Snowblind Read online

  She began down at Satan’s icy asshole, where she climbed gunslinger quick, as fast as she knew how, racing the sun and the devil’s daily bowel movement, when he drops a white load from a serac band two thousand feet up. Then she’d been up in his lungs, where the wind blew to tear her off the mountain and the ice looked like ropes of frozen snot hanging down over ribs of black rock. And even though she now has ol’ scratch by the neck, it’s only if and when she tops out his horns that she’ll have passed the underworld. Then she can reclaim her place in the land of the living, wherever in hell that is. DPO.

  For three hundred feet, Ann climbs seventy-degree ice coated by a rotten foam of rime. Her headlamp claims forty feet of night, but she uses even less, locking in on the ice right in her face. Staring too far into the darkness is a good way to bring the sucking void to life. Which makes a fine entertainment, on flat ground, with a six for company and something to smash the bottles against. The emptiness above is the enemy, just as bad as the flesh below and harder to fight. Strung up above a mile of empty air with only a few points of steel in the mountain, Ann confines herself to the bright surfaces of things, keeps the darkness to the borderlands of her mind.

  The angle ratchets out toward vertical. Warts of rock push through the ice. Ann pounds a half-inch piton to the eye, pulls the end of her rope from the loose stack at the top of her pack, threads a bight through her handle-modified GriGri, and clips the end to the piton. Her hands know how to do this frozen, pumped, and in gloves. The entire motion takes no time and less thought. Her rope is skinny as she is, looks like a spaghetti strap disappearing below her feet. She rope-solos three pitches of rock hung with glittering ice and powder snow, until the angle eases back into the seventies and she puts the rope away in her pack.

  Her mechanics are brutal, ruthless. Every move carries her higher. Her thoughts don’t stray. The music flails her eardrums. She hits blank rock and, minutes later, has a pendulum rigged. She swings left—instinct says so—and her headlamp digs up a rock corner plastered with snow and filled by a glittering black coal seam of old ice.

  Higher, back on rotted, grainy ice with the rope stashed again in her pack, her left tool rips out of the ice. She catches herself with the right. She waits a beat, prepping for an adrenaline storm, expecting her heart rate to jack up through the top of her skull. Her pulse comes and goes, steady as a bass line, and she . . . giggles. She has ice for blood. She’s inside the mountain looking out. She presses her lips, seals her thoughts, before anything else slithers out. DPO, DPO. She still has to prove up. But she can’t help smiling.

  The short night turns blue, then yellow. Shallow ice, about as deep as a piss on a wall, dribbles down over vertical rock leading up to the chimney that splits the last headwall. Sunlight streams by overhead. Wind rattles through her. Somewhere down below, a thunderclap of released snow reaches her through her music. Speed, she says to herself, imagining a two-man team fucking around with ropes and anchors and getting creamed.

  She’s been in a deep groove all morning. She keeps her rope in her pack, reaches up, and hooks an edge with one tool, whangs the center of a plaque of ice with the other. The climbing is delicate, kinetic, a hatchet fight with a monster. Her hand keeps twitching toward the rope, but there are no gear placements, and she has already committed. She blocks out the summit and the ground and the thought of falling.

  Each move fractures her resolve, a crack here, a chip there. Her brain wanders. She wonders if she—pieces of her anyway—will make it all the way to the ground if she falls now. It looks that sheer. Maybe she’ll just burn up on reentry, turn into a bloody mist. Her hands, arms, brain scream for the rope, but the rope means nothing without a crack for a pin or a patch of ice deep enough for a screw.

  Her muscles are on fire. She forces a long reach to an eyebrow of rock and nearly blows it when her crampon skates, shooting sparks. The eyebrow is nothing. She sees, knows, it shouldn’t hold. Part of her already seems to be falling. She cuts that part away, lets it fall. She is fucking here, fucking now. Like fleeing a burning building, she forces herself under the smoke in her mind, down to the floor of thought. Do, she tells herself, and she locks the eyebrow off at her hip, reaches up, spears a scum of ice. Do again.

  When the top half of Ann’s brain re-hooks itself to the rest of her, she is up in the chimney. She seems to be coming out of a trance, though she remembers every move. She’s never gone so deep into the reptilian bottom of her consciousness. Another weapon. She feels vacated and shaky. Better not use it often. But it’s good to know what’s down there.

  The chimney is deep, dark. Strange children of the mountain live inside. Hanging curtains of rock creak when Ann presses her back against them. Fungoid shelves of ice crawl out from cracks. She fishes for holds under liquid powder snow.

  And then she is on the summit ridge, in the sunshine. The actual summit is a fin of crusty snow that feels unstable, a trap for puffed up climbers with lowered defenses. Ann straddles it anyway, hanging one leg over the north face and the other over the south, just long enough to give the mountain the finger and blow a few kisses at the wind. The mountain looks evil, deadly, goat-ugly. It suits her perfectly. Past her right leg she can see six thousand feet down the face she has climbed. It’s hers now. Others have come. They brought their hopes and ropes and balls. No one else has sent the motherfucker. Only her. She banshees at the blue sky and claps her hands and gets the hell off the top before the snow collapses under her butt to spite her for her hubris.

  The descent is unreasonably long and drops her off far from her basecamp. Hell, the descent was a proud ascent. Until now. She spends the time trying to focus, trying not to daydream. Her methods, her strategy, her luck—they all worked. The people who looked at her and said, you need more margin, you need a partner, you need respect—they were wrong.

  Ann reaches her basecamp tent on the glacier in the middle of the next night. She’s completely fried but still too wired and happy to sleep. When she tries to piece together what all she did on the way down, she can only recover a sense that at times she moved too fast and at other times much too slow. Clouds blew in, right on schedule, covering the mountain and just about everything else. The wind came up. No matter. Here she is. She rolls around in the snow, cackling.

  She picks up her radio. Is it too late to call her pilot? Of course it is! Does she give a shit? No! That old boy dropped her off with a lecture about how much he hated picking up dead climbers. If she has the chance to drag his ass out of bed, she’ll take it. Ann flips on the machine, gets only static, throws it back into her tent, and chucks herself in after. She sleeps through the next afternoon.

  She wakes starving and cooks a huge breakfast out of powdered egg, sugar, and Tabasco. The clouds have gotten organized and are sitting fifty feet overhead, spewing snow. Ann turns on the radio again. Static. She scans the channels. Nothing but static.

  Next day, the snow turns to rain. Wet fog gets in her tent, her lungs, under her skin. The radio speaks nothing but white noise. She swaps batteries, but that’s pointless, right? If she’s getting static, then the damn thing is working. She fiddles all the knobs and gives it a few drops, wondering if some key connection has come unmarried and just needs to get wiggled back in place. She feels like a cavewoman trying to fix a toaster oven.

  The weather clears. Ann steps out of her tent. The mountain looks unearthly. Impossible to think she’s just been up there. She hugs herself. Hell, now it is impossible. The snow, the rain, the warm front. The whole face is coming apart, ice falling, avalanches pouring off ledges, white bugs and centipedes jittering all over it.

  Her pilot will know she took advantage of the good window, the three days of cold and clear. Pilots know those sorts of things. When he hasn’t heard from her, he’ll pass by and have a look-see. Won’t he? Sure, or one of his compadres. For all her grumbling and his gruffness, the pilots are a brotherhood of good guys, literal angels to the climbers. What if he’s had a heart attack? One too ma
ny fried moose steaks. Someone knows she’s out here, right? That’s a stupid thought—what does it have to do with static all up and down the VHF channels?

  Ann lays out every red piece of clothing she has and stamps PICK UP in twenty-foot letters. Then she cuts a chair for herself in the snow and has a seat. She watches the mountain—she can’t sit through a movie, but she can stare at a mountain for hours—but now she can’t focus. Her brain’s in her ears, listening for that subaudible hum of a distant bushplane. The sky suddenly seems too empty, the air too quiet. Like the world has stopped turning.

  She had been flying high. She has news to share! She can taste the lusciousness of casually dropping the bomb when one of the local hotshots asks where she’s been. Sit back, let the story jump itself from Alaska to Colorado to California. She’s crashed now. She’ll probably blab it all out to the first pilot or wildcat miner who gives her a lift. She can feel her chi sinking down through her butt into the glacier.

  Weather rolls back in. Ice. Fog. Heavy snow. Rain. The typical Southeast Alaska stew. The radio makes electric snow, the same every time. Ann amuses herself by wrapping her fingers around it and imagining a throat. Her pilot goes from overdue to long overdue. Food’s running low, and the battery dies in her third mp3 player. Ann studies the map she tucked into the case with the radio. The ocean is only, what, twenty-five miles away? Someone will be on the water, fishermen. Ann’s heard of guys walking the glacier. And, goddamnit, how appropriate. She climbs the whole north face alone, and now she’s going to die falling into a crevasse without a dead weight on the other end of the rope to catch her. Screw it. She’ll get herself out on her own. She doesn’t need planes or pilots. It feels good to be thinking this way, taking matters into her own hands. Where they belong.

  Ann bundles all her food—little enough—into her backpack. She packs her rope and harness but leaves out the pitons and other rock gear, her GriGri, her helmet, one of her ice tools. Presents. Offerings to the mountain. Three dead music tabs weigh next to nothing, but Ann can’t bring herself to carry anything useless. She keeps the radio, still hoping it will come back to life and restore her to the outside world with a flicked switch—though she resents it and looks forward to ceremonially smashing the smug little one-note snake.

  The next morning delivers drizzle and hanging curtains of cloud. Ann throws a snow-clod and loses sight of it before it lands. There is no point staying, but it’s hard to go. She gives the pile of gear she’s leaving on the glacier a kick and walks away.

  Ann can’t see a thing. The world is opaque, impenetrable. Behind the clouds, avalanches fall to the edge of the glacier. The noise of each slide seems solid as the falling snow. The sound tumbles down off the mountains till the air quakes. Blasts of wind punch crosswise through the clouds. Ann tries to stay psyched, to let the roaring stir her up the same way as a lunatic on the drums, but the detonations are so inhuman they make her want to crawl under a rock and take shelter. Beyond the curtains hung round the mountains, who knows what might be happening? Anything.

  On the clear day, when she watched the north face come apart, did she see any planes at all? Passenger planes? Jets? Should she have? Ann can’t remember if flight corridors pass over this corner of the Alaska panhandle and didn’t bother noticing planes until now, when she wonders if there are any left in the sky at all.

  She keeps to the middle of the glacier, steering by the concussions of sound as much as anything. She’s below the firn line, and crevasses are scarce, but Ann feels sure one has her name on it, so she keeps her eyes in a vice trying to find it through the white-on-white of the clouds and snow.

  Whenever Ann goes into the mountains, she always half expects she’ll return to a changed world. Shakeups, revolutions, they happen. So when she does emerge to see the same people doing the same things, it surprises her every time, even though she knows better.

  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 towar
d 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.