Snowblind (30 page)

Days passed in a blur of downpours, sand, and boulders, repeated in varying combinations. We muled our gear north along the narrow terra firma between waves and rainforest. The only dents in the wilderness were rusted machines from long-abandoned mines pushing out through the fog and woods. In all that time, we never once saw
the mountain. We barely even saw the local spruce-tops. It didn't matter. The mountain had become an article of faith. We'd made our choice between two doors ahead of us. Through one, the summit looked like empty real estate after you've survived shipwreck and drowning. Through the other, the top was the one place on earth worth risking shipwreck, drowning, avalanche, icefall, frostbite. The reward behind door number two would grow in proportion to what it took to get there, and that was the door for us, a pair of fanatics doubling down with each step toward the mountain. Or as Skim put it, as we sat huddled against a boulder that offered minor psychological protection from a particularly nasty squall: “You'd have to pay me six figures to do this as a job. But for free, I'll bulldog the mountain to the end.”

“That's probably why you barely scraped a pass out of econ,” I said.

“That's probably why I'll be hungry and poor.”

“I never hear you talk about the future.”

“Man, that's the present.”

In fact, we gave up on time. We'd already borrowed heavily against the bank, so it didn't seem to matter how slow or fast we went. The local clocks—the sun, the tides, the rain—spun through their own broad circles, and we kept to ours. We slept, we walked, we ate, doing each when it seemed right. On a long tidal flat, I chased down a nine-inch crab that had been pushed up on the beach by a freak wave, so we stopped and stuffed ourselves on Dungeness around a wet, smoking fire. In a deep creek splitting out through bent old spruces, Skim found a scrum of Dolly Varden and spent
an afternoon patiently thinning their ranks with a net made from a stuff sack webbed onto a long stick. When
Cowards Run
sank, our umbilicus snapped. We drifted forward, a life raft of two in the wilderness. Everything beyond the mountain faded off the map. Overhead, the strangled throat-clearing of migrating sandhill cranes fell down through low grey clouds. The salmon, the birds, the grizzlies mining streamsides for protein, they all had a direction, and so did we, fulfilling some part of our lifecycle sure as a Chinook swimming upstream.

At the outflow of the first of the snake's nest of creeks draining the Fairweather Glacier, we turned inland—into a wall of slide alder and devil's club. We bulled forward, snorting and grunting like moose. The harder we pushed, the stronger the brush pushed back. Branches hooked all our crotches: groin, neck, knees, pits. Leaves filled our eyes and mouths. Our packs suddenly weighed twice what they had on the beach. Each step came with a price, like getting whipped repeatedly by a jujitsu master. I'd never seen Skim enraged. He cursed the alder right down the evolutionary tree, all the way back to the first chlorophyll, but it was him who degenerated into howls and moans. We retreated, which cost us every bit of what we'd spent pushing forward, but at least we could see daylight to the rear.

We regrouped in a fringe of meadow by the creek, lying down with our heads on our packs, picking devil's club spines out of our hands and necks. The water banged down its streambed. It was fast and loaded with silt. It looked almost silver.

“What do you figure?” Skim said. “Snow gets dumped on the mountain, gets buried by more snow, turns to ice, walks down inside
the glacier. And it takes, what, a hundred, a thousand years for it to reach the end of the glacier and melt out into this creek?”

“Could be. The snow Cook saw on the mountain is maybe going past us now.”

“That's patience.”

We put our packs back on and sniffed around the wall of alder, trying not to get sucked in, looking for cracks and leads. We found a bear track clodded up with fresh huckleberry shits. An old streambed. A talus pile the brush hadn't fully colonized. Skim cut a short stiff center branch from the last patch of alders to lash to the frame of our broken snowshoe, so it wouldn't be completely worthless. Actually, he cut half a dozen, muttering to himself each time that the one he'd just cut wasn't
quite
right—until I realized what he was about and hustled him onward. Before long, we were up on moraines the size of mountains and old ice covered in crushed rock where nothing grew at all.

The next day, the clouds lifted and vanished. The world stood revealed, all bright, white light: crystal underfoot, crystal overhead, and the incandescent radiance of Fairweather blasting through us like cosmic rays. Veins of meltwater roared past us and poured down boreholes in the ice. We couldn't look directly at the mountain. It hurt our eyes and set our ears ringing. We kept our eyes down and scrabbled up the old ice where the glacier died and bled to the sea.

The ocean disappeared over the edge of the ice. The air turned thin and dry. When we reached fresh snow, we roped up. The piggish lips of crevasses were just beginning to open from their winter hibernation. I threaded the buckle of my harness and found I had to pull it an extra two inches past the webbing's accustomed spot. We
were both fading away, hungry all the time. Food became a game. We accused each other of ever-more-elaborate thefts. Skim spent an hour explaining how I'd used our repair needle to boost the filling out of his morning Snickers before sealing the seam in the wrapper with toothpaste.

The crevasses terrified us. They were the unknown, the crack in reality, the plunge into darkness. We shied away from the faintest line in the snow. “You know,” Skim said, throwing ice chunks down one deep crack and waiting for echoes to surface, “reading up on Z-pulley diagrams and klemheist knots in the library with you made me feel like a pro. But actually pulling one of us back out from down there seems kind of far-fetched.”

“Great,” I said. “Glad to hear it. Maybe you should go first.”

“Hell,” Skim said, “what do we have to go back to? Books and fishes? Out here, we're heroes. Watching you dive off
Cowards Run
a second before it sank, I thought I was at the movies. You won't get to do that back home. I don't think you can get back home from here.”

With pitfalls all around us, was it any wonder our conversations turned morbid? We were boys with muscles—the threads tying us to our place and our people hadn't fully developed yet. There in the mountain's lap, we had the rope between us, and beyond that, we barely seemed tied to anything at all. We could fantasize about glory on the mountain like it truly mattered.

Still, fear throbbed up through the glacial skin. I felt like a cat trying to cross a lake, unwilling to weight my feet for fear of the next step. Skim broke through the ceiling of one crevasse and landed on a bridge five feet down. He pulled himself back out, panting and
heaving. “It's unreal,” he said. “It goes down forever, and the walls glow blue.” Then he puked in the snow.

When the snow turned soft in the afternoon, we balked and pitched the tent. We probed the immediate area as best we could, but I still couldn't shake the image of us sitting on a skin of snow over a tent-eating monster. We belayed each other just to step fifteen feet away to take a dump. Inside, we stretched out on our backs on our sleeping bags, trying to unwind the tension from our minds. The tent filled with groans and tick-clicks as the snow settled and flexed in the sun. We could crawl under the nylon and hide, but we couldn't get away from the underworld of voids and trapdoors.

“We're not supposed to be here, are we?” Skim said. “I had no idea how much I'd feel like an interloper.”

In the morning, Fairweather was still there. A cold white light two miles high. It burned our brains right through our glacier glasses. We couldn't resist it. The mountain was dense as a star, that's how much gravity it had.

“I'm coming, I'm coming,” Skim grumbled as he laced up his boots. “I feel like a damn moth next to a candle.”

We'd gained four thousand feet over the ocean, and any time the sun wasn't direct, the cold peeled back our layers. Those little jobs, tying boots, priming the stove, collapsing the tent, turned our fingers numb and dumb. I was inside out with hunger. I wanted to bathe in food, to roll around in a tub of spaghetti till the stuff went through my skin and right into my blood.

Rather than head down to the elevation of Dolly Varden and wayward crabs, I jacked my pack up onto my shoulders and pointed
myself uphill. I'd drawn the front, and Skim was waiting for me. And Skim was right. I didn't have anywhere else to go. Cracks had opened up behind me even bigger than the Fairweather crevasses. I looked back at Gustavus, and it seemed more terra incognita than the mountain.

The crevasses multiplied as the ground levered up. The glacier tumbled off the mountain. Four days prior, it had been a shriveled geriatric, dying into the Pacific. Now it was young and fast, frozen mid-rapid. We spent the morning tiptoeing around, scaring the snot out of ourselves on snow bridges straight out of a cracked architect's nightmare while shuttling our gear up to the base of an icefall that Skim dubbed God's Class VI Kayak Run. To me, it leaned like a house of cards, only the cards were hundred-foot slices of glacial ice.

We climbed down into pinched-off crevasses and chimneyed up between their blue walls. Neither of us had climbed vertical ice before, so we were too green to be scared. I swung my tools, and they stuck in the ice, and I did a lot of pull-ups. At least the bottom wasn't going to drop out from under me. From an anchor of two ice screws below a twenty-foot gargoyle that looked like Dali's take on
Winged Victory
, I hauled our bags and belayed Skim. He led out a ramp of sun-rotted snow, then into another crevasse chimney. Up above, the glacier leveled off, and we planned to set a fixed basecamp where we'd leave our snowshoes and a reserve of food while we climbed off the glacier and onto the mountain. Skim spelunked deeper into the slot he'd entered, drumming away with his axes and calling out the things he was looking forward to once we'd stopped in the placid
snow above the icefall. “An unroped piss!” he yelled, deep inside the ice. “A pizza and a beer!”

Did I mention we were the only green things in the whole temple of blue and white light? We were slow as winter. We heckled each other mercilessly, yelling back and forth, the words warping off the ice. The sun came round and caught us, and the ice began to drip. But we were actually enjoying ourselves, because this kind of climbing we could do with our arms, and the top of the icefall was close. I had one short headwall to finish, which felt as good and simple as chopping wood. I hauled the bags and belayed Skim up to join me. When he arrived, I just shook my head.

We weren't safe. We were buggered. It had all been a trick—we'd filled the unknown with our wishes like Greeks filling the night sky with gods. A shattered glass of crevasses spiderwebbed out from the top of the icefall. Towers of pressed snow stood above the crevasses, a gang of evil-looking jack-in-the-boxes ejected from below by pressures that made my testes want to climb my spine. The towers were three and four stories high, small enough that we hadn't seen them from below, big enough to thumb us flat and bury our pancaked bodies so deep the blood wouldn't even stain the glacier. And the sun was on them, and I could see them melting and teetering. Fresh debris from yesterday's collapses was piled all around us. An avalanche swept down off the southwest ridge of the mountain.

Skim took four steps away from the belay to get a better look and fell into a crevasse to his waist. He kicked his feet, trying to stick his crampons into something solid, but the snow was so soft, he couldn't
tell whether he had snow or air under him. He swam back to me like a drowning man while I kept the rope tight.

We were paralyzed. Minutes passed, and I could feel the sun lowering, locking onto us like a death ray. Icicles and snow mushrooms sloughed into the crevasses. The towers were drooling, ready to pounce.

“We can't stay here,” Skim said.

“We go down,” I said.

“Through the icefall? It'll be a rattrap. The whole thing could collapse.”

“No. Down there.” I pointed into the last crevasse he'd tunneled through. He looked and took my meaning—and he shrugged. We were that desperate.

We sank four screws into the hardest ice we could find, and buried one of the packs deep in the glop as a gigantic deadman anchor. Then we fixed both our ropes in case one got cut, and I rappelled back over the final headwall, which was already coming apart in chunks. When I reached the slot Skim had climbed, I swung inside of it.

The crevasse angled into the pack. I bridged my feet, spiking the parallel walls of blue ice with my crampons, filling the three feet of space between with my body. I burrowed into darkness, the walls turning from blue to black and the temperature dropping as I scraped and tensioned deeper. All I wanted was an alcove or a ledge that could keep two idiots alive for a half turn of the earth. My standards were low and falling fast. I could hear Skim hollering at me.

Under a shallow curve, I found two sloping dishes good for about a butt cheek each. The rest of the crevasse seemed cut by a cleaver.
I spiraled in two screws above the lower dish, clipped them, then bellowed up to Skim that I was off rappel. The crevasse pinched off overhead. A well of blackness dropped away below. Thirty feet to my right, a slice of white-hot light, the outside world, blinded me if I turned that way. I sank our last two screws above the second dish for Skim. We wouldn't sleep and we might freeze, but nothing looked ready to crush us, short of the whole uphill chunk of the glacier slipping forward a yard—which would happen, but probably not in the next twelve hours.