Snowblind (31 page)

Skim arrived, sliding down the ropes and shouldering himself in from the outside. He looked around, taking in the screws and the stances, one of which was occupied by my foot. “Four stars,” he said. He clipped himself and his pack to the anchor I'd placed for him. “This is going to leave scars. But we'll probably live.” We got to work.

Full swings with an axe would have turned that narrow space into a blender, so we chipped away, feeling like two chained prisoners trying to crack concrete. We enlarged our “settin' porches”—as Skim called them—one sliver at a time. When my ledge had grown roomy enough for both cheeks, I pronounced it home and got the stove running in my lap to begin melting ice chips for water.

“We're in the guts,” Skim said. He gestured down into the darkness below our feet. “Just imagine if you fell down there. You'd be ground up, and some day your juices would come out in the creeks at the other end.”

“The glacier won't eat us. Too skinny—no meat left.”

“Was it Jonah who got swallowed by a whale?” Skim asked. “What'd he do to deserve that?”

I had a kind of greatest-hits knowledge of the Christian book: Sampson, Daniel, Jonah, Lazarus. “You'll like it,” I said. “God started talking to him, and he tried to run away.”

“Ah-ha! I
knew
running was a bad idea. Though we're not doing much better.”

“Yeah, but when Jonah got puked up on the beach, he still had to go to Nineveh. So running just made his trip longer.”

Skim kept hacking away at his seat in the ice, feeding me the chips for the pot of water. I couldn't move because the stove was precarious and I could only hold it perched on our shovel blade with gloves on my hands. Half my weight was on my ledge, the other half hanging through my harness off the anchor, and I'd added a length of sling as a foot stirrup to keep myself from sliding, so I was well and truly trussed. I'd insulated my butt and back with my sleeping pad, but now that I'd stopped chopping ice, I could feel my blood slowing down and the cold creeping in. It wasn't good to stare into the black chasm below us, but it was hard not to look. Outside, a few tons of ice smashed past. Our ropes, fixed to the anchor we'd left above, swayed back and forth. Skim paused to listen.

“Things must have been pretty gnarly up there,” he said. “I'm not near as freaked out by this bivy as I think I should be.”

“Maybe you're getting comfortable with the mountain.”

“No way, man. We're in outer space.”

I felt it then, the alienness of the ice. Black longing for kitchen-talk and the four walls of my parents' house reached up and snagged me. I felt suddenly used up.

“I thought you said we couldn't go back home,” I said.

“We can go back,” Skim said. “It just might not be home when we get there.” He returned to cutting ice. “Like the sailors with Cook. Spend three years sailing the dragon side of the planet. And the whole way, even when times are good and they're getting fed breadfruit by island girls, they dream of home: red-cheeked dairymaids and pasties and the moors or whatever. Then when they get back home, they turn around and sign up for another voyage.”

There it was. Skim wasn't the type for fake cheeriness, and I suppose if I wanted that, I wouldn't be camped out on an ice wall in the guts of a glacier.

The stove hissed in my lap. Outside, the light looked dense, yellow, a fourth wall of our meat-locker sanctuary. Skim gave up trying to expand his porch and wedged his butt onto the ledge he'd made. We traded off with the stove so that I could wrap my sleeping bag around me. Something big collapsed above, shaking the crevasse. Blocks tumbled down outside, dark shadows flying past. Our ropes jerked and twanged. A second collapse followed the first. The afternoon sun had reached some kind of critical point. Skim shut his eyes and worked through the lines of Frost's poem about the world ending in fire or ice. For half an hour, explosions rippled the airspace above us and walked down the ice wall at our backs. I started hollering back, and Skim joined me, because, goddamnit, why not? If we were going to die, we might as well go down yelling, and if not, it felt good to join in and make some noise. We yelled till the mountain went quiet and our echoes sounded like howls in an empty church. Our bomb shelter had held. The world hadn't ended.

Silence and cold dropped over us. We'd emptied ourselves out. The wall of yellow light outside the crevasse paled and turned blue. We fixed ourselves on the stove. Each pan took a geologic age to melt and bubble. And you'd think that somewhere between the eras, I could catch some rest. But each time I nodded, my sleep-self began to slide down into the blackness below us, and I snapped awake. We took turns with the stove, torching our throats with water fresh off a boil, trying to get some heat into our bodies.

Blue faded to black. Time stretched. Our headlamps showed the other wall of the crevasse, three feet from our faces. Numbness crawled down my legs. I had two inches to move left or right on my ledge. Half conscious, I began to think we'd missed a day and been down the crevasse for thirty hours instead of ten.

Somewhere in the middle of the dark hours, at maybe one or two in the morning, with the cold deep in our bones, Skim said, “I'm done,” and I said, “Let's go.” We were robots with rusty hinges. It took an hour just to pack the stove and sleeping bags. Our two ropes still ran up out of the crevasse and into the night despite the abuse they'd taken—though one or both of them might be hanging by a nylon thread for all we knew. Skim didn't hesitate or ritualize or go eenie-meanie to hang responsibility on fate. He just grabbed the blue strand and wrapped his prusiks around it, eyes wide open like a cold-blooded stoic. Or maybe he was just cold and beyond caring. He caterpillared up the rope on his prusik cords and disappeared into the night. Thirty minutes later, his voice filtered down through the heavy blackness, telling me to come up.

I reached the anchor as dawn began to open the sky. The place looked bombed. We whispered, not wanting to wake the dead. Jags of ice and compressed snow fanned out where towers and avalanches had fallen. The four ice screws we'd placed dangled uselessly from the ropes—they'd heated up, melted the ice, and fallen out. The pack we'd buried as a deadman had taken a direct hit and been re-buried by five extra feet of debris, which had frozen hard as concrete overnight. Without a word, we cut the ropes where they emerged, leaving the ends and the pack embedded. Then we roped ourselves together and fled for the ridgeline at the glacier's edge.

Maybe the world had ended after all. Sunrise was bleak. Bands of grey clouds rubbed up against the mountain. We saw nothing but white and grey. Shattered ice creaked and popped under our crampons. I felt ghostly, intrusive, nosing my way around the underworld or Valhalla—some place where the powers had duked it out. It wasn't clear to me if anyone had survived, ourselves included. We followed the debris tracks, telling ourselves those would be the thickest layer. Everything was so frozen we probably could have trusted an eggshell over a crevasse. We moved fast, racing the turning earth and the sun, feeling as if a Valkyrie might come winging past any moment to mark us for the bloody-corpse-in-the-ice treatment.

At the edge of the glacier, we paused to divvy a candy bar—breakfast. We couldn't stop long. A thousand feet up the flat face of the ridge, a hanging wall of seracs and fresh pack looked dangerous as the future, about a photon away from avalanching down on our heads. We angled west toward the ridgeline and were damn slow because the snow was steep and our consolidated packs were heavy
and we'd each had about a thimbleful of food and sleep. I drifted through waking nightmares in which the snow suspended above us began to fall, like horsemen in a cavalry charge, and I cartwheeled down under the white hooves, and then I'd return to my body and take another step and slip away when the snow fell again.

We reached the ridgeline and relative safety. The avalanches would come, but they'd fall left and right. Skim stamped out a little platform and sat on his pack with his head in his hands. Wind rasped along the ridge, scraping off snow and ice, blowing it in our faces. We'd put the glacier far below. Above, the mountain disappeared in clouds, which had fattened, looking about ready to split and drop their feathers all over the place. Between the layers out west, I caught sight of an immense grey surface speckled white. The sea. I'd forgotten it was there. It looked imaginary. We hadn't come that way. Might as well talk about beanstalks or Middle Earth.

The clouds closed, and the wind cut me open. Skim hadn't gotten back up since he sat down, and I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. I started digging into the hardpack under the surface of the ridge, using my ice axe to chop and my helmet to scoop, until Skim grabbed my shoulder and stopped me.

“What are you doing?” He had to shout to punch through the wind.

“Digging!” I said. He waved his hands at me to say,
no shit, I see the hole
. “Snow cave!” I yelled.

“What for?”

I blinked back at him for a moment, then realized he was serious. “The tent's in the pack on the glacier!” I yelled.

Skim froze hard. Another time and place, I'd have taken some satisfaction from that. It wasn't often the boy let surprise show. Under the circumstances, I might've enjoyed some brotherly bullshit better. I stuck my head back in the pit I'd dug, feeling like a strung-out badger going to ground.

It was a one-man job until I'd excavated enough space to get us both inside. As soon as he could, Skim joined me, and we chopped up snow with our hands and kicked it out with our feet, lying horizontally, side by side, two worms in a frozen apple.

“You ever dug a snow cave before?” Skim asked.

“I read about it in a book.”

That was all Skim needed to hear, that I had only a rudimentary idea of what I was doing. Meaning he had freedom to work out the details himself. He took over. I was the blunt tool you used to break ground and test the shape of a plan. Skim was the craftsman who turned schemes into substance. By the time he was done, the hole I'd dug had become a tiny cabin with elevated bunks and a platform for the stove, all carved from the snow. We had room to sit up and lie down flat. He engineered an overlap at the entrance that kept blown snow out without suffocating us. It would have been halfway comfortable, a safe house from the blade of the wind and the avalanches. But I could only think of going to sleep.

I woke from deep blackness. Something had hold of me. Was yanking at me. I peeled an eye open.
Skim
had hold of me. “What?” I managed, about as articulate as a side of beef.

“We need to go,” he said. “Or we're fucked. We're already fucked. We need to
go
.”

I got my second eye open. A checklist flashed inside my skull: Avalanche. Blizzard. Valkyrie. I listened a moment, heard nothing, concluded that none of those pertained.

“What?” I said again.

Skim was sitting on his snow bunk with his feet in his plastic doubles down in the narrow well between the two of us. He had some food between his feet. A few candy bars, a few packets of soup, an end of cheese, a handful of peanuts bagged in plastic.

“This is all of our food,” Skim said.

Ah. Correction. He had
all
our food between his feet.

“I couldn't sleep,” Skim said. “I haven't slept at all. All I could think about was eating. I'd eat toothpaste. I'd eat sand.” He waved at our pathetic little pile. “I could eat this all in two minutes with the wrappers. Or I could wake you up.”

I realized he'd been sitting there, with the food between his feet, for I didn't know how long. Outside the cave, light seemed to be seeping back through the Arctic twilight. I'd been asleep for maybe five hours. An avalanche snapped free, shaking the pack, breaking bones from the sound of it. We waited and watched each other's reactions to confirm the massiveness of the slide. The noise and tremors died off.

“That was early,” I said.

“Yesterday, that would have been us,” Skim said.

I nodded.

The roof of our snow cave collapsed.

The wind was on us before I'd even drawn breath. It got in my nose, eyes, and sleeping bag, carrying a load of ice with it. Hard
pieces of the cave roof had slammed down all around me, and one side of my face was mashed numb, while the other side was frozen numb—two different sensations, as it turned out. I balled up inside my sleeping bag. I'd left my outer layers in the footwell of my bag overnight in order to keep them warm. I zippered them on, wriggling around inside my cocoon, thinking of Houdini in a straight jacket.

When I emerged, fully armored, the wind had already drifted six inches of loose snow into the now-open bowl of our cave. Skim was on his hands and knees, fishing around in the powder, howling about the food. I dug for my boot-shells, emptied them out, shoved my feet in with snow flying all around. I found my backpack and began trawling the floor, stuffing in anything I found—stove, Snickers, helmet, rope coil. Skim and I put our heads together and yelled out an inventory. Then we dove back in for the missing pieces.

The cold took me to the edge of paralysis. I signaled to Skim that I needed to get moving. He nodded, we threw on our packs, and we rolled ourselves out of the cave and onto the ridgeline, into the full blast of the wind.