It was a funny idea, that the ‘engine’ of your body might quit. That you had a fuel tank of sharply limited size, and if you got between distant gas stations and ran out, you were just … gone. That from the day of your birth, you have to frantically keep fueling yourself, and you dare not take chances about it.
Nobody ever told me about that. And I hadn’t learned it for myself because I’d never been capital-H hungry or capital-T tired.
I knew stalled bodies could occasionally be jump-started, but I also knew that the appropriate tow truck and mechanics – ambulance and doctors – were well out of our reach. Once our engines quit and cooled, we were headed for the junkyard.
And it was very much a matter of cooling being the death of us, I knew. We were fragile vessels of heat in a carnivorously cold environment. An infrared satellite image, which I considered for a few minutes as a possible solution to our problems, would show us blazing in the infrared – losing copious amounts of heat despite our protective layers – in the midst of a black night which stretched for miles in every direction.
Tiny crystals of ice fell all around us, swirled into every crevice of us – through zippers, under gloves, into boots, down backs. In safer times and places, every snowflake is a little miracle, a piece of accidental art made of frozen water. But here and now, every flake was a tiny particle of anti-life. Taken one at a time, or even in the hundreds or thousands, compared to the fires of our beastly bodies, they were a very mild joke. But in their millions, billions, stretching out for miles in every direction, stacking upward and downward from our trudging feet, they were a cold crystal siphon pierced into the hearts of us, sucking the life out slowly. We were bugs pinned onto a vast frozen tray by our own fat and foolish confidence, bleeding our lives out a degree at a time into the frigid night.
Absolutely without landmarks and unfamiliar with the terrain, we slogged along for …
Eight.
Whole.
Hours.
The storm blew itself out by morning, but we were still completely lost, trudging desperately onward in what we thought was the right direction.
Finally – finally! – we reached Reds Meadow. The cold had crept into the chinks around my mind, and I have only a foggy memory of slogging past buildings in an open area. Captain Goosebag was easily fifty yards ahead of me, and I followed his tracks toward a particular cabin.
There was a log barricade in front of it, a section of Ponderosa pine a good three feet in diameter. The Captain’s tracks skirted the log, but I fell weakly against it, staring stupidly at the cabin door – which at this point was literally the doorway to safety and life, all of ten feet away – for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. The end of the barricade was only about six feet to my left, but I was so far gone in exhaustion that it seemed like miles. Even the thought of getting around that giant log, and then taking off my cross country skis, and finally climbing the two steps and opening the door, was exhausting.
I leaned there and thought about it. The only thing that got me was colder. The Captain was long inside, zipped into his down bag and asleep. Even if he’d been awake, I don’t think I had enough energy to raise my voice to call for help.
What got me to move was the absolute knowledge that if I didn’t go inside I would die right there – and it would probably happen in about half an hour.
Since you’re reading this now, you can guess the rest. I survived.
Moving like the half-human, half-glacier I’d become, I slowly bent down and unclipped one boot.
Rested.
Unclipped the other.
Rested.
Stood up.
Rested.
And then one robotically slow and distinct step at a time, I made my way into the cabin.
I fell into a chair and just sat there for a while in the cold. And got colder. I was no longer even shivering. I looked over at Kurt, unconscious in his sleeping bag, and thought it distinctly possible that we might still die here. Running on fumes as we were, what if our empty tanks were insufficient for warming us up enough to keep us alive? What if we fell into hypothermic sleep and our bodies just continued to cool, crossing from living to dead without our noticing?
I heaved myself up, fumbled with stiff fingers to load the woodburning stove, and finally got a fire started. I made hot cocoa and drank it as the cabin warmed up. It took a great effort to shake Kurt awake — I was finally shouting and slapping him hard on the shoulder — but I eventually forced him to sit up and drink a cup.
After I was well thawed, I rolled out my sleeping bag and just passed out.
I woke up ten hours later and went outside, while Kurt slumbered on.
In the evening light, the ground was a carpet of sparkling diadems, an expanse of perfect drifts out of which the rugged cabins poked. Massive white firs towered over me, rough columns holding up a sky of intense Sierra blue, and the total silence among those gray-barked giants was broken only by the wingbeats of a Clark’s Nutcracker, come to see if my commotion on the fresh snow meant food.
Though my breath came out in frozen fog and the memory of last night was fresh, I knew I was safe now. In my warm and well-fed view, the whole scene was fairyland-beautiful.
I went back inside and made Kurt wake up and eat, after which the two of us succumbed to exhaustion again and slept the night through.
In the morning I discovered huge blisters on both my heels, fully two inches in diameter. I covered them over with moleskin and pulled my boots on.
The trip back to the ski lodge was a four-hour slog, all but the last few hundred yards uphill, but at least it was along a well-marked road.
Some small part of me felt whiny and put-upon, for my blistered heels. Another part, on this beautiful, sunny winter’s day, felt fresh and happy to be alive.
Epilog:
Years later, I feel a quiet pride that Peabody, the second-string skier, managed to survive the adventure in quiet anonymity rather than ending up as fodder for a radio newscast: “Two cross country skiers were found dead on Varmint Mountain this week after a Forest Service rescue team using search and rescue dogs discovered their bodies under three feet of snow. Authorities say the two young men may have gotten lost in the snow storm two nights ago, and succumbed to hypothermia. The names of the two skiers are being withheld pending notification of next of kin. In other news …”
And wimp that I freely admit to being, I will still always have the sneaking suspicion that by staying awake long enough to start a fire and make hot chocolate for the two of us, warming up the cabin and stoking up our own internal furnaces, timid little Peabody may have saved the life of the more heroic and athletic Captain Goosebag.