July 26, 2016 Mile 566.5-588.2 21.7 miles A small diner on main street serves me an early breakfast. For the first time in 2 days, I am around people. A couple at an adjacent booth asks me questions about my hike. It feels difficult to talk, but I am grateful for the chance to interact with other humans. I don't realize it yet, but I will only talk to one person over the next four days, and that will be brief and awkward. I rush to pack up at the motel room; I want to pick up some pop tarts at the grocery store before my bus comes. I still have two beers left, so I drink one and stuff the other in my backpack. It's a little early in the day for drinking, but I don’t want to throw it away and I don’t want to have to carry all that weight through the desert. All the water I have to carry will be heavy enough. Besides, I don’t have to drive today, or go to work, or even interact with anyone who will judge me for drinking in the morning. I pick up pop tarts and a couple other high-calorie snacks at the grocery store and wander over to the bus stop. It looks like I have a couple minutes until the bus comes, so I pop open my other beer. Just then an elderly lady comes up and sits on the bench. She eyes my beer can suspiciously. I feel a little guilty, and then I don’t. Drinking a beer in public might be illegal, but there's nothing immoral about it and it's none of her business. The bus turns the corner and I chug the rest of the beer before I board and toss the can into an overflowing garbage can. The old lady and I are the only people on the bus, which is headed down the hill to Mojave. I pay the bus driver and ask him to make a special stop at the PCT trailhead. No problem, he says. I settle into a hard plastic seat, overfull from breakfast, with a contented buzz from coffee and beer. The trip takes about fifteen minutes, and then I am standing at the side of a freeway offramp, unmoored once again from civilized society. I stand listlessly for a moment to gather it all in. Just past the asphalt, litter collects in the branches of dead bushes. There is nobody to care for this place, to see that it is tended and clean and safe. It is not a place intended for human beings, but simply a place for their vehicles to pass through. It is a wasteland, neither wilderness nor civilization. I find that I dislike it very much. I cross the freeway on an overpass and exit the wasteland through a chain-link fence. A metal box with a hinged top sits atop a waist-high ledge next to the trail. It holds a trail register. Trail friends who passed through here before I met them will have written their names here. It feels like I have stepped backwards in time, and I am eager to find the old notes of Sprinkler, Goat, Earthcake. As I reach out to lift the lid, something moves in the shadows beneath the box. I yank my hand back before I’m even conscious that it’s a snake. I decide not to look through this trail register. The trail follows a levy next to the freeway for a bit. Last year, there were huge mudslides near here that flooded part of a major freeway and took it out of commission. With no river to hold back, that’s got to be the reason this levy is here. A police SUV pulls over a semi on the other side freeway. I walk toward it at first, and then the trail drops off the levy, through the sandy desert wasteland, and up switchbacks into the mountain. Each time I look down at the freeway I feel like a voyeur, watching a minor drama play out. I've already climbed a fair distance when the semi and the police SUV depart. I come over the top of the mountain and take a break in a bivy site under a joshua tree, one of the few in the area. The landscape is otherwise barren, just short dead grasses and colorless shin-high shrubs. The heat is already draining me, and I start to have serious doubts about water. I'm going through it fast. Seven liters usually gets me through two days, but I'm not sure it will even get me through all of today. The next source is 16 miles away. The water report says it was almost dry three weeks ago, which is the last time anyone updated it. After that there are two more water sources, each about 15 miles apart, and then a long, 45-mile stretch without any natural sources. Sometimes trail angels cache water for hikers in that stretch, but it’s risky to depend on that. Especially now, when every sane hiker is long past this section. Are the trail angels even replenishing the caches this late in the season? I follow a ridgeline for miles. The shrubs get taller and thicker, but they are still only waist high and provide no shade. I fall into a walking coma and landscape passes by as a smudge. Rows of windmills, distant views of nothing, jeep tracks. These blot onto my consciousness as brief impressions, temporary realities. My legs carry on by momentum, nothing more. Eventually some trees provide some relief from the sun, but not from the heat In the afternoon I wind around a hill, hopeful about the spring that is marked on my map. Golden Oaks spring. I am down to one liter and the next water is another 15 miles. I have already hiked 17, although I have almost no memory of it. I need this spring to flow. I cross a jeep track and down into a clearing. There, lying in front of the horse trough where the spring must feed, is one of the biggest black bulls I have ever seen. It stares at me and swats flies with its tail. Lying down it is almost as tall as me. This is not an animal I want to have a confrontation with. I pause to consider my options. I could wait it out, but who knows how long that would be. It looks like it's been here most of the day and has no intention of leaving anytime soon. I could go around it, but that wouldn't get me any closer to the water; the cow is right there, next to the trough. I could skip this spring and go to the next one, which would make a 32 mile day in oppressive heat. If that spring is dry, it would really leave me in a situation. No, that's not really an option. Maybe if I try to scare the bull off. It probably won’t charge me, right? I station myself near a tree and shout at it. It just sits there, glaring at me with wide eyes. I shout again, and it snorts and looks away, uncowed. Nothing. I steel myself for the inevitable and walk forward. When I reach twenty feet, its head whips back to me, eyes fixed in some emotion between terror and wrath. I can only hope flight wins out over fight. I pause, proceed. At fifteen feet the bull huffs in annoyance and shakes its head, then returns to a hot glare. Pause, proceed. Ten feet. It shudders and rises, like a leviathan from the deep. Flies explode off its back. I plant my feet and hold my hiking poles like spears, but the bull is bolting away, plowing huge clods of dirt underfoot as it goes. The horse trough has a small puddle of scummy water filled with flies, yellow jackets, and mosquitoes, alive and dead. A PVC pipe is there to direct the spring, but there is no flow, only drops of water, like a leaky faucet. It will be slow, but it is enough. I take out my foldable bucket and hang it over the pipe to collect the drops. I open my book and sit against the horse trough to read and wait.
Twenty minutes later the bucket has collected enough water to pump. Uncap dirty bag. Pour bucket into bag. Screw on filter. Uncap filter. Uncap waterbottle. Set caps together on a rock, face up. Place filter in waterbottle. Squeeze. It's a ritual as automatic as brushing one's teeth. Except without anything else to distract me, my mind stays fully present. I feel the creases in the plastic dirty bag, the cool wetness of the drops that fell on the outside of the bag. I hear the crinkle of the plastic, the squirt of water into my bottle. I smell the sour rotting of dead insects and cow shit and even the oppressive heat that pushes against me from every direction, that has a smell too. I experience the freedom and loneliness of my unique place in the world, out here in this wasteland that has been relegated, since there is little else to exploit, to cattle country and wind extraction. Another twenty minutes and I have a second liter. In exchange for its water, the trough demands its pound of flesh—hours of my life. I am impatient but not idiotic; I remain at the spring for nearly three hours, collecting life-saving water drop by drop, filtering it, and resting my weary legs. When I finally exit this blight of earth the sun has retreated to a lower angle. There are trees, and shade. I round a hillside to find the bull again, lying in the middle of the trail. It seems the guardian of the spring is not done with me yet. This time I try to go around, but the second I step off the trail, the bull bolts again, further down the trail. I follow it, nervous that flight will turn to fight at any moment, but with nowhere else to go. It bolts a second time, then a third, then finally leaves the trail on the downhill slope. It watches me as I pass above it. I watch it, too, for signs of aggression, and I try to speak comfortingly as I go. It bolts one more time for good measure, turning down and away, and I can finally break into full stride. I end my day only a few miles later, sapped of energy, sapped of moisture.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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