Nightcrawl
29/5 — Day 28 — 14 mi / 22km
Grace is never, ever ready before I am. Our walking paces are not dissimilar, but our pack-up speeds are greatly at variance: in the cumulative time I’ve spent waiting for Grace in the mornings on trail, I could have become fluent in Arabic or read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
So, imagine my surprise when, on the porch of Maria Bonita’s Mexican Restaurant, Grace was packed up and ready to go before I’d even got off the ground. “The lard,” she said, referring to last night’s dinner, “it’s gone straight through me.” Across the street (the only street) in Agua Dulce, The Rustic Mercantile was about to open. Grace, ordinarily among the least assertive people I know, shoved the other hikers out of the way en route to the toilet—but not before she called out her order to me: mochaccino and croissant—as if I didn’t know already.
The Rustic Mercantile was a kind of boutique cafe and gift store with a cowboy vibe. On the wall there were signs that said things like “It’s about to get Western” and artful posters of blond women riding horses in the California sun. We spent the day there, waiting for the heat to pass: there was a heat-wave, up to 40 degrees Celsius during the next few days. We heat-phobes had decided to transition to night hiking. Cobbler, a veteran of many a night shift in the emergency department at the hospital, took a nap in preparation. The other Carter and his wife Ann were planning to nighthike also. “We’re just gonna raw dog it,” Ann said.
Saying goodbye to Katie, Braddock and fam, who headed to LA for a couple days to escape the heat
We left at 6:30pm—it took that long for the heat to abate—and walked a mile or two along the road before heading up the hill on the other side of the valley. We walked under huge power lines. The wires made noises like the impersonal static of a robot language. The sun set as we climbed and our head torches blinked on. Cobbler said, “Isn’t it crazy that we plug this thing into the wall with a magic cable, and it sucks up energy, maybe, from the solar panels over in the Mojave, delivered by those wires back there, and, voila, we each have our personal directional sun!”
Coyotes thrilled the night with giddy yips, a bunch of maniac kids on a bender. We passed other hikers bedded down in tents illuminated with low-power mode red. Dust motes streamed through the beams cast by our personal directional suns and the trail swam out of obscurity to meet the light. Once we gained the ridge we saw below us towns and cities, little archipelagos of light in liquid dark. Above us, the sky looked similar, only more sparsely populated—a tall, lonesome land where the light of each home stood alone in the vast acreage of space.
We saw new creatures—something that moved like a frog, only sprightlier, and with a long tail—a Kangaroo mouse!—and an enormous blue centipede, about a hand’s length. “That’s why I don’t cowboy camp,” Cobbler said. A coyote cub ambled out of the bush and approached us timidly, lost its nerve, and ducked back into the bushes: a canine paused on the threshold of domestication, until it thought better of it.
A thin moon rose and took up its station. It was no match for the allure of our headlamps, moths hurtling into our faces in confusion. It was approaching midnight and we wanted to find a place to sleep. We dropped down and crossed a road. A car flew past, windows rattling to breakbeat techno. Above us, a couple of little lights still bobbed in the hills—Carter and Ann?—but it was time for us to stop and we lay out our groundsheet and fell to rest.
30/5 — Day 29 — 23 mi / 37km
We allowed ourselves four hours of sleep. After a quick, wordless pack down, Grace and I set off up out of the dark valley, the night a precious and perishable resource that needed to be used before it expired. The bats seemed to concur, whirling about in variable arcs and catching bugs by ear. Our head torches, once again, were not the only ones blinking in the hills. Up above us the on-off of the head torch as it passed among bushes looked like someone signalling Morse code for “I’m walking at 4am because it’s going to be fucking hot.”
The first light came and the birds called out the terms and conditions of the new day. Then the sun clambered over the horizon, eager as a lover, and planted kisses on our cheeks. Welcome now, in the brisk clarity of the morning of our relationship, but soon we knew that love would grow too ardent. So we bustled along as the temperatures climbed, completing a record 14 miles before 10am. Having dropped out of the folded hills to a road, we walked a few hundred metres along it to a rural fire station with some decent shade trees and a water spigot out front. We drank and then slept and when we awoke in the afternoon the grove was full of hikers prostrate and shirtless in puddles of shade, casualties in a war with an implacable foe. Overhead the victor vaunted triumphant.
Conked
We hid for a full eight hours, once again setting off after 6pm, up out of the valley. Our course through this section seemed to progress perpendicular to the range, climbing and falling, climbing and falling. As the sun dipped again toward the horizon, we crested a ridge and found the Mojave again before us, spread wide and flat as a barren prophecy. Its few mountains looked like hats that had been sat on—quarried for sand and for concrete and glass. In the twilight, several hundred red lights began blinking beneath the far distant range. That had to be the Mojave Wind Farm, the biggest in the country, and among the biggest in the world. We would be walking through it in a couple of days—nights?—time.
Poodle Dog Bush Blues
31/5 — Day 30 — 25mi / 40km
This section of the trail is dry. The whole desert is, by definition, but this section especially. The few water sources available to us on our 30th day were even worse than the worm water section coming into Agua Dulce. The first option was a manky concrete cistern, the next option involved going off trail to a tank that allegedly required tying your water bladder to your pole and reaching in to try to scoop it out and the next spot was two sources: a cistern with a mouse marinating in it and and a tank containing a large, dead lizard.
We elected for the first option, but when we arrived we discovered that there had been a fire and the whole area was now completely overgrown with ludicrously poisonous poodle dog bush. There wasn’t a ninja in the world that could get through there without brushing its toxic leaves. It was hours to the next source, we had no water, and the temperature at 7am had already surpassed hot and didn’t seem content to stop there: either Grace and I could perish of dehydration or I could brave its “blistering rash.” The next 30 minutes involved more profanities than I could in good conscience print here. I shimmied delicately through the dank hedges to the cistern, which was, delightfully, buried under fallen trees. I cleared a path through them to the water: it was in full algal bloom. On the map app, there were comments from previous people delineating all of this, but we’d somehow neglected to read them. I miserably filtered the disgusting water, which took forever as it was full of sediment, and escaped with less care from the PDB lair that I came in. Grace washed down my exposed skin with soap and water, which dried on my legs almost immediately—it was now 8am and fearsomely hot.
Hydration station
Just around the corner we left the burn zone and entered a beautiful forest, as if heaven and hell were simply adjacent suburbs. The forest was made up of gnarled oaks that presided over their domain like the knobbly patriarchs of some fantastical realm where old men were grandfatherly and wise and not malignant, orange tyrants. The shade did not last. We sweated through the rest of the day along a sweltering ridge listening to our audiobook on American history—These Truths. We came across the 500 mile marker, but couldn’t think of any songs to mark the occasion, so celebrated instead by knocking back some delicious water—now lizard flavoured. While procuring the water we’d seen a white reptilian belly floating in the dim light of the tank. A book I have about the desert says, “there are two easy ways to die in the desert: dehydration, and drowning.”
Grace, overwhelmed with joy
Evening came like a cool towel on the forehead of the fevered Mojave, which had been all day in full view to our east. It had baked bleakly all day, a place condemned to the sun. Somewhat reminiscent of computer chips, a vast network of solar panels were inset all across the flat sand in gridded clusters, and the sand itself it was divided by straight roads at right angles and diagonals, so that it looked, against the softly pleated hills on the far side, like an exercise in Euclidean geometry. We felt we were scouts before a battle, reconnoitring the battlefield. Our foe: the heat, the battlefield: a kiln-hot 25 mile strip of the Mojave we had to cross from this range to the next in the middle of a heat wave.
We descended towards the valley in the dark, our head torches spotlighting scorpions on the path—one, two, three in the space of a half mile, small and fearsome. “What is this, I said, “some kind of scorpion convention?” We slept in our tent. Tomorrow we would wait out the day again, and strike at night.
The Jazzqueduct
1/6 — Day 31 — 27 mi / 44km
As it deflated, the sleeping mat made a sound like the passive-aggressive sigh of a discontented teenager. Or, Grace’s side did. My side of our Exped Duo had developed, since we started, a slow and seemingly unfixable leak from a large, oft-repaired tear, so I woke up, as usual, on the ground. Outside, as we walked to Hikertown—reputedly one of the strangest places on trail—the light fell down in straight lines through the clouds and it was yet cool and almost beautiful.
We got to Hikertown mid morning. It was a bizarre arrangement: fake buildings around the perimeter of a dusty square, like a western town in a movie. All the buildings were tricked out with hand-painted signs that said Doctor and Sheriff and Bank and the various appurtenances of frontier civilisation. The bank had a defunct ATM out front. The Sheriff’s office had a semiautomatic rifle nailed high on the facade.
We swiftly got a ride to Neenach Cafe, where, along with a couple dozen other hikers, we hid from the heat of the day and prepared for battle. Some prepared like the warriors of old, daubing their faces with glow in the dark paint and kitting themselves out with neon glow sticks. Cobbler strapped his worsening blisters. Princess, the barrel-chested German, drank a gallon of milk. Almost everyone at some point made use of a muggy room out the back of Neenach, which was full of hospital stretchers specifically designated for hikers to nap on before their midnight marathon. One particularly perverse hiker neglected to nap, however, and spent the day in a state of high caffeination writing and uploading an unjustifiably detailed backpacking blog.
The proprietor of Hikertown personally returned us to his establishment. He was friendly and garrulous and something like sixty, kitted out in trail runners and oversized blue jeans that dragged a little on the ground. He offered to lend us his Ferrari if we didn’t want to walk to Canada. We laughed. “Don’t even worry about it,” he said, “I’ve got two!” We laughed again. Then he pulled up in his driveway beside two Ferraris. “Would you like the red one or the silver one?” He said.
Meet your rural GPs
Our route followed the LA aqueduct then cut through the wind farm and up into the safety of the far hills, where there was again water and shade to be found. We would be walking on top of infrastructure through which a hundred million litres of water flowed per day, but we could hardly access a drop of it. Soon we were walking along the famous pipe, which was enormous, half sunk in the sand, and barrelled straight across the valley. It was the colour of ochre, looked older than the Egyptians, and was beautiful in a rude industrial way.
As we strode jauntily along it we passed solar panels garrisoned in barbed wire fences: a modernised Roman legion with shields raised in Testudo, and little knots of hikers who looked like partiers at a very sparsely attended festival. Some of the hikers were smoking weed or ingesting mushrooms, carrying speakers that piped music into the golden air of an evening Dionysus would happily have attended, slapping his sandals across the Mojave with the revelers of a later age. It sure was different from hiking in New Zealand.
The sun went down in spectacular fashion—all the dust and the diffuse pall of smoke from various fires making a particulate canvas in the atmosphere for the late light to paint upon. The end of the world will be dire, however it happens—nuclear holocaust, climactic meltdown—but it might be beautiful in its way.
In the dark, our glow sticks looped neon purple and blue and green around our wrists and packs. Grace said it was like we were back at a primary school disco and it was true. We waited for the face paint to start glowing too. It never did—we just looked like uncoordinated kindergarteners with crayon on our faces.
After a few hours, we diverted from the pipe and onto the aqueduct proper. It was a huge runnel in the earth topped over with concrete and as we walked on the concrete we heard the rush and suck of stolen water racing to slack the thirst of a city of angels. We found a set of prints embedded in the concrete, cougar prints, the signature of this once wild place.
On the horizon, the lights of the city of Lancaster spread vast and bright across the horizon like the 10,000 fires of the Greek encampment at Troy. We closed on the city over the course of hours, passing at a distance a huge structure that looked almost like a stadium but had to be a prison. It had wide, flat-topped walls, brightly illuminated, which enclosed empty, dark, rectangular space. We had the freedom to traipse through the desert at night while others were barely allowed the run of a football field. Not far beyond the prison, a large, lighted cross was born aloft on some scaffolding.
Along the concrete surface of the aqueduct and down the rutted surfaces of dirt roads we walked independent of the sun, personal or otherwise: the dim light of the moon let down just enough light to see. Spiky and ink-dark against a blue-black sky, the Joshua trees looked ecstatic, improvisational—the jazz musicians of desert flora. We crested a rise and came upon the vast wind farm. The huge churn of the blades in the air was audible even from a mile away, the structures themselves standing murky and dim but for the uncoordinated blinking of their red lights which blinked high overhead and across the plain and far into the distance, a night-time scene from War of the Worlds. Grace, inspired by the Joshua Trees, put in her earbuds and listened to some Miles Davis. “Wow!” she said, “The red lights are set to Kind of Blue!” She shared one of her earbuds with me. It was true. The red lights weren’t uncoordinated—they were syncopated.
Disco time
The wind whistled down the corridor of the night and we crouched in the dark behind an embankment and brewed a coffee. It was 1am and we’d walked 15 of our 25 miles. We couldn’t stop till we got to Cottonwood Creek with its water and shade. The coffee gave us another couple hours but come 3:30am our weary feet found they still had 3 miles to go. Those feet had been walking every day but one for a month. We left the plain and started up a gradually steepening trail that led up the range on the side of the valley and sat a while, willing our legs to recharge. Two bleary men walked past—we’d seen their headlights bobbing behind us intermittently all night. Grace and I were sitting in the desert sand in the middle of the night on the perimeter of America’s biggest wind farm. It was kind of a weird situation in which to be greeting someone.
“How’re you going?” I said to the first head light. “Well,” the head light said, “the drugs are wearing off and it’s four in the fucking morning.” He stopped and did some leg swings and a forward fold. “Wooo!” He said, unconvincingly, and resumed walking.
Grace and I inched up the hill. Distantly, the sun rose, and a little of its light spilled into the valley. Some of the wind farms whirred slowly to a halt—even they were clocking off for the night. Grace felt like she might have injured something and babied her right hamstring. Normally we do almost three miles in an hour. The last three miles to camp that morning took us two and a half. Just before we dropped down into the gully with its treasure of water and shade we had the opportunity to walk fifty meters along a small knoll and get a view out over the entire sweep of the Mojave as dawn was breaking in a great wave across it. “I can’t,” Grace said. “I won’t make it.” So we climbed down to the creek and collapsed under a cottonwood. Others camped there were just stirring for their days walking. It was 6am.
Good morning!
Lactic Acid
2/6-3/6 — Day 32-33 — 14 mi / 22km
After the aqueduct marathon we snatched a couple hours sleep, filtered some sulphurous “butt water” from the creek, and eked out a fatigued seven miles to a camp atop the range.
The other Carter and Ann were at camp. They showed us pictures of the animals they’d picked up: pictures of Ann holding a bearded dragon, a horned toad, a desert rosy boa. You can pick up almost anything if you’re friendly and you’ve got fast reflexes, apparently. We dubbed Ann ‘Yoink’ and ate dinner and bedded down amidst low scrub, the desert expanse darkening below, hundreds of red lights blinking in time with Miles.
The next morning, unlikely clouds let down tendrils of rain in the sunrise over Tehachapi pass. Across the hills, yet more blades turned on venturi winds. We stumbled gratefully down to Willow Springs road and into the Tehachapi-bound vehicle of a man with a moustache and aviators who told us his name was ‘Easy.’
Like Moses and Lawrence of Arabia, we’d crossed the desert, that low, hot realm where only the canniest plants surpass the condition of dust, that realm where barren simplicity brings you to the arid core of things and you learn that the essence of life is water, that without water you have dust and rock, and that with it the manifold elaborations of earth, from Joshua trees to Los Angeles, become possible.
