I sank my head in my hands. If our situation had been bad an hour ago, maybe even dire, it was now circling the bowl of unimaginable.
I didn’t have a solution, but I knew I had to get moving. My teeth were starting to chatter.
I sat up, pulled off my gaiters, then my boots and both pairs of socks. “I know you probably don’t feel like talking to me right now, but can I borrow your socks?”
She nodded. Her knuckles were still white.
I slipped them off her feet, wrapped her feet in my jacket, and then zipped her gently back inside her bag.
Both sleeping bags came inside what are called stuff sacks. With down bags, it’s paramount to keep them dry or they lose all insulating ability. So most good bags come stuffed inside a “dry sack,” which is almost entirely waterproof.
I pulled both sacks out of my pack, stuffed my sleeping bag back into the backpack, slid on Ashley’s socks, slid my feet into the dry sacks, tightened the compression straps around my calves, loosened the laces on my boots, slid my feet in, laced them up, and then put my gaiters on beneath my pant legs. A poor solution, but the only one I could think of at the moment. I took a few steps. It felt like I was walking in moon boots.
I looked at my snowshoes and decided they were not salvageable. Both had bent in the middle, crimping the frames. They were one step from breaking in two. The sled was a much larger problem.
Ashley’s leg had to remain flat. I couldn’t just pick her up and carry her because the pressure of my forearm beneath her femur, aside from being excruciatingly painful, could rebreak it. A sled was essential.
I needed something to patch the hole. I had nothing but a backpack and two bent snowshoes.
The snowshoes caught my eye. The nets I’d used as the base of the snowshoes had been double folded when I’d first made them, in order to support my weight. If I unfolded them…
I did, and fastened the sides to either side of the sled. Doing so prevented Ashley from slipping through the hole, but it did not prevent snow from gushing through. My only option was to lift one end of the sled and tie it to me via the harness. This lifted Ashley’s head and shoulders off the snow and meant I dragged the back end—making two deep drag marks in the snow. Like railroad tracks.
Compared to sliding the sled along the snow, this was several times harder. And, maybe the worse part, it was harsh and bumpy for Ashley, which meant painful, and slower by a large margin.
I didn’t see any other way.
I pulled out the last of our food and split it with her. “Here, this might take your mind off the pain. But go easy. This is the last of it.” I ate my three pieces, which only made me more hungry. I strapped the sled higher on the harness, buckled myself in, and put one foot in front of the other. I readjusted the straps, then did it again. And again.
I didn’t stop until I could go no further.
I REMEMBER KNEE-DEEP SNOW, stumbling a thousand times, crawling on my elbows, pulling at tree trunks with my blistered and frozen hands, and the quagmire of more snow than I’d ever hoped to see. I remember walking through the afternoon, through dusk, through the first of night when the moon rose. I remember it shining down and casting my shadow on the snow. I remember starlight and then low clouds moving in. I remember blowing bitter-cold breath. And I remember walking a while longer. The compass dangled about me. I held it in my palm, let it settle, and just kept following the arrow. Bright green and glowing in the dark. Rachel had paid a hundred dollars for it a decade ago. Now, it was worth ten thousand.
I WOKE UP FACEDOWN in the snow. It was pitch-dark, no moon, no stars, and my right cheek was cold but, thanks to my beard, not frozen. My hands had cramped from holding on to the front of the sled behind me, trying to prevent Ashley’s head from beating about. The straps were cutting into my shoulders and I couldn’t really feel my legs.
I stood, pushed into the snow, and sank for the ten-thousandth time up to my thighs. I had stayed warm because I’d kept moving. But I could move no more, and my core was cold. Ashley was either asleep or unconscious. I unbuckled, lifted the harness over my head, crawled beneath an evergreen, kicked away the snow to make a flat section wide enough for two people, and pulled Ashley in underneath. I rolled out my bag, stripped, and climbed inside.
The tunnel narrowed, and I realized that I did not expect to wake up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The sun was high when I opened my eyes. I was sore in places I’d forgotten were part of my body. I wasn’t hungry, but I was so weak that I didn’t want to move. Other than a few crumbs, our food was gone. My face felt tight. Sunburned. My lips were peeling, and my two-week beard offered little protection against the reflective burn of the sun.
I picked up my head, rolled over, and took a look around. Ashley was looking at me. Her eyes spoke two things: compassion and resolution. As in, resolved to the fate we faced. Even Napoleon looked weak.
My clothes lay in a crumpled wet pile next to me.
The reality of last night returned in a wave of hopelessness. Ashley leaned over me, a strip of meat in her hand. “Eat.”
Spread across her lap, wrapped in the cups of her bra, lay several strips of meat. My thinking was cloudy. It didn’t register. “Where’d you get it?”
She tapped my lip. “Eat.”
I opened my mouth, she set a small bite on my tongue, and I began to chew. It was tough, cold, mostly sinew, and may have been the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth. I swallowed, and she tapped my lip again. We didn’t have that much food yesterday. “Where’d you…”
Clarity came with a rush. I shook my head.
She tapped me again. “Eat this and don’t argue with me.”
“You first.”
A tear dripped off her face. “You need this. You still have a chance.”
“We’ve had this discussion.”
“But…”
I pulled myself up on one elbow and reached out to grab her hand. “You want to die out here alone? Let the cold creep in and take you?” I shook my head. “Dying alone is no way to die.”
Her hand was trembling. “But…”
“No buts…”
“Why!” She threw the gnarly piece of meat at me. It ricocheted off my shoulder and landed on the snow. Napoleon jumped up and devoured it. Her voice echoed off the mountains rising up around us. “Why are you doing this? We’re not going to make it!”
“I don’t know if we’re going to make it or not, but either we are or we are not.” I shook my head. “No other option.”
“But…” She turned, pointed. “If you kept going, you might see something. Find something. What if it got you one step closer to finding a way out?”
“Ashley…I will not live the rest of my life staring at your face every time I close my eyes.”
She curled up, crying. I sat up, staring at my frozen clothes. The only thing warm and dry was my jacket. I needed to take a look around. Figure out where we were. I pulled on my long underwear, then my pants, sinking my feet back into my boots. My feet were badly blistered. Sliding them in was painful, but not as painful as those first few steps. I pulled my jacket on over my bare skin. If I could keep my core warm and not sweat, I’d be okay.
We’d slept in the open and were lucky it had not snowed. I turned in a circle, studying the top of the bowl-like valley in which we’d walked. I needed to get a bird’s-eye view. Dark, heavy clouds were spilling in across the mountains to the north. I wasn’t sure how long the snow would hold off.
I knelt next to her and touched her shoulder. Her face was buried in her bag. “I’m going to look around.”
One of the unique things about the trees around us were the limbs. They were straight, sturdy, started near the ground, and were spaced like ladder rungs up the trunks. I walked a hundred yards or so, found one I thought I could climb, slipped off my boots, pulled up, and started climbing. I was tired, my muscles ached, and my arms were telling me I weighed a thousand pounds.
At thirty feet, I to
ok a look around. I was amazed at how far we’d come since the evergreen shelter of yesterday. The ridgeline off which we’d seen the valley and made our decision lay a long way behind us. We’d traveled nearly the whole valley. Maybe eight to ten miles. That meant we had to be close. I cupped my hands around my eyes. We needed a break. We were due one. “Come on. Please be something.”
Being down in the valley changed our perspective, which was part of the reason it took me a few minutes to find it. Once I did, I actually laughed. I pulled out my compass, checked my reading, turned the bezel to mark the degree—because I was tired and chances were good I’d forget or get confused—and climbed down.
Ashley was weak and wouldn’t look at me. The resignation had grown. I stuffed my bag into the backpack, strapped everything onto the sled, and buckled myself into the harness. Doing so took energy I didn’t have. The first step sent pain spasms through me. The second was worse. By the tenth, I was numb. Which was good.
I hadn’t peed since yesterday, and given the amount that I’d sweated in the last twenty-four hours, I was dehydrated. I stuffed a Nalgene bottle with snow and handed it to Ashley. “I need you to hold this, try and melt it for me. Okay? I’ve got to try and get some fluid in me.”
The snow was wet, thick, and I felt more like a plow than a man walking. The trees obscured my view, so I had to trust the compass. Every few feet I’d stop, check my bearings, pick a tree a short distance away, walk to it, pick another, and so on. Every ten minutes, I’d turn, ask for the canister, and take two or three sips. That continued for two or three hours.
When we finally broke through the tree line, the snow started in earnest. Quarter-sized flakes. Some as big as half dollars. The frozen lake spread out before us, stretching an oval mile toward the mountains that rose up behind it. The snow obscured my vision, but the sight at the other end was one of the more beautiful things I’d ever seen. I collapsed, hit my knees, and tried to catch my breath. My wheezing was deep and my ribs were throbbing.
Lying in the sled, Ashley was facing away. Continually looking behind us. It’s the nature of a gurney. She needed to see this. I crawled around, elbow-deep in snow, and spun the sled. Her head was laid back and eyes closed. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey? You awake?”
She stared at me. “Ben…I’m sorry…”
I put my fingers to her lips and pointed across the lake.
She craned her eyes, staring through the snow, which was thickening. When she tilted her head and the picture made sense, she started crying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was late afternoon. 4:17 to be exact. I’d just finished up in surgery and returned to my office when my nurse said, “Your wife’s waiting on you.”
You never just appeared. And you never “waited” on me. “She is?” I asked.
They nodded but said nothing. They knew. I walked in, and you were looking at a color wheel. One of those things that looks like a fan, maybe two inches thick, eight inches long and covered with rows of every shade of every color in the spectrum. You were staring at it, hand on your chin, looking at it, then up at the wall, back at the color wheel and then back at the wall. “Hey,” you said.
I pulled the blue booties off my feet and threw them in the trash. “What’re you doing here?”
You held the fan thing up to the wall. “I like this blue. What do you think?”
A masculine striped pattern papered the wall. The wallpaper you’d picked out a year earlier when we’d “done” my office. I ran my hand along the paper. “I still really like this.”
You were in another world. You flipped to another section of the fan. “Of course, we could use this tan, too.”
I scratched my head. “You like it better than this $67-a-square-yard paper we picked out last year?”
You picked up a catalog off my desk. Flipped open to a paper-clipped page. “And I like this color of wood. It’s masculine, yet not too dark. It’s something we can grow with.”
I looked around my office at the $6,000 worth of swanky, fashionable, modern office furniture we’d bought in San Marco about the same time we’d papered the walls. I began thinking about the money we could make if we sold all that stuff on Craigslist. I said nothing.
Then you pulled out a large portfolio. Like those large briefcases that designers carry their drawings in. You laid it open across my desk, then starting flipping through several prints you had on loan from Stellars Gallery. “These…” You pointed. Tapping each one. “…I like. They remind me of Norman Rockwell; and then here are a few Ford Rileys and even a Campay.” You shook your head. “I know they are each different, but I like them all.” You chewed on a fingernail. “I just don’t know if we have the wall space for all of them.”
“Honey?”
You looked at me. Eyebrows raised. Your facial expression told me it made total sense to you.
Admittedly, I was tired and had been on my feet for twelve hours. Four surgeries. One that almost went south. “What in the world are you talking about?”
You said it so matter-of-factly. “The nursery.”
Your words echoed through my office in slow motion. Nurrrr-serrrr-ieeee. I remember thinking “Didn’t they have one of those in Peter Pan?”
“Ben?” You tapped me on the shoulder. “Honey, have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”
Maybe a dumb look crossed my face because you took my hand, slid it beneath your shirt, and pressed my palm to your stomach. “The nursery.”
If that other night during the storm you held back the waves, lifted me to the surface, and filled my lungs with air—then in this moment, leaning against my desk, color swatches and prints scattered around, my hand pressed to your stomach, your butterflies fluttering beneath my palm…you took my breath away.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I couldn’t risk walking across the middle. I had a pretty good feeling the lake was frozen several feet deep, but I had no way of knowing, so I kept to the shoreline. It was flat, free of debris, and the easiest walking to date. In comparison, it felt like we were speeding. The distance to the far shore was nearly a mile. We crossed it in a little over thirty minutes.
I pulled her up the small incline and into the trees that lined the bank. Again I turned her so we could both look.
The A-frame construction rose up some forty feet in the air. The front of it, facing the lake, was entirely glass. A few of the shingles on the roof were missing, but on the whole, the building was doing fairly well. The front door faced the lake, had been painted yellow, and because the prevailing winds came from behind the building, it was only half covered with snow.
I pulled the sled up to the front door and spent several minutes pulling away the snow and making a ramp. The door was tall and thick and looked imposing. I grabbed the hatchet and was about to strike the lock when Ashley spoke. “Why don’t you see if it’s unlocked first?”
I pushed on the door, and it swung easily on its hinges.
The supports for the A-frame were built entirely of lodgepole pine, the floor was concrete, and the inside of the building was one huge room—nearly as large as a basketball court. On the sides, the roof went all the way to the floor, and the only windows were the ones at either end. A fireplace—big enough for two people to sleep in—sat off to our right. A huge iron grate filled the middle. Stacked ten feet high in the corner sat a pile of wood that could supply the two of us for an entire winter. Maybe six or seven truckloads.
Beyond that, down the center of the building, two dozen pews, all worn and faded, were mounded on top of one another. Several silver canoes lay atop the pews, awaiting summer and the thaw. Off to the left was a kitchen area, and at the far end, a set of stairs rose to the second floor. The second floor took up only half the length of the building and was open to the area above the fireplace. Huge, forearm-thick cables hung from the apex of the building and supported the floor, which was made of one-inch plywood and cross timbers. Constructed across the length of the second s
tory were fifty or sixty bunk beds, all covered with carvings, pencil drawings, and every manner of name and lettering detailing who loved who. A squirrel had eaten a pine cone on the middle of the floor and left a mess and something else had chewed on a piece of Styrofoam and didn’t clean up after itself. Along the windowsill lay a hundred dead flies, wasps, and other flying insects. A good layer of dust covered most everything, and there were no lights and no light switches.
Napoleon hopped off the sled, ran down into the room, barked, barked again, then turned in four circles, and returned to me, wagging his tail and snotting all over my leg.
Slowly, I pulled the sled down the ramp, and onto the concrete floor. We stared, awestruck. I pulled Ashley over to the fireplace and began stacking wood for a fire. Then I scoured the place for anything small to start the fire. I started laughing when I found a box of fat lighter next to the pile of wood. I built the fire, small sticks on the bottom, larger pieces on top, tore strips of old newspaper out of an old box, and then pulled my bow drill out of the sled and began working the spindle across the hearth.
Ashley cleared her throat. “Uh…Ben?”
“What…” I was starting to get smoke and didn’t want her distracting me.
“Uh…Ben.”
“What!”
She pointed above the fireplace, off to a side shelf. A can of lighter fluid sat next to a box of strike-anywhere matches. I dropped the bow, grabbed the can—which was nearly full—quickly doused the wood and paper, struck a match, and threw it onto the wet paper.
When I first took a job with the hospital and began making a doctor’s salary, I started taking longer showers. Even shaving in the shower. Admittedly, it’s a luxury, but I loved the steam in my lungs, the hot water on my back, and the way the heat allowed me to relax.
We sat mesmerized and…bathing.
I was drenched. Every piece of clothing I had on was wet and cold. My hands were chapped, cracking, and the denim strips were torn and little good.
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