Blistered Kind Of Love (12 page)

Soon after the JourneyFilm Crew sped off, Duffy returned with water and we hiked on and up into the San Jacinto Mountains. Much of the tread through the San Jacintos had been blasted into the face of the mountains, dangerous work during which one trail worker died. As our climb took us higher and along cliffs, I avoided looking over the steep drop-offs and focused instead on keeping my balance on the loose scree. Every once in a while, our footfalls would send a rock careening over the edge and down the cliff side. Often, a felled tree or rockslide would block the path and we'd have to climb over it. That's when the troubling story of Marge (the “Old Gal”) would scuttle across my consciousness.

“Marge broke her leg somewhere around here,” Duffy noted as he picked his way over a three-foot expanse of freshly tumbled rock.

“Thanks for reminding me.” I surveyed the scene and my nervousness increased.

Marge had slipped on a loose rock in a pile just like this, jamming her foot and breaking her leg as she fell at an awkward angle. When a rock slips from a slide like the one we were traversing, it's sometimes called a “Judas Rock.” If the wrong rock plays Judas, an unsuspecting hiker may become the guest of honor at her own Last Supper.

It was May 18, two weeks since the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit had rescued Marge from this area. The seventy-two-year-old was attempting to trek all of Section B—alone. Her loved ones had advised against this, but Marge reasoned that there would be many other hikers on the trail if she needed assistance. And she was right, there were; they just happened to be three days behind her.

During that time, Marge dragged herself, her pack, and her broken leg thirty feet to a flat spot, where she made a makeshift camp. “The whole process took about four hours. It's amazing what you can do on your butt,” Marge later wrote in an email to a friend. “My fear the first night,” she added, “was cougars. I'd never thought of cougars before but for some reason that was my big fear so I was sure not to moan or cry out when I moved my injured leg. I didn't want a cougar to realize I was injured.”

The second night, Marge awoke at four in the morning to planes flying overhead and spent an hour trying to flash SOS signals at them. “I tried to pray but could not remember the simplest of prayers,” Marge recalled. “All I could say was ‘Dear God' over and over.”

Around nine in the morning on her third day, Marge had only half a cup of water left, eight sticks of gum, nine Tums, and two inches of toothpaste. “I thought about the great life I'd had,” she later wrote, “my marvelous kids etc. And if I died? That was ok. I had a very deep feeling of acceptance and peace.”

That same day, at about 12:30 in the afternoon, help finally arrived. Kathy and Ed, two thru-hikers from Spokane, Washington, had met Marge earlier in the year via the online Pacific Crest Trail community and had been impressed that the seventy-two-year-old was still hiking. They'd seen her entries in trail registers and thus were aware that she was a few days ahead of them. So when they came around a corner and saw an older woman sitting on the trail with her gear spread out around her, they knew it was Marge.
What they didn't know was that she'd broken her leg and had been sitting there for nearly seventy-two hours.

Once they realized what had happened, they gave Marge water, nuts, and energy bars. Then they sped off to get help. At about 4:30 that afternoon, Ed met a day hiker with a cell phone and called 911. By 7:30 that evening, two rescuers arrived at Marge's side with a special stretcher equipped with a big trail wheel called a “Stokes” litter. More rescuers arrived at intervals and took turns pushing and pulling the litter down a steep, little-used side trail. The trail was so narrow that Marge's rescuers sometimes slid off it and into bushes. By the time they got to a waiting ambulance at 2:30 in the morning, the rescuers' arms and faces were so bloodied it seemed as if they'd need medical attention, too. Later, in a thank-you note Marge wrote to the Riverside Mountain Rescuers, she joked that if there ever were a “next time,” she'd like to recommend Cadillac suspension.

Ruminating over Marge's story during the next seven miles, I felt alone and scared. Duffy's long legs were proving capable of covering ground quite quickly, with my short stubs leaving me lagging behind. What if I fell off one of these cliffs? How many miles would it take for Duffy to even notice I was missing? What if I took a water or rest break, fell farther behind, and got lost? These worries urged me to hike faster and forego breaks, but they also made me feel as if our romantic adventure was turning into a forced march. Was Duffy succumbing to the speed-hiking mentality? This jogged my insecurities. Maybe he resented me for holding him back. I could hear Meadow Ed now, “Duffy-me-boy . . . is that umbilical cord strangling you yet?”

With Meadow Ed's voice running through my head, I came upon a snow-patched saddle where Duffy had stopped to wait for me. He was leaning against a boulder and casually kicking a mound of snow with his toe. I tried to figure out how long he'd been there. Not long enough to take off his pack. I was relieved; I wasn't so far behind after all.

To our right was the notoriously steep and treacherous Devils Slide trail that would take us three miles down to an Idyllwild trailhead. From there we'd head four miles, by road, into town and to the hiker-friendly Tahquitz
Inn. By the time we descended to the trailhead and began trudging down the desolate roads toward town, night was falling.

Passing empty vacation homes, our trekking poles made
clack-clack
sounds on the pavement. My feet were burning and Duffy's knees were killing him, the joints grinding like engine parts needing oil. For Duffy, steep descents were proving to be one of the most painful aspects of thru-hiking. Sometimes he'd stop, lean on his trekking poles, and just gasp. It was pitch dark when we finally we made it into the outskirts of town.

A young woman came out of a Mexican restaurant, got into her car, and drove forward ten yards before screeching back to us in reverse.

“Wanna ride somewhere?” she asked.

“Yes, please!” I was so relieved; we'd find the hotel much faster by car. The girl started chucking Twizzlers, McDonald's bags, sweaters, and books off of her front seat and into the even messier backseat.

“No, really, we can walk,” Duffy said, giving me a strange look. I was puzzled. Didn't Duffy want a ride? I sure did—enough to sit in a backseat trash bin. Reluctantly, he finally climbed into the Honda hatchback and the girl careened out of the parking lot. She drove so fast that we sped past the Tahquitz Inn twice before noticing it.

When she pulled over,
onto
the curb, Duffy jumped out like a jackrabbit and glared at me. “Are you crazy? I was sure we were gonna die. Did you smell the booze?”

I certainly did not. All I smelled was myself. Besides, Duffy had been looking pale with the pain from his knees. I just wanted us to find a place to dump our packs and put our feet up. It wouldn't have mattered to me if she was drunk, stoned, or just plain insane, I still would've gotten in the car. After doing a twenty-eight-mile day, I was in desperate need of a bed.

At least we'd made it. We checked into a room and collapsed on its couch. We probably lay there for at least an hour before mustering the energy to shower. I watched the grime spiral down the drain in an almost hallucinogenic state, amazed at the amount of dirt coming off my body.

The next morning my feet were still throbbing. Hot spots on my heels
and little toes stung and the top of my left foot sent out intermittent sharp pangs. But lying in that soft bed, on clean white sheets, the trail seemed like that sweet romantic dream again. When I got up, however, the dream shattered. My leg muscles were tight, like knotted rubber bands pulled taut, and I buckled over.

It took a couple hours of running errands, stretching while waiting in various checkout lines, and reclining in the sun while writing emails (on our handheld email device) for my calves and hamstrings to loosen up. Walking back to our room, I noticed the JourneyFilm Crew sleeping outside the Tahquitz on the grass. “They're not going so fast now,” I smirked, and then stopped myself.

I'd been sucked into the competition. The race was on.

BY THE EARLY 1930s
, Clinton C. Clarke was too bent with age to enjoy backpacking. A Harvard graduate with a degree in literature, a successful oilman, and an avid Boy Scout, Clarke could still quote from
Huckleberry Finn
and light a fire in a blustery wind, but his hiking career was pretty much over—or so he thought. He was only fifty-eight—an age at which today's men clutch bottles of Viagra ordered off the Internet, learn to swing dance, or head west in Winnebagoes—but Clarke's perception of frailty left him with nothing better to do than dream of hiking and dispense advice. “Start hiking early, by eight o'clock,” Clarke instructed backpackers. “Go slowly at first. Always rest by standing in the sun (if you sit down you will lose pep.) Drink a little water, a raisin under the tongue will help.” These recommendations may seem humorously outdated now, but Clarke's Depression-era dream of the Pacific Crest Trail does not.

Clarke dedicated his final years to the vision of a border-to-border trail along the mountain ranges of California, Oregon, and Washington, “traversing the best scenic areas and maintaining an absolute wilderness character.” Why did Clarke devote the sunset of his life to the promotion of a pastime he could no longer enjoy? Maybe it was because he had made his fortune squeezing black gold from the ground and wanted to repay his debt to Mother Earth, or maybe all that Mark Twain had gone to his head. Whatever the reason, Clarke worked until his last days to preserve a slice of the American West from man's meddling. The Pacific Crest Trail, first proposed to government officials in 1932, took six decades and millions of dollars to complete.
Clarke didn't live to realize his dream, but given his altruistic dedication, this seems somehow appropriate. His tombstone might as well quote from Twain, “Always do right, it will gratify some and astonish the rest.”

The initial foundation proposed by Clarke and his supporters to federal officials for the PCT was a link between two existing northwestern trails, Oregon's Skyline Trail and Washington's Cascade Crest Trail, and two California trails, the John Muir Trail and the Tahoe–Yosemite Trail. But with the country in the midst of the Great Depression and lacking a popular mandate for long distance trails, the response from Washington, D.C. was tepid. At the time, the potential costs of trail construction, mapping, and rights-of-way across private land were beyond the will and thin wallet of the federal government.

Very gradually, though, like a glacier receding from Yosemite Valley, the idea picked up steam. Clarke founded the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference in 1932 to lobby for and map the trail; its founding members included the Sierra Club, the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and a young photographer named Ansel Adams.