Snowblind

by Daniel Arnold

  We turned back south and changed skippers. For a kid who claimed to know nothing beyond the next turn of the earth, Skim piloted the boat like he could see the next ten seconds clear as now, like he knew what the wind was going to do before it did it. Wind gusts punched hard, but Skim had already pushed back with the tiller before they arrived, so that Cowards Run never even quivered. He did all of that while asking me how Captain Cook kept his men from becoming rotting bags of scurvy (sauerkraut) and what the crew did between shifts (I wasn’t sure, but I imagined it had something to do with the three thousand gallons of wine and the drummer Cook took onboard at his last European port). Skim seemed to be adding my answers to his mental file, another few pages between how to raise a barn and what to eat on the tundra. His talents were wasted on the present. He should have been off discovering new islands in a square-rigged log raft.

  There was nothing for it but to wait until the wind and slack tide lined up right for us to slip into Lituya Bay. We paced back and forth outside the entrance through waves like movable mountains and the gale, which kept trying to plow us under. The earth finished another quarter turn under the moon, and we had our first chance at the passage through the neck, but we were out of position, and by the time we had Cowards Run’s nose pointed down the hourglass, the water poured against the rocks, raising white caps and recirculation holes bigger than our boat. So we went back to pacing, waiting for the heavenly clockwork to align. We’d gotten so numb to the wind we barely heard it or anything else anymore. Our ears shut down, and we talked through signs. The wind pinned Cowards Run at a permanent slant. We forgot about flat ground. It was a blue-sky storm, everything sparking and flashing in the lowering sun.

  High tide returned after our daily dose of twilight, and we nailed the slack water perfectly. We passed Scylla on the left, Charybdis on the right. Skim had the tiller, and he was masterful, bending our little arrow of fiberglass through the rocks, Cowards Run zipping happily between the wet teeth all around her. Skim hooted and slapped Coward Run’s side. “I’ve got the wind in a bag!” he said. And I believed he did—that right there, he could have put his finger in the air and pirouetted Cowards Run with a twirl of the rudder. We squirted through the opening, and that’s when the crosswind jumped out from behind the rocks and hit us sideways across the mouth of the bay, flicking us over into the stone teeth on the other side.

  The first rock we hit tore the bottom out of the boat. Spun around with its tail to the wind, Cowards Run’s boom thrashed back and forth, the sail convulsed, the main sheets cracked against their blocks. The boat was dying under me, and then I was in the water and crushed by the cold. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Frozen brine went in my eyes and up my nose and down my veins. I wrestled out of my jacket and boots and kicked for the rocks. At least I must have, because when my thinking self rebooted, I was in sweater and socks and water up to my ears, clutching a peninsula of stone with my forearms because my fingers were solid wax. Upright shelves lifted out of the water above me, but they slid out of my grip. I had no grip. The wind drove the water over my head. Saltwater pushed down my throat. I thought: numb hands gonna kill me. I made my elbows do the work instead, hooking and arching and spluttering and kicking. I hung my middle over a spine of rock and puked out saltwater till I could breathe.

  I crawled along the spine to a solid ledge eight feet above the waves. The point of Cowards Run’s bow jutted out of the water a hundred feet from my rocks. The mast veered off vertical and rocked side to side. Water and stone, mountains and forest, plus that splinter of broken boat—that’s what I could see. A monster stab of loneliness pinned me there. No boat, no partner, not even my hands, which were still blocks. I was outcast, exiled. I got up to look for Skim because I realized I’d even take the company of his corpse. I found him half in the water and half out where he’d lodged himself headfirst in a sheltered angle in the rock. He was breathing and shivering and barely knew I was there.

  I hooked my wrists under his armpits and hauled him up out of the water. We leaned against each other, and he shook his head side to side. We stumbled across ribs of rock together, over to where the arm of land that separated the bay from the ocean became a wide spit with sand and trees to the east and rock on the west. Skim’s legs didn’t work so well. I forced him to take steps while half dragging him. I found a wind-sheltered patch of sun and peeled off our saturated clothes, then marched us back and forth until Skim could stand on his own.

  “Slavedriver,” was the first thing Skim said to me. “Whips and chains.”

  “Welcome back,” I said.

  “I’d given up,” Skim said. “I thought I never would, but I did.”

  “Everyone gives up eventually,” I said. “Unless you get shot or die in your sleep.”

  “Cheerful thought. I feel like I died twice. Once in the water, and again doing whatever you did to bring me back.”

  “See anything interesting along the way?”

  “Big nothing and deep sleep,” Skim said. “Real peaceful. Little dream flickers up above. Then a demon with a pitchfork came and lit me on fire.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We were far from warm and not moving very well, but we hobbled up to the divide and sat down where we could see Cowards Run. The front quarter of the boat broke the water, settled at a steep angle. We guessed the tide was about half out, which meant three hours had gone since we wrecked. Three minutes or three years seemed more right.

  Set there above the waves, cold but not dying from it, watching Cowards Run broken on the rocks, I felt deeply mellow. Nothing pushed me forward. I was in a nice, still-water eddy. We were going to need to find water and food and sort out how to stay alive. But right there at that moment, I had no boat to steer, no ambitions. Fairweather was a luminous cone on the near horizon, and I barely noticed. It was just scenery.

  “I hear some people fantasize about prison,” I said. “Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Stop the world and get off.”

  “We could start a business,” Skim said. “Chartered catastrophes. We’d crash boats and planes onto uninhabited islands for folks who need a break. No soap on a rope. Way better views.”

  “The insurance would kill us.”

  “It’d be a fly-by-night sort of thing. Cash and balaclavas.”

  The water ran out through the mouth of the bay. Inch by inch, Cowards Run surfaced. “A few high tides will break her,” Skim said. I said nothing. He was intruding on my serenity. A hundred more monster teeth poked through as the water flowed toward Asia. Skim continued: “She’s not broken up yet.” I refused to go with him. He said, “We’ll raid the cabin at low tide.”

  “I’m not going back out there.” My calm had shrunk to a life ring, but I gripped it tight.

  “Sure you are,” Skim said. “But we might as well get warm first.” He stood and chucked my life ring into the water. My blissful complacency popped. I was hungry. I was thirsty. There were clouds in the west and, if we were lucky, a tent in Cowards Run. And Skim, who’d been four-fifths dead, was getting ready to do wind sprints.

  We organized the Castaways Beach Olympiad. We threw rocks and caber-tossed drift logs. We steeplechased boulders. We were seventeen. We lost track of being shipwrecked. Skim found a spot where he could do a running gainer off a cliff into the sand. I found an overhanging prow of rock and did pull-ups till my head swam. We couldn’t start a fire, so we burned our own bodies for heat. My stomach cursed me so long and loud I was actually looking forward to the swim to Cowards Run.

  We sat on the divide in our underwear. As I recall, the land seemed as raw and restless as we were. The mountains and glaciers and woods and tides were all unfinished, on the move. We watched the water. The outgoing river slowed. As soon as the white caps around the rock turned to ripples, we charged. We gained the first fifty feet by rock hopping and wading. Then Skim slugged my shoulder, yelled, “Feed no fish!” and we kicked off and swam. The water was black and as heavy-cold as before. It wanted to para
lyze me and pull me down like a stone. But we were revved up, instead of sitting fat and foolish, flushed with success, and we hit Cowards Run side by side and heaved ourselves onto the tilted deck.

  We took two minutes to unclench ourselves. My hands were half gone again. Skim tried jumping jacks but nearly fell back overboard. Cowards Run shifted and ground against the rocks under our feet. I felt the fiberglass cracking. “One tide will do it,” I said. “The ocean’s coming back.” The clockwork was ticking. We got to work.

  All our things were in bags and duffels in the cabin, a nine-foot-long shoebox that was damp and smelled like brown piss even on dry days. The storms and the wreck had stirred it up with a dressing of bilge water, but at least the hole in the stern end of the hull had levered the cabin above the low-tide waterline. Skim dove full length into the reeking crawl space atop the gear, squirming back out minutes later with our two butterfly coils of rope. I flaked the ropes while Skim hauled out sodden gear bags and stacked them in the crook of the slanted deck. When I was done, Skim tied the rope ends around his waist. He beat his chest, and I threw him into the water, which is what he’d told me to do back on our perch on the rocks. While he swam for shore, I pulled more bags out of the cabin.

  We didn’t have time to unpack and inventory the things we wanted most. Water was already flowing through the bottleneck into our end of the hourglass. We’d decided to grab as much as we could and make do with whatever we got. When Skim reached the rocks, he scrambled up onto the spine of rock where we’d sat, yelling and shaking off water, rat-a-tatting hellfire and damnation till it was verse. He looped the ends of the ropes around a three-ton boulder and tied them off. I ran the middle of one strand around Coward Run’s starboard windlass and cranked the rope tight, trying not to listen as Cowards Run creaked and popped. When the rope was tensioned between the boat and Skim’s rock, I put a knot in the middle of the second rope and clipped it and a duffel bag to the taut line. Skim pulled on his end, and the duffel rafted across the water, half submerged and half suspended.

  The bag stuck against a rock and we worked it free, pulling back and forth on the haul line. It stuck again, and we wiggled it loose. It took long minutes to deliver the bag to the shore. I could feel the moon circling closer, pulling water into the bay. We worked like maniacs, the water climbed higher, and Cowards Run groaned and rocked against the waves.

  We’d ferried half a dozen bags to shore when Cowards Run lurched hard to its starboard side. I turned, released the windlass, watched the rope run free, then dove off the port gunwale as the boat rolled out from under my feet. Just before I hit the water, I heard a big, wet, burping crunch. When I surfaced, our boat was sinking in pieces. I swam back for the last time, feeling leaky and pretty near sinking myself. Skim fished me out of the water and hauled me up to the rock spine with the ropes and gear.

  Like bears grubbing under logs, we tore open the bags, hunting food. Two pounds of dried salmon disappeared behind bared teeth and greasy fingers. We chased the salmon with a jug of honey we’d planned to make last a month, swapping hits off the bottle, downing it easy as Gatorade.

  Everything was rank and sea-slimed—our food bags, our gear bags, our soul bags, too—and the clouds in the west had piled into mile-high masses. We upended our duffels, spreading our salvage on the rocks, trying to dry the gear before the next storm. Our tent and two tarps had made it to shore, so we constructed a little shanty in a sandy cove well above the tide line, tensioning the corners to cracks in the rock with our ice axes and odds and ends from the climbing kit. Then we split a brick of cheddar and built a driftwood bonfire that would have been visible on Mars.

  We slept through the brief night and through much of the next day. When we were awake, we ate and moved gear around, trying to get it all dry and kept out of the rain squalls that swooped down on our camp every few hours. I’d been so occupied with not drowning or freezing or starving, I hadn’t gotten much time to think. When I did start thinking, it occurred to me I’d been expecting calamity of one sort or another since I was old enough to notice the winds changing with the seasons. I was three-quarters Russo-Alaskan and a quarter Indie, and apocalyptic blood drained down both sets of veins. There were earthquakes, blizzards, bears the size of jeeps, white invasions, brown rebellions, and a goddamn lot of guns and spears and anarcho-libertarian fervor. Badness was all around, and I checked my fingers and toes half expecting to find I’d lost one while I was preoccupied. Besides, I’d read the books: Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Odyssey. If you didn’t get marooned somewhere wild by the time you were out of your teens, you weren’t really trying.

  So it was only natural that I spent some time stamping around the fire, yelling at the ocean and the sky. I let the gods know I was wise to their ways. Meantime, Skim was down at the waterline practicing Chinese calligraphy in the sand with a pointed driftwood stick. A wave would roll out, he’d step down into the wet sand, trace out a single character, then jump away when the water reached back to claim it. “I read that monks do this in summer with a waterbrush on asphalt,” he said. “You get a few seconds to make your mark, then a few seconds to see what you’ve done, then it’s gone.” I asked him to translate. “Wheel,” he said, jumping back from the water. “Wind.” “Wave.” “Wheel.”

  There was time for disappointment, too. Whenever the clouds weren’t spitting their guts all over us, Fairweather stood right there, fifteen miles away and three full miles high. It had never been so close and never looked so far away. The base of the mountain might as well have been in Siberia for all the good proximity did us.

  The second night turned to dusk, but we weren’t tired, having slept so much of the day. When we built up the fire, it glowed against the low clouds draped over our camp, making strange ghosts in the sky.

  “How long do you think we’ll be here before a boat comes by?” I asked. Fishermen used Lituya Bay. It could be a week, it could be a month, but someone was bound to show up.

  “Cowards run,” Skim said.

  I realized we hadn’t talked about Skim’s boat yet, and I felt bad for avoiding the subject. “Hey, man,” I said, “I know she was your baby.”

  “Cowards run.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Skim was hardly the sentimental type, but that boat had been an extension of him. I’d been thinking about losing digits, but maybe Skim had already lost a whole arm. “I’ve got some savings,” I said. “Not much, but I’d go in with you on a new boat when we get back.”

  “Listen to me,” Skim said, “cowards run.”

  It occurred to me that I’d been the one adding capital letters, not Skim. Then I understood what he was suggesting. I looked around our camp. We had ropes, climbing gear, tent, sleeping bags. We had food. We hadn’t planned on sailing overland to basecamp anyway. “We’re not waiting here for a rescue, are we?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “We can wait for a rescue next month just as well as we can this month.”

  “Yup.”

  The prison bars melted. The mountain was, in fact, as close as it looked. And just as stepping out of prison is supposed to be as bad as stepping in, our night world seemed suddenly perched on the edge of a cliff. The mountain had been much less terrifying when it stood in Siberia.

  We started packing. Once the decision was made, we couldn’t sit still. The ocean slapped the sand, heavy fog wrapped its wet arms around our camp, and we kept the fire high and took inventory of the things we’d carry to the mountain. We had two sleeping bags and one sleeping pad. We’d lost the pickets but had all our ice screws. One of the snowshoes had snapped. The twenty-pound bag of dry beans we’d planned on eating trekking to and from the mountain was gone. “Just think how much easier the approach will be without all that stuff,” Skim said. That hadn’t been my dominant thought, but it was true enough.

  The sun drifted up above the fog—so we surmised, at least, when the darkness trickled away, leaving behind a cold, white blindness. By midmorning, we’d fi
nished dividing our gear into four loads we’d relay to the base of the mountain. Fairweather, when we could see it, looked almost close enough to shoot, but the fifteen straight-line miles between us were a 3D Escher maze of mountains, glaciers, and rivers filled in with hectares of slide alder and raw boulders. Others had passed the labyrinth—it just wasn’t at all clear how. We sat on our packs, not quite willing to begin, stalling over a ration of dry fish we couldn’t really afford to eat.

  “I guess this is why people hire the ski plane,” I said.

  “When Cook landed somewhere, did he climb the mountains?” Skim asked.

  “White guys didn’t start climbing mountains till they’d finished with the oceans and jungles.”

  “Sure, that makes sense,” Skim said. “First Ma Ocean, then the subconscious, the steamy thickets, then up into snow-white soul-land. Trying to escape to the heights but always falling back to their earthbound selves. Tragic.”

  Skim would go ballad hunting like a dog chasing the wind in the trees. But I was rooted in practicalities. “Bag hauling,” I said. “I bet it was their luggage. On the ocean, you’ve got a boat. In the jungle, you chain a bunch of locals together and make them carry the bullets for the rifle you’re pointing at them. But in the mountains—even Sherpas would only go so far. Those Brits would do anything to keep from being their own mules.” Skim brayed like a donkey, put his pack on his back, and we started walking.

  Days passed in a blur of downpours, sand, and boulders, repeated in varying combinations. We muled our gear north along the narrow terra firma between waves and rainforest. The only dents in the wilderness were rusted machines from long-abandoned mines pushing out through the fog and woods. In all that time, we never once saw the mountain. We barely even saw the local spruce-tops. It didn’t matter. The mountain had become an article of faith. We’d made our choice between two doors ahead of us. Through one, the summit looked like empty real estate after you’ve survived shipwreck and drowning. Through the other, the top was the one place on earth worth risking shipwreck, drowning, avalanche, icefall, frostbite. The reward behind door number two would grow in proportion to what it took to get there, and that was the door for us, a pair of fanatics doubling down with each step toward the mountain. Or as Skim put it, as we sat huddled against a boulder that offered minor psychological protection from a particularly nasty squall: “You’d have to pay me six figures to do this as a job. But for free, I’ll bulldog the mountain to the end.”