How do I know there's no heaven? Because anything that seems intrinsically good can still be turned into something awful by repeating it interminably until you're beaten into submission with it.

Love is grand, isn't it? The difference in overall quality of life between a life in which you occasionally have a girl's legs folded across your lap and a life in which you don't is vast. However, would you want to sit there for seven hours with them on your lap? You get one bathroom break, a small snack, and a Capri Sun. You can only shift minutely in your seat. Otherwise, you're frozen in that position with the pressure points formed by her thighs and calves slowly deforming your flesh and grinding tendons against bone. Grand, right?

My younger brother and I discovered that we could ruin the most beautiful thing in the world simply by overdosing on it.

And while some people won't agree with my characterization of Robotussin as “the most beautiful thing in the world”, I ...

I kid ye. I figured your imaginations would prey on the verb “overdose”.

Me and my bro [sic] were staying at a small rental home in the southern California desert, landscaped with the climbable boulders and Dr. Seuss-like joshua trees of the curiously named Joshua Tree National Park. We had each had our tenures renting this cabin (and living there alone), but this was the first time we had ever stayed at the cabin together.

On our first night, we were both extremely disheveled by the other's presence. It was so absurd to us to be sharing the cabin with someone else, let alone someone so close as a brother.

This cabin (which would just be called a 'house' if it were on any suburban block, but I will generally defer to calling it a 'cabin' because it better conveys its remote nature) sits at the end of a long dirt road, at the back boundary line of human settlement for this pioneer-type town, curiously named Pioneertown, and its front door opens out onto 20 or so square miles of unclaimed territory.

The desert vegetation, which to the uninitiated will seem like something out of God's psychedelic artistic palette (and on the 9th day, God dropped acid and recorded Sgt. Pepper), is sparsely laid out, due to the paucity of moisture. This makes for amazing, endlessly interactive terrain, repeating the same themes of {boulders, rocks, cactii, joshua trees, prickly bushes, sand, dirt, hill, mountain, valley} in a labyrinthine array. This bevy of obstacles to circumvent and props to utilize becomes a never-ending playground to the indefatigable.

Well, guess what. All y'all are defatigable.

That's right, America, and all you other meaningless people who exist: You're all defatigable. I don't know if that's really a word, but I figured I'd just jettison the “in” prefix and get the opposite meaning. Still, given that the meaning would be “giving in to fatigue”, you'd think it would just be “fatigable”, pronounced “fatigue-able”. Jesus, this is going nowhere.

Staying at the cabin is taking a deep dip in the waters of isolation and irrelevance. You are out of phone range. There is no television, internet, or newspaper funneling in. If you had a fire, you'd better keep it under control by yourself for the hour it would take before authorities would be able to arrive. You have no job. You have no boss. You have no friends. You have no family. You have no lover. You have no frame of reference. You have no source of external judgment. You have no economy save the trips to the grocery store to exchange more food for another swipe of your card. You have no attachment to anything but the here and now.

When you wake, when you sleep, when you cook, eat, drink, clean, exercise, read, relax, smoke, pleasure yourself, nap, hike, and sing is all up to your spur of the moment caprice. We humans are not used to this much autonomy. Humans don't live alone, in general. I don't mean humans don't dwell alone. Multitudes do, but they still SEE other humans on a daily basis. To spend several consecutive days in a desert with absolutely no contact with or information from any other sense of “outside world”, the space of your world greatly compresses into nothing but your immediate surroundings.

Shortly after I drove up to meet him at the cabin, my brother and I spent a few minutes digesting the surreal nature of being together at the cabin and then we were forced to commiserate on all the fun/terror/novelty there is to living alone at the cabin. It was so satisfying to both of us to finally have someone else to whom we could even fathom “relating” to on this topic.

Let's talk for a bit about “commiseration”: the joy of empathizing. It can take on so many forms, from the 'misery loves company' solace of a negro spiritual to the spiritual euphoria of a simultaneous orgasm. In the context of cabin life, there is so much life, love, fear, and void bombarding your system, that your cup truly spilleth over. During my stay, I spilled into music. During my brother's, he wrote prose. Still, your own apprehension of how beautiful the scenery is seems inadequate. You long for a way of teleporting in friends, family, or lovers so that you can collectively bask in the bliss.

Does the presence of another human amplify the aesthetic experience? Is it some effect of corroborating the same conclusion: “this rocks”?

In general, it seems to be that humans are not overly possessive of beauty. That may seem ripe for counterexamples, such as overprotective husbands, owners of priceless works of art, or Green Day fans who got pissed when they became famous. However, this is being possessive of things, not of the beauty contained within. An overprotective husband wants to possess his wife, his “thing” (oh, how I love objectifying women), all to himself. Nevertheless, he doesn't want to be the only one who perceives her beauty. He wants everyone to admire her beauty; that is why possessing her as a thing seems so valuable to him. Similarly, the art owner wants his friends and visitors to revel with him in how beautiful his art collection is; that's how he derives his elevated self-esteem. Fans of obscure, unknown bands who begrudge those bands if they later go on to achieve some fame are similarly not trying to begrudge other people the satisfaction of relishing the beauty of the music. In fact, these guys would love to talk your ear off for hours about good it is. However, they don't like the idea of the music having mass appeal because they enjoyed their status better as keen prospectors, ahead of the curve. The beauty of the music is not lost by sharing it with a mainstream audience, but the social implications of being a fan of that music have changed.

In a similar way, having now shared the cabin together, my brother and I have given each other a tremendous mixed blessing: on the upside, for the rest of our lives we will always be able to commiserate with each other on how sublime the cabin life was | on the downside, we have taken an experience that was once so uniquely selfish and personalized and now diluted its distinction by blending it into a shared memory.

I was going to use a metaphor involving a beautiful virgin princess who is only allowed to have sex with one person in her life and chooses you, only later you find out she's also had sex with your brother. However, I'll go with a more sporting/adventure based metaphor: imagine you are the first Ninja Warrior grand champion. (Ninja Warrior is an obstacle course based game show that is incredibly difficult to complete.) In its first twenty or so tournaments, there was only ever one person who finished the whole thing. People trained 24/7 in between tournaments and took this gravely seriously. Still, only one man had the claim to fame of winning it all. Then another man won sometime several years later. Now the accomplishment was diluted for both men, because their mark was something “many” could conceivably experience.

I think when I was at the cabin by myself, I suffered from “Renter's Delusion”: the notion that this property was mine (and that I had somehow created it). Although my brother had already seen pictures of the cabin from my stay, I'm sure he had a similarly novel experience of driving alone up to its lonely driveway, hunting for the key hidden outside, and initially exploring the empty domicile on the fringe of civilized humanity which he would now call “home”.

When you stay in the house alone, you don't think of yourself as a renter involved in something temporary. Diametrically, you actually start to accept that this plot of earth is specifically reserved for you. Because there's no human contact, there's no sense of sharing the neighborhood. The 20 square miles of unclaimed territory out your front door make you just feel like you're living some indefinite life of purgatory:

I often expected to see the sandworms from 'Beetlejuice' start surfacing if I strayed from my house too far.

Now that my brother and I have stayed at the cabin together and watched our groceries, clothing, cannabis, and laptops all intermingle, the cabin will feel less like our individually apportioned slice of heaven and more like a lovely hostel somewhere in Thailand where many sojourners revel in the fortuitous surroundings.

Luckily for me and my bro, we are so like-minded that the image of the cabin we'll each retain in our minds will still be relatively untainted by the other's contributions. In fact, the closely shaped overlap of our experiences may allow subtler aspects to be revealed, just as a total eclipse allows the more delicate corona to come into view.

I don't have any idea what subtler aspects I could possibly be referring to, but I couldn't resist making such a pretentious simile.

The first couple days we spent at the cabin felt completely right. We continued to operate on our individual impulses, but they frequently coincided when it came time to make coffee, get creative, read, smoke a bowl, or go to town and do some work. However, being around each other relieved us of the self-imposed guilt we experienced staying at the cabin separately, staunchly resolved to turn our hermetic time in the cabin into an optimally efficient harvest of artistic fruits.

Around each other, we indulged in more self-justifying merriment like playing HORSE, using the bed of a pickup truck as a basket, or writing a crass first-person story that essentially allowed us to speak in our own lazy, undisguised literary voice.

All the while, there were two weed-infused cupcakes sitting in the refrigerator, procured from one of my friends and then infused with the poetic significance of being slated to be eaten sometime within days of my brother's birthday.

(The night I arrived was his birthday, but we didn't want to eat drugs at midnight. Go figure.)

We surmised that the most appropriate use of the budcakes would be to eat them and then enjoy our natural surroundings. Similarly, we anticipated taking a sizeable hike at some point in the three or so days we had together. So in an ever-organic fashion, a plan was hatched to have an “epic” hike on Thursday, catered by budcakes.

There are no hiking trails, to my knowledge, within close proximity to the cabin, nor did we particularly want one. Our idea for the hike was simply to walk in the direction of the unclaimed territory, generally heading west towards the 8000 ft. snowy peak known as Big Bear. The night before the hike, I surveyed Google's terrain maps of the area to try to devise a feasible route. I ended up without a conclusive plan, due to the fact that some of the distance scales on Google's maps didn't match the known distance of certain landmark roads (which I had previously measured on my odometer). A straight road I had driven for almost 4 miles appeared to be only about 2 miles on the map. This made me distrust any hiking plan I would make for fear that the actual distance would be twice the apparent distance on the map.

Mostly, that paragraph is a disclaimer due to the fact that I'm about to describe one of the most poorly planned hikes two intelligent people have ever attempted, so I'm going to blame the inchoate nature of our plan on my disconcerting, inconclusive use of Google maps.

The other part of the blame deservedly goes to the minimalist machismo of my brother and me.

“What the fuck do you need a plan for? Here's the plan: walk somewhere. Then: walk back.”

The next part of the planning stage was departure time. The only real variable at play here was: “to leave at sunrise, or not to leave at sunrise”.

Despite agreeing that leaving at sunrise would provide an optimally enchanting, brisk, and quiescent opening stretch to our hike, we also found cogent persuasion in the counterargument: “Yeah, but wakin' up's gonna SUCK.”

As we were going to bed, we tacitly agreed we'd 'play it by ear', which is really a 99% vote against waking up for sunrise. First of all, we made no explicit mention of who would be setting an alarm, posturing as though there was ANY chance we would wake up at 5:55am naturally. Secondly, to collectively wake up when it's still going to be dark outside, you normally need multiple alarms and an emphatic authorization from the other person that whoever wakes up first is granted 'any means necessary' in forcing the other awake.

We partook in none of that and merely decided that God would wake us if He really thought the sunrise was all that.

8:30 am rolled around and my brother and I found each other stumbling around the kitchen and bathroom, not sure who had awoken first and who had heard muffled sounds in the other room and decided he no longer had an excuse to stay sleeping. We put the proper layers of solids and liquids into our bellies: first cereal, then a bagel along with coffee, then a weedcake along with coffee. Somewhere in that sequence probably should have been water and/or fruit, but we ended up feeling sufficiently awake and ready to begin a walk that we figured would start out as work and mature into delight.

As we packed up the backpack for the trip, a couple packs of trail mix and a couple oranges were thrown in for food. The only big water container we had was an empty 2-liter of Diet Dr. Pepper (don't ask me why it's diet; my brother needs to explain to you that one; he'll undoubtedly offer you that Diet Dr. P. tastes more like regular Dr. P. than do most diet parodies, as though that is yet an explanation as to why he is avoiding regular Dr. P). I filled up the 2-liter bottle to about the 2/3 mark (just underneath where the top of the label is) with the remaining spring water we had. I wanted to fill the rest of the bottle but the only options remaining were unpotable tap water and a huge container of Sparklett's water that had a funky aftertaste. I reasoned that I'd rather have 1.3 liters of good water than 2 liters of mediocre water (with .7 liters of diluted funk in it).

In addition to food and drink, several optional items made the cut: a Nerf football (not sure where/when it would get used on a hike, but how can two brothers RESIST throwing around a football if they've got one?), a Hi-Def Digital Video camera (wrapped in a protective T-shirt and then crammed into a forgotten corner of the backpack), and a weed “dugout” - a one-hitter disguised as a cigarette - (for extra weed smoking en route in case the cupcake failed to make an impression).

Forgive me for rushing to the punchline, but those three beloved items could not have been any more irrelevant to our existence by the time we reached the back end of this hike.

The hike started out swimmingly. (which I guess means it was 2/3 of a triathlon?) The steep hillsides take a lot out of you on the way up, especially because the elevation begins at 4500 ft. and the air continues to thin as the altitude goes well past a mile high. Also, the hillsides are characterized by loose dirt, so your footsteps fall softly beneath their starting point, much like a stair climber at a gym (and much like exercising there, you expend a lot of effort to get nowhere). Whenever we would reach the ridgeline of any hill or mountain, we would “fun run” down the descent. Essentially, “fun running” looks like skiing on land. You pick up almost uncontrollable downhill speed, but you can regulate it and slow it down by cutting switchbacks across the slope. Because the dirt you're running down is generally very loose, you really can dig into the hill when the terrain is right.

Our merriment continued for the first couple hours. At certain points, we tried to gauge whether the weedcakes had ever taken any effect. In even early retrospect, we realized it was pointless to have eaten them. What noticeable benefit would they add to this experience?

We were already going to be happy. We were already going to be enjoying nature. We were already going to be getting hungry and dry-mouthed from exerting ourselves in the desert. We quickly realized the inane redundancy of adding “slow release” THC to this equation.

I was keeping an eye on how quickly we were getting to the halfway point of our water supply, but I reasoned that “it's better to hydrate early than later”. (it's really great to hydrate at both points, as it turns out).

The next time we got to a stopping point, I peeled an orange to try to delay more use of the water. After several more iterations of long, exhausting climb followed by quick, barreling fun-run, we reached what could have been our potential destination.

The whole hike we were essentially angling ourselves towards the snow covered peaks that sat several ridges behind the hills in front of the cabin. Our implicit goal was to reach one of them. However, as layers of the hike unfolded, we began to realize the growing differential between ridge and valley (initially, the hills were only about 500 ft. of ascent, but by the third and fourth it was getting to be 1500 ft. of elevation gain). With the successive climbs taking an increasing toll, it looked like our view from the 5th ridge would probably spell the outermost point of our trek. It did appear that the snow capped peaks were the next ridge out, but we were fairly sure that our view from the 5th ridge would dispel any remaining heroic notions we had about getting there.

The rock formation where we stopped at the 5th ridge was spectacular. It was a village of lumbering brutes, with several channels of rocky walls that created almost a little shanty town of rocks. Within one clearing in the central chamber of the rock city, we found elements of a camp site. There appeared to be a tent-sized cave with enough dirt to put down some sleeping bags and enough rocky exterior to shield sleeping humans from the winds that would presumably pummel this rocky perch. There was also a cute little fire pit and a three person bench. The variety and spacing of rocks within this area made for an interminable obstacle course.

In short, there could not have been a more scenic, dynamic, and well-furnished destination for our hike.

Nevertheless, as we scarfed the remaining orange, we extrapolated some physical and temporal estimates of how far the next ridge was from us. From our perch, we could see the cabin in one direction and the snowy peaks in the other. We estimated that as far away as the cabin looked, the snow peaks looked to be about 60% as far away. This meant that were we to attempt to extend our hike, we would almost be doubling the length of the round trip, whereas we could stop where we were and be satisfied with having taken a four hour hike.

After about seven minutes of pro-and-con-ing, we both got on board with the “let's just walk a little further and size it up” approach. In truth, we were still a little too energetic for our own good and felt guilty accepting a hike of reasonable length.

As people so often are on vacations, we were hungry to create the type of story we could tell people about later --- tell them about, say, in the form of a really long essay that strays from the point constantly.

By the way, you know what I think was actually BETTER about “Saved by the Bell: The College Years”? These six things: 1. Bob Golic ....

We decided it was worth the extra fatigue to attempt to get all the way to the snowy peaks, so that we could proudly point to them if we were to ever entertain guests at the cabin and say, “Yup. Walked there.”

From this point on, I would say that only 8% of the next four hours was at all pleasurable. As I said before, the steepness of the elevation difference between ridges and the dried up riverbeds had gone from hill/valley to cliff/canyon. We were hoping that we would be able to “fun-run” down the 1500 ft. from our perch to the riverbed in about 5 minutes or so, leaving only the following climb on the opposing ridge as last piece of drudgery we would have to perform.

The problem became, however, our latent awareness of the hill vs. cliff transition. We could no longer run down hills. We could no longer walk down hills. We actually had to lean backwards and vertically crab-walk down a 75-degree incline. The only thing making this possible was the looseness of the dirt, allowing you to slide to a stop with each step, rather than toppling forward. However, the entire cliff-side was made up of small rocks, so every third footstep would dislodge a cluster of different sized rocks which would then snowball down the hill dislodging even bigger sized rocks as they tumbled. There was no civilization at the bottom of the hill, or we would not have so flagrantly risked a rock-slide. Still, you'd think there'd be SOME concern for our own well-being.

As soon as we realized the the dreadful terrain and slope of this hill, we should have turned around. Unfortunately, by the time we honestly faced the facts, I was almost halfway down the hill. My bro was only about 15% down, so looking back up at him, it seemed moronic for me to force him to continue down this wall of death. By the same token, though, it seemed unfair for me to attempt to scale back up this slippery beast when, I reasoned, if we both got to the bottom we could more safely follow the riverbed to a hill that was less steep in order to make our way back.

When I got to the bottom of the hill, I sat up on a giant boulder sitting in the riverbed and watched my brother complete the second half of his descent. As I removed my hiking boots and socks, emptying them of their crumbly stowaways, letting my bare feet enjoy the cool rock / warm sun McDLT (“it keeps the hot side hot and the cold side cold”), I got to witness the serenely stupid sights and sounds of my brother attempting to safely make it down this unthinkably inaccessible wall of rocks. The sliding whoosh of dirt and cascading reverberations of tumbling rocks were the only sensory bits of variation in a still, desolate valley.

Once we both had a chance to look back at the treacherous hill-side, we carried on in disbelief that we had come down so perilous a path and in weary bemusement as to how we would avoid dealing with its agony on the return trip.

The next fifteen minutes of the walk was the final enjoyable 8% of the hike I previously mentioned.

We were scaling a ridge's 1500 ft. of elevation gain via its most modestly slanted channel, filled with the rocks that typify mountain streams. Since we had already climbed similar stream beds, we were very surprised when we eventually reached a point with this one where there was running water. (Remember, this is a desert. Even when there's snow, the dirt just looks moister than usual. Running water seemed an impossibility to our senses given all the terrain near the cabin.) We wondered if this water would be somewhat potable. We were too scared to chance it, although we should have taken the precautionary measure of filling up our 2-liter bottle with it just in case we would want it later as an alternative to death by dehydration.

The novelty of running water in the desert quickly vindicated our decision to extend the trek, however, the steepness and duration of this ascent quickly evaporated any satisfaction we felt about the water. By the time we were reaching the top, we had lost all ability for extraneous conversation. We were stopping almost every twenty steps to catch our breath. Our legs simply didn't have the power any more to generate more inclined push. As our speed declined to that of a three-toed sloth, it was only the horizon-like brim of the ridge-top that fueled the final fifty yards of slogging. When we got there, we were greeted by a slim patch of snow (like a bald man's final strip in the back), but we realized the real snowy peak we had aspired to climb still sat hopelessly in the distance.

This time our bravado was no match for our physiological feedback systems. Our bodies flatly refused to consider walking as they visually “felt” the length of walk that lay ahead to reach the peak. Knowing we had reached our limit (and knowing we had only about 10 oz of water left in the 2-liter to make a return trip), we noshed on some dehydrated fruit from one of the trail mixes.

The sadistic irony of turning to DE-hydrated fruit to delay taxing our water supply was not lost on us. Of the two options in the trail mix, the cherries still retained enough moisture that they felt like they generated more saliva than they absorbed.

The dried apricots tasted awful and probably had as much water content as a Mallomar.

We soaked up the view to our southwest, knowing we wouldn't be able to see it once we started walking back to the cabin. Plus, we were a little afraid to look in the direction of the walk home. Now perched atop a 6500 ft. peak, we could see several ridges cascading across our path, flattening out into the valley that lay at 4500 ft. Beyond the Pioneertown valley were giant plateaus, rising up like bunkers on pool tables, almost creating an undivided barrier, but allowing a couple gaps through which humans could build roads to connect the valleys lying on both sides.

The reward of hiking is always this “Giant's Eye View” - the ability to perceive some of the larger geologic forms unfurling themselves. The endlessly fluid scale to nature often makes for fractal like layers of reality. On a certain scale, certain forms and details stick out and announce themselves as the representative features. As you pull back (or zoom in), you end up seeing a whole new set of shapes that now define that neighborhood. It's sort of like those crazy posters in which someone's face is visible from a distant view, even though the poster is nothing but a composite of hundreds of tiny, square photographs.

The reason I belabor this description of the high-altitude forms of nature is that you DON'T want to see a number of them standing between you and eventual destination. It is much easier to simply stare at a 3 ft. wide trail that snakes through a forest. There, you're next objective is merely to wind around the next corner and see where that's taken you.

When you're hiking across a desert landscape (and you're already at your highest point), you have the unfortunate luxury of seeing your destination 8 or 9 miles in the distance. Picture, as you're already starting to feel too tired to tolerate much more hiking, making yourself a list of “hmmm, 3 or 4 mountains to scale and descend, followed by a stretch of tumbling hills, followed by a long, dry, valley. Sigh. No problem.”

Our immediate obstacle was how to circumvent the nasty, rock tumbling, sheer hill we had cautiously slid down before climbing to our current perch. Staring at the mountainous wall, we couldn't see any significantly milder slopes in the area. Instead, we decided to try to follow a dried up riverbed as it headed due south (our general direction home was east). It looked like the riverbed would wrap around the tall-ass ridge in our way and dump us out into the big valley in which our cabin resided. That would mean a long, straight, flat walk from there.

If anything should seem clear by this point in the story, our hunches and preconceptions turned out to be dead wrong more often than not.

We sucked in some sobering breaths before commencing our long walk back. The potential enormity of what lay ahead was not lost on us. We had been walking, running, and climbing for four hours straight with THC circulating through our blood and augmenting the natural cotton-mouth of desert hiking. We had essentially no water for the return trip, other than the three or four warm sips of backwash at the bottom of the 2 liter.

We sensed that talking was no longer a luxury we could afford and readied our minds to shut down into the “trudging zombie” mode that kicks in when you absolutely must keep walking, despite your will to stop.

However, before that, one final fun run from our current perch down to the riverbed in the valley below.

The “fun” run was increasingly becoming a misnomer due to the increasing soreness of our joints. Still, it took less time and less energy to barrel down the slope of a mountainside than it would have taken to constantly be fighting gravity in order to restrain our momentum.

Riverbed, check.

We started heading south, not fond of the fact that we were gaining no ground on the distance home, but resolved that there was no feasible way to scale the steep hill that rose up in front of us.

Elements of the next twenty minutes of riverbed hiking were interesting. Although there was no still or running water, there was definitely an element of moisture that allowed for denser foliage to hang around.

At one point, we passed by a community of willowy trees, which created such a thick mesh that we had to snake through its outskirts. When random breezes pushed their way through the trees, an unusual and somewhat unnerving sound emanated that was reminiscent of horror movie sound design.

I listened carefully for a “Go the distance” or “If you build it, he will come.”

All I seemed to make out though was, “The Kansas City Chiefs will be painfully mediocre for another four years.”

The further we got in the riverbed, the more we realized how far we would have to walk south to actually get past the ridge of mountain we were hoping to avoid.

After a “pro and con” conversation that probably had the lucidity of two heavyweight boxers discussing Renaissance poetry during the 10th round break in their fight, we decided to abort our plan to circumvent the mountains and resolved instead to force our way directly over them.

What tipped the scales was happening upon a more gentle (read: feasible) slope. Whereas the other facades we had considered were nearly impossible to scale, this one was merely harrowing.

There was a crease along two converging walls of earth that was less steep than anything else in the vicinity. When viewed from a distance, it appeared as a manageable, though, lengthy climb.

Of course, what looks like a smooth gradient from that distance becomes an endless succession of steps from one rock face to the next once the journey unfolds.

Have you ever been driving a car up a long winding mountain road and felt like it was simply losing all its power? You switch to a lower gear, which temporarily helps, but ultimately it feels like any additional gas will do nothing to push the car forward. It simply loses the ability to climb. That's the physical wall we hit by the time we had gone about 12% of the way. I am really not exaggerating.

The altitude, weariness, and dehydration were forcing us to stop after about every 30 giant upward steps. The entire trip up was bound to take 1000 steps or more. Do the math.

If only a tourist could have happened upon us at that point to beseech us to drink in the beauty of the surroundings, we would have looked callously at our environment like a Republican looking at a single mom on welfare. (what a pointless, political cheap shot)

Although my brother and I had no doubt we would summit this hillside eventually, there was a growing look of alarm on our faces (and we're relentless optimists) due to how much this climb was depleting our remaining stores of energy.

By the time we had reached the highest point, we had essentially run the tank down to “E”.

Sure, everyone knows there's still more gas after “E”, but you don't want to start a road trip from that juncture.

There was no need nor energy to say it, but we were fucked. We knew the walk back from that point was at least 2.5 hours, requiring further ascension and descent of subsequently milder mounds.

We had to polish off the water at that point because the steep climb had ravaged our insides like a “two-a-day” water polo practice.

That meant that our bodies were going to receive no further deposits for the rest of the trip – just a long series of withdrawals, and, hopefully, the body's survival instinct equivalent of overdraft protection.

The next two hours deserve little prose, for they were not experienced by the minds of literate men. We were quite literally walking for our lives, as we were in the middle of nowhere with a gigantic distance in all directions separating us from help.

We could not stop, lest our bones realize that they had become gelatinous. We could not speak, because we had no oxygen or moisture to spare. We knew the situation was going to become more dire, but we did not literally worry for our lives.

As we got to the final stage of the hike, though, we actually did start getting curious as to our abilities to make it all the way without collapsing via dehydration.

The last forty minutes of the hike went through a town called Rimrock. It's a sparsely laid out pioneer town that borders Pioneertown. We had hiked north of it on our way out in the morning, but now we were coming back through it.

The re-appearance of civilization was simultaneously encouraging and exasperating. On the one hand, we were at least relieved to know that if one of us really did start fainting, the other could burden a stranger for water and a possible trip to the hospital. However, on the other hand, there was water inside all of these houses we were passing.

This most precious, life sustaining substance, this tonic that would ameliorate our enervated agony was just gurgling behind the closed doors of every stranger's domicile.

I know what you're thinking .... “I've been thirsty before, it's not that bad.” Again, I kid you not when I say that when dogs would run out into yards to bark at us as we walked by, we SERIOUSLY considered drinking out of their water bowls. The stagnant, viscous, warm water that would by this late point of the day now be unpalatable to these dogs would have still been up to our standards.

At one point, shortly after WISHING we could sink to that desperate measure, Justin had to stop. And by stop, I mean, he lay flat on his back, on the dirt, with a face of confused torture. How did a day that was supposed to be so rewarding reach a point of such intolerable cruelty?

We were probably only another twenty minutes from the finish line, but his body had actually shut down.

We took a brief respite on the ground, knowing rest would only make it harder to restart our plodding. Twice more during the final stretch, I turned around to check on him to find that he was supine once again.

By the final few hundred yards to our house, I was a decent stretch ahead of him. As you can imagine, the propinquity of the finish line was enough to impel the legs to keep shuffling along the dirt (we had LONG since lost the ability to actually pick our feet off the ground as we walked).

To give you a sense of how urgent we considered water at that point, I began grabbing for my house keys at least 30 paces before I was at the front door, jettisoned the backpack in the middle of the road once I found them, and had the house key ready to go in my pinching fingers before I was even within 10 feet of the door. I let the wall of the patio hold my weight while I tried to slow my anxious hand enough to summon the dexterity required to twist the lock.

Upon opening the door, the keys remained dangling in the knob as I grabbed whatever cup I could find (and there were dirty ones everywhere) and filled it with the funny smelling Sparkletts water we had eschewed eight hours earlier. I swallowed 16 oz violently in a matter of seconds and started refilling the cup.

My brother, whom I care for, was still not in the house, nor did I bother bringing water out to him.

This was akin to oxygen masks deploying in a plane: parents must take care of their own masks before making sure their children are situated.

As Justin finally made his way into the house, there was no talking or smiling. He, too, mechanically filled with water the first receptacle he could find and began chugging.

The talking and smiling probably didn't resume until a good twenty minutes later, after an extended spell of us both lying shell-shocked on the porch.

It was clear to both of us that we had done days worth of damage to our system, both physically and psychologically.

The clearest proof of this latter fact came the following morning. Obviously, our bodies would feel sore and spent the next day, but I never foresaw how much scar tissue would register on our souls.

The view outside our house, the rolling hills to one side, the bountiful boulders to the other, the distant sun-swept plateaus on the horizon ... all of them thoroughly repugnant to the eyes. The 2nd half of the hike from hell had been so heinous that it had actually tainted our love for the landscape.

We could not look at the outdoors without experiencing the same queasy shiver that Homer feels when he considers Patty & Selma.

It was at this point that I knew for sure I had ruined the cabin experience for both of us. It was time for me to go back to Los Angeles. Mission accomplished?

So to return to the central thesis of this travel memoir, just remember that too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

If/when you get to heaven, remember to ask for the sampler.

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