Snowblind (4 page)

Fuck
the climbing press and their backhanded praise, the “Psycho Bitch Rises” headline most of all. She was told to relax and take it as a compliment. Fuck 'em. Does she look relaxed?

Fuck the city people hiding from death in their homes. Binding themselves to their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors till they're left wriggling on their own webs. Secure, sure. Ann's fighting the good fight, trying to bump humanity off its inward spiral.

Fuck the whole brotherhood of the rope—they're just as bad. Dudes tied together, married by their knots and common purpose. Greybeards in Anchorage or Aspen or wherever they take themselves to rot in their own memories and dream up new certifications and associations. One way or the other, head up or down, she'll be there to remind them of their white hair and their caution.

Ann cups her mouth with her gloves and owl-screeches at the night, then takes a breath and cycles a few more times through her mantra:
DPO
. Dead till Proven Otherwise. She has the words tattooed in black under her collarbones. From the moment she touches the mountain, she
is
dead, clawing at the dirt from six feet under. She swings her right-hand tool into the ice and cleans the anchor screws with her left. If she wants to live, she'll have to prove it.

She began down at Satan's icy asshole, where she climbed gunslinger quick, as fast as she knew how, racing the sun and the devil's daily bowel movement, when he drops a white load from a serac band two thousand feet up. Then she'd been up in his lungs, where the wind blew to tear her off the mountain and the ice looked like ropes of frozen snot hanging down over ribs of black rock. And even though she now has ol' scratch by the neck, it's only if and when she tops out his horns that she'll have passed the underworld. Then she can reclaim her place in the land of the living, wherever in hell that is. DPO.

For three hundred feet, Ann climbs seventy-degree ice coated by a rotten foam of rime. Her headlamp claims forty feet of night, but she uses even less, locking in on the ice right in her face. Staring too far into the darkness is a good way to bring the sucking void to life. Which makes a fine entertainment, on flat ground, with a six for company and something to smash the bottles against. The emptiness above is the enemy, just as bad as the flesh below and harder to fight. Strung up above a mile of empty air with only a few points of steel in the mountain, Ann confines herself to the bright surfaces of things, keeps the darkness to the borderlands of her mind.

The angle ratchets out toward vertical. Warts of rock push through the ice. Ann pounds a half-inch piton to the eye, pulls the end of her rope from the loose stack at the top of her pack, threads a bight through her handle-modified GriGri, and clips the end to the piton. Her hands know how to do this frozen, pumped, and in gloves. The entire motion takes no time and less thought. Her rope is skinny as she is, looks like a spaghetti strap disappearing below her feet. She rope-solos three pitches of rock hung with glittering ice and powder snow, until the angle eases back into the seventies and she puts the rope away in her pack.

Her mechanics are brutal, ruthless. Every move carries her higher. Her thoughts don't stray. The music flails her eardrums. She hits blank rock and, minutes later, has a pendulum rigged. She swings left—instinct says so—and her headlamp digs up a rock corner plastered with snow and filled by a glittering black coal seam of old ice.

Higher, back on rotted, grainy ice with the rope stashed again in her pack, her left tool rips out of the ice. She catches herself with
the right. She waits a beat, prepping for an adrenaline storm, expecting her heart rate to jack up through the top of her skull. Her pulse comes and goes, steady as a bass line, and she . . . giggles. She has ice for blood. She's inside the mountain looking out. She presses her lips, seals her thoughts, before anything else slithers out. DPO, DPO. She still has to prove up. But she can't help smiling.

The short night turns blue, then yellow. Shallow ice, about as deep as a piss on a wall, dribbles down over vertical rock leading up to the chimney that splits the last headwall. Sunlight streams by overhead. Wind rattles through her. Somewhere down below, a thunderclap of released snow reaches her through her music.
Speed
, she says to herself, imagining a two-man team fucking around with ropes and anchors and getting creamed.

She's been in a deep groove all morning. She keeps her rope in her pack, reaches up, and hooks an edge with one tool, whangs the center of a plaque of ice with the other. The climbing is delicate, kinetic, a hatchet fight with a monster. Her hand keeps twitching toward the rope, but there are no gear placements, and she has already committed. She blocks out the summit and the ground and the thought of falling.

Each move fractures her resolve, a crack here, a chip there. Her brain wanders. She wonders if she—pieces of her anyway—will make it all the way to the ground if she falls now. It looks that sheer. Maybe she'll just burn up on reentry, turn into a bloody mist. Her hands, arms, brain
scream
for the rope, but the rope means nothing without a crack for a pin or a patch of ice deep enough for a screw.

Her muscles are on fire. She forces a long reach to an eyebrow of rock and nearly blows it when her crampon skates, shooting sparks.
The eyebrow is nothing. She sees, knows, it shouldn't hold. Part of her already seems to be falling. She cuts that part away, lets it fall. She is fucking
here
, fucking
now
. Like fleeing a burning building, she forces herself under the smoke in her mind, down to the floor of thought.
Do
, she tells herself, and she locks the eyebrow off at her hip, reaches up, spears a scum of ice.
Do again
.

When the top half of Ann's brain re-hooks itself to the rest of her, she is up in the chimney. She seems to be coming out of a trance, though she remembers every move. She's never gone so deep into the reptilian bottom of her consciousness.
Another weapon
. She feels vacated and shaky.
Better not use it often
. But it's good to know what's down there.

The chimney is deep, dark. Strange children of the mountain live inside. Hanging curtains of rock creak when Ann presses her back against them. Fungoid shelves of ice crawl out from cracks. She fishes for holds under liquid powder snow.

And then she is on the summit ridge, in the sunshine. The actual summit is a fin of crusty snow that feels unstable, a trap for puffed up climbers with lowered defenses. Ann straddles it anyway, hanging one leg over the north face and the other over the south, just long enough to give the mountain the finger and blow a few kisses at the wind. The mountain looks evil, deadly, goat-ugly. It suits her perfectly. Past her right leg she can see six thousand feet down the face she has climbed. It's
hers
now. Others have come. They brought their hopes and ropes and balls. No one else has sent the motherfucker. Only her. She banshees at the blue sky and claps her hands and gets the hell off the top before the snow collapses under her butt to spite her for her hubris.

The descent is unreasonably long and drops her off far from her basecamp. Hell, the descent was a proud
ascent
. Until now. She spends the time trying to focus, trying not to daydream. Her methods, her strategy, her luck—they all
worked
. The people who looked at her and said, you need more margin, you need a partner, you need respect—they were wrong.

Ann reaches her basecamp tent on the glacier in the middle of the next night. She's completely fried but still too wired and happy to sleep. When she tries to piece together what all she did on the way down, she can only recover a sense that at times she moved too fast and at other times much too slow. Clouds blew in, right on schedule, covering the mountain and just about everything else. The wind came up. No matter. Here she is. She rolls around in the snow, cackling.

She picks up her radio. Is it too late to call her pilot? Of course it is! Does she give a shit? No! That old boy dropped her off with a lecture about how much he hated picking up dead climbers. If she has the chance to drag his ass out of bed, she'll take it. Ann flips on the machine, gets only static, throws it back into her tent, and chucks herself in after. She sleeps through the next afternoon.

She wakes starving and cooks a huge breakfast out of powdered egg, sugar, and Tabasco. The clouds have gotten organized and are sitting fifty feet overhead, spewing snow. Ann turns on the radio again. Static. She scans the channels. Nothing but static.

Next day, the snow turns to rain. Wet fog gets in her tent, her lungs, under her skin. The radio speaks nothing but white noise. She swaps batteries, but that's pointless, right? If she's getting static, then the damn thing is working. She fiddles all the knobs and gives it a few
drops, wondering if some key connection has come unmarried and just needs to get wiggled back in place. She feels like a cavewoman trying to fix a toaster oven.

The weather clears. Ann steps out of her tent. The mountain looks unearthly. Impossible to think she's just been up there. She hugs herself. Hell, now it
is
impossible. The snow, the rain, the warm front. The whole face is coming apart, ice falling, avalanches pouring off ledges, white bugs and centipedes jittering all over it.

Her pilot will know she took advantage of the good window, the three days of cold and clear. Pilots know those sorts of things. When he hasn't heard from her, he'll pass by and have a look-see. Won't he? Sure, or one of his compadres. For all her grumbling and his gruffness, the pilots are a brotherhood of good guys, literal angels to the climbers. What if he's had a heart attack? One too many fried moose steaks.
Someone
knows she's out here, right? That's a stupid thought—what does it have to do with static all up and down the VHF channels?

Ann lays out every red piece of clothing she has and stamps PICK UP in twenty-foot letters. Then she cuts a chair for herself in the snow and has a seat. She watches the mountain—she can't sit through a movie, but she can stare at a mountain for hours—but now she can't focus. Her brain's in her ears, listening for that subaudible hum of a distant bushplane. The sky suddenly seems too empty, the air too quiet. Like the world has stopped turning.

She had been flying high. She has news to share! She can
taste
the lusciousness of casually dropping the bomb when one of the local hotshots asks where she's been. Sit back, let the story jump itself
from Alaska to Colorado to California. She's crashed now. She'll probably blab it all out to the first pilot or wildcat miner who gives her a lift. She can feel her chi sinking down through her butt into the glacier.

Weather rolls back in. Ice. Fog. Heavy snow. Rain. The typical Southeast Alaska stew. The radio makes electric snow, the same every time. Ann amuses herself by wrapping her fingers around it and imagining a throat. Her pilot goes from overdue to long overdue. Food's running low, and the battery dies in her third mp3 player. Ann studies the map she tucked into the case with the radio. The ocean is only, what, twenty-five miles away? Someone will be on the water, fishermen. Ann's heard of guys walking the glacier. And, goddamnit, how appropriate. She climbs the whole north face alone, and now she's going to die falling into a crevasse without a dead weight on the other end of the rope to catch her. Screw it. She'll get herself out on her own. She doesn't need planes or pilots. It feels
good
to be thinking this way, taking matters into her own hands. Where they belong.

Ann bundles all her food—little enough—into her backpack. She packs her rope and harness but leaves out the pitons and other rock gear, her GriGri, her helmet, one of her ice tools. Presents. Offerings to the mountain. Three dead music tabs weigh next to nothing, but Ann can't bring herself to carry anything useless. She keeps the radio, still hoping it will come back to life and restore her to the outside world with a flicked switch—though she resents it and looks forward to ceremonially smashing the smug little one-note snake.

The next morning delivers drizzle and hanging curtains of cloud. Ann throws a snow-clod and loses sight of it before it lands. There is
no point staying, but it's hard to go. She gives the pile of gear she's leaving on the glacier a kick and walks away.

Ann can't see a thing. The world is opaque, impenetrable. Behind the clouds, avalanches fall to the edge of the glacier. The noise of each slide seems solid as the falling snow. The sound tumbles down off the mountains till the air quakes. Blasts of wind punch crosswise through the clouds. Ann tries to stay psyched, to let the roaring stir her up the same way as a lunatic on the drums, but the detonations are so inhuman they make her want to crawl under a rock and take shelter. Beyond the curtains hung round the mountains, who knows what might be happening? Anything.

On the clear day, when she watched the north face come apart, did she see any planes at all? Passenger planes? Jets? Should she have? Ann can't remember if flight corridors pass over this corner of the Alaska panhandle and didn't bother noticing planes until now, when she wonders if there are any left in the sky at all.

She keeps to the middle of the glacier, steering by the concussions of sound as much as anything. She's below the firn line, and crevasses are scarce, but Ann feels sure one has her name on it, so she keeps her eyes in a vice trying to find it through the white-on-white of the clouds and snow.

Whenever Ann goes into the mountains, she always half expects she'll return to a changed world. Shakeups, revolutions, they happen. So when she does emerge to see the same people doing the same things, it surprises her every time, even though she knows better.