I like to think of myself as a writer, like to pretend that I can string together the odd sentence here and there and make it sing. But I have to admit that I was constantly humbled by the word play of Dan White in The Cactus Eaters. It’s the story of an idiot and his one true love walking the Pacific Crest Trail, a little hiking path that runs from Mexico to Canada through some of America’s last great wilderness.
Here’s a couple of the sentences:
His joylessness made him stand out like the shy one at an orgy.
The shower was sensational, hot water pulsing, our dirt twirling down the drain like Janet Leigh’s blood in Psycho.
Dan White has a nice way with words, don’t you think?
I’m not a hiker, but I have been a long distance cyclist once or twice, though no where near the same league as Dan and PCT. I had never heard of the Pacific Crest Trail, had never heard of Ray Jardine and his light pack followers the Jardi-Nazis, and was totally unfamiliar with the bulk of the landmarks described in The Cactus Eaters. But none of that matters, because Dan White does a great job of introducing and romancing anything and everything PCT.
Like all memoirs, The Cactus Eaters keeps a pretty tight focus and very little happens that doesn’t relate to the hiking of the Pacific Crest Trail. By the time I finished reading The Cactus Eaters, I didn’t want to go hiking, but I did find myself quit fond of Dan White. Being something of an expert on slacking myself, I can relate to his love of dropping out and his dread of dropping back in. For Dan the PCT is his own personal reality show, where he gets to live out a fantasy of having no other responsibility than to walk eight miles, or maybe twenty miles, before the sun sets again. Then get up and do it again the next day.
Doesn’t everyone want to run away from home?
There were lots of laugh out loud moments here, mostly of the oh god, don’t do that variety. Dan does a number of not very bright things, has a number of odd adventures, and lives to tell the tale. The end of the story is bittersweet, lacking that fairy tale ending as reality so often does. Life goes on and all is well enough. Dan White did get his book published, which is more than most of us would be writers can say.
Regular readers will know that I seldom love the books I read and often hate them, but The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind – and Almost Found Myself – on the Pacific Crest Trail (P.S.)
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