The Cactus Eaters Read online

  My mom and dad couldn’t hear Allison’s whimpers. They had popped a CD into the deck and were now playing, at deafening volume, the soundtrack of Carnival, an old Broadway musical. “Love Makes the World Go Round” was blasting so loud, the rearview mirror trembled. Because of the blaring music, my parents had to holler at each other to be heard. My father was lost, driving in circles, getting more agitated. My mother was scrambling through the road maps.

  The ride seemed endless. Buttock-shaped rock formations mooned us as we drove toward Wrightwood. Getting lost had thrown my parents behind schedule, and now they were going to be late for a matinee of a play they had been looking forward to seeing all year. As we hurtled down the highway, my father kept checking his watch every few seconds. Like me, my mother and father plotted out most aspects of their lives several months in advance, and worried constantly about being on time. This fixation blocked certain realities out of our minds, such as a woman in the backseat threatening to spray her guts all over the new upholstery.

  “Oh no,” Allison said. “I’m gonna throw up again! Make them stop the car now. Please, Dan, please make them stop the car.”

  They still couldn’t hear her, but fortunately we had arrived at our destination. My dad pulled up to the Wrightwood ranger station, eased his six-foot-three frame from the car, and lumbered off to get directions. My mom and I followed. Allison told me she needed to be alone. She bolted from the Mercury, slipping on gravel, holding her stomach.

  “What’s going on with her?” my father said, looking back at her. “What’s she doing in the bushes? What’s she pulling back there?”

  “She’s not pulling anything, Dad. She just isn’t feeling so well right now.”

  “What do you mean she’s not feeling well? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  My father looked worried now, and yet he did not suggest we abort the mission. Neither did Allison. Neither did my mom. Neither did I. Any one of us could have taken decisive action at that moment but chose not to do so, which was, in itself, a decision.

  Allison insisted on staying outside while my parents and I walked into the ranger station, where we approached a woman with a face like a loggerhead tortoise. She had matted hair, a Smokey Bear hat, and a frown. My parents and I stood together by a 3D topography map and a postcard rack. I was so worried about Allison—and, at the same time, convinced that my dream hike was about to be ruined—that my stomach gurgled. To ease my nerves I studied the map, tracing the mountain crest with my index finger. Dad stepped up close to the ranger woman. “My son and his girlfriend are hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” he said, sounding proud and exasperated at the same time. “They’re hiking all the way from Mexico to Canada.”

  The ranger yawned and showed her yellow teeth. “Is that right?” she said in the tone people use on telemarketers. “The Pacific Crest Trail? We see an awful lot of those.” She blithely added that the trail near the ranger station was “totally snowed over and impassible. No way you’ll make it without snowshoes and ice axes. Do you have snow gear on you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, if I were you I’d start farther north a ways, in the lower elevations, somewhere near Agua Dulce. That’s fifty-five miles north of here, near the Antelope Valley.”

  I was vaguely familiar with the place she was talking about. It was in a parched area of Los Angeles County, forty-four miles north of downtown L.A.

  “But…” I said. “Isn’t that kind of in the desert?”

  “Yeah,” the ranger said. “But at least there isn’t snow.”

  “Then we’ll need directions to Agua Dulce,” Dad said.

  But the ranger wasn’t looking at my mom and dad anymore, and her bored expression had melted away, replaced by a look of restrained horror, for there, outside the window, my girlfriend was on her hands and knees vomiting with abandon all over the landscaping.

  Agua Dulce was not what I had in mind. For one thing, it was 454 miles north of the Mexican border. If we hiked to Canada from Agua Dulce, we’d have to come back at some point and make up all those missing miles. In the car, I was having a hard time processing all the new developments. I swore under my breath and kicked my boots together until Allison, still slumped over, with her hair hanging down, scolded me. “Stop freaking out, Dan,” she said. “I’m the one who’s not feeling well.”

  To reach Agua Dulce, we sped past gated condo towns. Pale mountains rose. While Wrightwood was cool, the desert sizzled. Waves of heat rose off the blacktop as we entered the parking lot of Vasquez Rocks County Park, Agua Dulce’s tourist attraction. Visitors crawled over sandstone shapes that jutted over the Antelope Valley. The rocks, supposedly, would be our starting point on our epic journey. My father stopped the car. Allison got out and sat on a flat-topped rock. She put her face in her hands.

  “You sure about this, Daniel?” my mother said.

  “I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life.”

  “But why are you doing this?” she said.

  “Because I want it very, very, very, very badly.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “But wanting something very, very, very, very badly and actually getting it are two different things, Daniel.”

  Allison was by my side. Even then she could have risen up and said, “Fuck this. Let’s go home.” Instead she sat in meek silence. I can only guess that she felt subsumed by the desires of others. A whole lot of concerns and neuroses were swirling through the air, and none of them had anything to do with her.

  My father got out of the car and started helping me drag the packs from the trunk. “Boy oh boy,” he said. “These packs are monsters, young Daniel. Are you sure you need all this?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “It’s a long way to our next supply town.”

  My mother gave Allison a brief worried look and whispered to me, “Is she all right, dear? Danny, do you want us to do something?”

  I greeted the query with silence. I got a quick hug from Mom. Dad—who looked stricken—did not shake my hand. They sped out of the parking lot and were gone.

  This was supposed to be a heroic moment. Even now, some part of me still thought we might start hiking that day. But where would we walk? And from what energy source? What the hell had I done? Now I wished my parents would return to rescue us, but we had no cell phone, and neither did they. Allison and I lingered for an hour in the Vasquez Rocks parking lot, in a daze, watching jackrabbits leap and hornets chase each other in wild circles.

  Now that it was too late, I was ready to take care of Allison. I left her alone and found a ranger office in the county park. The young female clerk let me use their phone for a local call. Allison and I had brought with us a set of “emergency contact numbers” supplied by Kirk and Eddie back in Connecticut, just in case something bad happened to us along the trail. “Just in case” was now. Among the names on the list was Mark, a postman who lived here in Agua Dulce. Eddie had told us that Mark was a PCT enthusiast who did everything he could to help hikers. I called his work number. Mark answered on the first ring. I asked if he might give us a ride to a motel. I told him Allison had vomited recently and was weak. Mark asked us why on earth we’d left for the trail today if Allison was sick. I had no ready answer. He asked if we needed a doctor. I told him what Allison had said—that she felt rotten but probably just needed some rest.

  “Sure, I can help you out,” he said. “Your girlfriend had better be feeling hardy before you try that desert crossing. This is unusual, though. I’ve never had anybody need me to help them out before they’ve even set foot on the trail.”

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  True to his word, Mark was there soon, driving his mail truck. There were no hotels, motels, or a campground in Agua Dulce, so he drove us to Santa Clarita, a city of a hundred thousand people, twenty miles south. Mark was an Italian American in his early thirties, with olive skin and a bushy mustache. He told us he lived here to escape the constrain
ts and bullshit of “normal career society.” He used to run a feed and seed store, before becoming a mailman. Mark loaded up our packs for us. I could barely talk to him. Woozy, Allison tried to engage him in a conversation about a recent article she’d read about a mentally scrambled postal worker who gunned down all his coworkers. This led to some awkwardness as we squeezed into the truck. Mark drove us out to the Comfort Inn, on the edge of a busy road. “It’s a shame you didn’t do some hiking before staying at this place,” he said as I handed the clerk our credit card. “A week from now in the backcountry, this place would seem like a palace.”

  In the lobby near the checkout counter, three spiky-haired rock climbers in Lycra outfits lounged in chairs. One gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Those look like serious backpacks,” said one of them. “You guys must be hardcore.”

  We walked right past them without saying a word.

  Chapter 5

  The Outpile

  Mark helped us drag our packs into the elevator and we rode to the second floor. We invited him into the room, where he shoved the gear against a wall. “Man, those packs are heavy,” he said. Allison lay on the king-size bed, under a Cubist portrait of what looked like chopped liver. The painting bothered me. I walked over and tried to remove it but someone had nailed it to the wall. Below the balcony of our second-floor room, a burly janitor dragged a net across the pool. Squinting in the sun, he skimmed bees and spiders from water the color of Mountain Dew. This is not how I had imagined our first day in the desert. Mark glanced at me. I could tell he was alarmed by the heaviness of our packs. I could also tell that he was going to give us a stern lecture about them, but I didn’t want to hear it. Allison lay back, grimacing, her hands placed gingerly over her stomach.

  “Listen, I’ve just got to ask you something,” Mark said, leaning forward. “Does either one of you have any idea what it’s like out there?” He pointed, with his thumb, toward the black-ribbed mountains out the window, jagged in the distance. The sinking sun had turned their edges red. For years, Mark had been a friend to Pacific Crest Trail hikers passing through Agua Dulce. He’d offered them free rides to a camping “super store” a half hour away from the trail, and picked their brains about backpacking. He’d already hiked small sections alone or with friends, and something, he said, always went wrong: sprained ankles, tick bites, loneliness, heat exhaustion, and sometimes all of the above. “I know from experience that this is going to be the most incredibly strenuous thing you’ve ever done,” Mark said. “With all this stuff, I’m sorry, but you will never make it. If she hadn’t gotten sick now? If you guys had just waltzed right out there? I mean, you could die out there with all this stuff.” He zeroed in on me and my backpack. “There’s no reason to bring something that large. Then you’re just tempted to stuff it full of things you don’t need. So let’s start getting rid of stuff right now.” I stared at Allison and she stared back. “Come on,” Mark said. “Let’s see everything you’re bringing, in a pile, on the floor.”

  Allison threw me a baleful look. She sat up on the bed, reached over, and flopped two sacks of food and gear on the ground. Mark’s brown eyes narrowed when he saw two Swiss Army knives with beer openers, wine openers, magnifying glasses, and every kind of screwdriver head. He sighed when he saw a German lantern that weighed three pounds and needed four D-cell batteries. He whinnied when he saw our money belts, our wash towels torn in half to save weight, extra batteries for the lantern, and four toothbrushes with the handles lopped off to save even more weight. Next were thirty yards of Ace bandages, four unbreakable Lexan bowls, several spools of twine, a John McPhee anthology, four layers of insulated clothing, one large and putrefying sack of home-dehydrated apples the color of snot, and four bags of mock seafood pasta supreme with freeze-dried protein specks. But the item that puzzled Mark the most was the kite. He turned it around and around in his hands. “Kite?” he said. “Kite? Tell me when, in the course of walking twenty-six hundred miles, over unbelievably steep terrain, would you have time to fly a kite?”

  “Look,” I said, “Allison bought the kite for me at an Eddie Bauer store in Connecticut for my birthday. And we decided to take it along with us. We thought it would be…I don’t know, fun.” I pointed out the kite’s many attractive features, including five tassels, each six feet long, colored yellow, purple, pink, blue, and chartreuse. “See?” I said. “It’s made of parafoil, so it really doesn’t weigh very much. And…it’s collapsible.”

  Mark reached over and threw the kite on the floor. I thought Allison was going to holler, but she was too weak to fight. Instead she leaned back on her puffy pillow and closed her eyes.

  “See that kite?” Mark said. “That’s the first item in the ‘out pile.’ And everything that ends up in the outpile is going home to your mom and dad’s. Believe me, I’m doing you a favor.” He reached in our packs, grabbing item after item, as methodically as a robotic arm. He ripped our 526-page Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California guidebook into chunks, divided by chapter, and threw the sections into different piles.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “That book cost me twenty-five dollars.”

  “You carry only the guidebook pages you need for any one section. You send the rest of the pages ahead to yourself, at each supply stop. It’s a waste of weight and space. You’ve got to do this smart, guys, or you’ll be off the trail in a week.”

  Soon food, spoons, and other gear formed a three-foot-high cone that leaned, at a perilous angle, against the coffee table. I was dumbstruck. Every pound that Mark took out of our packs filled me with fear. To me, every ounce of pack weight was a tether to civilization.

  “Listen,” Mark said. “You’re going to burn through all your money before you even set foot on the trail. Why don’t I come and get you tomorrow morning, and you can stay over at my grandma’s place out in Agua Dulce. Stay there with me as long as you like. Meanwhile, I’ll store all the camping stuff you don’t need, and later on you can mail it back to your parents.”

  We said we’d take him up on his kind offer. Even so, I hoped, against reason, that he would have no more advice for us. I couldn’t bear to hear any more.

  Later, we watched from the balcony as Mark, crouching beneath two big Hefty bags stuffed with our loot, said good-bye. Allison watched Mark shove the mess into his truck and drive off. She sat on the bed and stared at the spot on the floor where our gear used to be. Then she turned and whispered in my ear, “I can’t believe our kite is gone.”

  Chapter 6

  Reign of the Jardi-Nazis

  Mark honked his horn outside the motel the next day. He was at the wheel of a pickup truck with a sticker on the bumper reading, SAVE A HORSE, RIDE A COWBOY! We shouldered our packs, piled in, and drove to Mark’s grandma’s bungalow in a canyon full of chaparral, snakes, and silver sage. Allison was feeling better—she was taking in solid food and hadn’t puked since the motel, but she wasn’t strong enough to hike. I sat there, fidgety, on the carpet of Mark’s grandma’s living room feeling trapped, watching the big red sun rise over a neighbor’s cactus garden. That morning I felt stuck, longing for some outside force to kick-start our stalled adventure. I wanted some deus ex machina to sweep in and rescue us. It was at that moment I first saw The Book.

  Ray Jardine’s PCT Hiker’s Handbook had a cover the color of peach yoghurt. Typeset in an awkward font, the book had the thrown-together quality of a smuggled document, a backcountry samizdat, something the authorities didn’t want you to see. Ray Jardine was a mountaineer, kayaker, long-distance hiker, and inventor of The Friend, a spring-action camming device that had changed the face of rock climbing. Now he was starting a light-packing revolution on the Pacific Crest Trail. Jardine believed people could walk faster and be happier if they carried less than ten pounds of gear on their backs, including the weight of the pack. He urged his readers to hike in running shoes, or go barefoot for a spell, because “the nerves in the soles of our feet provide our brains with a wealth of tactile information.”
Hikers should shun boots, because they can damage our feet. Eat gooey corn pasta in camp, Jardine said, because it is “rocket fuel” for your legs, and when you’re done with the meal, consider guzzling the cookwater to glean a few more carbohydrate calories. These strategies sounded wacky, but the results were indisputable. Most people take five to six months to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, but Jardine, in middle age, had knocked it off with Jenny, his sprightly wife, in less than three and a half months. That’s 2,650 miles in 100 days, in heat and snow and rain.

  Mark walked in to the living room and caught me reading The Book. He must have noticed my vacant expression, my tongue pushed to the side of my mouth, my eyes bulging as I stared at the pages.

  “I see you’ve found The Book,” he said. “Ray Jardine has some great ideas, but I’m not sure how much it will help you to read that now. It’s like a textbook. You can’t just sit down and absorb all that knowledge in one day.”

  Mark explained that the book had inspired a lifestyle. In fact, some of the hardest-core followers of “The Ray Way” called themselves Jardi-Nazis. Apparently, the term had started out as a put-down aimed at Jardine’s most ardent fans. Essentially, it was a synonym for “joyless speed-walking freak.” In response, the Jardi-Nazis appropriated the term for themselves. Mark said these hikers had a few things in common: sculpted legs and buttocks and twiggy arms, because upper-body muscles tend to atrophy on long-distance walks. To a Jardi-Nazi, every smidgen of pack weight mattered. Jardi-Nazis figured it was six million steps from Mexico to Canada, so if you brought along even one pound of useless crap, that would be six million pounds of useless crap, enough to kill a man.