Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (27 page)
Read Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail Online
Authors: BILL WALKER
“I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords,” Mark Twain wrote of the beautiful lake. Its tranquil presence is the ultimate in dreamlike serenity. Speaking of dreams, everybody should be afforded a few of those over the course of a Mexico-Canada journey on foot. Right? Here’s mine.
All through the wonders of the High Sierra, and now following a rim above Lake Tahoe, I had a recurring thought. If Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and George W. Bush could have gone on a backpacking trip together through this kind of hushed landscape, would they have been able to work out their differences in a less violent fashion? Obviously, it’s a pie-in-the-sky scenario. But there is something about backpacking that brings out the better angels of our nature, as compared to politics and power.
Unfortunately, Lake Tahoe may not have the hold on backpackers that it once did. Besides its size, it is renowned for its crystal clear, blue water. But studies show it is up much less clear than just thirty years ago, due to over-construction and the consequent soil erosion mucking up the whole scene. It doesn’t take a frothing-at-themouth eco-warrior to get bent out of shape over that.
I was intensely lonely and happy to run into Wisconsin and Firefly on the ridge overlooking Squaw Valley. A different kettle of fish they were. Wisconsin was essentially an
anarchist.
“I hate money,” he repeatedly said. “Look at how well we all get along out here trading things, bartering everything. Why can’t the rest of the world be that way?”
His girlfriend, Firefly, was a professional roller-derby player and a real physical specimen, but with an amazingly elegant personality to match.
At our campsite overlooking Sherrold Lake, he pulled out some electrical device that was presumably compliments of the capitalist system he so detested.
“What songs would you like to hear, Skywalker?” he asked me.
“Have you got the Allman Brothers on there?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“How about
Midnight Rider?”
The Allman Brothers were from my hometown of Macon, Georgia, so requesting this song was a small lapse into provincialism. In 1972, the group’s guitarist, Duane Allman, had died when his motorcycle had crashed into the back of a peach truck. They subsequently named the album they had been working on,
Eat A Peach.
Its memorable lyrics, which came pouring out of Wisconsin’s machine at 9,000 feet in the California mountains, go as follows:
Well, I’ve got to run to keep from hiding
And I’m bound to keep on riding
And I’ve got one more silver dollar
But I’m not gonna’ let ‘em catch me, no
Not gonna’ let ‘em catch the midnight rider
The song is a paen to freedom and independence, which, come to think about it, is kinda’ what the PCT is. And the God’s-honest-truth is that for the next two days this song carried me a total of fifty miles in an elevated state of morale.
I
n the early spring of 1846, an advertisement appeared in the Springfield, Illinois Gazette.
“Westward ho,” it declared. “Who wants to go to California without it costing them anything?” It sought eight able-bodied men. The ad was placed by 65 year-old George S. Donner. Like many farmers of the time, Donner craved more land in the West. Given the pioneer spirit of the mid-nineteenth century, this expedition soon swelled to 87 people.
Timing was everything. The wagon trains couldn’t leave before the winter rains and snow stopped, yet it was absolutely crucial to clear the Sierra Nevada Mountains before the first heavy snows of the new season. On October 31, 1846 the Donner Party only needed to ascend a 1,000 more feet to have cleared the last mountain pass in the Sierras. At that point, it would be all downhill to their destination. The exhausted party raced up the pass. But heavy snow began to fall. By morning the pass had become completely blocked with
twenty-foot snowdrifts.
They had arrived one day too late. Thus commenced one of the most gruesome tales to ever unfold in the mountains.
Over the next four months, the men, women, and children huddled together in tents and make shift lean-tos. First, the cattle and dogs were all eaten. Then people began to eat bark and twigs. Realizing that doom was impending, a group of fifteen, dubbed
the Forlorn Hope
, set out in the snow-covered mountains to look for help. Soon they were lost and on the verge of starvation.
The fifteen men drew straws to see who would be eaten; however, malnutrition struck three of them before anyone had to be killed. The other members of the Forlorn Hope wrapped their dead companions in packages and carefully labeled them so nobody would be forced to eat a relative.
Six members of the Forlorn Hope eventually survived and stumbled onto a cabin to tell the terrible truth of what had happened. Rescue teams were dispatched to find the rest of the party. When the relief party finally stumbled on the rest of the Donner Party, they were witness to one of the worst single scenes in human history.
“Half-eaten bodies” lay strewn all over the place. One rescuer reported that the survivors “looked more like demons than human beings, surrounded by the remains of their unholy feast.”
The PCT comes right over Donner’s Pass, where this tragedy unfolded. Predictably, hikers (including this one) refer to it as Dahmer’s Pass, named after the infamous modern day cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer. All jokes aside, the comparison couldn’t be more off the mark.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s story is a morbid tale of human evil. On the other hand, if you really think about it, the party of George Donner mostly exhibited what we would refer to as positive human traits—pursuit of dreams, enormous energy, bravery, loyalty, and amazing survival instincts.
One of the Donner Party members had convinced everyone to try a shortcut, which ultimately failed and cost them several days. If not for that, the entire party would have arrived intact. But for somebody that has been lost as much as me, I’m uncomfortable even second-guessing that decision.
Yes, cannibalism is among the most gut-wrenching prospects a human could ever face (whichever side of the equation you happen to be on). But who can honestly say what they’d do in such a situation? It’s a very sobering tale, indeed.
Northern California Tales—
Psychological Crucible
“S
omebody could steal our backpacks,” Fran said.
“Yeah, what else?” her fiancée, Double Barrel, asked skeptically.
“Maybe some injury that makes you get off the trail, but then heals quickly,” Fran suggested. “A foot or something.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Double Barrel responded, still unexcited. “How about if somebody stole our credit card. People have to get off for things like that.” This seemed to pick their attitude up, but it didn’t help mine one bit.
Fran and Double Barrel had been a couple days behind me most of the way. Now they had caught up. You might think they had a head of steam. But, in fact, they were absolutely miserable with this heat and endless hiking. They desperately wanted off the trail, altogether. But they wouldn’t allow themselves to do so. Why?
Like so many hikers, they had begun with great ceremony in their respective hometowns. Quitting—at least according to this logic—would be a humiliation. At least quitting for the sake of quitting. But if something strange happened to them so that they had to get off; well, that was another matter. Thus, this perverted conversation in Sierra City, that I sat there listening to with a kind of morbid fascination.
As you might expect, they weren’t around much longer.
“SkyWalker,” came a familiar voice from the top of the hill.
“No Pain,” I exulted. “I don’t believe it.”
He was the first PCT hiker I had seen in three days. But he was going south.
“Where the hell are you going?” I asked.
“I hitched up to northern California and am hiking south to tell everybody goodbye?”
“You’re getting off?”
“Northern California is endless, man. I want out.”
This was a bit depressing. Here was a multiple-time AT hiker that appeared to have become totally disillusioned with the PCT. Worse yet, some of the non-AT hikers had been repeatedly pressing the theme: “The AT hikers don’t do well on the PCT.” I didn’t have much ego as a hiker, but I didn’t want people gaining pleasure that another AT alum had bought the dust.
No Pain was the only African-American on the trail, as far as I knew. Both the PCT and the AT cast very wide nets in terms of their hiking populations. But there is one great exception. Both trails are vastly underrepresented by members of the nation’s two largest ethnic minorities—African-Americans and Hispanics.
Why?
My best guess is that it’s a matter of basic geography. Neither African-Americans nor Latinos have ever settled heavily in mountainous regions. Honestly, it’s a shame. Long-Distance hiking is a great unifier. Things like skin color and national origin fade completely into the background given the demanding day-in, day-out challenges that one faces. Which is why is was so disappointing to see No Pain quitting.
“You should see everybody—they all look like shit,” No Pain said. “Dirk’s all shriveled up. And everybody’s depressed, too.”
“Yeah, I’m just trying to hang in there, myself,” I said. “But, God, it’s impossible to stop the weight hemorrhaging.”
“Man, you look really frail,” he said staring at me.
We embraced and went our separate ways. From what I later heard from other hikers that he passed further south, No Pain used much more vivid adjectives than ‘frail’ to describe my physical appearance. He probably was right about that. But I liked the struggle. It had great clarity to it, and I planned to see it through.
