A small crowd of people surrounded the bulletin board at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.
There’s usually a small crowd, to be fair. Aside from a couple of seminars every day, there’s not much else on the agenda. It’s a relaxing and uneventful 10 days. The sunsets are beautiful.
The RTR is a gathering of thousands of vehicle-dwellers. It’s been happening every January in Quartzsite, AZ for nearly a decade. Most live in vans, but a wide spectrum is represented, from Priuses to Class A RVs.
I was making my usual rounds, checking for useful items in the free pile and reading through index cards tacked to plywood.
There was a note from a guy named Simeon looking for a hiking partner. It turns out he was standing next to me as I was reading it. I assumed he was in his early 60s. We were both interested in hiking up the tallest nearby hill.
We made a plan to meet at 8 AM the next morning, and he said: “Invite anyone you want — if they’re scared that they can’t make it to the top, tell them I’m 78 and I’m doing it!”
Nobody else came. It was about a two-mile walk from our campsite in Scaddan Wash to the base of Scaddan Mountain, and the summit was a steep, rocky, 1300-foot climb from there.
Simeon and I headed out across the cactus-filled wasteland together.
He quickly opened up about his life. He’d grown up in Macedonia as a child chess prodigy with a one-in-a-million IQ, immigrating to North America at age 24.
We discussed his favorite social philosophy: “people” and “humans” are distinct categories, and they are differentiated by their adherence to the enlightened philosophy of “live and let live.”
He and his wife live and travel in a converted Sprinter van. They’re vegans, and were eating everything raw because they had no means of cooking food. They always cruise at 48 MPH, because he ran a series of tests and determined that was the optimum speed for fuel economy. They get 38 MPG.
We passed by tall and iconic saguaro cacti; colorful and quaint barrel cacti; spiny, stick-looking cacti that I don’t know the name of.
We got to the base of the mountain and chose a route. Simeon was in great shape, and climbed about as fast as I did, despite being 47 years my senior.
As we ascended, we weaved through another type of cactus I haven’t mentioned yet — the most malevolent species of cactus I’ve ever encountered.
Its name is “jumping cholla”. Cylindropuntia fulgida.
They grow in a series of spiky, oblong nodules that are eager to cling to your flesh and break off from the plant. The spikes on these nodules have microscopic barbs that make them painful and difficult to remove.
It’s an impressively satanic cactus.
I joked: “God, can you imagine how bad it would be if someone fell onto one of these?”, raising my eyebrows and shaking my head at the thought.
We climbed about two-thirds of the way to the top without incident. As we neared the summit, the ridge got narrower and steeper.
To avoid a particularly jagged section of ridgeline, we traversed a gravelly side-slope for a short distance. The footing was precarious and the cacti were all around us.
You’ve read the title, so you can guess what happened next.
The timing couldn’t have been worse — he slipped just as he was passing between the two biggest patches of jumping cholla. Time slowed to a halt as he lost his balance and fell. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He crashed right on top of them.
Tens of clumps of the sinister cactus were stuck to his leg, arm, side, and back. They’d pierced his clothes and lodged their demon-spines in his flesh.
What happened next is a blur in my memory. He stood up, we evaluated the situation, and I grabbed two rocks, using them to pull out the big nodules. I had to rip them forcefully from his body.
It must have been excruciating, but we both knew it had to be done. He endured everything without complaining.
He sat down and I continued to work on him. We were still on a fairly steep slope with loose rock, so I had to be mindful of my footing as I helped him. Clumps that I’d ripped off were falling onto my body, stabbing me through my shoes.
I saw the cap of his water bottle roll down the hill. That’s strange… then he dropped the bottle, too. I saw him begin to fold forward, eyes drooping closed. He was about to tumble down the hill — he had fainted from the shock of all the pain — but I was able to catch him in time. (Fortunately, raw vegans are not usually very heavy.)
When he woke up, he didn’t remember what had happened, but I had him recline so that he wouldn’t go anywhere if he passed out again.
I didn’t know why he’d fainted, and I was full of adrenaline, barely holding myself together. Was he having a heart attack? A stroke? Did I need to run down, get service, and call a helicopter to save him, leaving him stranded on the mountain as a human pincushion? Was he going to die in front of my eyes?
He drank some water and slowly regained his stability. Fortunately, he wasn’t having any medical emergency other than shock and mild dehydration.
When I’d yanked all the cholla nodules off of him, we exposed his skin, pinching and plucking out the hundred individual spines that were still embedded, leaving pinpricks of blood.
As soon as it was possible, we scrambled back to the top of the ridge and collapsed on a flat, safe spot. This was much better than being on the exposed slope. We ate snacks and caught our breath, agreeing to ditch the summit attempt, but my stomach was still in knots about getting back down. I was nervous that he might fall again.
He assured me that I didn’t need to worry about him.
Fortunately, he was right.
We took our time and carefully picked our way down the mountain. My anxiety level decreased proportionally to our altitude. He slipped a few more times on the loose surface, but never near a cactus, and neither of us got hurt.
Back on level ground, we walked the two miles home and he told me the entire plot of a movie where a famous artist was thought to be dead and everybody was confused. It was a good distraction. He actually seemed to be in high spirits.
I could not have been more relieved to arrive back in camp. I said goodbye and retreated to my bus feeling completely drained.
I joined Simeon and his wife for a raw vegan lunch. The next day, they drove 48 MPH all the way to Yuma.
