Earthman's Notebook

In five minutes we were smothered in swirling, blinding snow. I could see about four feet in front of me. I could make out my partner’s tracks in the snow ahead, but absolutely nothing else.

Kurt was the stronger of the two of us, and he strode perpetually ahead, vanished in the gray wall ahead of me. Every ten minutes or so, his attenuated voice would drift back from the cold silent distance: “Peabody!” and I would yell back “Captain!”

For hours at a time, I was totally isolated – only our occasional voices shouted into the night , and our frequent breaks to stoke up our body’s fires, kept us in touch.

There might be quite a lot I should say about the time that followed. I should probably go on for pages, building the story up into the kind of edge-of-your-seat life-and-death struggle you’d find in a Reader’s Digest Drama in Real Life. I’d have to make up most of the details, though, because the time was, literally, a blur. The trek began to take its serious toll.

Cross country skiing is one of the best aerobic activities there is – especially at altitudes ranging up to 11,000 feet. The problem for us was that we weren’t in this for a nice workout – we were lost in a blizzard. We couldn’t really even rest – we might get cold, and we both knew that would be really bad. The relentless need to keep moving on those skis – over rough, frozen endless terrain – steadily sucked the energy out of us. No matter how often we stopped to eat, our bodies wound slowly down.

Yet even striding steadily into dumb exhaustion, my brain still worked fine for some things. One part of me focused tiredly on the terrain and the barely-visible tracks of my companion. A different part fizzed with the intriguing quandary I found myself in – not looking for solutions so much as simply toying with the reality of being lost in a snowstorm.

It happened in movies all the time, and the main characters always survived. Given that I was undoubtedly a Main Character, I was free to play with thoughts such as what it might feel like to almost die of hypothermia, or wonder if your toes really turned black before they had to be cut off, or how I might later tell the tale of those missing toes when someone noticed my heroic limp.

I’d heard stories at the lodge of The Guy Who Skied Down the Wrong Side, the unfortunate flatlander who was never seen again because he skied down in a place where there were no lifts to bring him back up, no Ski Patrol to find him. They discovered his ski boots the following summer with his lower leg bones still in them – the rest of him having been eaten and scattered by happy coyotes – less than 200 yards from a Forest Service rescue cabin. But he was obviously not a Main Character.

It all got real for me, finally, with something small. I’d figured out long before that we were really lost – despite the undaunted Captain telling me we were on the right trail and Reds Meadow was just a short distance ahead – but the thought that we might be in real life-or-death trouble still hadn’t hit me. It had gotten to the level of an inconvenience, and was getting more annoying as time passed, but it still didn’t feel like a realio-trulio threat.

Somewhere in those eight hours, though, wrapped in a gray cocoon of blowing snow, we sat down to take a snack break and I dug in my pack for my banana. When I brought it out, it was frozen solid and dead black.

The irritation boiled over: “Dammit!” I yelled, and threw it down into the snow. I stared at it there on top of the packed crust our skis had made and angrily thought about how much I wanted a nice ripe yellow banana, and how there was nothing I could do about getting one, here and now. I thought also about how I wanted to be either home in bed or at Reds Meadow right now, and there was nothing I could do about that either. And then I thought that there might be other things I would dearly want before this trip was over, and for those things too there might be nothing I could do. I felt a funny sinking feeling and said to myself, for the first time in my life, “We could die out here.”

An image of my old VW Bug came to mind, parked on the side of the highway after running out of gas. That’s what it will be like, I thought. They’ll find us out here somewhere just stopped in place, with our fuel gauges on ‘E.’

In that moment, I saw us clearly as biological machines. You could probably write an equation about the situation, I imagined, calculating the amount of energy remaining in our bodies and the amount of refueling available to us in our packs against the distance we had to go to get to safety. You’d compare the rate at which we were outputting energy to the maximum rate at which we could input it. Given all the figures, you could predict almost exactly where we would coast off the trail and sputter to a halt.

The difference between us and my Bug, though, was that we would never start again. No amount of pushing, carburetor cleaning, sparkplug wire testing, key turning, or battery cable tapping would get us going. I pictured a graphical representation of the running of my own body compared to the running of my Bug: the line extending futureward for the car could be broken countless times and still resume at its same strength, whereas the same line for a human body would never start again, after even a very brief stop.