Zero Days Page 10
The only problem was, Donna didn’t have a car. “After all these years, Jeff and I still can’t figure out why we had only one operating vehicle at the time,” she says. “Jeff had taken the Taurus to go to the bachelor party in Sierra Madre.” So Donna walked the short distance to Vasquez Rocks for the celebration. Donna always laughs at the memory of her pride in walking a few miles, when soon she would be hosting people who regarded 20 miles with a full pack as no big deal. When she reached the park, she was disappointed to discover that the event was going to end much earlier than advertised. She attended anyway, and enjoyed the beauty of the dancing and costumes among the spectacular rocks. But afterward, the rest of the evening still stretched out in front of her.
“I walked out from there and thought, well, I’ve gotta eat, and I didn’t want to go home and heat up a pathetic frozen TV dinner, so I decided to go to the pizza place,” she says. “I went in and ordered chicken and sat down by myself for this very exciting Saturday night.
“So, in walks this couple. They were absolutely, disgustingly dirty. I mean, it was awful. I thought, I know what they’re doing! Now, when Jeff and I first moved here, we didn’t know anything about the PCT. We had seen hikers, not knowing what they were. I thought they were homeless people, or dayhikers who had somehow gotten absolutely dirty. We were mountain biking one day, and Jeff sees this blaze. We weren’t on the PCT, just near it.” (Donna always points out that she and Jeff weren’t riding on the actual PCT. Bicycles—indeed, all wheeled vehicles—are forbidden on the PCT for safety reasons, and the number of mountain bikers who ignore this rule is a sore subject with thru-hikers.)
Jeff had read a Los Angeles Times article about thru-hikers, and they had both been impressed by the story about people who hiked the equivalent of a marathon on some days, carrying everything they needed with them. Donna had helped at a local marathon, handing out water, and she remembered the excitement of watching the runners. “It fascinated me how people would line the streets and cheer for strangers—they don’t know who you are, but they cheer for the effort,” she says. She and Jeff discussed the hikers and agreed they wanted to help them in some way. “Here they are doing this every day, they not only look like homeless people, they are being treated like homeless people,” she says. “They’re just invisible. We saw no sign of people helping them in any way. We wanted to do something, but we didn’t know what.”
All of this was going through Donna’s mind as she watched the couple walk up to the counter. “They were very dirty but also very wholesome,” she remembers. “Her legs were a real mess. It looked like she had fallen into a patch of poison oak. She had the raised blisters and the dirt and all. Down here, in the heat, the dirt just clings to you.” At the counter, the hikers asked the workers if they had seen their friends, three guys with backpacks. The counter workers replied that they hadn’t seen the other backpackers. “They were so extremely disappointed at not seeing these guys,” Donna says. She watched as the backpackers ordered a pizza and then went into the tiny bathroom, where they proceeded to do their best to wash up before eating. Donna was between jobs in what she calls “corporate America,” where people are always clean. “These people were putting entire limbs into the sink!” she marvels. “And then they took paper towels and were sort of smearing the dirt around. And I kept thinking about her and how she really needed a bath. As they came out of the bathroom, they were facing the window, and the three guys they were looking for (they’d been in the Mexican restaurant) walked by and they saw them. They were so thrilled.”
The three came in, and one said to the other, “We knew you were ahead of us. We saw your tracks.”
“They ‘saw their tracks’?’’ Donna thought. “I’m into mountain biking, and you do look at tracks—you see if there are many riders and where they’ve gone—but they knew exactly who it was by the tracks. What do these people do, sit around the fire and show off their boot soles to each other?”
Then they said, “We were camped over here, you must have been over there.” Donna was amazed. Not only did they recognize each other’s tread, they had figured out the way they had leapfrogged each other.
Pretty soon, their conversation turned to where to camp for the night, and one of them informed the others that a permit was required for camping at Vasquez Rocks. “Little did I know, I was about to start on years of trail angeling,” Donna says. “The next thing I know, one of them says, ‘Miss? Miss? Do you know where we could stay tonight?’”
Donna, who had no idea what was happening, was the subject of a “yogi,” a technique thru-hikers use for getting help from strangers who might not realize at first that it’s their turn to provide a little trail magic. It’s not outright asking, nor is it begging like a hungry chipmunk for part of someone’s picnic lunch. It’s more a matter of insinuating oneself into the good graces of someone who happens to have a barbecue dinner spread out with more food than he really needs, or who happens to have a car handy and may not have been planning to run into town, but could if she thought of it. Gary and I didn’t have to develop a yogi technique. Thanks to having Mary along, people frequently offered us water, food, rides, and so on, without us doing anything. But for many hikers, it’s a useful talent. The origin of the word is no mystery to those of us old enough to remember the Yogi Bear cartoons of 1960s television. Yogi thought he was smarter than the average bear and was constantly teaching his sidekick, little Boo Boo, how to separate the tourists of Jellystone National Park from their picnic baskets, while outsmarting the rangers who tried to stop him. (Yogi Bear’s clever schemes often boomeranged, to the amusement of the misnamed Boo Boo.)
In response to the yogi, Donna mentioned a little motel on the Sierra Highway. “Their faces just lit up like Christmas,” she recalls. “I didn’t know this at the time, but it had been 11 days since they’d had showers, since Big Bear.” But when they found out the motel was several miles away, and that Donna didn’t have a car to give them a ride, their faces melted.
“Then I thought, you know, Jeff would probably be OK with this,” she says. “He’ll call me, and besides which, I don’t need his permission. I’m a big girl and I can do this by myself. So I resolved: I can have these people over to my house without his permission. I turned to them and said, ‘I think I know where you can stay. It’s not much, but I have this little single-wide trailer.’ If gratitude were terminal, they would all have died right there.” At this point, the pizza the couple had ordered was ready, and the group decided to bring it along, so some of them could be showering and laundering while the others ate. Even in her enthusiasm, Donna was a wee bit cautious. While asking the owner for a hot bag to carry the pizza in, she leaned over the counter and whispered, “If I don’t bring this hot bag back by 5 p.m. tomorrow, could you just remember who you saw me with last?” It was the female hiker who broke through Donna’s reservations about the group. Her heart went out to the girl, Sarah, with her poison oak rash.
So off they went on the 1-mile walk to Donna’s place, and soon the five happy hikers were taking showers, washing clothes, eating pizza, listening to the stereo, and generally having a great time. Donna sat outside with them, “grilling them with every stupid question,” until about 11:30 p.m., when she decided to turn in. She said goodnight, encouraged her guests to carry on, and headed inside her house, still wondering if she’d done the right thing. “I didn’t want to offend them, but I was still very nervous,” she explains. “They seemed real nice, but I locked every door and window in the house—very quietly. Then I went to bed. I was very nervous, but I did finally fall asleep.”
Jeff’s story begins at about 2 a.m. The bachelor party was winding down, and he realized he really didn’t want to spend the night with that bunch, so he decided to drive the short distance home. “I remember going up to the front door to walk in, and the door was locked,” he recalls. His first thought was that Donna was just being cautious, since they didn’t normally lock their doors. But Jeff didn’t have a
key. After he checked all the doors into the house and the garage, he decided that rather than waking Donna, he would sleep in the trailer for the night.
“There’s a little porch light that illuminates the steps. I saw these black lumps against the trailer and thought, ‘Wow, Donna has been doing some late spring cleaning. She’s been busy while I’ve been gone, that’s good.’” Jeff says. The lumps that Jeff saw, of course, were five backpacks leaning against the trailer.
“I walked into the trailer and looked at the couch and there was a big black lump on the couch,” Jeff remembers. “I didn’t know what to think—and then it moved! My first verbal reaction was, ‘Who in the hell are you?’” After a brief moment, the response came back: “Well, who in the hell are you?”
“I said, ‘I’m Jeff, and I live here!’” Jeff remembers. Then there was a more timid response: “I’m Jeremy, and didn’t Donna tell you? She said we could sleep here tonight.”
“Once he said that, it dawned on me what she had done because we had talked about the hikers, what they were doing, wouldn’t it be nice to invite them up for lunch,” Jeff says. “So I said, ‘Sorry to wake you up. Go ahead and get some sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.’”
Jeff walked back out to the soft, warm darkness of the desert night in late spring, looked around, and thought, “I have nowhere to sleep tonight.” His need for rest finally overcame his reluctance to awaken—and possibly frighten—his wife. He rapped on the bedroom window and stage-whispered that it was him and he needed to be let in. As expected, Donna was momentarily frightened. “All I could think was, why don’t they come to the door like normal people?” she says. But she eventually let Jeff in the house and told him the story of her evening.
The next morning, they peeked out a window to see if the hikers were up. From there, they spied one hiker, Todd, sitting on the steps preparing his breakfast. “He’s got this little teeny stove and this little teeny pot,” says Donna. “This great big guy is hunched over this little teeny thing, and he’s stirring it, and we say, ‘My God, is that how they eat?’” Jeff leaped into action, and soon had prepared a procession of pancakes, tortillas, salsa, and fresh orange juice ready to be taken outside. “Their eyes were just as big as saucers when they saw all that food,” says Donna. “We had a lovely time. They said, ‘This is trail magic.’ We’d never heard the term before. And then they cinched the deal for all time: ‘And you guys are trail angels.’
“Something happened at that moment. I had a personal epiphany: That’s what I am, I’m a trail angel! This is the thing I had been looking for, what I was meant to do. We just looked at each other. I don’t know what was going through Jeff’s mind, but we just knew without words, this is what we could do.”
That was 1997. The Saufleys hosted a few dozen thru-hikers that first year. “I used to seriously go out and troll for hikers,” Donna says. “I’d go up and down the road looking for them.” Soon the word got out, and thru-hikers began showing up at Hiker Heaven in significant numbers. The Saufleys took on more chores: accepting resupply boxes, maintaining water caches in the desert, working with the Pacific Crest Trail Association to promote the trail. Through it all, Donna says, they’ve had a wonderful time. “We’ve hosted over 1,700 hikers since we started in 1997, and we’ve never had one problem,” she says. “We haven’t had to ask anyone to leave. There have been no serious issues—a few things—but nothing unmanageable. It’s a real testimony to who the hikers are. You couldn’t pick 1,700 random people and have this experience. It’s been an absolutely marvelous experience.”
A long day’s hike north of Hiker Heaven is Casa de Luna, the home of Joe and Terrie Anderson. They knew about the Pacific Crest Trail before they moved to Green Valley because Joe had thought about hiking it, and they had seen occasional hikers in town. Their fateful day was a Monday—they know that because the town’s restaurant was closed on Mondays. “We saw this elderly couple from Maine walking down the road,” Terrie recalls. “They went to the restaurant, but it was closed. Joe had spent all day making this vegetable soup, for no reason, so we see these hikers and start talking and we invited them over. The woman said, ‘My husband has been craving vegetable soup,’ and we said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but come on in, it’s ready.’ So they came in. They were the first people we had over. They had dinner and spent the night.”
The next year, the Andersons began reading trail journals online. “We saw Nocona and Bald Eagle’s trail journal, and we got hooked on it,” says Terrie. “Every night we’d call it up, and it was like, where are they now? Where are they now?”
Terrie thought it would be wonderful to meet the couple whose journal was so interesting, but how? Joe pointed out that their online itinerary indicated a stop was coming up in Wrightwood, so Terrie wrote a letter to be delivered to them at the post office. Thru-hikers have many of their resupply boxes mailed general delivery to post offices near the trail, so a letter addressed to them, also general delivery, would be picked up at the same time. Joe recalled it was a little awkward explaining why they were so eager to meet people whom they only knew from the internet, and they were a little concerned the backpackers might think they were more like stalkers than fans. Roughly paraphrased, they remember their letter said something like this: “We’re Terrie and Joe Anderson, and we’re, like, 38, we have kids and we’re not weirdoes, and we’d like to meet you because we feel like we know you, and you’re, like, celebrities.” Next thing, Joe says, “They called, and they were a little concerned, but evidently Terrie passed the test on the phone and they said they’d be there in a week.” The week stretched out and then some, and the Andersons were beginning to think the meeting wasn’t going to happen after all. Finally, they got a call from the Saufleys’ place. It was Nocona. She told Joe they would be there the next day, but that there was a problem. They had four people with them. “They didn’t want to just show up with six people on our doorstep, but they didn’t want to bail on their friends, either,” Joe explains. “So we said, ‘Bring them all, after all, it’s a party.’” Since they were already inviting over six hikers, Terrie figured there might be other people who needed a place to stay. So she drove up to the ranger station and started soliciting hikers. “She found one and brought him back, and he spent the night and we had a great time,” Joe says. “And then she just started picking people up.”
That year, 2000, the Andersons hosted 40 backpackers. The next year it was 80, and 170 the year after that. “Now we run about 225 a year, plus southbounders,” Joe told us at the 2006 Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick Off. “This will be our seventh year, and it just keeps getting better every year.”
Not every trail angel is as established and well-known as the Saufleys, Andersons, Heitmans, and Dinsmores. Our first angel encounter began in an atmosphere of apprehension. It was Easter Sunday, our fourth day on the PCT, and we were very aware that we hadn’t traveled far from the border. That morning, a U.S. Forest Service employee happened to see us from his truck while we took a lunch break in a woods. He walked over with the sort of deliberate steps people use when they’re not sure what they’re getting into. He asked us a few questions, and after it became obvious we really were innocent backpackers from the San Francisco Bay Area, he relaxed enough to ask whether we had seen any illegal immigrants. We hiked on to Chariot Canyon, a big, dry wash with a few wildflowers to attest to the fact that water had been there at one time, although not recently. We didn’t see any water, but that didn’t really matter, as we had expected a dry camp and were carrying plenty with us. We established a pleasant camp on a sandy bench above the dry streambed, and let Mary explore while Gary and I set up the tent and cooked dinner.
About 9 p.m., it was just getting to be full dark. The night was warm, the stars were out, and I had walked a little ways from the tent for a final pit stop before crawling into the tent. So I was crouched there, hidden by the darkness rather than by vegetation (of which there was hardly any), when I hea
rd—to my horror—the sound of a vehicle approaching. I quickly zipped up and hurried back to the tent, where we all froze in place as we saw headlights winding down the dirt road into the canyon. We knew that the pickup truck that eventually came into view couldn’t go much farther—the road was eroded to the point of being impassable just beyond our campsite. The truck went past us a ways, and then stopped. We looked, we listened. But without using our headlamps or getting closer, we couldn’t tell what was happening. We whispered back and forth our fears: Could this be a “coyote,” a smuggler of human beings, come to pick up the undocumented immigrants who might, at this moment, be slipping through the dusk toward the canyon? Could it be a drug smuggler, waiting for another vehicle or even a plane to drop off a load of pot or cocaine from south of the border? Or mightn’t it be a local yahoo, looking for a private spot to get drunk, get stoned, or get laid? Whoever he was, he showed no signs of leaving, or of approaching us, either. In the end, we all got in the tent and eventually fell asleep, after Mary wrote this journal entry:
Day 4: Today my dad got water from the Shriners and we walked through more burned area and we saw a rusted old car that had rolled off the road. We also saw the Lucky Five cache. We then went down in Chariot Canyon and found a great site, but then a white truck came up. We don’t know who he is. He’s parked by a big hole in the road. He might even be a ‘coyote.’ I’m kind of scared.