Skywalker--Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail Read Online Free PDF Page B

thrashing around, but never seen one,” he answered. “They like to hang out on big rocks and spring out for the clean kill.”
    “That doesn’t scare you?” would have been the logical question. But nobody asked it. It wasn’t that type crowd.
    Somebody did defensively ask, “What do you recommend doing if you see one?”
    “You know in India and countries that have lots of big cat attacks,” he answered, “some of the rural people wear hats with bills on both sides because the cats like to attack the back of your neck. If your hat has a bill on both sides, cougars don’t know where to attack.” That entertaining response brought murmurs of laughter as we all looked at each other in amazement.
    “But, honestly,” he reasoned when the laughter died down. “Is a cougar really gonna’ look at something moving six-feet of the ground with a light shining off the top of its head and think, ‘There goes my next meal’?”
    “I don’t think so,” he added in a reassuring tone. I’ll have to hand it to him. The reason we were all at the Kickoff was to hear what it’s really like out there, not some hedged remarks in cover-your-ass language.
    The seminar ended when a man who looked to be pushing seventy sincerely asked, “I’ve never tried a thru-hike. How do you get your trail name?”
    “What’s your real name?”
    “Bob Atkinson,” the man responded.
    “Well, Blow-Job Bob hasn’t been taken yet,” he replied logically. The seminar broke up in stitches, and we all filed out.

     
    A well-known trail angel named Meadow Mary (married to the even better-known hiker, Billy Goat) had a booth set up to give massages to hikers hoping to iron out any kinks before heading off into the desert. All the predictably idiotic jokes aside, the massages were anything but kinky. Rather, hikers kept emerging from there looking like they had gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson.
    The next morning the former hikers served us yet another fabulous breakfast, while a volunteer went around passing out a very critical piece of paper to each hiker—containing the most up-to-date information available about the water sources in the desert. Then, I joined the northward-bound masses fanning out into the desert.

Chapter 6
    The Desert
     
    The desert is atonal, cruel, clear, neither romantic nor classical. Like death? Perhaps. And that is why life nowhere appears so brave, so bright, so full of miracle as in the desert.
    Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
     
    T he summer of 1942 was the very darkest hour of the Second World War. The British, despite their vast experience in desert warfare, had been shocked when the Germans sacked their fortress at Tobruk in the Sahara Desert. Suddenly, the United States had been thrust into desert warfare against the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel. Despite the vast desert regions in our own homeland, the United States was utterly lacking in desert warfare experience.
    One of the first things the U.S. military did was hire Edward Adolph, a professor at the University of Rochester, to commission a study on how much water soldiers required in desert warfare. Adolph commenced a series of studies on water deprivation in which he variously locked people in jeeps all day in the glaring sun, marched them in the day, at night, etc. The results were not encouraging.
    “We find that a man who stops drinking water sweats about as fast as one who continues to drink,” Adolph found. Since the human brain is about 75% water, we can keep on sweating without drinking water. However, after a few hours a person begins to lose his or her mental faculties.
    “All the evidence known at present shows that a man cannot do without water, nor be trained to do with less water.”
    Adolph’s research was groundbreaking at the time of World War II, and to this day remains the gold standard on human water requirements.

     
    Every year about two hundred people die in our national parks. They drown, they fall, have heart