Snowblind (5 page)

Now something has happened. Ann can't trust the loose-wire-in-the-radio theory. The sky has emptied out.
Yeah? When's the last
time you saw more than ten feet overhead?
All right, explain the radio. She chases her tail round and round. If all the world's pilots have been put to some other use, what does that mean for her?

For fuck's sake,
Ann tells herself.
Volcanic ash in the jet stream. Malware at the FAA. The Apocalypse is only a song
. But it's hard to stay focused and believe in benign causes when megatons of snow keep banging down all around her. Damned hard to keep faith with stability while moving through avalanche country.

Ann pushes down the glacier, blind to everything beyond the snow under her feet but pretty sure the Pacific Ocean is somewhere that way. Hours and miles pass. Presumably. Seeing nothing but whitish grey scale, Ann's eyes invent shapes, people, creatures uncurling from the clouds. It's a fucking primeval mist, from before the separation of land or darkness. Nothing fixed, everything malleable. Her watch tells her she's put in a full day, but she keeps going an extra hour because she's driving herself crazy on the hoof, and when she stops she knows it will only get worse.

She's been soaked by the day. When Ann gets into her tent and sleeping bag, every surface clings damply, and the wet sucks the heat from her. She hadn't expected rockstar treatment, but goddamnit, abandonment and a survival trudge through a marine fog seem a damn poor reward for her climb.

Ann tries the radio again—given the miles she picked up, she ought to be easily in range even of fishing boats. Static. She pitches the infernal thing into the corner of the tent—and knocks down a rain of condensation drops, which splash all over her. She howls into her fist, afraid to take her frustration fully off its leash, afraid she
might begin to crack. She pulls her sleeping bag over her head, tries to turn rage into clean, dry therms, and wills herself to fall asleep.

There's one good thing about the night: it's brief. The sun dips over the pole and comes back like a yoyo on a string. At least Ann assumes that's what turns the wet murk from black to white. She hasn't actually seen the sun in how many days? Ann is up again before she's really slept, which hardly matters since she's had nothing to do but sleep since she got off the mountain.

The air in the morning is so heavy with water that just passing through it cuts loose rivulets. Ann can see fat grey nothing. But staying put would be succumbing. The weather could still blow up, go from bad to nasty. Her food will only hold out so long. A rescue will never find her here. Fuck that thought. No rescue is coming.

Ann slogs down the glacier through the blind wet. The mountains have declined. Ann can tell because they've gone silent. No inhuman roars, no spooky crosswinds blasting through the fog. Ann drifts left and right. When twenty feet of cliffed-up ice loom out of the grey, it might be a twenty-one-foot-high pimple or the toe of a mountain at the edge of the glacier for all she can tell. Ann has one corner of her much-too-wide-scaled map and the needle of her eight-dollar compass to guide her.

Ann thinks back to 9/11, when all the climbers sat around toasting America and joking about the bad luck of waiting for a pickup while every plane in the country was grounded. Is that what's happened? A world war, a jihad? Or a slipped circuit in her radio.

With nothing to see, her mind wanders its own corridors, rattling doors and throwing rocks through windows. She wonders if
there will be dead people on television when she emerges—assuming she does, assuming TVs are doing better than her radio. Anyway, there are always dead people on TV. She wonders if anyone will still be around to care about the north face. Will she? If the whole knotty-rotten stump of the American century had split open, will she still climb futuristic alpine routes? Hitchhike on fishing boats and do overland approaches to obscurities no one wastes a damn on anymore? Stick out her neck with no one to tell it to afterward?
Call yourself a soloist. You'll climb mountains alone, but you get back, and you need applause.

Her watch numbers the passage of another day and extra hour. She flops up her tent, gritting her teeth against the damp fabric and what waits inside. In theory, she's made miles toward the ocean, but this camp twins her last. She leaves her compass in her pocket even as she sets camp up, not because it will tell her anything new now that she has stopped moving. Keeping it close calms the voice in her that says she has no idea where she is and has spent the day backing and forthing over the same ground, ending where she started. The rain turns to snow, then back to rain.

In Salt Lake, where she overwintered last season, twenty-five miles was a long training run, four hours if she didn't try to bust her ass. How slow can she be going now? The ocean must be close. Even on snow, with a pack, weaving like a drunk, she's still dropping miles. Has to be.

Inside her tent, Ann examines her feet, like a pathologist fingering a drowned corpse. The relentless wet went down into her boots. All day long, her feet swam with the fishes. The flesh is white, bloated,
waxy. She pinches one big toe hard enough to crease it and feels nothing. She dries her feet as best she can and shoves them into her dank sleeping bag.
It's a race between trench foot and frostbite. A footrace. Ha. Fucking joke's on me.

Her food bag has crumbs in it. Ann can live on air and NoDoz, but it doesn't come easy without music. She would
kill
for some sound that puts nails through her face, wakes her up. She might kill just to do it, separate dark from light. Better than unending grey. God, what a bitch. She hasn't seen a live thing for a month. Now she's fantasizing about twisting the neck of the first rock sparrow that flies by. She slips an inch below the surface, nodding off into twitchy half sleep.

Ann wakes to rain and static. “Screw it,” she says out loud, finding her voice rusty and thin as a reed. “Today, the ocean.” She shoves herself willfully into the downpour. Saltwater, salt air. She tastes each damp inhale, searching for the sea.

The rain hisses against the snow. Ann draws the hood of her jacket tight around her face. The world comes to her though a tunnel. The clouds bleed all over her. Even the candy red of her jacket looks grey. Wet noises surround her—the atmospheric pissing seems to be coming from left and right and straight up out of the snow.

No, those sounds
are
coming from the snow. Ann hears a hum, a roar, then she stops at a trench cut through the surface of the glacier by a boiling-fast whitewater creek. The water mesmerizes her. It looks muscular enough to rip off a leg. Ann fantasizes about a kayak, calculates the slim possibility of not getting pulverized by the current.

She tracks along the edge of the creek, till another vein of melt joins the first and strands her on the inside of a V. The two join and double and punch a hole through the surface, howling into the bowels of the glacier. It would almost be worth it, a hell of an exciting ride.

Ann turns upstream along the second creek. The rain drills down. Froth and fresh chunks of ice float past.
Son of a bitch.
It dawns on Ann that she is walking through the middle of a glacial flashflood. One minute, the rain falls and just disappears, and the next thing you know, the line gets crossed, the water heaves back out of the ground, takes over, and the whole world comes apart at the seams. Happens just like that, no warning.

Ann finds a low snow bridge over the torrent. Now that she's looking, she's sure she can see the creek level rising. The water rips handfuls off the sides and bottom of the bridge. Ann cat-foots over before the current tears the whole thing away, forcing calm, not hurrying, because, damn it, she is still in the mountains,
her
mountains, and she refuses to get pushed around.

Ann takes out her compass and points herself back southwest, the orientation of the glacier on her map. Every few minutes, she checks the needle again. Another creek slices in from the side and cuts her off again. Ann follows its edge, not too close, to where it drains down into its own round suck hole. Past the drain, the freshly wet track of the creek continues. Ann boulders down into the trough, sticking her front points into hard, freezer-tray ice. The ice is polished, milky-blue. The suck hole must have just opened, a trapdoor under the creek that popped and diverted the whole shebang into some subsurface vein. Ann climbs out the other side.

DPO, DPO. It's still in effect. There are trapdoors all around her. In fact, she's more dead now than she ever has been on a mountain. She has split from the outside world, dropped down a suck hole herself, siphoned off to fuck knows where. Nobody knows where she is, least of all Ann. And moreover, it's not at all clear that Ann will recognize the world when—
if
, adds her inner demon, twisting the nail—she returns.

There are no visible features, nothing to sight her compass on. She glances at it every few steps, trying to keep the needle steady in her mind.

She made a deal with herself that morning: No more speculating about the outside. It changes nothing. She chose to walk out. Until she hits saltwater, nothing else matters. But it's impossible—the scenarios belch out unasked for from the corners of her mind. She has no distraction, nothing to look at but the snow under her boots and the clouds in her face.

Earthquake. Alaska could unhook a monster. And the sky would be full of planes and radio talk. War. (With . . . China? Arabia? Some nuclearized -stan no one has heard of?) Solar flare. What is she, an astrophysicist? Just stop it. What does she know, really? But that maddening static, those empty skies. Something isn't
right
. She feels space all around her, no signals in or out.

She hears another creek and searches for it in the fog. It's loud, close. She looks left, she looks right. Nothing but snow. The sound comes from all around. Not all around. Below. The snow collapses under her boots. She's quick; god, her reflexes are sharp. She swings her axe far from the sound, sticks it in good snow just as the ice
water grabs her feet and tries to yank her boots off. Her body recoils, jackknifing up out of the creek. She thrutches and rolls away from the water and unstable snow—and glances downstream in time to see her eight-dollar plastic compass, which she'd held in one glove, floating away under the ice.

It's still raining, she's shivering, she has to get up, has to reduce her profile, get her rain gear pointed in the right direction—which is good because she has a strong impulse to lie in the snow till global warming lowers her back to solid ground. She's not soaked.
You dropped your compass.
Her left foot got a strong, cold splash, but what is she going to do, stop and light a fire? Her shell pants and plastic boots repelled the rest.
Dropped your goddamn fucking compass!
This Boy Scout bullshit is going to kill her. Ann gets up, feeling very tired.

She looks around. It's hopeless. Clouds, clouds, snow. West is where? Ann tries to visualize her angle to the creek when she last checked her compass. She tries to pry open the clouds, as if a landmark or compass rose might appear through force of concentration. Nothing. She puts the water sound to her right and starts walking.

Fuck it. She'll walk a line. It might not be precisely right, but if she follows it straight, it will lead her somewhere. Anywhere will do. She'll walk to Wrangell or fucking Vancouver if she has to. Who's going to stop her? She'll walk right down the glacier's throat.

A crack oozing slush crosses her line, and she jumps it. She end-runs around a jumble of blocks and fissures, an old scar in the snow. Rain slops down. Another creek—a big one, some branches must have accumulated—swings in from the left, and Ann tracks it a
quarter mile to a shelled-out snow bridge that shifts and pops under her weight.

Her line fades. She curves around a soft patch of snow, imagining a sinkhole to hell. The degrees of uncertainty multiply.
Pathetic
, she thinks, pushing forward because it seems slightly less pointless than standing still.
Might as well shut your eyes. Take your chances the next water you fall in will be salt.
The clouds press low and bleed and bleed.
Like a whale artery in the sky. Beast won't die.
There's nothing but the rain to walk toward.

Her watch marks the end of the day. Ann doesn't bother adding an extra hour. She puts up her tent, fighting the snow's invitation to sit and let her shaking muscles play themselves out.

Inside the tent, Ann swallows her last gel and eats all the scraps out of the bottom of the food bag. It's necessary. Her body needs the fuel. It's also another line crossed. No more food.

The calories and shelter pacify her muscles. Ann feels a little less like simply drifting away. She pokes at her feet. They look decayed and smell like a graveyard. Black edges four toenails on her left foot, which took the creek splash. She loosens a strip of white skin off her arch and cuts it away so it won't tear and rub the next day.

Ann slides into her sleeping bag and falls asleep like a dropped stone.

She comes to in the middle of the night. Something waked her. A noise. The
absence
of noise. It's not raining. She throws off her sleeping bag and pulls on her jacket, then her boots, done gingerly because her feet are dead flesh and live nerves. She unzips her tent and steps out into the snow.

Stars. Not a full sky of them. Clouds still jam the horizons.
Stars.
Bright and hard. Motionless. Nothing else. No planes, no satellites. Empty space and frozen stars.