🥾 The Cactus Eaters by Dan White | Adventure Analysis & Pacific Crest Trail Challenges

0:00Okay. Let's unpack this. Imagine for a second that you were standing at the edge of a desert. The sun is already beating down. The air feels like the inside of a convection oven. And you have a backpack strapped to your spine that weighs, I don't know, roughly the same as a small microwave. Right. And standing next to you is your significant other who is already looking at you with this mixture of skepticism and mild nausea. Yeah, exactly. And just to raise the stakes a little bit, you have absolutely no idea what you were doing. None. None whatsoever. Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are strapping on our boots, or I guess maybe our running shoes depending on which philosophy you subscribe to. And we are trekking into the wild with a book called The Cactus Eaters by Dan White. This is such a fascinating book because it is so not your typical survival manual. It's a memoir, you know, but it reads like a tragic comedy. It really does. It's the story of a young, completely inexperienced couple, Dan and Allison, who attempt to hike

1:02the Pacific Crest Trail or the PCT. All the way from Mexico to Canada or at least that's the plan. That's the plan. We are going to dive deep into just the first section of their journey today. And frankly, it's a master class in what not to do. It's not a nature walk. It's this story about hubris relationship dynamics. Oh, the relationship dynamic. Disastrous preparation. And this bizarre, almost cult-like subculture of long distance hiking. It really is. And our mission for this deep dive is to look beyond just the narrative of, you know, do they make it or not? We really want to explore the psychological drive to manufacture hardship in our modern world. That's the perfect way to put it, manufacture hardship. Why don't we do this to ourselves? Why leave a comfortable apartment with climate control and a refrigerator full of food to go eat dehydrated beans in the dirt? Exactly. Why invite misery? That is the big question. We're also going to analyze the specific history and geography of that Southern California section of the PCT, the Mojave, the Teyachophys,

2:03because the land itself is such a huge character in this story. It absolutely is. And of course, we have to talk about the cast of trail characters they meet. The trail family. The trail family. It's a fascinating sociological experiment. You're thrown together with people you would never, ever meet in your real life. And you're bound only by this one single fact. You're all walking north, right? And it creates this intense, pressurized social environment that brings out the very best and, well, the absolute worst in people. Oh, definitely the worst. Yeah. So let's jump right in. The source material we have covers what they call the break in period, the first 100 plus miles. And honestly, looking at Dan's life right before the trail, you can totally see why he wanted to escape. He was working at a small town newspaper in Torrenton, Connecticut. A place he affectionately or not so affectionately refers to as devil's island. Yes, that's stuck with me. He had this old coworker who would just sort of whisper to him, this newspaper is devil's island. No one escapes. It sounds absolutely soul crushing.

3:04Completely. It does. And soul crushing is the right term because it wasn't just that the work was hard. It was that it was absurd. I mean, Dan paints this picture of a workplace that is just steep in mediocrity into K. He mentions a pair of shoes left under a desk for three years, just gathering dust as if the person who owned them just evaporated. It's those little details, the sort of Kafka-esque details that just get you. Exactly. And the incompetence, he talks about the bizarre misspellings in the paper. There was one headline about a tragic house fire, right? Yeah. But the paper reported that two family poets died in the blaze instead of pets. Instead of pets. Two family poets died in the blaze. It turns a tragedy into this weirdly specific, almost literary disaster. It's dark, comedy gold. It really is. And it just highlights the futility that he was feeling. He's a writer, right? He cares about words. And he's working in a place where words are treated like, well, like garbage. But the detail that I think really truly sells his desperation, it involves the pencil. All the total quality program. Yes, please. Let's unpack the pencils.

4:08Okay. So the publisher in their infinite wisdom tries to boost morale. They institute this corporate total quality program, which is already a huge red flag. Always. And they hand out these custom pencils for the staff that are supposed to say striving for total quality. A noble, if corporate goal. Sure. But due to a printing error, a type of one the pencils, they actually say striving for total quality, striving, not striving, striving. No, for anyone who hasn't brushed up on their medieval theology lately, what does striving actually mean? It's an archaic religious term. To strive means to hear a confession or to impose penance on a center. It's all about purging your sins through suffering or confession. That is a Freudian slip of truly epic proportions. It's not a typo. It's a prophecy. It's incredibly symbolic. And Dan took it to heart. He felt like he needed to strive. He felt sinful in a way because he was wasting his life. He was in his late 20s living this soft, comfortable life. And he felt untested.

5:09And this brings us right to the core psychological engine of the book, which I think is something that resonates with a lot of people. The dad complex. This is huge. I mean, this is everything. Dan admits he feels soft compared to his dad. And when you look at his father's backstory, you can completely see why the comparison is just brutal. Dan grew up in this comfortable suburban A-frame house in California. He admits he was pale and untested. A product of comfort. Right. Now contrast that with his father. His dad grew up poor, but truly poor on the lower east side of Manhattan. We're talking about extreme grinding poverty. Dan's grandfather's dad's dad died of a tooth infection. A tooth infection. A tooth infection because they couldn't afford antibiotics. Wow. That just puts everything in perspective immediately. Today, that's what a trip to the dentist and a $10 prescription. Back then, it was a death sentence. It was. And then his mother, Dan's grandmother, ended up in a mental hospital. So Dan's dad was basically a ward of the state, fought in the army, and then eventually clawed

6:12his way up to become a successful businessman. He was what we might call a finished man. A finished man. I like that term. What does it imply? What does that mean to you? It implies that he had been through the fire and he came out forged like steel. He had form. He had substance. He was built by hardship. Dan by contrast felt like a capitulating blob. A capitulating blob. What a phrase. He calls himself a man boy. He looked at his father's very real life or death struggles and felt that because he hadn't suffered, he wasn't really a man yet. So the PCT wasn't just a hike. It was a quest. It was an attempt to purchase that struggle that he missed out on to manufacture the hardship so he could finally, you know, feel like he could measure up to his dad. It's a classic right of passage attempt. A self-imposed one. He wanted to use the wilderness as a kind of machine to transform himself from a boy into a hero. But as we see almost immediately, the universe has a pretty wicked sense of humor about these grand ambitions. It really, really does. Let's talk about the send-off. They have a farewell party. And because

7:16their friends clearly have a dark sense of humor, they nickname it the Dan and Allison Donner party. ominous. Just a bit. Celebrating a hike that goes near the location where the actual Donner party resorted to cannibalism is. Well, it sets the tone perfectly, doesn't it? Dark humor and impending disaster. Exactly. And then literally days before they are supposed to leave, Allison gets taken out by a blue crab. The infamous blue crab incident. They're in Redondo Beach having one last nice seafood meal before they go suffer for months. Dan is fine. But Allison needs a crab as Dan speculates might have been diseased or something. And she gets just devastating food poisoning. Horrible. I mean, violently ill. And this is so crucial because they are already late, right? Most PCT hikers start in, what, April? It's June. They are drastically behind schedule. Starting the PCT in June is, it's not just late. It's flirting with disaster. You have a very, very narrow window to hike 2600 miles. You have to start early enough to avoid the worst of the desert

8:18heat. Right. But you have to finish fast enough to beat the first snows in the cascades in Washington. If you start in June, you are basically racing the calendar every single day. There's no room for error. So the pressure is just immense from the get go. But Allison is physically wrecked before they even take step one. She's vomiting. She's weak. She can't keep anything down. But they pile into the car with Dan's parents and drive to the trail anyway because they feel like they absolutely can't wait another day. But they don't go to the Mexican border, which was the whole plan. No, because of the extreme heat and their late start, a ranger in a town called Wrightwood, basically as Dan puts it, looks at them with his board skepticism. We see an awful lot of those. I think that was the quote. Yeah, exactly. He sees these bright eyed dreamers all the time. He tells them to start further north to avoid the worst of the immediate heat. So they skip the first 454 miles. Oh, man. Imagine the blow to the ego right there. You plan this heroic end-to-end cross-country track. You tell everyone you're walking from Mexico to Canada and on day one,

9:19you're already skipping the first 450 miles. It knows it, Dan. He immediately feels like a fraud. And when they finally get to their new starting point at Aguadolche, this place called Vasquez Rocks, which is a famous movie location, by the way, Star Trek, all that stuff. It is. But for them, it's where reality hits them like a ton of bricks. Allison is still sick. She's literally vomiting in the bushes while Dan's parents are looking on, probably thinking this is the single worst idea our son has ever had. And this is what leads us to their first encounter with a trail angel. A guy named Mark the Postman. Mark is a legend in this story. He's one of these trail angels, who are these incredible volunteers who just help hikers out of the goodness of their hearts. Mark takes one look at them. Allison's sick, damn looking terrified, and he basically rescues them. Takes them to his grandmother's house. Right. But the real intervention, the truly crucial moment happens in their motel room before that. The scene Dan calls the outpile. This is a scene every

10:20backpacker knows, but this is taken to an absurd extreme. Mark looks at their packs, which are just monstrously heavy, and he forces them to dump all the gear they don't need. And the list of things they brought is hilarious. It's so revealing. It just shows how completely delusional Dan was about what this trip was actually going to be. Okay, hit me with the list. What's on the outpile? Okay, first up, a three pound German lantern made of brass. A three pound lantern. Why for what? What was the thinking there? Presumably for ambiance. Yeah. To read by candlelight. It's heavy, it's useless. It's insane. Okay, what else? He brought heavy hardback books, including a massive John McPhee anthology. Because nothing says lightweight travel like a thousand page anthology. I mean, a book is one of the heaviest things you can carry ounce for ounce. But the piece of resistance, the absolute crown jewel of the outpile is the kite. The kite. I love the kite. A collapsible kite with six foot long tassels. Dan brought it because he thought it would be fun. He had this romantic cinematic image of them frallicking in some high altitude meadow, flying a kite

11:24in the wind. And Mark just looks at it and throws it on the floor. He has to. He's trying to introduce them to the brutal, unforgiving reality of gravity. Every single ounce you carry is misery. You cannot fly a kite when you were fighting for your physical survival. The outpile is the death of their romantic fantasy and the birth of their physical reality. So they shed the weight, they shed the lantern and the kite. And while they're staying with Mark recovering, they meet their foil, the anti-dan. A guy they call Todd the Sasquatch. Todd is fantastic. He enters the story like a force of nature. He's huge. He's muscular. He's just crackling with energy. He has size 13 feet hence the nickname. And crucially, he has already hiked the 454 miles that Dan and Allison skipped. So he immediately has moral high ground and the physical high ground. He's the real deal. And he's doing it all in sneakers, not hiking boots. Which introduces us to this whole other world, this jardi Nazi philosophy. Can you unpack that term? It sounds pretty intense. It is. It refers to the followers of a guy named Ray Jardine. He wrote the PCT hikers handbook,

12:28which is basically the Bible of ultra light hiking. Okay. The core philosophy is boosts are bad because they're heavy and cause blisters. Heavy packs are death. You should show your own gear to make it lighter. Use a tarp instead of a tent. You eat corn pasta for rocket fuel. It's a whole system. And Todd is the living embodiment of this philosophy. He sleeps in what is essentially a glorified trash bag. A bivy sack. Yeah. But to Dan who is carrying a massive heavy camera and clunky leather boots, Todd is terrifying. He's a different species. And Todd looks at Dan's gear and just asks him point blank, how far do you really think you're going to get? Oof. That question just has to hunt Dan. It triggers every single one of his insecurities about being a soft suburban kid who skipped the first section. It absolutely does. It highlights this weird class system of the trail. You have the Jardine Nazis who are efficient, athletic and frankly a little bit smug about it. And then you have the unprepared dreamers like Dan and Allison. And to make it worse, Todd has this girlfriend, sweet Elaine.

13:33Sweet Elaine who meets him at every trailhead with fresh baked cookies and little handwritten notes saying you're special, which just has to drive Dan crazy with jealousy. He's about to go eat mummified salami and Todd is getting cookies and adoration. It creates this dynamic where Dan feels like he has to prove himself not just who is dead father's memory, but to this random hypercompetent guy named Todd. Dan and Allison eventually get a trail name from another character who will get to later. But for a while, they start calling themselves the lowest and Clark expedition. It's very self-deprecating. They're acknowledging they are reporters like Lois Lane, but also trying to imply their explorers like Lewis and Clark. It's a defense mechanism, really. If you make the joke about yourself first, the Jardin Nazis can't hurt you as much. Right. So they finally start hiking. They leave the comfort of Mark's grandma's house and they hit the trail for real. And almost immediately the romance just evaporates. Oh, instantly. The source material describes the landscape not as an Eden, but as the snakebitten valley.

14:35The physical toll is instantaneous and it is grim. They describe their salami turning into a mummified dog penis in the heat. That image is burned into my brain forever. It's so visceral and disgusting. And the cheese sweating pus, it's just foul. They're literally walking through a furnace. But this is where the deep dive gets really interesting historically because as they walk through this parched unforgiving landscape, they are walking over the ghosts of California's water history. You're talking about William Mall Holland. I am. They camp very near the site of the St. Francis Dam disaster. And this is critical context for their entire journey. William Mall Holland was the water baron who basically built modern Los Angeles by bringing it water by famously stealing it from the Owens Valley by stealing it. Yes, California water wars. And he built the St. Francis Dam to store that precious water. And it collapsed right catastrophically in 1928. It collapsed just before midnight, sending a wall of water 140 feet high, crashing down the canyon. It killed over 400 people. Bodies were washed all the way

15:38out to the Pacific Ocean. It completely wiped entire towns off the map. It's one of the worst civil engineering disasters in American history. And Dan and Allison are just sleeping in the wreckage of that history. Totally oblivious. Exactly. And it connects right back to that theme of manufacturing hardship versus real tragedy. Mall Holland tried to impose his will on the landscape to engineer it to control it just like Dan is trying to impose his will on the trail to change himself. And in Mall Holland's case, the landscape won. The damn broke. It's this profound reminder that nature is not a backdrop for your personal growth. It's a powerful, indifferent, and sometimes deadly force. That is a chilling parallel. And speaking of the landscape messing with your head, let's talk about the Kahoot's incident. This was one of the funniest and also scariest moments in the first leg of their trip. This is pure desert paranoia dehydration and isolation do incredibly strange things to the human brain. Dan and Allison get lost, which happens frequently. And they see two figures in the distance. And they're not hikers.

16:39They're men in dress shirts and shiny patent leather shoes just standing in the middle of the wilderness, which immediately creates this surreal David Lynch style horror movie scenario in Dan's head. He thinks they're hitman or ghosts or something. He's clutching his pepper spray. He's convinced these men are in Kahoot's. He uses that specific word Kahoot's with such conviction. He's whispering to Allison, I think they're in Kahoot's. And then the payoff is just pure comedy. The menacing truck carrying these men comes roaring up the dirt road. Yeah. And it's just an old man with his grandkids. And one of the kids is wearing a Disney crab shirt. A little mermaid crab shirt. And they just lean up the window and offer Dan a coke. It perfectly illustrates what Dan calls the solipsism of the trail. You start to think the entire world is a movie about your personal struggle that everything is a sign or an omen. But actually, it's just a nice family driving down a dirt road. Exactly. It shows how quickly civilization and sanity can strip away when you're hot and thirsty and scared. You become the terrified center of a universe that doesn't actually exist.

17:39So as they push deeper into the hike, the cast of characters expands. We meet these two figures who really represent the opposite ends of the hiking spectrum, the gingerbread man and doctor John. These two are perfect archetypes. The gingerbread man is the mentor figure. He's eccentric. He limps, but he's incredibly fast. He eats expired vegan food. He gets from dumpsters. And he pees on plants while yelling, I water the. Yes. I love this guy. He seems to be hiking on a completely different plane of reality from everyone else. He is. His entire philosophy is hardship is what it's all about. He embraces the pain. Yeah. She writes these long beautiful love letters that he never sends. He hates the dairy industry. It's but he's competent. He's a true woodsman. He guides Dan and Allison. He teaches them things. He's the one who give them their trail name, Lois and Clark. He represents the wild joy and freedom that Dan is secretly looking for. And then there is Dr. John. The burden. Dr. John is the shadow side of the trail experience. He has a PhD in mathematics. He's depressive. He's obsessive. The dynastine with Dr. John

18:43is just excruciating to read. They're all trying to eat this huge breakfast biscuits and gravy. This moment of pure joy. And he starts calmly describing the color of his urine. Strawberry chiffon, he says. It's so gross, but it's also medically alarming. If your urine is strawberry chiffon colored, you're likely suffering from severe dehydration or even rabdomyolicis, which is when your muscle tissue literally starts to break down and poison your kidneys. And he recites this poem, he wrote. My feet, my feet, my feet do not exist. He is completely dissociating from his body just to survive the pain. But the real tension with Dr. John isn't just that he's odd. It's social. Dan becomes intensely almost pathologically afraid of hiking with him because Dr. John is a slow walker. This was such a fascinating social dynamic to me. You're in this vast wilderness, right? Millions of acres of empty space. And yet Dan feels completely claustrophobic because he can't escape this one guy who happens to hike at the same pace. It's like being stuck in an elevator with someone you don't like, but the elevator is a thousand miles

19:46long. That's a perfect analogy. It's the trail family phenomenon. You don't choose your family. On the trail, you're stuck with whoever moves at your speed. And Dan's fear of being lumped in with the slow walker's losers, essentially in his mind, drives him to do something incredibly rash and dangerous. And this brings us to the crisis point of this whole section. The moment he calls Operation Water Gump. This is the moment where the comedy really just stops and the book becomes a psychological thriller. They are in the town of Tehachapi. They plan to leave it 4am specifically to escape Dr. John. And they have a 22 mile stretch ahead of them with no water sources at all. A dry stretch. So they're carrying gallons of water. It's incredibly heavy. 20 plus pounds of just water and damn panics. He's tired of the weight. He's tired of being slow. He is desperate to outrun Dr. John. So in this moment of utter madness driven by ego and fear, he secretly pours out about 40% of their total water supply. Behind Allison's back. That's the key. Behind her back. He betrays the team. It's a pure act of ego. He thinks,

20:50I'll make us lighter. We'll go faster and she'll never know. But he miscalculates everything. The heat is worse than he thought. Allison, not knowing they're on rations, drinks her water more freely than he expected. So now he's hiking in a panic. Terrified. They are going to die of thirst. But he can't tell her what he did because she'll, you know, justifiably kill them. He has to pretend he still has water while he's secretly rationing his last few sips. It's an absolute pressure cooker. Yeah. And that pressure that desperation leads directly to the prickly pair incident. Oh, man. This is the scene that had me physically wincing while I was reading. Desperation makes you so stupid. They're almost completely out of water. Allison mentions just offhandedly that she read somewhere that you can get water from a cactus. And Dan, in his delusional, I'm a survivalist state of mine. Seize a prickly pair of cactus and just bites it. He hacks a lowbaw for his knife and just chomps right down without peeling it without removing the spines. And not just the big spines you can see, but the glotchids. Glotchids. What are those? They're the real menace. They're these tiny

21:52hair-like spines that are almost invisible. They cover the surface of the cactus plot. They detach by the hundreds at the slightest touch and they burrow into soft tissue. Oh, no. And they have microscopic barbs so they don't come out easily. So suddenly his tongue, his gums, his lips are full of hundreds and hundreds of invisible agonizing needles. And the imagery just completely shifts. Allison, who Dan has sort of viewed as the soft one, the one he has to protect, she suddenly becomes the surgeon. She has to use her tweezers and a little compact beauty mirror to painstakingly pick the spines out of his tongue while he's riding in the dirt. It's a total reversal of their roles. The man boy who wanted to be a hero is now just a crying child and the girlfriend he underestimated is the one saving his life. It's like the biblical expulsion from the garden. Nature isn't this benevolent mother, it's armed. And then the ultimate humiliation, they make it to the spring, golden oak spring, barely alive. And who's sitting there waiting for them? Dr. John. Dr. John. He caught up anyway.

22:55All that drama, the water dumping, the cactus eating, it was all for nothing. The slow walker beat them there. Wow. And he delivers this final stinging line. He looks at Dan, pathetic and covered in dust and says, I wonder if you dropped an orange peel. It takes 100 years to biodegrade. Oh, just kick a man while he's down. He's accusing him of littering after he almost died. It's the ultimate burn. And it forces Dan to realize that his frantic efforts to be hardcore are actually just making him incompetent and dangerous. He tried to gain the system by dumping water and he almost killed them. Dr. John just plotted along patiently and made it just fine. No, you mentioned earlier that this whole need to manufacture hardship, this fear of being soft. It has historical roots. It's not just Dan. It's actually baked into the trail's origins. Oh, absolutely. When you look at the history of the PCT, you have to talk about a man named Clinton Churchill Clark. He's known as the father of the PCT. And he sounds like quite a character from what I read. He was. He was wealthy. He lived in a hotel in Pasadena.

23:57And he never really backpacked much himself, which is key. But in the 1930s, he was terrified that American youth were becoming soft. Soft from what? This was before television, before the internet. Radios and movies. He thought sitting in soft seats watching movies and listening to the radio was destroying the moral fiber of the nation. He was worried about creating a generation of so-bellied youth. So he literally invented the trail as a kind of national toughening up exercise? That's exactly it. He wanted a gymnasium of the wild to forge stronger citizens. Oh. He had all these weird, specific rules like you should never sit down when you rest because you lose your pet. You seize your pet. And you should keep a raisin under your tongue at all times to quench your thirst. That sounds like torture, not hiking, a single raisin. For how long? He was trying to engineer a tougher generation. But that's the DNA of the trail. It was literally born out of a fear of modernity, a fear of comfort. And that is the exact same fear that is driving Dan White in 2004. He's afraid that his office job and his comfortable life have made him soft.

25:02He is Clinton Churchill Clark's target audience just 70 years later. And then there's the other founder, Warren Rogers. And his story is more tragic. He had polio as a child, so one leg was shorter than the other. His trail name was one and a half step. He was the one who did the actual work, the mapping, the hiking. He has the beats on the ground completely. And he basically bankrupts himself for his dedication to the trail. He dies just before the final golden spike is driven in 1993 to complete it. His story shows that the trail demands sacrifice. It demanded Rogers' life and fortune in a way just like it's now demanding Dan sanity in his relationship. So as we wrap up this deep dive into just the first 100 or so miles, we leave Dan and Allison in what the book calls a buffer zone. They've survived the desert, but just barely. And they're heading toward the high Sierra, but the relationship is badly damaged. Allison no longer trusts Dan. And how could she? He lied to her, he dumped their water, he ate a cactus impulsively. He has proven himself to be a loose cannon. The trust is gone.

26:03And Dan feels betrayed by the wilderness. He came out here thinking it would be this grand spiritual awakening, but it was just pain and humiliation and thirst. There's this really telling moment where Dan throws a dovebar, his last luxury item, off a cliff, as a kind of desperate sacrifice to the pagan spirits of the trail. He's completely lost and he's trying to bargain with the wild. But then they turn a corner and they see the mountains for the first time. The high Sierra, John Muir's range of light, and they see the sunset, these cinnamon and sulfur clouds. And despite the cactus needle still festering in his tongue, despite the lies and the fear, there is that glimmer of something else, that beauty. The gingerbread man told him, hopefully there's something really, truly golden that comes out of it. And that's the hook, isn't it? That's what keeps them walking, that little glimmer of gold. It is. And it raises that final provocative question for all of us. In a world where we can buy comfort, where we can order food to our door and never be cold or hungry, what is the value of voluntarily walking into a cactus?

27:06Yeah. Is the man boy becoming a man, or is he just becoming a more scarred, more traumatized version of himself? That is the question we'll leave you with. If you want to know if they make it to Canada or if they kill each other first, you'll have to read the cactus eaters. It is a wild, wild ride. An absolute must-read for anyone who loves or maybe fears the great outdoors. Thanks for joining us on The Deep Dive. We'll see you on the next trail. Stay hydrated, everyone, and seriously watch out for the glotchets.