Trespassers Will be Hogtied
17/5 — Day 16 — 0mi / 0km (!)
After 15 days walking, Grace and I had our first ‘zero’ day: we didn’t go anywhere, and it felt glorious.
The small mountain towns in Southern California strive to outdo each other in quaintness. Big Bear, with its lake and log cabins, was a strong contender. It had wooden statues everywhere. There was a statue in front of every store and every other home and all the statues were of bears.
At a discount store called Dollar Tree, which specialises in fake versions of things like Oreos and Pringles, we paid $36 USD for enough calories to sustain us for 4 days and 75 miles. Out front, as we sat eating a Snickers branded ice-cream in the palpating heat, a man walked past low-riding a pair of jeans nearly to his knees. Underneath those jeans, he had on another pair of jeans worn in the regular manner.
We walked back to the bus. There were banners hung from the street lamps with portraits of young men and women in the navy, army and airforce, “Big Bear Lake honors military personnel.” Grace said it felt weird walking without poles. “What do I do with my hands?”
18/5 — Day 17 — 10mi / 16km
In the morning, Cobbler (Tristan), Grace and I went to the famous Grizzly Manor Cafe. The walls were covered floor to ceiling with stickers and dollar bills and memorial plaques and a sign that said “Trespassers will be hogtied and told they have a purdy mouth.”
Joe and Emily and the gang were there attending to pancakes that literally spilled off the sides of the plates. They seemed to be entering a kind of post-pancake catatonia, except Joe, who has unlimited energy for banter, and Emily, who has to keep him in check. “Got any trail names yet?” Joe asked. We said nah. Joe adjusted his cap. “I was going by ‘Big Beaver’ for a while there…” “No one called you Big Beaver,” Emily said, —“you just put a few sticks in a creek and started calling yourself that.” “Yep,” Joe said proudly. “The Big Beav.” He looked at me conspiratorially, “El Beavo Loco.”
They said they’d met a guy doing trail magic who was going for the supported speed record this year and who hoped to do it in 42 days—60mi / 100km per day. “Jesus,” I said, “what’s his name?” “Jesus” said Joe. “Yeah, crazy,” I said, “but what was his name?” “No, his name is Jesus,” Joe said. “Desert Jesus.” Before we set off, Cobbler checked his hobbit Tracking app. “We’re halfway to Rivendell,” he informed us. “Frodo got stabbed by the Nasgul already. Apparently ‘the land is cheerless and gloomy.’”
Desert Jesus
Back on trail we passed some Joshua trees, which were distinctively Seussian—Grace had mentioned this to Joe, who knows a little of the flora of his native California, and he’d said that Dr Seuss had in fact written much of his work in San Diego, down the road. After a couple hours walking, the wide view over the Mojave yielded to forest. “What’s this now? Oregon?” Tristan said. He gestured with his pole back the way we’d come. “One minute it’s all rock and desert and now we’re in pine forest. I’m getting ecological whiplash.”
We arrived at a camp tenanted by a half dozen hikers, all men, mostly on the other side of fifty and every one of them a salty raconteur. They talked shop, flourished well-worn punch-lines and traded Winston Churchill quotes. “One time at a dinner with Her Highness a young, hotshot diplomat said, ‘Sir, I understand you have something to say upon every subject—what do you have to say of the Queen?’ ‘My dear boy, the Queen is not a subject!’”
Into this arena, Cobbler ventured, misty eyed, to revisit the fond memories of his time at In ‘n’ Out burger several days earlier. “Two doubles, two singles, two loads of fries and a chocolate thick shake,” he told his audience in the darkening light, “it was such a… such a pure and ethereal delight…” His voice trailed off in a humble gesture to the ineffable.
Makin’ a Fuss
19/5 — Day 18 — 17mi / 27kms
The next morning, we set off through the forest, the trail wending along the sides of minor ridges through sinewy Sierra juniper and scattered palmfuls of mountain phlox. Grace and I slowly gathered pace until we were fairly trotting downhill, whereupon I checked the map and realised we’d made a wrong turn a mile prior.
As we climbed wearily back the way we’d come, a man with a day pack and the accent of a southern gentleman accosted us and wished us the best for our journey. “It’s mah sixty-seventh birthday” he added. We said happy birthday. He looked uncertainly at the ground a moment. “It’s real nice of yah tuh come tuh this country” he said. “I just want you tuh know that we ain’t all jerks here. I bin protestin’ and makin’ a fuss. We ain’t all jerks.”
We got back to trail and loped along through a burn zone, the skinny black bodies of charred trees standing like the sculptures of Giacometti. On the horizon the proud San Gabriel range swung into view, with Baden-Powell in there somewhere, where we’d end up after a few days and several litres of sweat. Meanwhile, we were getting cut up by whitethorn again. Cobbler called them ‘the San Jacinto Spikers.’ “Look at the little bastards,” he said, “all spike and no leaf—they’re not even trying to be plants.”
In the afternoon, we were filtering water for a dry camp when a big-boned, black-bearded man turned up wearing a red spandex wrestling suit. He looked like a gay conquistador, but he was just gay. His name, he told us in a camp British accent, was ‘Showstopper.’ He’d walked most of the PCT last year with his husband but had to miss some sections because of intense blisters—now he was catching up. We walked together into the evening. Showstopper was aghast at our ambivalence about Lorde, and railed mildly against American culture. “Lipton tea is a joke,” he told us. “I’ve had stronger brews from water sources on this trail.”
Grace sporting her town dress on trail to mitigate chafing
We pitched camp on a knoll among flowering ceanothus and manzanita, the perfumery of the desert. Their abundant tiny flowers looked like they’d keep a billion pollinators in business and they probably do. A small, silver helium balloon in the shape of a heart floated overhead. The setting sun spread its lineaments of soft light over the distant mountains. Grace and I slept tentless, lying on our backs with the stars above and all about our netted heads a small congregation of mosquitoes hymned the thin whine of their need.
SoCal Spa Retreat
20/5 — Day 19 — 18 mi / 29km
We awoke to a fingernail moon and thin light and the scampering of a desert vole and we too scampered through the slow blush bruise of dawn down the valley to water. Granite boulders lay piled around the valley as if the children of some terrestrial deity had been playing Lego last night and neglected to clean up.
Late morning, we arrived at a sedate river wide enough to warrant a bridge and deep enough to suggest a swim. It was the most water we’d seen on trail since day 2 at Lake Morena. Mallard ducks dipped their emerald heads, spreading ripples across its surface and wobbling reflected light across the scaly trunks of overleaning trees.
Grace and I sat quietly and ate fake Pringles till Cobbler arrived. His feet had been badly cut up by his new shoes. He’d also finished the narrative portion of his Lord of the Rings audiobook the previous day and was now listening to the several hours of appendices. “This is a bad day,” he said. “The Cobbler has become the Hobbler,” I said. He limped on, hoping to beat the heat.
Grace and I left off the temptation to swim and followed—the hot springs were alongside a swimmable portion of the same river. Just a half dozen more miles. Gotta beat the heat.
Beat the heat: the mantra of the desert. We wake up early or very early. 5:30am is a sleep in. By midday, the air is thick and coarse and breathing it is a chore, but in the morning the air passes coolly across your face and your body parts it like a silk curtain. Grace and I didn’t beat the heat that day, however, and instead slogged sweatily to hot pools we couldn’t imagine ever desiring.
But we did hit 300!
One good dip in a cold river changes things, though. The Deep Creek hot springs were an oasis and also something of a circus and a nudist haunt. A wide beach led down to the water. Hikers were swimming and lounging in steaming pools and sprawled in the shade of riverside trees. Jack and his prodigious pectorals were there, attempting to walk across a slack-line set up from one bank to the other. Regular folk were there too: a big, violently sunburnt 20-something guy with a lion tattoo was flying a drone.
The area was noticeably dirtier than usual campsites too on account of it being only a couple hours walk to the nearest road—the closer a place is to civilisation the more polluted it gets. There was a plastic bag full of miscellaneous rubish and a few cigarette butts. One hot pool had shreds of cabbage and some sliced ginger floating in it, and there was mandarin peel all over the shore. No wonder the squirrels in the area were said to be calculating and remorseless.
In the river swam schools of catfish a hand and a half long with white bellies and moustache tendrils that made them look like French waiters. Even more excitingly, we heard a New Zealand accent. Its owner introduced himself as Skillet. “Skillet!” we said, “it’s an honour.” We’d heard of Skillet—everyone had. He was famous for carrying a cast iron skillet and cooking steaks on trail while the rest of us counted grams and chopped the handles off our toothbrushes.
Grace and I alternated cold, hot, cold, read, repeated and our bodies let us know they thought this was thoroughly agreeable. Hobbler had a short dip and then retired to his tent to finish listening to the LoTR appendices. One of the big, deep blisters had become infected. “This is a bad day,” he said again—his spirits, normally so high, were at an all time low.
Meanwhile, Katie and Braddock arrived with their posse of Europeans—it seemed they were trying to repair American foreign relations. We sported in the water, had a grand old time and stayed up well after hikers’ midnight, which is about 8pm, retiring to bed after dark. I went for a pee, saw a huge toad, and called Braddock over. “Wow,” he said, spotlighting it with his head torch. We stood there with our toothbrushes. “Is it… pooping?” Braddock said. The toad slowly extruded a fecal log about a third the size of its body. “Nature huh,” he said. “Nature,” I said.
Plastic Beach
21/5 — Day 20 — 18 mi / 29km
We thought we’d just have a quick dip in the hot pools before we headed back on trail but it turned out that one may be quick or one may dip but not both. While we soaked a young guy wrapped in a shawl threw some mandarin peel over his shoulder into the river. I explained the deal with leave no trace, how you ought to pack out what you pack in and leave the environment as you found it. While I talked he continued peeling his mandarin and throwing it into the river. “You’ve been socialised to think your way,” he said, “and I think my own way. I’m not telling you how to live, so don’t tell me how to live.” The following conversation proved unfruitful, except for the river.
We walked off with Phillip, a handsome, enigmatic and bespectacled Swiss-German lawyer whom Katie and Braddock had adopted and to whom they attributed a quasi-mythological status. Though he was completely silent about his personal life, they said he’d once talked uninterruptedly for several hours about a sub clause in Swiss tax-law. They said that he did a flip at every 100 mile marker but no one had seen one yet, and they called him Flipsie. Most confoundingly of all, though he was a great lover of Russian literature, he spent his time on trail listening to audiobooks like “How to Win Every Argument”—he might have had better luck than I did with the Mandarin Man. “When I’m at work,” he explained, “I need to escape. When I’ve escaped, I need to work.”
We wound our way out of the canyon and atoned for the hour spent dallying in the hot pool in the morning by sweating our way through the foothills above the Mojave River. The range was covered in low scrub that offered no shade and it felt like the water in our bottles simply bypassed our organs and came straight out of our pores as perspiration. We dipped down to an industrial area at the foot of a dam with huge concrete pipes and razor wire fences that said ‘No loitering’ and we needed no encouragement to get the hell out of there.
In the early afternoon, we crested the hill alongside the dam and met with the shimmering visage of Silverwood Lake. We were feverish for a swim, but the first beach we passed was covered in trash. We continued on, a little deflated, till we arrived at our proposed campsite, the Chamise Boat-in-picnic-site, where we found—rubbish everywhere. Plastic all over the ground, piled up against bushes, floating in the water. Something, we figured it was a bear, had pulled the lids off the trash cans and raked out all the contents. The wind had done the rest.
Our friends arrived. I said I didn’t want to stay. We deliberated. Showstopper said, “America is gross and sometimes you just need to submit.” A siren sounded an ascending whine that wobbled up to a high note and stayed there, reeling out over the water. “This kind of thing is going to get a lot worse with the cuts to federal funding,” someone said. Katie came out of the drop toilet. “Did I set that off?” she said, “did it smell that bad?!”
All the refuse was from hikers: mouldering tuna packets and greasy peanut butter jars full of ants, ziplocks containing ziplocks containing plastic wrappers of every persuasion.
I quietly spiralled. We live a filthy, desacralised life, I thought. We do not live like animals. Most animals live clean lives and eat from the unadulterated earth and from the bodies of those animals allotted to them. We thru-hikers eat food that is not food, food made in laboratories with a hundred ingredients, dairy products full of hormones, instant noodles and potato chips calibrated by scientists to stimulate overeating. And we revel in overeating, walking ourselves daily into a fever of hunger, and everything we eat comes out of plastic. Plastic is the medium in which our food is carried, it is the medium in which our water is carried, and more and more we carry tiny particles of plastic inside our bodies, in our blood and in our bowels and in our testicles. We each leave behind us a small mountain of plastic that in its ten thousand years of unlife will choke and strangle life and interpose itself between living cells and kill them, ten thousand years of plastic, longer than history, global as history and equally deadly—a ghostly petrochemical epilogue to all this struggling towards an arbitrary end.
When the siren finally abated, Grace said let’s just clean it up. So we formed the Chamise Boat-In-Site Beautification society, and a half-dozen of us went around with ziplocks on our hands picking up the festering trash and putting it back in the bags and putting the bags in the toilet to prevent the bear from dumpster diving. It took a while, but we felt better. We went for a swim amidst the algae in the lake. Braddock went to the bathroom and got trapped in there by a baby rattlesnake seeking shade.
Over dinner, we replayed the talk with the Mandarin Man from the morning. “He was weird,” Katie said, “I mean, the possum situation—” “What possum situation?” I asked. “He had a baby possum in his backpack. His dog had killed its mother. He had two actually, but one died. He’s rearing the surviving one so he can release it into the wild.”
The lake silvered in the dusk. People lay on their backs on the concrete picnic tables, like human sacrifices rehearsing for the big day.
Braddock on the altar
The Industrial Sublime
22/5 — Day 21 — 23mi / 37km
We set off in the nascent dawn. Chastened by the previous day’s heat, we wanted to get as many miles in as possible before the unholy monocle of the sun turned its glare again upon the scurrying world.
In defiance of Grace’s explicit instructions, I slipped a generous dollop of olive oil (the most calorie-dense food in existence) into our breakfast. “Good brekkie?” I asked, slyly. “Yeah,” Grace said, “particularly good.” “It had about two tablespoons of oil in it,” I confessed. She narrowed her eyes. “You bastard.”
We walked up and away from the lake on a sandy trail pressed firm by hundreds of feet and dimpled either side by the traffic of poles. At a water source in a steep gully, I was in the middle of introducing myself to a hiker with superlative eyebrows who was also called Carter when I was seized by urgency and had to climb up a steep, crumbly bank away from the water to undertake what was easily the most precarious defecation of my life.
With full bottles and empty bowels, we ascended gradually to the edge of a steep cliff that sheared away below us like the ramparts of a sandcastle. The view opened out over the Cajon Canyon and the Interstate 15 and the Southern Pacific Railroad. Trains blared at each other as they crossed paths and cars switchbacked up to the Baldy Mesa and over these conveyor belts of want sat the mute immensities of the San Gabriel Mountains, presiding.
We dropped down into a narrow canyon that would spit us out at the highway. Several hikers legged it past us to the infamous Cajon Pass McDonalds, including a big German hiker with a fabulously deep voice who was called Princess.
We exited the canyon and strode alongside the highway toward the Golden Arches. Cars and articulated trucks panted past an enormous sign featuring McCrispy Strips haloed against a golden background. Underneath the sign an ‘Alpha Omega Septic and Sewage’ truck was pumping something into or out of the ground and as we passed it we were sprayed us with a fine and not altogether pleasing mist.
A little stall beside the McDs sold fresh fruit. We bought a box. A stroppy wind railed at the stall, which was pinned down by guy-lines and large rocks. “Hay mucho viento!” I said. “Sí,” said the man, dispassionately cuttting the watermelon. “Siempre es así?” I asked. “Sí,” he said.
At the McDonalds all the hikers were crowded into a corner that smelled little better than the Alpha Omega spray. “Welcome to the back of the bus” said the German in his resonant bass. He was wasted on a thru-hike. Should be at the opera. There weren’t any vegetarian options and Grace was thoroughly unimpressed. We settled for two large fries and a sack full of cookies and an enormous Oreo milkshake. Bella, a fellow vegetarian, came over. “It’s no good,” she said, “even the chips are cooked in animal fat.” “Don’t tell Grace,” I said, “she’ll cry.”
Las frutas
Phillip came in and beelined for the bathroom. Katie told us that he hadn’t yet dug a cat hole on trail. “One time, he held it in for almost a week.” Cobbler, whose blisters had only worsened, decided to catch a ride into Wrightwood early to let them heal. We’d meet up the next day when we came in off on an alternate from the hilariously named Gobbler’s Knob—a dozen miles of the trail had been closed since a huge fire destroyed the area around Wrightwood a couple years prior.
We headed back into the jaws of industrial America and passed through a dark tunnel under the overpass. At its mouth there was, improbably, a chaise lounge. Grace reclined on it for comic purposes and later got a rash which may or may not have been psychosomatic. Then we climbed over the train tracks, past little villages of prickly pear and up above huge outcrops of sandstone that looked with their blond-brown worlds like miniatures of Jupiter.
All day long on da chaise lounge
In the evening we dropped into the Lone Pine Canyon and found a water cache. The other Carter and his wife Ann were there, setting up their tent. Carter’s eyebrows in the evening light were full and dark and perfectly demarcated. I wanted him to frown or raise an eyebrow ironically—just to see them in action. I couldn’t help it: I blurted out my admiration. “Well,” he said, “All I did was grow them… Ann shaped them into the eyebrows they are today.” “I have a little kit in my bag,” she said.
Grace and I farewelled the crew to climb another hour into the slow sunset. We took up residence for the night on an exposed knoll with views over the canyon and out west to the vast, dim glow of LA rising above the mountains like a hidden fire.
From two thousand feet below rose the antique complaint of the trains and the rise-fall of far off sirens and the petrochemical thrum of the traffic on the I-15. In the darkness the red and white lights of cars moved like blood cells through the great artery of America. From up high the cars seemed to move slowly, with a formality almost processional, and as the highway arced behind the ink-black mountain the cars and their soft cargo blinked into oblivion.
23/5 — Day 22 — 8 mi / 13km
A cloud moved in overnight and enveloped our camp and left all our things slick with moisture. Grace greeted this state of affairs with a thin, reedy fart and we walked through the cloud to Gobbler’s Knob. The cloud thinned and finally opened up as we began descending the dirt road to where we could hitch into Wrightwood. We stepped off the road for an approaching pick up truck but it stopped and Showstopper leaned out the passenger window and told us to jump on the back. There wasn’t much room and we sat with our feet dangled off the back and the ground rushed under our feet and occasionally our feet scuffed the ground.
The three of us were deposited on Lone Pine Canyon road and were promptly bundled into the vehicle of a friendly woman with knee braces. There was a yellow duckling sitting in the cup holder. “I found this little guy lost in my garden,” our benefactor said. His name was Flecks. Some teenage boys on rollerblades wielding wooden swords and shields, hurtled past us and down the road. Grace held Flecks. Showstopper held Flecks. Flecks paddled Showstoppers palm with his little feet. “Work it, Flecks” Showstopper said, “Get those calluses.” It was Memorial Day. “Who are we remembering?” I asked. “War dead,” said the driver, “Any war. —Also, everyone has a yard sale.”
In Wrightwood, American flags hung limply over driveways strewn with unwanted goods. Around the town, the fire-licked hills crouched in rising heat. In fields across the country, war dead lay swaddled in the earth. In the earth, the slow mouldering bodies of those who fought the British, who gave their lives to end slavery or protect it, bodies brought home from Europe, Vietnam, the Middle East—brought home whole or in pieces or not at all, but dead either way for causes righteous or otherwise. And all the dead waiting quietly for us who take breath still, we who step blithely through the bright light of days and hawk old shirts and sporting goods and roll down hills brandishing our wooden swords at eternity.
