no humans perished, “but two family poets died in the blaze.” We referred to a sign-language training program as a course on “palm reading.” We printed two consecutive Wednesday issues in the same week, providing further ammunition for the local crazies who already thought the Earth stood still. In a story about a retiring city clerk named Evelyn Ronalter, I spelled her name several ways, including “Eveline Rinaltier.” In the text, I mentioned her “horn-rim glasses” and the “gray bun of hair rising off her head,” though neither attribute appeared in the photo that ran alongside the piece, the photo I took myself. We tried our best to reverse the losing streak, but some gremlin always crawled into the machinery. Hoping to turn our luck around, the owners launched a “total quality program” to minimize errors and boost pride. The publisher kicked things off with a banquet at Dick’s Restaurant in downtown Torrington. To surprise his staff, he handed out souvenir pencils that were supposed to have our brand-new motto printed across them: STRIVING FOR TOTAL QUALITY…The pencils all came out saying, SHRIVING FOR TOTAL QUALITy…

  In northwest Connecticut, if you hated your job and doubted your purpose in life, one surefire pick-me-up was to drive up Route 8 on a summer night and head to the R&B Sportsworld miniature golf course in Winsted. There, the pygmy windmill made you feel like a giant for a while. That’s what I did one evening when the mosquitoes were buzzing and my Polo shirt was stuck to my back. The newspaper’s young reporters were hanging out on the course. I first saw her near the third hole. She was leaning on a post between a fake drawbridge and a faux fisherman’s shack. She stood to the right of a sign reading, LOST BALLS WILL BE REPLACED…. Her hair was blond, light at the roots and darkening as it reached her shoulders. She was giggly and flirty, talking to a male reporter, closing her eyes and showing her white teeth as she laughed at his joke. She had a high forehead, fair skin, and an out-of-context Italian-looking nose. The nose was by no means large but there was something assertive about it. It added an ethnic edge. I fixed my eyes on the young woman’s neck and the espresso-colored beauty mark at its base. I noticed her bosom, which I later described in my diary as “quite stately.” When it was her turn at hole three, she stepped away from the fence and steadied herself in front of the ball. She thwacked the ball hard but with great control, getting a hole in one. As the others swatted and stumbled around the course, she pulled her fingers through her hair, laughing with the boys or at them. I couldn’t tell which.

  For the last few weeks, I’d heard all about Allison, the saucy new Register Citizen reporter who’d graduated from journalism school in New York City and had published an environmental handbook scolding polluters for dumping toxic waste in the Great Lakes. She’d applied for the Register Citizen reporting job because she wanted to stay on the same coast as her lanky film-school boyfriend in Manhattan. I heard that she’d aced her interview with the paper. In fact, she so impressed the editors that they passed her clips around the newsroom, including her “Cookie Story,” a feature about a sweet old lady fond of baking cookies in her high-rise apartment. If memory serves, the first paragraph paints a loving portrait of a granny cooking up a storm, the scent of brown sugar wafting through the hall. The second graph is about the same woman being flung out the window by crackheads. I remember reading that and thinking, “Holy shit! I’ve got to meet the woman who wrote this thing.” Besides, she was now available; her film-school beau had just dumped her.

  At the golf course that night, she wore a short dress revealing a small waist, strong hips, and long legs. She was shapely and sexy, but there was something different about her. For one thing she was loose-limbed and goofy. She had a pretty face but she could mold it into crazy expressions. When she walked, she did not flounce. Instead she galumphed across the turf like Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners. Her walk was mannish, loping, and purposeful, shoulders tilted, chin up, arms dangling in front of her. It was as if she couldn’t decide whether to flirt with the boys or become one of them. While waiting my turn at the mill hole, I walked over and said hello. She giggled at my nervousness and shook my hand a touch too hard.
I’m not sure why I felt sheepish. Maybe it was the story I’d heard about the older sports staffer who hit on all new female hires. Apparently he’d chatted her up in the newsroom while wearing a loud sweater. While he was putting on the charms, she burst out laughing and told him, “You aren’t man enough to be wearing that sweater.” It was just a tossed-off remark, but he slunk away like a neutered dog. Or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that all women, and in particular, attractive women, make me twitch and blink as if I’m channeling “Rain Man.” A product of the low self-esteem movement, I didn’t have my first kiss until I was almost twenty-two. Allison’s sensuality was too much for my sensibilities.

  I was frightened to ask her out. But thoughts of her hair, her giggle, her nose, consumed me. We did not work in the same building. Her office was a rented room forty-five minutes from Torrington that served as the newspaper’s rural bureau. There, Allison wrote stories about WASP-y towns with manicured village greens and Congregational churches. I figured out her route to work and went jogging along the rural highway, just so she might see me. She never drove by. I kept seeing her at newspaper parties, in bars, and at the Berkshire Café, the pizza joint where reporters hung out. We had little in common. She was neat and particular. I stored lasagnas in my desk at work. She was Protestant. I was Jewish. She loved dancing to funky music. Dancing makes me ill. There was no logical reason that things would click between us.

  Besides, she was emotionally unavailable. She told me she had been “crying like a volcano” over her ex-boyfriend. But we became friends, which slightly diminished my fear of her, while adding a new dimension of torture: since she thought we were “pals,” she felt comfortable making offhand comments about cute guys, and making me feel like a eunuch. Chance encounters kept happening. One night we both found ourselves at a party at the rented house of a nerdy reporter from a rival newspaper. I’d heard, for a while, that this man had his eye on her. He approached her but seemed to bore her. That night she came wiggling up to me with a Banks Beer in her hand, her bubble ass bouncing to the music. I wore a stupid T-shirt with a smiling Tyrannosaurus rex across the chest. Someone stuck a James Brown cassette in the ghetto blaster. It was “Get on the Good Foot.” Allison stood and forced me to dance by the pool while holding a pineapple stalk against my butt and telling me to pretend it was a rooster feather. “Shake it,” she commanded. It was a horrible yet strangely liberating experience.

  Later we sat by the pool and talked of ghosts, demons, and Bigfoot, the sunset dyeing the water pink. She smiled, and when she listened, she leaned in tight, a sweetly intent expression on her face as I forced myself to hold her gaze a moment too long. The conversation turned. We got to talking, for some reason, about sex and romance. With a coy expression, she told me about a wild fling she’d had in her younger days while traveling overseas. She’d confided the steamy details to her journal. One day, her twit of a boyfriend found out about it by pawing through the diary when she wasn’t home. He was so shocked by what he’d read that he chopped off his hair. “I saw him in the library the next day,” she said. “It was so weird. I didn’t recognize him. He was practically bald.” I knew this was my cue to reveal a sordid past, but none existed. What could I say? The skeletons in my closet had all died of boredom. And it filled me with longing to have such erotic adventures with this woman, doing the kind of things that might drive one of her future boyfriends to shave off all of his hair.

  And yet I was scared to make a pass. Later that night my best friend, Dave, chided me. “Why don’t you plant a lip lock on her?” he said. But I couldn’t. Unable to seduce her in any direct way, I had no choice but pull her in, bit by bit. Like a farmer trying to woo a guileless bunny, I threw crumbs of bread in front of her and hoped she would follow me down into the dungeon-dark rabbit hutch of love. I gave Allison two “Heartbreak Healing” tape mixes, designed to foster tenderness in impressionable women on the rebound. My mixes included weepy songs by George Jones, Dolly Parton, Buck Owens, and Randy Travis. I drove for an hour to a Strawberries music store in Canton, just to buy K. D. Lang’s Shadowlands so I could put “I’m Down to My Last Cigarette” on the mix. But Allison was anything but guileless, and my strategy did not pay off. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I just blurted it out. She said that while my feelings were “not entirely one-sided,” she couldn’t picture herself in a romantic relationship with me. Though I was crushed for weeks, I got over it. Knowing I had no chance, I gave up trying to woo her. Then one night I got a startling phone call. Allison had gone home to the Midwest for a three-day weekend, and had had a dream in which she kissed me. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “We’re pretty much a couple already. We see each other every day and hang out every weekend. If we’re doing all this other stuff, we might as well have the fun part, too.” I was surprised, confused, put off, thrilled, insulted, flattered, and annoyed. Why the change of heart now? But that didn’t stop me from racing to her apartment in my Honda and running a stop sign on the way. We sat on her couch. Our making out started out squirrelly and tentative—a few lame attempts to put our arms around each other. Soon the halfhearted hugs turned into groping. We kept rearranging ourselves, attempting to kiss, which was hard to do, considering that my nose and her nose were plus-sized; our noses jousted, making it hard for our lips to connect unless we tilted our heads at a violent angle. She apologized as I began to undress her.

  She worried that her undergarments were “kind of dowdy; I would have worn much nicer lingerie if I’d known.”

  I was surprised, too, although the jarring quality of making out with a platonic friend added to the excitement. As we fooled around for hours in her room, I regretted the times I’d held myself back and not acted on impulses because I was afraid. I wondered what other experiences I had missed or ruined because of fear and wimpiness. It occurred to me in the dark that I might get what I wanted just by going for the gusto and taking some risks. I vowed not to waste any more of my life second-guessing my decisions. I promised myself an adventure of epic proportions. It would have to be something so unlikely and grand that no one would think me capable of pulling it off.

  And whatever it was, Allison was coming with me.

  Chapter 3

  “Something Golden”

  After that first night, we often went away together, inner-tubing down the listless Farmington River, drinking bottomless glasses of Chianti, spending weekends in bed. On Saturday afternoons, we’d drive out to the old Cornwall Bridge to buy sandwiches and fresh tomatoes. We’d throw them in a backpack and walk into a steep-walled forest overlooking fields full of blue moths and neurotic cows, who would see us coming and start lowing their heads off. On every excursion, Allison identified wild plants to impress me, including a fuzzy green one called a lamb’s quarter. “Look,” she said. “That’s miner’s lettuce.” I was thrilled she was a gardener, and an expert on weeds and shrubs. I’d killed every plant I’d ever owned, including, of all things, a Wandering Jew. Her garden vegetables thrived. They responded to her innate practicality. “Who knows?” I thought to myself. “Maybe her knowledge of flora will one day save my life.”

  One morning, we hiked out to Lion’s Head, a crown-shaped rock, where Allison leaned over and said, “What if we kept walking and never went home? What if we drove to work one day but kept on driving and didn’t stop, with our middle fingers in the air?”

  It might have been a tossed-off comment, but my new relationship with Allison, and our weekend adventures, underscored the tedium of my work life. One day I was working the Saturday shift at the newspaper. No one else was around, so I was vegetating, playing with a magnetic paper clip holder, drinking Sanka, examining the lake of grease on my plate of chicken and broccoli chow mein. The police scanner bleeped. Through the hiss and foam of static, a dispatcher barked out cop call codes: Number sixty-eight meant intoxicated person; seventeen, attempted suicide; ninety-eight, missing person; eighty-eight, untimely death; thirty-six, hostage situation. It
was giving me a headache, all the goddamned numbers, so I shut off the scanner and called my friend James on the WATS line. James was an environmental writer and editor down in North Carolina. He has a vast knowledge of national parks, paths, and recreational opportunities. I told him I wanted to go on an American safari. I’d thought about through-hiking the Appalachian Trail but had heard rumors about a local man whose nephew tried to walk it but quit after straying from the trail in Georgia and getting a warm two-dollar pistol stuck up his nose. James asked me if I’d ever heard of the Pacific Crest Trail, a wondrous path across the American West. James told me it was the western equivalent of the Appalachian Trail, an epic walk so enormous it spanned 16.5 degrees of latitude. In one stretch, backpackers must venture two hundred miles into a forest without crossing a single road, a power line, or even a fence.

  I could hardly believe such a thing existed. I’d grown up in California, and no one there had even mentioned it. When James told me about the mystery trail, something clicked. Think of it! A chance to pass through time, to see America as it looked in the days of fur trappers and Miwok Indians. I’d never felt connected to the Golden State. My parents lived outside L.A. in an A-frame house. I knew what it was like to see office towers rise like ships’ masts through the photochemical haze on smog days, when the teacher wouldn’t let you play in the fields, on mornings when breathing burned the lungs. But this would be the authentic West, the one I’d seen in the backgrounds of William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy movies on late-night TV, a land of revelations. The trail, it seemed, would be beautiful enough to fulfill my longing for escape and tough enough to meet the conditions of a test, an outdoor finishing school for the soul. Soon I could think of little else except the trail and Allison.