Tahoe Avalanche

by Todd Borg

  “Tell me about the avalanche class?” I said.

  “Well, we studied snow and weather and slope angles and stuff because those are the things that make snow slide down mountains. We even dug these deep snowpits to study the snow. They were eight or ten feet deep. I thought it was ridiculous. But then I got to go down in there. It was like a blue cave. We identified the weak layers ‘cause those are where the snow above can separate and slide. After that I realized it made sense to dig the pits. But what a lot of work!” She focused on her drink.

  “Was that the main way Claude determined if a slope would slide? To dig a pit and look for weak layers?”

  “Oh, no! There were so many factors, I can’t begin to think of them all. Like, we examined snow crystals. We actually put them on this piece of dark velvet and looked at them with a magnifier to see if they had agglomerated. Is that a word or what? I still remember.”

  “You mean they stick together?”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe not if they stick. More like if they’re just grouped. The crystals get all rounded. Sometimes, if that happens and then new snow falls on top, it can easily slide off. I forget some of the details. I know we also looked for cohesion. That would be more about stickiness. Claude said that even if you find mostly cohesive layers, sometimes the very bottom layer at the ground can still be weak. Then all of the snow can slide even though it’s stuck together. That’s called a slab avalanche. They’re really dangerous because they can get going really, really fast. A slab like that will take out everything in its way. Buildings, trees, chairlifts, you name it.”

  “You learned a lot.”

  “There’s more, too.” Amy was excited now, recalling the details. “We stuck these density things into the snow. That told us how heavy the snow was. Denso-meters? No, wait, I think they’re called densitometers. And we measured temperature gradients and learned how to determine slope angles. That’s important because if a slope is between thirty and forty-five degrees, watch out.

  “We also studied the different kinds of mountain faces. Claude always said how we had to notice which were windward and which were leeward. That means when the mountain faces away from the wind. It’s just like sailing. Isn’t that cool?

  “Anyway, I remember that that’s important because the wind can blow most of the snow off a windward face and drop it on a leeward face. They can be just yards apart and one will have almost no snow and the other might have a hundred feet of snow. And guess which one will slide!”

  “Do you remember any of the other people in the class?”

  “Just Paul Riceman who you mentioned on the phone. And my boyfriend. Only, he’s not my boyfriend any more. We still get along, but he’s not my kind of guy. I want a regular guy, you know, regular job and all that. Reliable. But my boyfriend was kind of exciting, and I thought it would be fun to take the class together. He’s big into the backcountry thing. Always takes his snowboard and rides down. You know Mt. Tallac on the South Shore, right? Well, he rides down the cross. I think he’s crazy. It’s like this narrow gully between the cliffs. And super steep. That’s part of why I broke up with him. I would never go with him on those dangerous rides because I’m too sensible, as he puts it. He always would say, ‘You’re so sensible. How can you live like that, always sensible?’ It drove me nuts. I took the avalanche class. Is that sensible? Climbing up on some ridiculous mountain and digging snow pits? Like I’m going to use that in my job?

  “My boyfriend was the opposite of me. He was totally interested in avalanches and how they work. Plus, he was into the whole control thing. How to rig up detonators and toss the dynamite.”

  “Do you have his number? I’d like to call him.”

  “Yeah, I still remember it. His name is Packer Mills. He’s a poet. Talk about not being sensible. No wonder he wanted to break up with me. Here, I’ll write the number down on my napkin.”

  Amy and I talked some more, finished our coffees and left.

  “You’re going that way?” she said. “That would be leeward. I’m going windward. See, I told you I was a good student.”

  I gave her my card. “If you hear of Claude, give me a call?”

  “Sure,” she said. She was walking backward down the sidewalk, facing me as she moved away. The wind whistled around from behind her head, blowing her hair out toward me. She wiggled her fingers at me. “Hey, Mr. McKenna,” she called out, yelling over the wind. “What I said about more men should be like Terrance Burns? I wouldn’t want that for you. If you want to do coffee again, I would, too.”

  I nodded at her. “Thanks.”

  She turned around, leaned windward, and trudged up the sidewalk into the blowing snow.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I drove down the East Shore. Street had left her lab and gone home, so I picked up Spot from her condo.

  I caught Packer Mills just as he was leaving the snowboard shop. He had his key in the shop door, the glass of which was a color-burst of decals. The only light came from a light pole at the street and the neon signs of a nearby bar.

  We exchanged ‘Heys.’

  I said, “I met a girl named Amy Brewer who said she used to be your girlfriend and that you and she took an avalanche class together three years ago. She said the teacher was called the guru of the Sierra.”

  “So?”

  “You said you’d never heard of him.”

  “I hadn’t,” Packer said. “This is the first I’ve ever heard him called that.”

  “How come you never mentioned taking the class?”

  “You never asked. I didn’t think it mattered. Half of Tahoe’s serious boarders and skiers have taken avalanche classes. I’ve skied and hiked above Emerald Bay, too. Does that matter?”

  “Did you hear that Paul Riceman died yesterday?” I asked.

  “No,” Packer said, no surprise in his voice. “How?”

  “Buried in an avalanche off his roof.”

  “Really? Must have been a lot of snow on his roof.”

  “Were you and he close?” I asked.

  Packer shook his head. “Barely knew him.” Packer’s dull lip metal caught the streetlight and sparkled as if it were polished. “Amy still in Truckee?” he asked.

  “She still works there, anyway,” I said.

  Packer nodded. He picked up a snowboard that was leaning against the outside wall of the shop and walked toward his pickup.

  “She say anything about me?”

  “Like?” I said.

  “How she regrets leaving one of the last true poets?”

  “She did mention that you were a silver-tongued, mellifluous-voiced maestro of verse and walking out on you was the stupidest mistake she ever made. But other than that, no.”

  “Good,” Packer said. He dumped his board in the back of his pickup. It clattered against the metal bed.

  “Just curious,” I said. “You spend a lot of time grinding and polishing snowboard bases, trying to make them perfect.”

  “So? Same with skis,” he said.

  “Then you toss them down without regard to how they get banged up. And some boarders ride rails in the terrain parks, and on off-hours they ride down stairway railings. One day at the mountain I saw several guys riding down a long series of concrete steps. There was no snow on the steps, no cushion at all. A single trick like that must pretty much destroy the base of the board that you worked so hard to polish. What am I missing?”

  Packer made a little smile of frustration, then went serious, looked at the ground and shook his head. To him I was a geezer, incapable of understanding an artist.

  “It’s experience. It’s process. It’s about finding authentic expression. Ginsburg had an amazing command of the language. You could say he worked on his chops the way I work on the base of the board. But he didn’t write Howl because he wanted to celebrate polished English. No way, man. It was about finding a gut-level experience and then translating it into words. The more raw, the better. Think of it as a voice of the viscera. That’s what the board
ers are doing. They don’t all know about Dizzy and Pollack and Kerouack. They just know that when they get on their skateboards and snowboards they have a true experience, raw and unpolished. If the rails are rough enough to rip up their boards, it’s like Ginsburg’s obscenity. The gouged bases and trashed edges become the marks of authentic experience.”

  “You ever think about teaching?” I said. “Some of those kids could benefit from learning the antecedents to their passions.”

  “I could teach, but I couldn’t handle the administrators. I’ve got a friend who teaches creative writing at UNR. He says the rules he operates under and the creativity he’s supposed to teach are mutually exclusive. That’s why Claude had to run his own avalanche gig. The schools, they all have outdoor programs, now. It’s the new big thing. Sure, we’d love to have you teach, they tell you, but you gotta teach our way.”

  Packer leaned back against his pickup. “No way. I’d rather grind bases and get plastic lung disease.”

  “Is Claude Sisuug an artist?”

  Packer nodded. “Absolutely. The mountains are his subject, the snow is his language.”

  “You keep in touch with him?”

  “Nobody keeps in touch with him. He comes into a community at the beginning of a story and he rides back out at the end. Claude is the classic existential loner. His entire life is like a Western. He lives by his code, and he doesn’t care what other people think.”

  “Any idea where I could find him?”

  “Like I said, I haven’t heard from him since we took his class.

  “Amy said he supposedly lived in a hut in the Granite Chief Wilderness. Any idea where?”

  “Not exactly. I remember him mentioning that he had an old miner’s shack not far from the Pacific Crest Trail. Somewhere between Donner Pass and Squaw. He talked about how he could get to his place from either the north or the south. He said the hike from Donner on the north was about ten miles farther but it didn’t have much elevation gain. Whereas the shorter route in from Squaw on the south side had a climb of fifteen hundred feet. No big deal with a day pack, but when you’re hauling all your food in on your back, it adds up. He said hauling water was the worst part. That country is mostly volcanic in origin. Snowmelt doesn’t stick around like in granite country. It just runs down through the rock and disappears. But like I said, for all I know he could be back in Montana. Or the Yukon.”

  “Where in Montana?”

  “I remember him talking about the Beartooth Range. Near Red Lodge. He said they’re real big mountains. Not like ours.”

  “Anybody else you know who took his class?”

  Packer shook his head. “It was a pain driving up to the North Shore every time, fighting the weather. There wasn’t anyone else from the South Shore to share the drive with.”

  “Has Claude taught any other classes since?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I don’t think he has any other way of earning money. It’s not like he could get a job.”

  “Why?”

  Packer laughed. “You’ll know if you ever meet him. He’s a mountain man, a real piece of work.”

  “You mean unkempt and strange?”

  “Yes and yes. Wild eyes. Amy said he was creepy. I would say he was passionate.”

  “Amy told me that you were really into the avalanche control stuff. Detonators and explosives.”

  “Sure. Who wouldn’t be? The explosives are powerful. The slides they dislodge are even more powerful.”

  “That would be raw, authentic experience?” I said.

  “You catch on fast for an adult.”

  “You think you could find Claude’s shack?”

  Packer shook his head. “Maybe. Maybe not. I got the idea it was pretty well hidden because he didn’t worry that hikers would stumble upon his stuff. Oh, one more thing. He said that he would take his morning coffee up to his lookout rock. From there he could see the top of one of the chairlifts in the distance. I don’t know if that would help you. You thinking of going there?”

  “Maybe. Want to come along?”

  “Just say when.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I headed across town, stopped at my office and called Teddy Post in Oakland. I’d met him back when I worked homicide in San Francisco. Turntable Teddy, as he was known, was a pink-faced guy in his forties, about five feet tall and nearly as wide, and he lived in his mother’s basement in one of Oakland’s roughest neighborhoods. The basement had its own entry at the bottom of a broken concrete stairwell that had been dug out on the side of the limestone foundation maybe fifty years after the 19th Century house was built. Teddy had a regular stream of visitors who carried their aged, non-functioning electronic gear up and down those steps. In an era when most music libraries had shifted onto iPods, Bay Area vinyl record holdouts increasingly found their way to Teddy to keep their turntables spinning and their old amplifiers humming. I also knew that Teddy had a long history of fencing for small time burglars with electronics to unload.

  “Hey Turntable,” I said when Teddy answered. “Owen McKenna.”

  “I dint do it,” he said in his squeaky voice.

  “But an electronic guy like you can help me find who did.”

  “Okay, but careful what you say. You-know-who might be listening.”

  “Right,” I said, remembering that he always made the joke about his mother listening in on his phone calls. “I’m looking for a way to make a detonator go off with one of those radio-controlled model airplane devices.”

  “You know I don’t do bombs,” Teddy said. “I’m clean. I fix record players.”

  “Of course. But you’re smart. You can help me figure this out.”

  Teddy sighed. “Tell me what you know. Maybe I’ll have a thought.”

  “Guy set off some avalanches using dynamite. The avalanche charges were up on a mountain. I think he fired them from down below. He was also into those model airplanes you fly from the ground. I wondered about a connection.”

  “I dunno. Not much like making vinyl sing out of old speakers. Model airplanes are line-of-sight stuff. Not like you could fly them where you couldn’t see them, right? We’re not talking military drones run by satellite uplinks. So, while the frequencies the model airplanes use might work at a distance and out of line-of-sight, the power level would probably be too low to send a signal way up a mountain.”

  “What would have enough power?”

  “Anything that can communicate over distance,” Teddy said. “Like cell phones.”

  “I don’t think this guy used cell phones,” I said. “They can be traced.”

  “Right. And the receiving end would get blown up. Okay, walkie talkies. The expensive kind that operate on the GMRS frequencies. They will transmit for a mile or two. Technically, you have to have a license to use them, but it’s not like anybody who buys a set at Walmart is going to register with the feds.”

  “How would a walkie talkie fire a detonator?”

  “Like I said, I don’t do bombs. Talk to Mr. Lee across the bay.”

  “Lee have a first name?”

  “Yeah,” Teddy said. “Mister.”

  “How would I reach him?”

  “I dunno. I’ve never talked to him. But I’ve heard about him.”

  “What’s his business?”

  “Import, export. Stuff that ain’t his. He specializes in electronics. But he brokers anything that you can’t buy legally. From what I heard, if you want some military-grade night vision equipment, Mr. Lee might be the person to talk to. If you want to buy some explosive contraband, Mr. Lee might be the person to talk to for that, too.”

  “You think he would know about firing detonators with walkie talkies?”

  “I’m a vinyl guy,” Teddy said. “What would I know about relays?”

  “What’s a relay?”

  “A switch that gets a low-power message and turns on a higher power circuit. Like all the stuff in your car. You turn on the headlight switch, it sends a little current to the
relay, which handles the big current for the headlights. Probably need a relay to make a walkie talkie run a detonator.”

  “You think Mr. Lee knows about relays and detonators?”

  There was a pause. “I heard the feds went to Lee when they were trying to solve the bombing of the Milton Building in L.A.”

  “Any idea where to find him?”

  “He’s in the Tenderloin. That’s all I know.”

  “White guy or Asian guy?”

  Teddy had to think about it. “Chinese, I think.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  I hung up and dialed the San Francisco PD. Both Kim Hu and Billy Fong were sergeants back when I was a homicide inspector. I asked the receptionist if either of them was working the night shift. The receptionist said that Lieutenant Fong was in.

  “Hey, Inspector,” he said in my ear.

  “So you got promoted. Congrats.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Now, instead of working the streets, keeping track of what’s going on, I sit on my ass and do paperwork. What’s that like, going private, spending your days skiing and sailing up at the lake? Sounds pretty sweet to a paperweight like me.”

  “Sure thing. I’m on the chairlift as we speak.” I touched the lever under my desk chair, dropped it a couple inches, put my feet up on the desk. “I wonder if you can tell me anything about a Mr. Lee in the Tenderloin. Import, export, electronics, might know something about how to wire a walkie talkie to fire a detonator.”

  “My name is Fong, sure, but I was born in Arizona. I’m not much more Chinese than you. Not like I speak Mandarin.”

  “You’ve got born-in-China family in The City, right?”

  “Chinatown, not the Tenderloin,” he said.

  “Maybe make a call or two? For old time’s sake?”

  “Comp me a lift ticket next time I’m up the hill?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you back.”

  I ate chips and a beer from my micro fridge while Spot demonstrated his napping expertise, on his side, his back solidly against the office door, a loud snore to intimidate potential visitors. The phone rang thirty minutes later.