The Cactus Eaters Read online

  “Agua Dulce,” Allison said, her face full of expectation, as if she sensed an awed response was coming, something along the lines of “Holy shit, you walked all the way from Agua Dulce?”

  “Agua Dulce,” the firefighter grunted. “So you only just started.”

  We asked him if he’d seen our “friend” Todd the Sasquatch. The firefighter said Todd had passed there more than two days ago. Allison and I frowned. Todd was practically sprinting.

  The firefighters loaded our canteens with sweet water out of the cooler, and let us camp for the night on a patch of grass behind the fire station. That night Allison cooked us freeze-dried couscous. We read in the dark in our sleeping bags with our headlamps. As the sun sank and the ravines faded to black, an absolute quiet came over the yard near the fire station. I felt uneasy for no reason at all.

  To borrow a phrase from Henry Miller, the canyon was “a murderous spot,” though I didn’t know it then. William Mulholland, chief water engineer for the city of Los Angeles through most of the 1920s, had his fall here. Now that I know his story, I feel a certain kinship with him. Both of us came to California to remake ourselves. The circumstances were a bit different; I moved back after a long absence, while Mulholland, born in Ireland, made his way out west to find his fortunes in the goldfields, a scheme that never panned out. I could sympathize with his desire to impose his will on a landscape, to make it conform to his plans. Mulholland, in his prime, had a prize-fighter’s nose and a scrub brush for a mustache. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1877, he found work pulling weeds, garbage, and branches out of ditches in the hot sun. Some might consider this a demeaning job, but he was proud, even arrogant, in his labors. When a supervisor stopped by and asked him his name, Mulholland told him to mind his own goddamned business and let him do his job. Impressed by his cheekiness, the boss promoted him.

  Mulholland was fond of his work and loved his town. Looking back on those days, he wrote, the “world was my oyster and I was just opening it. Los Angeles was a place after my own heart.” L.A. had once been a backwater slum, cut off from the gold rush spoils that turned San Francisco into a boomtown in the 1840s. Los Angeles had no port. Until the 1870s, the city didn’t even have a rail link to the rest of America. But when Mulholland gazed upon Los Angeles, he saw a great American city in the making. He was sure it could be a contender, if not for one incontrovertible fact: two thirds of the water in California was concentrated in the northern third of the state. Southern California was essentially a desert, and L.A. sat on its edges, with the anemic L.A. River dribbling through town. Meanwhile, all that precious moisture was just sitting up in northern California. Mulholland thought this was a dreadful waste.

  Mulholland, after becoming L.A.’s water chief, was a relentless cheerleader for a 250-mile aqueduct, the largest engineering feat since Roman times. The structure—dismissively known as “Mulholland’s Ditch”—siphoned water by gravity feed from the Owens River, beneath the High Sierra’s eastern edge. Mulholland’s project turned Los Angeles green, with circling sprinklers, swimming pools, and jungles sprouting from Hollywood back lots. Six years after the aqueduct’s completion in 1913, the population of L.A. doubled, to two hundred thousand. By 1922, the population had surpassed 500,000.

  Los Angeles’s success happened on the backs of Owens Valley farmers, who now realized that Mulholland and his cronies had misrepresented themselves while coaxing ranchers into selling parcels with the best water rights. Mulholland’s project bled the water tables dry. His aqueduct had a striking if unintended consequence: all those gallons of diverted water turned Owens Valley so barren that Hollywood producers started using it to film low-budget oaters starring Buck Jones and Hoot Gibson.

  Owens Valley farmers were furious when they found out their lush pastureland was being turned into a nouveau desert. They filed lawsuits and took up arms. Saboteurs staged spectacular attacks on the aqueduct, blowing up sixteen-and forty-foot chunks of it, prompting Mulholland to bring in an army of Tommy gun–and Winchester rifle–slinging “detectives,” with shoot-to-kill orders. The attacks hastened plans to build a massive water storage facility far from the tensions of Owens Valley. Mulholland chose a spot close to where Allison and I spent the night, San Francisquito Canyon, where an army of workers took two years to build an arch support dam 180 feet high and 600 feet long. By spring of 1928, St. Francis Dam was filled to capacity.

  That night, in our campground near the fire station, I stayed up for a while, leaning from the tent, looking at the violet clouds. Unable to sleep, I wandered the field and stared up at the black rock bowl that surrounded us. Fire ants, perhaps smelling the minty Dr. Bronner’s soap I’d used to bathe that night, crawled from their nest and took wet chomps out of my ankles. Each bite burned like a hot needle. At midnight, the clouds cracked open and moonlight spilled across our campsite, a great flood filling the canyon, until the waves of white and yellow washed over our tent.

  On March 12, 1928, Mulholland’s men noticed a crack in the dam and a brown trickle of water. Mulholland told his men to put some caulking in the crack and go home. He wasn’t about to lose sleep over a chink in his fail-safe creation. Three minutes to midnight, the dam exploded. As it roared down the valley, the twelve billion gallons of water carried with it a moving wall of mud, dirt, and concrete blocks piled seventy feet high and rolling at thirty miles an hour. Floodwaters smashed through Piru, Fillmore, Bardsdale, Santa Paula, and Saticoy. The black mass crashed into its victims with such force that it ripped their clothes away. Floodwaters swallowed farms, work camps, and apiaries and cut a two-mile-wide, seventy-mile-long swath from the canyon to the ocean. Chunks of dam washed up on beaches two hundred miles west. Four hundred people drowned that night.

  The arch-support dam was reduced to rubble, and so was Mulholland’s reputation.

  Mulholland tried to blame the dam’s failure on saboteurs, but the jury at a coroner’s inquest hearing did not believe him. Instead, the jurors blamed “a monolithic chain of command” that gave Mulholland almost total control over the dam’s construction. They ruled that the dam had collapsed because of “the failure of the rock formations upon which it was built.” Mulholland had overestimated himself and underestimated a shifting landscape. The valley’s secret history destroyed him; he had no way of knowing that he’d built his dam against a slow-motion landslide that had been shifting and slipping since ancient times. Mulholland avoided criminal charges, but he resigned in disgrace. Before he came to this canyon, he was one of the most powerful men in California. By the time he left this place, he said that he “envied the dead.”

  I recall the evening’s strangeness, the traces of fire, and the smoke leaking up from the hills. I had a strong sense of being walled into the bottom of a valley, and the land containing me, along with its past and its stories, as I fell into a deep sleep.

  As usual, I dreamed of spirits.

  Chapter 9

  A Bottle of Mace

  One morning on the trail, three days after we left Agua Dulce, I woke up and looked at the bruised-orange sky. We were out in the Angeles National Forest, not far from Lake Hughes. The sun and moon were out. It was cold outside, and yet there were patches of warm air. I lurched around camp, half asleep. Fat ants pottered about. I saw traces of scavengers. A night mouse had chewed a hole in my backpack’s lumbar-support pad and gnawed through a strap. Thank God I still had a twenty-five-yard spool of duct tape in my fanny pack. In the desert dirt I sat, cursing the night mouse, fixing my pack, shooing the rug ants away. After a while I let them be. They waddled aimlessly, carrying nothing. Their unhurried purposelessness soothed me.

  Allison emerged from the tent, a leg, a torso, a mop of hair. She smiled at me and yawned. We woke up exhausted and ate our sloppy breakfast of Grape-Nuts, chocolate chips, and almonds floating in iodized stream water mixed with nonfat dehydrated milk powder. It took us two hours to pack up our camp. Tired and disoriented, the two of us bounced down the trail into a box canyon. Our heads were
full of sleep. No wonder we screwed up again. Around noon, after four hours of hiking, we took a wrong turn near Maxwell Truck Road, near Upper Shake Campground, and wound up in a copse of black oak. We heard the crunch of gravel. There was something in the bushes.

  “You hear that?” said Allison, who was out in front. “I swear I heard footsteps.”

  She pointed into the canyon. Footsteps getting louder. Something slipping and sliding in the sand, heading for us.

  This was an unlovely branch of trail. One recent nature-walk book had described the section as “pig ugly” and “a punishment.” There was no reason a pleasure walker would be here now, in mid-June, unless he were stupid or crazy.

  Allison smiled and squinted. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said, “if it turned out to be that idiot Todd, after all? Going the wrong way.”

  We laughed, puffed our chests, and bellowed like Tarzan to imitate Todd. But when we rounded the corner, it was most definitely not Todd. For one thing there were two of them, two men with blank expressions and pencil-thin mustaches. They seemed to be in their late thirties to early forties, with greasy remnants of hair. It was noon, the hottest sun of the day, but they were wearing long-sleeved buttoned-down shirts and slacks the color of Italian nougat. Their heads looked like sweaty thumbs. The men were twenty yards apart but heading in opposite directions, fanning out. They were having some trouble moving forward. Both wore patent leather shoes, pointy in the fronts. No traction. They skidded on the gravel. The fat one ran to us while his thinner companion ran up a firebreak, a vertical slash in the hills to keep wildcat blazes from leaping. Then he stood on the hill, where he bent down and removed a pair of binoculars from his pants pocket. The fat one came closer, sweating. His stomach shoved up against his Oxford shirt, as if trying to break free.

  “Where’d you park?” he said. “Where’s your car?

  “No car,” I said.

  “We walked,” Allison said.

  “What do you mean you walked?” the man said, stepping into our space, close enough for us to smell his sweat and a whiff of cologne. “What you got in there?” he said, pointing to our swollen packs.

  “A stove,” I said. “Our maps.”

  “What else? Where’s your car? Where’d you park? What’s in the bags?”

  “We’re telling the truth,” I said. “We’re Pacific Crest Trail hikers. We took a wrong turn. And we thought you could tell us how to get back to the turnoff.”

  Could that work? Bring the man to our side by asking directions? Allison looked blank. I had no proof the fat man was a threat, nothing but a gut feeling from his bulging stomach, his attitude, his questions, his clothes, the cologne. And those terrible shoes.

  “I asked where you parked,” the man said, sharply.

  Huh? Was he deaf? “We walked,” I said again. “From Agua Dulce.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “I been all over this valley,” he said. “And I never heard of no Agua Dulce.”

  The man put his fat fingers in his mouth and signaled to his friend with three shrill toots. The second man, now fifty feet away, whirled and ran down the hill toward us. It was time to get the hell out of there. We “ran” as best we could, but our packs weighed us down. We “ran” in a way that reminded me, at the time, of crustaceans. The scrambling for purchase, the wild motions, the lack of any real forward momentum. As we ran, I thought of hobbled lobsters and crabs on Xanax. These were not similes but the actual images I saw in my brain as we headed for the bushes. My heart was pounding. My tongue felt stiff. We ran through a muddy puddle and got gook all over our boots. Allison led the way. She had astonishing lower-body strength, and though she went slowly, she moved with a measured relentlessness. Allison was leader for now, and I was too frightened to care. I backed her up, occasionally turning, stopping to see if I could hear the men pursuing us. I couldn’t tell; it was hard to hear anything above the blood thumping in my ears. A chaparral hedge grew high enough for us to do a duck-and-cover. “This is where we’ll make our stand,” I said.

  I reached in my pack and pulled out a canister of pepper spray I’d bought for $15.75 at a pharmacy in Winsted, Connecticut. You’re supposed to go to the local community college and take a two-hour evening class, led by a community service officer, on how to use the spray. Then they give you a permit. I hadn’t bothered with all that bureaucratic tedium. I thought it would be a no-brainer. Allison looked pale and uncomfortable. She crouched behind me. At that moment I felt unworthy of having any woman crouch behind me, especially Allison. I crouched behind her. It became unclear who was crouching behind whom. All the crouching was making me queasy. “Those men are in cahoots,” Allison whispered to me, emphatically, and though I was scared, my brain also noted that this was the first time I’d ever heard anyone use cahoots in a conversation. Allison’s hands rifled through my pack to find the pepper spray directions, which, for some reason, had been socked away in a separate compartment. She found them in the fanny pack.

  “Congratulations,” said the directions. “You have purchased a truly unique combination of tear gas and pepper solution. Security and satisfaction are yours.” The directions were astonishingly detailed. They had two columns on the bottom, comparing the ingredients of this cheap generic pepper spray and that of actual Mace. Mace, as it turns out, is a registered trademark. How interesting, I thought, but found it unfortunate that the directions didn’t tell me what part was the trigger and what part was the aperture, where the squirts come out of. The wind blew up through the valley, straight into our faces, and the chances of macing ourselves were becoming very large.

  I was afraid then. Aside from the spray, all I had to defend myself was a Swiss Army knife with an awful lot of peanut butter on the blade. I’d bought the knife in Zermatt, Switzerland, on a high school senior-class trip, in a store that specialized in sculptures of gnomes, Matterhorn desk implements, and plush animals with milky, pleading eyes. The knife came with a special holder to protect it from scratches. It also had my name, DANIEL MURRAY WHITE, power-stenciled on the handle. I’d always been so proud of it, and never let anyone touch it, and stashed it away with my Steiff piglets and Star Wars figurines, though it now occurred to me that this knife, at that moment, may have been the wimpiest weapon in the world, if not the universe. I pictured us screaming on the ground from spraying ourselves with the generic pepper solution while the men laughed and stole our stuff and killed us ever so slowly, Jif peanut butter blending with our blood as they cut our throats with that sissy knife.

  “You hear anyone moving out there?” Allison said.

  I listened. The desert had gone silent. Nothing, not even a breeze.

  I sat there, holding the generic pepper spray. Twirling it in my hands like an amulet. Barely breathing, we sat together behind the chokecherry bush, the sun in our faces as we waited for the men. We checked our watches. Ten minutes had passed since we made our retreat. Where the hell were they, anyhow, and would they ever show up? I decided to do a recon maneuver, poking my head above the hedge, while waving, in a threatening manner, the Baggie that contained the pepper spray. The idea was they’d see the Baggie, be scared, and go away. Still, nothing happened. Perhaps I’d frightened them off already. We stepped from behind the hedge. Still nothing. In the distance we heard the vroom of an engine. Allison and I looked down from our rock overhang. Below us, on the trucking road, the fat and thin man were crammed into the cab of a pickup truck. Five other men were sitting on the flatbed. They were staring up the hill in our direction. Talking among themselves and glaring. At last they drove down the trucking road and were gone in a cloud of brown dust. After a while of staring at the dust, listening to the truck sounds fading, we decided the threat was over. “Who the hell were those people?” Allison said. We ran through all possibilities, from contract killers to Jehovah’s Witnesses. We took a few minutes to let our pulses return to normal. Then, when we were certain the men were gone, we decided to resume our walk to Canada—but first we had to find the
intersection where we’d messed up in the first place. Allison said we should split up.

  “But they might come back.”

  “I really don’t think they’re coming back,” she said. “If you hear anything, get the hell out of there. Let’s meet back here in ten minutes.”

  I left my pack in the bushes and walked down the trucking road while Allison climbed through arm-cutting bushes in front of a barbed-wire fence. I ran down the dirt road looking for a trail sign. I was moving along with the sun in my eyes, wearing my torn-up Gregory Backpacks T-shirt, holding a half-empty quart bottle. I ran, my eyes watering, looking for the white marker. In the distance I saw a distinct pole a quarter mile down the road. It seemed to be a Pacific Crest Trail marker. I whooped. But when I arrived, panting, I found it was just a yucca plant swaying, its white diamond-shaped tuft a dead ringer for a three-pointed PCT sign.

  I stood there disappointed as the ground began to vibrate, lightly. Then came the rumbling sound, the motor, the crunch of wheels, the returning car, the men coming up the road toward me. I froze as the sound grew louder, sharper. I could make out the sound of a shot transmission, a muffler coughing, voices. Yucca plants and rocks walled me in on either side. I’d left the generic pepper spray in my backpack. All I had, by way of a weapon, was half a twig I’d found on the ground. No time to run. All I could do was stand there, facing forward, and try to look psychotic. Fortunately my appearance was frightening already. I had not showered in three days. Dirt and sweat gummed my hair, making it stand on end as if by electrocution. Smears of Knorr Swiss instant chocolate mousse, from the previous night’s dinner, stained my lower lip. Now, in the desert sun, the stains probably looked fecal.

  The vehicle kept getting closer, on the other side of a bend. I could not see it yet, but the noise was increasing. It rounded the corner and I started swearing, using every foul word in my arsenal, while standing in the road with my arms waving. I gnashed my teeth and waved the twig. And it occurred to me, only gradually, that I was glaring and snarling and shaking a twig at the startled occupants of a sad and wheezy pickup truck, a late 1970s model with a banged-up bumper hanging on as if by a thread. The driver was a Mexican man, too sun-beaten and wrinkled to be a minute under seventy-nine. I was surprised he had a driver’s license anymore. His cowboy hat kept his face and neck in shadow. In back were three boys, two of them teenagers, the other, kindergarten-age. The littlest wore a white T-shirt with the Calypso-singing crab from a Disney cartoon. He was cringing.