The Cactus Eaters (16 page)

All of this is enough to give any mountain low self-esteem, but Whitney faced even more degradation in the last half-century. As recently as 1958, it was the undisputed highest point in America. Then, in 1959, Alaska became a state, which meant that the 20,320-foot Denali was suddenly part of our country. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, people with too much time on their hands put forth the theory that White Mountain Peak, facing Whitney from the other side of the Owens Valley, was really a few feet higher than Whitney, and that White Mountain rangers had perpetuated the “Whitney is the highest” myth to keep tourist hordes out of White Mountain’s delicate high-desert ecology. I asked District Forest Ranger Jan Cutts, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, about this conspiracy theory. She suffered my queries with good humor. “We’re rather low on the pecking order, you know,” she said. “We only manage land. We don’t determine tallness.” In any case, a 1998 global positioning study put the matter to rest: Whitney conclusively dominates the lower forty-eight, and White Mountain is merely the third highest peak, at 14,246 feet.

Pushing our way slowly up the switchbacks, hiking fast above the timberline, I could understand all the confusion. Even when we made it to thirteen thousand feet, feeling nauseated and barely able to nibble our chocolates, the summit was nowhere in sight. We climbed, up talus slopes, past a platoon of marmots, and straight through the slush of melting ice. On rocky wastes where no trees grew, flowers bloomed through cracks in the granite. “How far are we from the top?” I croaked to a man with a walrus mustache.

“You’re on the summit, buddy,” he bellowed back, “I mean it. You’re on top of it!”

An hour and a half later, we were still nowhere near the summit, and a second man, also with a walrus mustache, assured us we were still two miles from the top. It was pushing 3:00
P.M
., and we had to allow four hours to get back. What if we got caught in the dark? I was tired, looking around, wondering why Allison was not in sight, when I heard a blast of “fucks” and “shits.” I looked back and saw Allison fifty yards back, in a wet heap in a snowbank. “Do you want to get to the top so badly that you don’t care if I break my leg?” she said, dusting off snow particles. I pulled her out of the snow and was about to apologize when a familiar figure came bolting down from the switchbacks. It was the Wolf, looking no cleaner from his journey to Lone Pine. He’d just scaled Whitney from the opposite side, out of Whitney Portal, and was now skipping toward us. “Hey,” he said, looking at Allison, who was still shaking the snow off her haunches. “I’m worried about you guys. Take my headlamp in case it gets dark. It can be hard to find your way up there. If you make it down by dinner time, I’ll make you eggs and bacon.”

“You mean real eggs and bacon?” Allison said. “What if it leaks all over your gear?”

“What gear?” Wolf said, flashing a smirk. He waved and ran away from us down the switchbacks.

We turned to face the mountain and made our way up the last pitch. At last we stood on top, staring at flat-bottomed clouds and the shadows they cast on the Owens Valley, a sultry murk to the east. Below us, day hikers in orange, yellow, red, and blue formed a rainbow inchworm making its way up the switchbacks. On the mountain, no one was around, just a brick shack with a metal roof among the talus. We were standing on Whitney, savoring our triumph, when we saw a thin man, unshaven and puffing a cigarette, even as he walked into the shack and signed the guest register. When he was done scribbling his message, I bent down to sign the next available space. The smoker had written, “Jason,” giving no last name. Under “Address,” he’d written, “Wherever.” Outside, he took only a sleepy interest in the peaks and clouds. Thinking I might get him to smile, I unholstered my Pentax K1000 monster camera and stepped up to take his picture. Jason From Wherever threw his hands in front of his face.

“No pictures” he shouted.

With vague thoughts of hidden bodies and the Witness Protection Program, we followed him as he trotted back down toward base camp, off the mountainside. The land unfolded, rock staircases dropping to a mandolin lake where a beautiful woman sat on a rock alone, peeling an avocado. Back at camp, Allison and I stopped to fetch some food from our tent, then followed Jason From Wherever through the smoke of burning logs. At dusk, Wolf sat in a clearing tending a fire, while making good on his promise to cook us dinner. After ensuring he had an audience, he set a box of bacon on the flames and stripped the lid off to reveal a pound of white fat streaked with red. When the bacon was good and bubbling, Wolf took out twelve unbroken eggs from a red shock-proof container and dumped them in the bacon, which received each egg with a haughty hiss. Jason From Wherever sat down with us; Wolf had invited him to share our supper. The eggs foamed and spat. When they
were cooked, Wolf grabbed a gluey clump of eggs and meat and stuffed it down the hole in his beard. Between moans, he said, “I’m gonna catch that Gingerbread Man and pass him, ’cause no one keeps up with me for very long.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, reaching out with my Lexan camp fork.

“Oh, I’ll get him,” Wolf said through a muffler of eggs.

We sat there, hunched, and bared our teeth in the firelight. All of us grabbed fistfuls of the smoked-meat pudding. The fire gave off so much smoke, the moon turned yellow. I felt part of something larger than myself, a wolf pack, a clan. Eating this burned, wet food felt like the fulfillment of an unspoken promise, a backwoods communion. When the flames died out, the first stars showed through the trees, and Allison announced it was time for dessert. She took out a brown Ziploc bag full of dirt-brown powder, spiked with a pinch of powdered espresso, added some filtered water, twirled the mixture with a stick, and, voilà, there was a pot of chocolate mousse so thick it clung to the stockpot’s sides. Those with bowls made use of them. Those without them ate like bears. Wolf was speechless. “Fucking awesome,” said Jason From Wherever.

We sat there most of the night, having the kind of loopy conversations that might sound intelligent in college, when all the dorm mates sit in the stairwells draining twelve-packs of Black Label, smoking impotent Samoan skunkweed, and pronouncing it “kind,” then analyzing Peter Gabriel lyrics backward for an hour or two. “Followed the Grateful Dead for a while,” Jason From Wherever said. “The thing about the Dead is they never fuckin’ moved. Oh yeah, they sorta pivoted sometimes, but they mostly just stood there. Went to a concert once when Jerry moved, just a bit, I mean, he kinda shook his shoulders or something, and the whole place just fuckin’ exploded.”

The whole night went like that. Wolf talked to Allison about an “easy” way to cure her blisters. “Don’t pop them
’cause they’ll grow right back,” he said. “What you want do is take a hot, clean needle with the thread still attached, and run it through your blister and let the pus wick off it.” In the woozy haze of fat, sugar, and exhaustion, this sounded like a brilliant suggestion. And the night kept stumbling along until, at last, Jason From Wherever stood up and let loose with an extravagant belch. He took a tug off his cigarette, bathed us all in blue smoke, thanked us all for the free food, picked himself off the log, dusted off his bottom, and bid us farewell. He walked out into the woods and the forest swallowed him up.

Allison and I were about to take off, too, when Wolf, poking at the burned crisp of the bacon box, called out to us. “Listen, you guys. You want, we can hike together a while if you like,” he said. “I could use the company.”

Allison and I looked at each other. We hadn’t seen this coming. The Gingerbread Man had proven to us that these speed-demon hikers could make good conversationalists, and could guide us over dangerous terrain. On the downside, speed demons could make us collapse from exhaustion with their relentless hiking techniques.

“You don’t have to answer now,” Wolf said. “I’ll be in the lake near Crabtree Meadows tomorrow at ten thirty, taking a bath. If you want to hike, come looking for me. You’ll find me.”

Allison and I lit up our headlamps and made our way through the meadow, while considering his offer.

“Forty miles in the wrong direction?” Allison said wistfully. “No map? No tent? No guidebook?”

I didn’t know what to say. He did seem a bit wacky, but I liked the knock-kneed coltishness that made me forgive the know-it-all smirks. More than that, I was curious. But I slept fitfully, knowing what lay ahead. Forester Pass was slippery and dangerous. I’d never hiked up and over an icy pass before. Suppose I split my skull? Allison had grown up in the frozen
Midwest. She understood how snow behaved. I’m a Southern Californian, born and raised. The first time I saw snow falling, while going to college in Connecticut, I thought there had been an explosion at a detergent factory. Besides, I hate slippery surfaces. Sure, we had ice axes, and everyone said they could save our lives. Back in the desert, the Gingerbread Man had tried to show us how to use them by throwing himself on a mound of dirt and stabbing it with his hiking pole. But his display wasn’t all that helpful. The fact was I’d never practiced a self-arrest before. But not hiking with Wolf would have seemed rude at this point, considering the feast he’d given us. And besides, backing down would have made me look like a pantywaist in front of Allison. The decision was made. We would walk with Wolf over dreaded Forester Pass, the highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Next morning we found Wolf floating in water so cold it made him howl. He put his clothes on, and we hiked into a deep wood where spider webs drooped in hammock shapes. Shelf mushrooms grew in plates so thick up the sides of trees I swore I could climb them and they would hold my weight. Wolf was patient and kind, indulging our slow pace. He walked in a birdlike manner, using his legs for the forward thrust while letting his arms hang to the sides as if they were incidental. He kept turning back to watch us waddle. “You guys need extra energy?” Wolf said. “I’ve got snacks.” He reached in his pack and pulled out a baggie full of white glop mixed with red paste and blackish lumps. “You’re welcome to eat as much of this as you want,” he said. “It’s cinnamon Gummi Bears, marshmallows, and raisins.”

I thanked him but feared the snacks would make me heave. By my own calculations, we had plenty of food. I asked Allison to hand me the food bag. But when I looked inside, there was almost nothing left except some crumbling oat bars. We had plenty of flatulent freeze-dried dinners remaining: Lip
ton’s Noodles, space-age stroganoff, and Big Bill’s Beans and Rice. What had happened to our crackers? Where were the string cheeses and Blenheim apricots? Suddenly I remembered, with self-recrimination, that I had thrown our five-pound bag of granola into a Dumpster at Kennedy Meadows. I had my reasons—the granola was sickly sweet and the cashews had all gone bad—but we needed the calories now. I felt my body starting to digest itself.

Wolf frog-hopped boulders. Slow and indulgent as first, he was racing along, as if making up for wasted time. And there was one more unsettling factor. This was clearly not the Pacific Crest Trail. The signs all read,
LAKE SOUTH AMERICA TRAIL
. Rushing to catch a glimpse of him, we had no time even to ask him why we were going this weird way, or to check the directions to figure out where we’d gone wrong. Tired and ornery, I began to wonder if our imperious leader had any sense of direction. I also wondered if he was aware of his surroundings. I once read that a certain species of European swallow can fly when it’s fast asleep. Is that how Wolf hiked? Did the wilderness even register in his mind? He never commented on wildlife except the sort that could harm him: chiggers, blackflies, and the like. His pace was robotic, metronomic. No slope could tire him out. Wolf hurled himself over every steep thing we saw without comment. He seemed superhuman. And though we were out of breath, and worried we would never catch him at all, the pace made me curious. What was the source of his tremendous strength? And what sort of person can hike for a day in the wrong direction, get up the next day, find his way back to the trail, get lost again, and not go mad? Or was he mad already?

Allison caught him on a rare rest break and asked him why he couldn’t stop hiking. He told her that one of his girlfrends broke his heart. “I’ve never gotten used to rejection. I’ve been hiking ever since.” When Wolf surged ahead of us again, and
was out of earshot, Allison and I privately discussed why he didn’t just leave the trail and meet someone else. When we finally managed to sprint our way alongside him, Wolf gave us a few more tidbits of his life story. He was twenty-three. In high school, his classmates voted him shyest. His driver’s license showed a confused-looking young man with hair that reminded me more of an alpaca than a wolf. Wolf had been a roofer, camp counselor, and, to my surprise, a trail guide. But his main purpose in life seemed to be walking vast distances to mend a fractured heart.

He did not go into any detail about the true love who had dumped him. He did not even tell us what she looked like, how old she was, or the state where she lived. He talked only about his many treks into the backcountry. On his first fateful Appalachian Trail hike, he carried close to eighty pounds. At one point, he carried two backpacks at once. He brought along a trail guide dating to 1978, no map, six pounds of pancake mix, and a bundle of clothes, all of which got soaked. Then he hurt himself and could barely walk. It took him a month to hike a hundred miles. He gave up early, called his mother, and said he was quitting, but she knew that her son was so reluctant to give up any goal that she thought he was just kidding around. She would not pick him up at the trail turnoff. Consequently he had to walk, and hitchhike, a hundred miles home. “I thought I’d give up hiking forever after that,” he said. “But I tried the Appalachian Trail again. I hated it all over again, but then I went to a town near the trail, bought a gallon of ice cream and a can of fruit cup, the kind with the little half-cherries and all the syrup. I dumped it on the ice cream and ate the whole thing. I felt better after that and kept hiking.”