Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail (14 page)

“Skywalker, Skywalker, hey, which one is Skywalker?”

“Here I am.”

It was 4 o’clock in the morning, and it was a bit alarming to be awakened in such a frantic way. The previous night I had chatted extensively to an African-American former Special-Forces soldier named Pete. Between the cold fog that had blown in and the ample quantities of alcohol he had consumed, he couldn’t find me in the sea of cots.

“Where’s the trail go out of here?” Pete asked hurriedly. After groggily giving him a basic route, I asked, “You’re not going now, are you?”

“Yeah, I’ve got to catch up with those other guys.”

“Wait til’ morning and I’ll go with you,” I said.

“I’ve gotta’ go now,” Pete said, and hurried off in the thick fog.

However, it wasn’t to be the last I saw of him today. A few hours later, a car pulled up to the Saufleys. None other than Pete emerged, with blood pouring from his knee.

“What happened?”

“Got hit by a car,” Pete said matter-of-factly.

Donna immediately took over and had him icing his knee and a doctor’s appointment.

“Who did it?” someone asked him.

“Oh, it was just a bunch of kids,” he said offhandedly. “They didn’t see me. It’s all good, no worries.”

Pete’s calmness in this crucible earned him the trail name,
No Pain.

No Pain then sat there regaling us with stories of his days in Special Ops, tumbling out of airplanes, drinking urine, you name it. He was also a veteran Appalachian Trail hiker.

“Last December, I’m in my tent in Shenandoah National Park eating a pizza,” he recounted. “A male bear comes busting in there—you know males don’t hibernate in the winter the way females do. The bear threw my ass right out of my tent and ate my pizza.”

To nobody’s surprise, No Pain was soon back on the trail.

Chapter 15

The Andersons

A
mazingly, after all the people at the Saufleys, I again found myself alone in the desert. Immediately, I got lost near some power lines and walked up a hill before noticing the footprints I had been following had given out. I scurried around worriedly, before spotting a familiar oval-shaped PCT sign down the hill to the left. God knows what would have happened if I had been hiking drunk at night like that group last night.

Rattlesnakes are fish-in-water in the desert;
you couldn’t say the same about hikers.

While I didn’t come across many humans, I did see plenty that I wasn’t terribly keen to see. I turned a corner and there traveled a rattler, sloping off the trail. Twenty yards later another one lay coiled up in the middle of the trail. Immediately, I backed up, making sure I wasn’t getting too near the previous one. Then, I just ran around the coiled snake which remained lying there in the middle of the trail. There was no sudden uncoiling of a serpent like in Greek mythology.

Like every hiker, I was trying to develop a better idea in my mind of the most likely places
where
you’d spot rattlesnakes. I never was able to develop a reliable profile, but there was a clear pattern as to
when
I saw them. It almost always was late in the afternoon after the worst heat of the day. This, not coincidentally, is when hikers are most active.

I was absolutely rocked; it was possibly the most unbelievable site I ever have seen, and maybe ever will see.

It had been a pretty
good foot day—
maybe a seven out of ten. My simple focus had been on the water cache at mile 18 for the day.

I turned a bend in the trail and in a clump of bushes to the left was the desert version of a haunted house.
The Andersons.
They had hung goblins and skeletons in all the bushes. Better yet, they had stashed plentiful gallons of water.

I scanned the area for 200 yards in both directions looking for suitable campsites. Unfortunately, the only place my two-person tent would fit was right in the middle of the PCT. So I had waited until right before dark to erect it. Of course, cougars wander around all over at night, including occasionally on the trail. But I had the thin membrane of my tent to protect me from any misunderstanding with them.

In the middle of the night, I got out of my tent to urinate. When I happened to look up at the sky, I was suddenly seized. The stars shined in a bolder, clearer fashion than I could have ever imagined. It honestly felt as though I was scanning the wide-arc of the heavens with a powerful telescope. Like humans in desert settings through the ages, I felt stirred to my greatest depths.

It was Sunday morning, and everybody looked pretty much gone already. No, not as in gone to church. They were gone as in drunk. And they were just getting started.

“I’m not going to stay here for long,”
was my first reaction.

I’d hitchhiked into Green Valley, California, site of the PCT-famous hostel, Casa de Luna.

“Skywalker, get a shirt on,” several hikers, looking like Turkish sultans, encouraged me.

Over to the side was a big rack of Hawaiian shirts. Most of the dozen-or-so hikers sitting here had arrived knee-walking drunk yesterday morning, including five of them who had successfully completed the 24 beer challenge. Needless to say, they were retelling the whole story for the umpteenth time. Soon a middle-aged woman emerged from the house.

“Welcome, I’m Terrie,” she introduced herself. “I hear you’ve got a foot injury. She immediately set me up soaking my feet in salt water.

As we sat there chatting, somebody suddenly yelled, “Terrie, here he comes!”

I looked over and saw a police car slowly passing right by their driveway. In what was obviously a well-honed routine, Terrie quickly placed her cigarette in her mouth, dropped her drawers, and revealed her ample rear-end right at the policeman. I say policeman; he was really a police boy—all of probably about 23, but looked 18. He looked like a little kid stealing a glance at a Playboy Magazine, he was so saucer-eyed. I soon noticed he rode by several times a day; he was probably new and that earned him the assignment from headquarters to keep his eye on this place,
Casa de Luna.

The counter-culture element on any hiking trail is bound to be strong. Normally, however, it was integrated with the more
de rigueur
aspects of hiking. Here, though, it was on full display. I had been too young for Woodstock and the Age of Aquarius, so I reckon this was the closest I’d ever get to it.

Romances were struck up in this free-for-all atmosphere. One free-spirited hiker with a striking resemblance to the 1960’s musician,
Tiny Tim,
became interested in a Canadian hiker named Josephine. He was not only successful, but other hikers gushed for hundreds of miles at his effortless style in winning over this shapely girl. Another guy, Five Dollar, who was a Mormon (although you would never know it!) began an incendiary relationship with a girl named Not a Chance. This was impressive for the simple reason she had previously rebuffed other chatty male hikers with the memorable words, Not a Chance.

One group of hikers packed up their backpacks every morning to head back to the trail. However, after eating the pancakes Joe Anderson cooked for everybody, somebody would always crack a beer, followed by the sounds of other beer cans being opened. The kiss of death was sitting in the black sofa that everybody labeled
the vortex.
The manager, Doug, who is the single most laid-back human I’ve ever had the privilege to meet and who has yet to ever be seen in public without a beer in his hand, would laugh at them and say, “You’re not going anywhere.” He was almost always right.

By late afternoon, they would make their last lame statement, “I’m leaving after taco salad tonight.”

Finally, after the trail-famous taco salad dinner and a few more beers, they would hoist their backpacks and head back to the
Magical Forest
(the Anderson’s backyard) to cowboy camp.

Honestly though, several hikers never seemed to recover psychologically from the whole experience. To them,
this
was the
summit
of the PCT, not Mount Whitney or Forrester Pass in the Sierras, or Manning Park in Canada. Every future trail town was a letdown to them after the Andersons. They talked about it repeatedly hereafter. Some even suspiciously got lost in the desert after leaving here and called Joe and Terrie to come pick them back up.

Joe and Terrie Anderson, themselves, have a miraculous, unequivocal love for smelly hikers, and their hostel is one of the worthwhile attractions of the PCT. Honest-to-God, I never felt so welcome anywhere besides home.