Blistered Kind Of Love (17 page)

Soon we were involved in our own surreal scene. One minute we were snapping pictures of me cozying up to what Duffy called “Jabba the Rock,” and the next we were arguing. I'm not sure how it started. I think Duffy asked me if I could “please smile . . . for once.” His tone was aggravated and condescending.

“Of course I can smile,” I said. “I just don't feel like it.”

“You never feel like it. I'm sick of turning around and seeing you being miserable. I feel like I'm making you do something you don't want to do. If you don't want to be here, maybe we should just go home.”

“Lately I feel like I might as well be out here alone,” I replied in between sobs. “It's like you don't even notice me.” I was exhausted and hysterical—quite the stereotypical girl. Duffy's accusations and ultimatum didn't help one bit. I needed some sympathy and positive reinforcement; encouraging words like “You're doing a good job,” or “I know this is hard, but it's going to get better,” and “It won't always be hot and dry like this.”

“I don't want to go home and I don't want to quit,” I said. “But I need you to slow down, cut me some slack, and stop being such a slave-driver. Could you just acknowledge that this is hard instead of walking stoically onward all the time? When did you become the iceman?”

Perhaps Duffy was partially right and I wasn't savoring our desert experience. But I didn't say that, and Duffy didn't apologize for acting like a drill sergeant. Back home, during our pre-PCT training, we joked about “Ballard Boot Camp,” but lately it seemed all too real and not at all funny.

Despite the harsh words and bitter feelings, however, we still had common ground—neither of us wanted to go home, and we both wanted to get to Agua Dulce for food, Gatorade, and rest.

“I need to rehydrate and sleep,” I said. “I think it's the sun.” Duffy's response was as dry as the sand around us, pretty much par for the PCT course, so far.

We left Vasquez Rocks in silence. Now, instead of sulking I was fuming.
Suddenly it seemed that not only did I have to prove to the hiking community that I could make it to Canada, but I also had to prove it to Duffy, while smiling like a beauty queen. Miles ago I'd acknowledged that we, as a team, were in competition (albeit unspoken and hopefully healthy) with our thru-hiking peers; now it seemed we were also in competition with one another.

UNDER BRIGHT MIDAFTERNOON SKIES
, we walked up Escondido Canyon Road into Agua Dulce. All was silent except the sound of trekking poles on pavement and the growl of an occasional passing vehicle. After the flurry of verbal fireworks at Vasquez Rocks, Angela and I hadn't had anything to say to each other. We were both brooding and sulking, and there wasn't much scenery to distract us from our ruminations. I hoped that a stop in Agua Dulce would help assuage the tension—we'd heard many hikers talk with excitement about the town's trail angel, Donna, and her home, “Hiker's Haven.”

“Hiker's Haven had better live up to the hype,” I thought. This was a fragile moment; another obstacle, no matter how small, could easily set off a domino effect and land us on a plane back home. I loved Angela very much, but hiking with her wasn't always easy. I knew she felt the same about me. With our recent battle fresh in my mind, it occurred to me that this hike was rapidly transforming us from honeymooners into bickering spouses. She wanted positive reinforcement, reassurance that she was doing well and that I was proud of her. She
was
doing well and I was
extremely
proud of her, but it was difficult for me to consistently express this. I didn't want to be a cheerleader, and I don't think she wanted that, either. Besides, most of the time I was too exhausted and tired to cheer. I tried my best to maintain a smile and a chuckle, and I didn't think it was too much to ask her to do the same. Otherwise, what was the point of being out here? This was supposed to be fun—a twisted and masochistic type of fun, but fun nevertheless.

My thoughts were interrupted by our arrival at Agua Dulce's downtown plaza. Agua Dulce is a small ranching town, and I was able to quickly process all of the options—three restaurants, a hardware store, and the Agua Dulce Market, with a post office inside. A large laminated sign in front of the market announced “Welcome PCT Hikers.” The sight of the sign and a well-stocked store resurrected my mood, and in a flash I was inside procuring cold beverages. I delivered a Squirt to my little squirt and instructed her to rest outside while I retrieved our re-supply package. I also half-jokingly suggested that she consider working on an attitude readjustment. She looked at me sullenly.

We were sitting outside the supermarket ripping at our huge box when a man with a two-pronged goatee and a scraggly bushel of blond hair approached. I would have thought him a PCT hiker but for his shirt—dark blue cotton (
gasp!
) with white lettering on the front.

“Thru-hikers?” He asked.

We nodded our heads. He introduced himself as Tweedle. Tweedle's freshly sculpted facial hair indicated that he was “town clean.” He looked like a man who'd know how to find Hiker's Haven.

“Hiker's Haven? No problem, dudes. We're about to head back there in Donna's car.” Tweedle gestured at a dusty Jeep Cherokee.

“Yippee!” exclaimed Angela, her face reanimated. We picked up our packs and forty-pound re-supply box and walked toward the Jeep. As we did so, a team of scraggly hikers emerged from the nearby pizza parlor. They were wearing blue shirts like Tweedle's, and as one of them turned his back, I noted the imprint—“Saufley Electric.” Very odd—a band of rogue electricians roaming the PCT. We all packed into the Cherokee and headed to Hiker's Haven.

Situated on the dusty outskirts of Agua Dulce, Donna's house and one-and-a-third-acre lot was a thru-hiker's delight. Behind a comfortable, one-story home was a well-tended lawn filled with lounge chairs, picnic tables, inflatable mattresses, five dogs, and a frenzy of hiker gear. Adjacent to the lawn was a long, rectangular guesthouse and a retired RV, both of which functioned as auxiliary accommodations. There were hikers everywhere—sorting through re-supply boxes, soaking feet in Epsom salts, coating umbrellas with Mylar, playing cards, and stuffing food into their mouths. And they were all
wearing dark blue “Saufley Electric” shirts. A tall woman with buoyant blond hair greeted us. Everything about her screamed “Mom.”

“Welcome! I'm Donna Saufley. You guys look like you need a shower.”

I nearly exclaimed, “I love you, Mom!” but controlled myself enough to utter just a guttural “Yes, please.”

“Okay, here's the deal . . . take the hamper, go inside the guesthouse, and take a left. The bathroom is down the hall, on the right. Dump your dirty stuff in the hamper and after you wash up, throw on some clean clothes from the closet.”

“Ahh,” I thought, “the blue shirt mystery is solved.”

“Then you can get settled in the master suite. We don't have too many couples here now, so you guys lucked out.”

Amen to that. Not only were we given the guesthouse master suite, but we also had access to the full range of Hiker's Haven services—phone, TV and VCR, an extensive PCT library, Internet access, and a tightly stacked, fully stocked refrigerator. To top it all off, those nasty clothes we dumped in the hamper, well—Donna washed the heck out of ‘em. She delivered them to our suite and, with an unbelievable flourish, took a large whiff of my socks to demonstrate her cleaning prowess. What a brave soul. A few hours earlier and such bravado might have caused her to asphyxiate. And no band of rogue electricians could have saved her from that.

Not surprisingly, Hiker's Haven was a popular place. Over the course of our long weekend at Donna's, we met about twenty other hikers. There were some familiar faces, including Zach, Chris, and Stacey, but mostly there were strange, scruffy ones. Many we would come to know by nickname (“trail name”)—Hawkeye, Tweedle, Fish, Pansy Ass, Aussie Crawl, Tye-Dye, Bald Eagle, Nokona, Madame Butterfly, Improv, Sunrise, and Mirage.

Some hikers, mostly PCT or AT veterans, began their hikes with trail names already in place. Others were urged to develop them as they went. Invariably, each had its own unique story. Surgical treatment for gastric cancer had left “Gutless” with only one-tenth of his stomach, necessitating small, frequent meals but also providing excellent nickname fodder. Then there was “Just Mike,” a military man of well-chosen words. When asked his name, he'd reply “Mike.”
If urged to reveal his trail name, he'd offer the practical response, “Just Mike.”

On our second night at Donna's, we had a titanic barbecue. Casey and Toby, college-age buddies from Seattle, organized the event. Casey, a slightly chubby guy with bleached hair and melancholy green eyes, was known by the trail name “Crazy Legs.” Apparently when Crazy Legs walked on narrow stretches of sandy trail, his aggressive stride sometimes collapsed its lateral edges, sending him on chaparral-infested detours. A crisscross of scars across both of his meaty calves validated this story.

Casey had spent the previous summer serving booze to tourists on an Alaskan tourist train. He was disorderly, gregarious, and unpredictable. In contrast, Toby was the organizational glue that kept the duo on the trail. He'd started the hike with the trail name “Major Major,” a reference to a character in Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
, but this name proved too obscure, so he'd changed it to “Catch-23.” Toby explained the provenance of his name by putting a twist on Heller's famous “catch.”

“Given the dangers and discomfort, both real and immediate, of thru-hiking,” he said without emotion, “one must conclude that it is crazy to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But once you have started and gotten this far, to quit would also be crazy. So there you go, Catch-23.”

“That's some catch, that Catch-23,” Casey chortled in response.

“It's the best there is, Crazy Legs, the best there is.” Toby sat back and scratched his short, bristly beard.

Toby had been planning to hike the PCT since he was eight years old. Casey, his childhood friend, had decided on a whim to accompany him, but only if they thru-hiked
their
way, the
fun
way.

“Casey and I,” Toby said, “have defined our hike as a continuous walk from Mexico to Canada on or very near to the Pacific Crest Trail while maintaining a drunken state at least one percent of the time.”

While the barbecue provided a perfect medium for Casey and Toby to make progress toward their one percent drunkenness quota, I was extremely content to sit at the picnic table and attack a plateful of ribs. Meanwhile, Angela's attention was focused on Ed, an “organic” farmer from Humboldt County. Ed, a vegetarian for over fifteen years, had decided that his rapidly
emaciating body could no longer be separated from meat. So there he was, gorging on animal fat and protein hand-over-fist, trying to make up for as much lost time as possible. Although Ed wasn't exactly sure what type of meat he was eating (he kept asking, “What's this? What's that?”), he sure liked how it tasted. I wouldn't have wanted to be a well-fed squirrel or less-than-agile pigeon around a guy like Ed that night.

“No vegetarian can survive this trail,” Casey said, and it made sense. A thru-hiker's body is subject to such constant assault that without consistent protein intake, it is almost impossible to maintain muscle and body mass.

Later, as the crowd gathered over bottles of beer and trail stories, Donna and her husband Jeff emerged from the main house. Rumor was that there was a funny story behind the inception of their trail angeling careers.

“Story! Story!” Crazy Legs chanted, echoing the group sentiment.

Somewhat reluctantly, Donna launched into the tale. On a Saturday night in the summer of 1997, Jeff went out for a friend's bachelor party and wasn't expected back until morning. Donna, with visions of lusty strippers and rowdy male behavior gyrating in her head, drove to the pizza parlor to indulge. As she suffocated her worries with mozzarella, she noticed a table of dirty and disheveled young people filling water bottles from pitchers at a nearby table. Later, Donna ran into one of the female hikers in the bathroom. The woman had her foot in the sink and was scrubbing it vigorously. Shocked but intrigued, Donna asked what she and her friends were up to. The woman explained that they were PCT hikers re-supplying in Agua Dulce. Because Agua Dulce didn't have any motels, they were going to walk a couple miles down the road and sleep on a church's lawn. Well, this was too much for Donna's motherly instincts. Before long she'd gathered up the motley group and arranged them comfortably on the couches of her guesthouse. Satisfied with her altruistic act but not completely at ease, she returned to the main house and proceeded to lock all the doors and windows.