The St. Walburga Abbey, founded on Psalm 23 and the other psalms of trust, is the largest of the three churches and simultaneously part of and separate from the landscape. It’s gray and stucco with a bronzed roof, and it’s built right into the edge of the rocks. Or this is what the abbey’s website photographs show; it’s set away from the road so I never actually see it. Like this day, all I ever see is a small metal sign on the edge of a dirt drive leading to the abbey, right before the top of the Virginia Dale hill. I sometimes slow down, but I always end up driving by.
One day, I almost stopped and even turned onto the dirt drive. There was only a light snow that afternoon when I left Laramie; people were walking and biking around town. The blowing snow started in Tie Siding, eight miles north of the Colorado border. By the time I reached the Virginia Dale hill, I couldn’t see the road, only wide swaths of white, gusting and then piling into drifts. I thought about stopping at the abbey that day and even practiced what I might say to the nuns who lived there if I went inside. The body is a unit, I remembered reciting in the church of my childhood, for we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
In the end, I drove only a short ways down the road to the abbey before changing my mind, turning around, and deciding to keep moving.
Within the first week of his disappearance, the Japanese government and the U.S. Air Force joined in the search for Craig. Soon a private NGO, 1st Special Response Group, went to Japan to look for Craig. Fulbright volunteers, too, came to the island to walk in slow lines up the mountain and canvass off-trail areas that hadn’t been combed through or couldn’t be seen by helicopter or airplane. A fund was started and a Facebook page and a blog, all called “Find Craig Arnold.” People around the world—many who did not know Craig, some who did not even know his work—were donating money or writing their representatives and senators in hopes that the U.S. and Japanese governments would intervene or that the private search group might have the funds to look harder and longer.
At first, the investigation seemed to pay off: footprints that looked like Craig’s were found heading up one of the volcano’s trails but not coming down. Japanese officials posited that this meant he made it up the path but got disoriented near the summit and took a different path or what looked like a path but wasn’t a path down.
Still, as the days went on, no one could quite tell where the obscured footprints led and whether Craig had actually summited the caldera of the volcano and then walked over to another strato-volcano site, or if he had tried to come straight down the mountain and slipped somewhere along the way. Craig’s tough; he’s an avid hiker, he’ll be fine, faculty and students in Wyoming told one another in the long hallways of our old English building and out on the browned-grass quad after each new piece of seeming evidence was relayed and then refuted, it’s only a matter of time.
We didn’t know if it was a matter of time, or how much time. All we did know was that Craig was still lost and the Japanese island that he’d been hiking was dense; it was filled with trees and grasses. It was nothing like Wyoming there, where Craig was: it was green; it was swelling.
Craig spent a couple of days in Wyoming, shortly before he left for Japan. Though he’d been traveling on leave already for some months, he had decided to return to Laramie to give a reading from his latest book and from his new volcano prose poetry.
It felt as if he’d swept into town that visit with just enough time for a few meals and to repack his things for the apocalyptic landscapes ahead. The posters advertising Craig’s reading appeared hastily made too; they showed a dark granite cliff—probably some ocean edge—with steam and water pouring over it. Just left of center, though, two electric-orange shoots of lava—like a cartoon or a piece of clip art—were superimposed on the cliff, pouring right into but never mixing with the water.
Neither Dixie nor I could make Craig’s reading, but we still hung that mockup of a volcano poster on our office door, next to a couple of advertisements for the MFA reading series, a list of semester dates and deadlines, and a signup sheet for student conferences. Some of my friends did make it to the reading and told me that Craig read with urgency and with flair, throwing his scarf into the audience at one point, beating the lines of his poems like a snare drum on the bookshop’s wooden podium.
Craig told a story, too, on that visit, of his encounter with a small bird on a volcano in South America. Craig and a fellow hiker and guide were coming up a trail. The air was filled with smoke and ash, so much that Craig covered his mouth and nose with a scarf, his head with a hat. Suddenly, there as they rounded a bend was a bird, tropical and hopping in long fluid strides, right along the path, seemingly unaware of the landscape around him. That was it: Craig relayed the story without interpretation or commentary; the bird was a poetic observation, a fact, just another thing that seemed to draw him.
Perhaps—I will think as someone tells me this story later—some things had already begun to come apart.
On April 24, 2009—three days before he plans to hike Shintake—Craig writes:
The day is breaking—
one side of the mountain pink
one in cold shadow
As the days went by, the news reaching Wyoming grew increasingly bleak. Five days after Craig went missing, searchers determined his steps didn’t lead to the caldera of the volcano and that he was lost elsewhere along the trail. Nine days after Craig went missing, the 1SRG search-and-rescue group believed they found his trail, leading toward the edge of a ravine. Two and a half weeks after he went missing, a technical climbing team from Tokyo, the Canyons, were hired to go over the cliff, belay down to the bottom, and search for Craig’s body in the thick vegetation.
Body: this was the first mention of a body. It made sense; a person survives only so long in the woods, without water or food, injured, unconscious, possibly taking a long fall.
“I felt like I knew Craig,” people who did not know Craig were writing or calling to say, even that soon. To legitimize the loss? To brace themselves for it? Or maybe this is what we talk about—our knowing—because there cannot be a loss of what is not known. Without a loss, there’s only a gap—an empty space or interval; interruption in continuity, a wide divergence or difference, a break or opening, as in a fence, wall, or military line; breach, a deep, sloping ravine.
Craig and I talked about 287 just one time, a few months before he went to Japan. We were in his office; I was sitting in an old green chair beside a white fur rug; he—tall, lanky, legs stretched out—was leaning on a metal desk. Why do you do that drive? he asked me, nodding slightly, like he knew, before the question, the answer. 287 is a narrative of life, he said, your life, though I can no longer remember whether he said “narrative” or “story.” I sometimes try to imagine his voice—quick, crisp, accenting the ends of words—and to listen for which phrase sounds more right in that cadence, but I cannot hear him. It seems the distinction should not matter anyway, but it feels like it does and like it might have to Craig, who titled his book Made Flesh, after the word made flesh, and in it began his “Hymn to Persephone,” Help me remember this.
The Wyoming West, you see, was not enough for Craig: not the stable, everyday university life in a mountain town, not the wide expanse of sky. Craig lived in a barely furnished apartment—not a house—rented, not bought; he left on long weekends, in the summers, for winter breaks, went to Denver, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Manhattan, Athens, Rome, Japan, any place exciting, any place with the possibility of something more, something else. There was no illusion of permanence there in the West, not for him, not for me. There was only art—I realize now but did not then—only poetry.
Craig gave me two books that day I met him in his office. He took them right off his bookshelf and told me to read them and keep them, that they would change the way I thought about my writing. The first was The Rings of Saturn, a part-biographical, part-fictional record of W. G.
Sebald’s walking tour in eastern England but a record that begins with a stint in a hospital and Sebald’s telling of the “paralyzing horror” that comes over him when “confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.”
The other book, The Lady and the Monk, is a story of a much different trip, a trip through Japan where Pico Iyer meets his future partner and wife and discovers he can reside happily between two places and cultures. “I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility.… I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe,” Iyer writes. “Taking planes seem as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school; I fold up myself and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag.”
That spring I kept driving, even after the Canyons could not locate Craig’s body, after the conversation changed from “finding Craig” to “recovering Craig” to “bringing Craig home,” and then the search was finally given up altogether amidst a steady stream of toasts, memorials, and readings of Craig’s work in Laramie, Denver, Salt Lake City, and New York.
One night I drove through a blizzard alone, snow falling onto my windshield in heavy clumps, wet and then so icy my windshield wipers stopped working and I had to hang my head out the car window to see. Another, I slid on the wet pavement toward the edge of a sharp bank and had to back my car up, slowly off it. Many times, I prayed for God and angels in a way that I have not since, probably never have before. I wouldn’t mind seeing them tonight, I called to the road.
I knew that eventually I too might find myself in danger and alone. I knew this and yet I still did the drive, every day, sometimes at night, even when I left town and could hardly see the road underneath the white, white snow. Is this what Didion calls the mechanism of terror? That we go forth willingly, that we bury ourselves in it, tell each other that the only way around it is through it—is to seek it out—that all that matters is that we keep moving, that we do not stop.
“Danger has a way of cutting through melancholy,” Craig writes, “the real fear blinding you to the fear dimly imagined. If you could only always just have escaped death, you would never be sad again.” But would we never be sad again? I want to ask him now. Or would we be sad always or afraid? Might the terror of the death-just-missed ever remind us that we live in bodies which have limitations, which are faltering, which at any point might be swept up as easily as the headlights in the distance in the early-morning sun? I never saw Craig before, I tell a friend who knew him like I did, but now I see him everywhere.
In his final travelogue entry before he disappears—before we’re left only rough outlines with which to think about his last days and life—Craig writes about a plant called ashitaba, “the tomorrow leaf.” They say it grows so quickly that leaves picked in the evening will be replaced the next morning, he writes. Or it may bring more tomorrows…. Crushed in the hands, the fresh leaves are sweet, slightly musky—not quite mint, not quite juniper. It is a clean, windswept smell, the smell of meadow, of England, of green, the smell of a road after rain. It is the smell of a world in which there is nothing rotten or putrid or sulfurous, a world in which all of those things have been rinsed away.
This day there is nothing to rinse away. I’ve traveled and moved to Norway, back to the Midwest, and then to Norway again, but I’m in Wyoming for a visit and decide to drive 287 both ways.
As I once did every day, I’ve left the southern edge of the Snowy Range in my rearview mirror, and I’m driving toward the northern edge of the Front Range, moving between the place I used to live and the place where my life is now.
It’s cold and quiet; the sun has risen. I’m in the last stretch of the drive, nearing Owl Canyon, the final hairpin curve before I make my way into Laporte and nearby Fort Collins, but I’ve stopped early, gotten out of my car, and I’m standing on the edge of the road in the uncut grass. The road is dusty, but the mountains in the distance are snowcapped. Another car ahead of me has stopped too, driver-side window rolled down, a man’s arm resting along it. There’s a field somewhere below the road with circular bales of hay spaced at almost-even intervals.
I’ve stopped driving because, at last, I want to stop but also because I must. Fifteen feet in front of me, crossing the centerline, is a herd of running pronghorn, forty or more, slender, legs outstretched, flying over the road and down the ridge just past it to the open grassy valley, two or three at a time. They’re close enough I can see their reddish-brown hair and light bellies, strips of white along their necks, hair raised slightly, and moving. I can hear their hooves on the blacktop, clicking for a moment between strides.
LOST
/LÔST, LÄST/
1. no longer possessed or retained
2. no longer to be found
3. having gone astray or missed the way; bewildered as to place, direction, etc.
4. not used to good purpose, as opportunities, time, or labor; wasted
5. being something that someone has failed to win
6. ending or attended with defeat
7. destroyed or ruined
—Dictionary.com
LOST JEWELS
In 2013 approximately $300,000 worth of jewels were found in a small metal box marked “Made in India” that was halfway buried, halfway sticking out of the thick, icy crust of a glacial peak on France’s Mont Blanc. The tin box was about the size of a shoebox; the jewels inside it included emeralds, rubies, and sapphires—roughly a hundred stones in total—each tucked in a small sachet.
The box of jewels was discovered by a twenty-year-old French student and mountaineer. When he found the box, he immediately carried it down the mountain to the nearest police station. The jewels could have been worth millions for all he knew, but he said he would give them to a museum if no one claimed them and he was entitled to the find. Though it was one of the most valuable mountain discoveries, the student never released his name to the public.
It turns out, though, that the jewels weren’t random or lacking an owner. They had been carried across Europe—from Bombay to Delhi to Geneva en route to London—by Air India Flight 101, a flight that on January 4, 1966, crashed into the Bossons Glacier on Mont Blanc at 15,584 feet, killing the flight’s crew and all its passengers. The jewels had been there ever since.
LOST IN ICE
On September 19, 1991, Erika and Helmut Simon, German climbers visiting the Alps, were hiking Mount Finailspitze near the Austrian-Italian border when they noticed a shoulder and then a skull protruding from the ice, half in the open, half-buried, facedown. Assuming it was a recent death, Austrian officials came back four days later, chipping the body out of the ice with jackhammers and pickaxes.
There was some clothing made of skin near the body and strange tattoos on its right knee, left calf, and spine. Its forehead was partially decomposed, but it still had hair and a dagger and a copper axe. When the body was taken back to a morgue, it was dated to be 5,300 years old: Europe’s oldest mummy. He was named Otzi after the Otz valley where the Simons discovered him.
In 2002 glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, hiking near the edge of a receding glacier in Peru, found a plant that was 5,200 years old, the same age as the famous iceman, Otzi. This suggests, he writes, “that the present warming and associated glacier retreat are unprecedented in some areas for at least 5,200 years.”
In August 2004 a local mountain guide, Maurizio Vicenzi, found the mummified bodies of three soldiers, hanging upside down from an ice wall, near San Matteo, Italy: soldiers—it was soon decided—who had fought in the First World War. A love letter was found in those same mountains and a soldier’s diary.
Only a year later Vicenzi again made a find: this time an entire wooden cabin emerged from underneath the ice. The cabin was used as a supply station in the war, and was set between a one-hundred-foot tunnel drilled into the ice and a several-thousand-foot cableway that soldiers used to bypass the glacier to get to the front lines.
In the summer of 2006, in a melting Nor
wegian glacier, a leather shoe was found that dated back to the Bronze Age.
In 2010 a ten-thousand-year-old hunting weapon was found in what had once been a frozen ice sheet in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
In 2013, not long after the Mont Blanc jewel find, a message was found in a bottle in a cairn near a Canadian glacier. The message was left in 1959 by an American geologist named Paul Walker, who told the recipients that he had placed his note and bottle exactly 168 feet from the edge of the glacier and if they wanted to see the movement of the glacier, they could measure from the bottle to the glacier’s endpoint.
The biologist who found the bottle measured; the bottle and the message were 401 feet from the nearest edge of the glacier. In just fifty years the glacier had receded more than 200 feet.
LOST COIN, LOST SHEEP, AND LOST SON
In Luke 15, the Bible narrates three parables about lostness: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. In the first parable, a man has one hundred sheep and loses one. In the story, he leaves the ninety-nine to go look for that one lost sheep and searches until he finds it. In the second parable, a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. In this story, she lights a lamp, moves the furniture, and sweeps until, like the man with the lost sheep, she finds her lost coin. In the third parable, a man has two sons. One stays home and works faithfully while the other sets out and squanders his inheritance, partying and living recklessly until he has no more money and finds himself living among pigs. When that lost son finally comes home, the father runs out to greet him, bringing him a ring and robe and sandals; he throws a feast in the lost son’s honor.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 7