The skin of the world
By Rick Craig |
| Photo by MikeTittel |
The woman who came for the aisle seat on our flight out of Seattle had a halfdozen gadgets slung over her shoulder. As she reached us, her wheeled suitcase snagged a seat and jerked her arm back, dislodging the shoulder straps. She dragged everything the last few feet like a defeated schoolgirl and grunted the suitcase up to the bin. She flopped into her seat and said, “I am having such a bad hair day.”
Casey looked right at the woman and burst out in her farm girl laugh, a guffaw most people would call it, slapping the flat of her hand on my thigh for emphasis.
“Bad hair?” I asked across Casey. The woman’s dark curls were in a stylish tousle.
“It’s an expression,” she said.
“You know, from that commercial.”
“We’ve been on an island,” I told her. “Off Alaska.We’re a little out of touch.”
Casey, who never wore her red-blond hair in anything but a ponytail, stared hard at the woman, making a display of her amusement.
“What were you doing there?” the woman asked.
“Canning fish.”
The woman’s lip curled as if we were knee-deep in the piles of fish guts we had stood in back in Kodiak. It made me self-conscious, because the smell does linger a few days after the season. A little girl trailing her father to the toilets at the back dawdled her way down the aisle, casting her big brown eyes around for an audience. When Casey gave her a wink, the girl stopped and announced, “If you pull on my daddy’s finger, he farts.”
Casey reached across the bad hair woman more than she had to when she extended her finger to the girl.
In bed that night, straddling me and catching her breath after one of her grueling rides, Casey placed a hand coquettishly behind her ear and said, “Is my hair okay? I’m worried I might be having one of those days.” Then she fell over beside me, laughing into a pillow and thumping my chest.
Casey couldn’t laugh without hitting something, usually me. If I teased her – about being butch or uncouth, about always skiing first to get the unbroken line through fresh powder – she would lean forward and laugh with her eyes squeezed down to slits, then throw a sharp jab at my shoulder. For her own jokes, too. She would introduce to me someone as her “friend,” and if they looked surprised she would say, “Thought I was a dyke, didn’t ya?” Then the same gut-hugging laugh and the punch.
In the morning, we came out of the spare bedroom to find Wally and Sarah already drinking their coffee.
“And how did you two sleep last night?” Sarah asked while Wally made lewd insinuations with his eyebrows.
Casey draped herself over my shoulder. “As Hemingway’s white hunter said after nailing the Macomber bitch — ”
“Casey, please — ”
“Topping!” And she fell away from me with the usual jab. Then they all stared at me in anticipation. A favorite sport of theirs, making me blush.
Casey spent the next two months helping Wally and Sarah button up their little organic farm for the winter. I picked up some carpentry work, commuting over the pass to Jackson to help a friend do trim work on the log mansions being built there. In the evenings, Wally would grill some of the salmon we had brought back, while Casey and I, sick of fish after the seventy-hour weeks of freezing and canning, gorged on late tomatoes from the greenhouse. Then the snow came, and Wally and Sarah were off to their season of maintenance work at an Antarctic research station. And Casey and I were in the backcountry every day, avalanche beacons around our necks and climbing skins on the bottoms of our skis, heading for the top of some untouched slope.
It was mid-December when the first big storm hit the Tetons. It came in at night, slow-moving and warm, then parked over us while the temperature dropped and fine dry powder sifted down over the world. We skied the next day while snow poured down at more than an inch-per-hour and the conditions steadily got better. The next morning, Casey dragged me out of bed, excited as a kid at Christmas. The storm was tapering off, but even in the valley there was a foot-and-a-half of light new snow. We started early, heading for one of our favorite slopes, a place far enough from the road we were likely to have it to ourselves.
At the top of the slope, Casey got impatient. She had her skins peeled off and packed away, ready to ski the first deep powder of the year. The slope measured only 30 degrees, a few shy of high avalanche risk, but I still insisted on digging at least a hasty pit.
“My self-appointed guardian angel,“ she said as I took the avalanche shovel off my pack and started cutting a hole big enough to stand in. I flung a shovelful at her.
“Oh, baby,” she said, admiring the spray. She took her skis off and stepped into the hole beside me as I shaved a smooth edge on the uphill wall of the pit with the blade of the shovel. Even with three feet of new powder, the snowpack was less than five feet deep, the snow from earlier storms compressed to half its original depth.
I dragged my glove down the wall, tracing the history of the winter. The layers from previous storms were well-bonded, no evidence of a potential sliding layer, but near the ground were big loose grains that could move like ball-bearings under an avalanche. Temperature gradients and vapor pressure move through the snowpack each day like the rise and fall of breath. On cold nights, water vapor rises through the snow, buoyed by the escape of the summer’s residual warmth. As the vapor collides with snow crystals, it freezes, packing them like snowballs into irregular, rounded grains.
“Aw, you’re not afraid of that,” Casey said when I held a handful of it out to her. “Just a little bit of depth hoar.”
“Not today. But keep it in mind. You have to know your snowpack, always be thinking about what’s happening under here.” I jotted a few observations down in my notebook.
“Yes, professor.” Casey climbed out of the pit. “Can we ski now?”
She was needling me because I wanted to go back to school for a PhD in snow science, then get a job as an avalanche forecaster in a little mountain town where we could raise kids on fresh air and fresh powder. What Casey wanted was to link two consecutive winters — go straight from the Tetons to New Zealand for five more months of skiing. Then get work in Antarctica with Wally and Sarah and do the seasonal thing in the Southern Hemisphere for a few years before linking two more winters to get back North.
“Since when do you wait for my permission?”
“Oh, come on, lover,” she said in a sugar-sweet voice. “You know I only live for your approval.”
When I rolled my eyes, she stepped to the edge of the pit and gave a jump that buried my legs in powder. “You are killing me with this waiting,” she grinned, offering me a hand out, “Let’s cut it up.”
Casey skied to the lip of the slope and stopped, looking hungrily over the white expanse while I got back into my skis.When I joined her, she did something she hadn’t done since our first winter together, four years before. She bowed and swept one arm over the slope, saying, “After you.” I started to make a crack about how it wasn’t like her to ski second, especially on the first real powder day of the season, but her face warned me against it. The last of the snow drifted down, each flake pulling down a piece of the sky in its branches. The lightest powder is ninetyeight- percent air, and what looks like a solid surface is really a slow transition between earth and sky. In that space, skis are wings. I slipped onto the slope and let my skis run until powder streamed up from the shovels. Then I dropped into the first turn, knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist deep. The skis flexed like a hunter’s bow with me nocked into them like an arrow poised for flight. I rose from the turn in time with the uncoiling skis, skimmed weightless above the snow and then plunged again. By the third turn, snow washed over my head. I whooped as it hit my glasses, blinding me, and Casey answered with a whoop of her own. Two more turns and I was at full speed with the whole world washing over me each time I dropped. I wove myself into the world’s winter skin, plunging again and again until the earth and the sky and me disappeared into one white flowing thing. Casey swears that in the instant she loses herself in a set of turns she feels the snow passing through her.
I watched Casey’s run from the bottom. She skied beautifully, spooning my tracks. Casey says there’s a hidden rhythm in the angle of the slope and the feel of the day’s snow and the flex of the skis and a thousand other things we can sense but not articulate. She says the skier’s job is to find this rhythm and flow with it, and she does it better than anybody I’ve ever seen.
Skiing is the only serious thing in Casey’s life. The rest is tomboy clowning and misdirection, her true heart hidden by flashy sleight of hand and that barking gruntlaugh. But on the slopes, she is open to the whole world. Casey believes snow is the world’s truest surface — fragile and always changing, a thing that can be lived but not held. She gropes me under tables in public places, would make love on trains and airplanes if I were willing. But we ski in private, as far into the backcountry as we can get.
She skied down to me at the bottom of the slope, and I could see the quiet joy in her face. “Oh, my love,” she said as she stopped beside me, and I knew we would be happy for as long as the snow was good. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was tracing the sweep of our paired tracks down the slope.
After that storm, the sky stayed clear for a week. The sun ruined the south-facing slopes, and once the lift-serviced area near Jackson was skied out, more people came to the backcountry looking for fresh tracks. Even the north-facing slopes we considered our secret places were tracked up by the fourth day.We went farther from the pass road — the north side of Mount Taylor, the gully behind Mount Oliver. In both places, there were already tracks.We made the long, flat ski into Beard’s Mountain and for the first time found skiers using snowmobiles to get deep into the backcountry, hauling each other up the slopes.We made a couple half-hearted runs over other people’s tracks with their whining engines all around us and then slogged out to the road on the machines’ hard-packed ruts. It was suddenly trendy, leaving the ski lifts behind and finding virgin slopes in the backcountry. Casey thought there should be some kind of entrance exam, that you shouldn’t be allowed into the mountains without a certain appreciation. I wasn’t crazy about sharing, but I said let them come. The mountains don’t care, and anybody who spends enough time in them has to learn humility eventually.
My first season in the Tetons, before I knew Casey, I was skiing alone, headed for a safe route through the trees on Glory Peak. But I spotted three guys at the top of Glory Bowl, gleaming in their neon powder suits, psyching each other up for the run by head-butting one another. I wanted to rip by them, sailing past on my beat-up telemark gear, duct tape patches on the knees of my windpants, and leave them staring after me while I poached their line. I gathered all the speed I could, and as I sailed into the bowl someone said, “Dude,” half in anger, half in awe. It was perfect. The slope avalanched on my third turn. Blur and tumble, a white wave closing over me, a flash of sky, then the wave closing again and again. My whole body puckered into itself, tight with fear. My only articulate thought was the word, “dead.” The fear alone seemed enough to kill me.
I slammed against a tree at the edge of the bowl. The force of the avalanche folded me around it, cracking my ribs and squeezing the air out of my lungs. Darkness closed in from the edges of my vision until I saw just one bright spot directly in front of me. Then the slide swept by, leaving me on my side, buried to the midline. My skis stuck out of the snow on the far side of the tree.
I was still there when one of the frat boys skied up and said, “Dude, are you okay?” He looked as scared as me. They helped me down to the road and took me to the hospital, showing nothing but kindness the whole time. It was during my recovery that I started studying snow physics. I had a lot to learn.
When we came back from our grim day on Beard’s Mountain, I spread topo maps over the kitchen table and tried to find a slope that might still be unskied, some secret place that could carry us until the next storm. With all the snow and all the terrain here, we thought we could always count on the Tetons to have an untracked slope for us — like coming home. Skiers we had known for years were giving up, getting real estate licenses. But I knew Casey would always stay ahead of it: New Zealand, Canada, Alaska, wherever it was still untracked. At some point I would have to decide how far I was willing to follow.
I kept looking farther from the pass road, beyond the named slopes. I found one, finally, northfacing and open, but so far into the mountains that just getting there and back would take most of the day. I showed it to Casey, who had been moping since the first snowmobile roared by us on the trail. She spread both hands on the table and slouched over the map like a sullen teenager. But when she saw the slope, she got interested. I felt the fog around her lift, which relieved me, too. The way things were with us, her moods might as well have been mine, especially the bad ones.
She traced an approach route with her finger, up a long ridge from the road, across a drainage and then along another ridge to the top of our new slope.
“We’ll have to start early,” she said.
The final stars were fading from another clear sky as we trudged away from the parking area the next morning.
“This is what we need,” Casey said. “To go someplace we haven’t been before. We must have skied all these slopes a thousand times. It’s time to go someplace new.”
“It could be a boulder field. This snowpack is still too shallow to cover boulders. It could be anything; you can’t tell from the map.”
“I don’t care if we make turns or not,” she said, lying. “I just want to get out and explore — get away from the crowd.”
Her voice was forced. She was talking about New Zealand now more than where we were headed. We had been talking past each other for a month. The more she talked about going South, the more I studied for the GREs. The best thing about the schools with snow science programs, I would say, is that they’re all close to good skiing. They have to be; there’s so much fieldwork involved. To which she would respond, “On the Tasman glacier, there’s a run that’s eight miles long.”
We worked our way into the mountains for over three hours before crossing a drainage and leaving the last ski tracks behind. Trail-breaking was slow in the deep powder, but in the shade the snow was still light, amazingly so for being a week old. We climbed a ridge that made a lowangle sidewalk into the sky. The slopes that fell away to our left were covered in lumpy, sun-baked crud. To our right was thick timber dropping into a narrow canyon. The sun was warm, and we swapped leads to share the trailbreaking. There was just the winter- quieted forest, the sound of our breathing and the muffled thud of our steps in the snow. Casey was happy. She loved breaking trail, the sweaty rhythm and cool air knifing into the lungs. I was happy, too. I felt as if I was watching from a distance as the two tiny dots of us rose toward the peaks. The air was still, and the temperature in the sun was above freezing, though it had been fifteen-below the night before. Gray jays flitted in the trees beside us, following our progress. Then we came on our slope, a deep blue glade that opened in the trees on our right. It was a graceful arc, starting steep and wide below a short cliff band, then flattening and funneling down to a narrow swath through the trees at the bottom. The surface had been stippled by a breeze, but was otherwise undisturbed. Casey breathed out a slow, greedy sigh and turned to me.
“What?” she asked, her face dropping.
“Don’t tell me you don’t see it.”
“You see it wherever you look, love. Ghost avalanches coming at you in the dark.”
“Look at that starting zone,” I pointed to the base of the cliff band that wrapped the top of the bowl. “And that.” I pointed to where previous avalanches had scoured an alley through the trees at the base of the slope. “It’s a frequent flyer.”
“How frequent? It’s not gonna slide today. This is a stable snowpack and you know it.”
I ignored her, holding an inclinometer at arm’s length to align it with the profile of the slope.
“It’s not gonna run on depth hoar,” Casey said. “When was the last time that happened around here?”
“Thirty-eight degrees,” I said, lowering my arm. It’s a magic number in avalanche forecasting, statistically the most likely to slide.
“You could have measured that from the map.We didn’t have to come all the way back here to find out you’d be afraid of it.”
“You could have measured it, too. Or are you some helpless snow bunny, and I have to make all the decisions around here?”
She stared at me. Her eyes narrowed, and her quiet voice was beyond anger. “No, you don’t have to make all the decisions around here. I’ve decided to ski this slope, and I don’t give a shit what you have to say about it.” She peeled off her climbing skins, and when I did the same, she smiled, thinking she’d won.
“Would you ski it alone?” I asked. “Without your guardian angel to dig you out? Would you? Ten miles in with a cold night coming? A sprained ankle is all it would take.”
Then I turned and placed my skis in our up-track, pointing toward the highway. The ridge sloped just enough to allow a slow glide on our packed trail, and I stood stock-still with the winter sliding past me. The scene looked like film shot from the window of a slow-moving car, not part of my life at all.
I wondered whether Casey would ignore me and ski alone. If she did, and it didn’t slide, I would be subjected to descriptions, in agonizing, gloating detail, of the skiing I had missed. And if it did slide, if she was hurt or killed while I glided toward the road, it would not matter what I did with the rest of my life, there would be no redeeming it.
All this went through my thoughts and still my skis stayed in the track, the distance between us widening. Why is it so hard to love someone?
I was within a mile of the road, back where all the slopes were carved by ski tracks, when I saw the avalanche. Part of North Woods Bowl had cut loose since we passed it that morning. Casey was trailing, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t have to talk to me. The slide hadn’t run far, just a quarter-mile down to where the slope eased slightly. It was nothing compared to the catastrophic slides that can happen there, but it was still a big mass of snow in the deposition zone. People had been skiing there, even though it was notorious. At least a dozen ski tracks disappeared into the slide path. But there had been that many tracks when we came by it in the morning, or nearly that many. Of course, I hadn’t counted, so there was no way to tell if someone had been skiing there when it slid. Unusual for it to slide so long after a storm without some kind of trigger, but possible, with depth hoar developing a little more each cold, clear night.
I switched my beacon to receive and skied down the adjacent ridge, then cut over to the jumbled blocks of snow at the toe of the avalanche. The compacted snow was like firm Styrofoam, squeaking under my skis. I stopped to listen and there it was, a faint signal. My chest went tight. I looked up the slope and saw Casey, traversing the ridge trail with her eyes straight ahead, and even from that distance I knew she was still fuming mad.
“Casey,“ I shouted, “Switch to receive!” When she saw the slide, and me at the bottom of it, a look of disgust came onto her face. As if I was mucking around there just to point it out to her, my way of saying, “I told you so.”
Her hand went to the beacon
on her chest, and the signal disappeared.
Relieved, I tramped back and forth across the deposition zone and didn’t hear anything. Of course, that close to the road, you sometimes saw people skiing without beacons, especially among the new crowd, snowboarders and such. But no signal meant there was probably no one buried.
“What did you do?” Casey asked after she skied down to me, “Drop a bomb on it?“
It was supposed to be a joke — about how far I was willing to go to win an argument — but she sounded tired. There was also hint of conciliation, and I saw how I could play it, making my tantrum out to be a careful strategy — the only way to convince someone as pigheaded as Casey. With this slide to prove I was right about the danger, I could get away with that.
“I didn’t know you were so close,” I said. “I heard your signal and thought it was someone buried. Scared the hell out of me.” She turned away, squinting into the distance like a pensive cowboy, and was maybe going to say something forgiving when her face suddenly dropped wide open.
I turned and saw it — a mitten shell lying on the surface of the snow. We scrambled for it because it’s the last thing you’re supposed to do when you’re caught in a slide, cover your mouth with one hand and reach for the surface with the other. There are stories of people who were saved by someone who thought they were picking up a glove.
But this was just a mitten shell, Gore-Tex marked with Day-glo hieroglyphics, and a picture formed in my mind of a kid cutting classes, hitchhiking up the pass road with a snowboard and enough time to squeeze in a run before anyone knew.
Casey already had the basket popped off of one of her poles. She unscrewed the handles and fitted the poles together, making a probe that she jabbed into the snow where the mitten had been. It went into the snow its full length, and she retrieved it and probed again a foot to either of side of the first spot. She went on, working her way methodically down the slope, while I fitted my poles together and joined her. It was a hopelessly slow way to find someone, and survival rates were terrible for anyone buried longer than five minutes. It was ten minutes already since I realized there had been a slide, plus the unknown time before we arrived.
We were still probing when a signal came over our transceivers, rapidly getting louder, though we were hardly moving. We looked up to see Dan Renkowitz, the carpenter I had worked for in the fall, skiing down the ridge toward us.
“Is someone buried?” he shouted.
“We’re not sure,” Casey yelled back. “We found a glove.”
“No signal?”
“Just you,” I said. He switched to receive, and the beeping stopped, but the ringing cadence of it carried into the silence, speaking Death, Death, Death.
“How long have you been here?”
“Too long.”
“Has anyone gone for help?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said, starting to sidestep back up to the trail. “Is this the one they call North Woods?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell them to bring dogs.”
We kept probing, working our way systematically down the slope; a baby step forward, then probing at one-foot intervals along a lateral row, fanning wider with each step down the mountain.
Casey was single-minded, sweating into the dusk without a word. After an hour, I left my probe in the snow and dug the water bottle out of my pack. I rolled back the insulated cover and offered Casey a drink. “Let’s wait for the dogs, love. It’s just body recovery now.” She glared at me without stopping, her face a dull mask. I held the water out, but she just stared and kept probing. When she turned away, I drank and closed the bottle. I was just reaching for my probe when hers stopped three feet down. We heard a muffled “click-click” as Casey tamped against something. I grabbed my shovel and dug frantically, as if there might be hope, and by the time Casey got back with her shovel, we were looking at the bottom of a snowboard. The graphics showed a comet exploding across a psychedelic sky. We dug around it and reaching beneath it at the same time, felt the boots still strapped into the bindings, and the ankles inside them. We dug on both sides, frantic, bumping each other with our shovels as the hole got deep and narrow, angling back up the slope. We heard the helicopter landing and soon there was a big panting shepherd at the edge of the hole, whimpering with excitement.
The trainer called it off, working over the rest of the debris in case there were other victims. The baggy ski pants had been driven up around the thighs and packed with snow, exposing goose bumps that sprouted fine gold hairs. One of the search-and-rescue guys appeared at the edge of the hole and said, “Damn. He got an avalanche enema.” Even in the fading light, the look Casey gave him was enough to make him shuffle away and pretend he had something else to do.
The avalanche dog finished quickly, not picking up any other scents, and I called the trainer and the search-and-rescue guy over to help us lift the body out. It was a girl — or a boy too young to shave — the smooth cheeks frozen in a lopsided sneer like a child pressing its face against a window. Frozen hair fanned into the snow like an Indian headdress and had to be freed before we could lift the body out.
The search-and-rescue guy opened a med kit, but all he did was look the kid over for a second and say, “Adios, amigo.” One of those trauma freaks, wisecracking at death like he thought that would keep it from spreading.
When we found the mitten, and I first realized someone was buried, the picture that formed in my mind was of a skiing savant, a kid who understood all about snow being the skin of the world, about sky-flying and earth-swimming and merging with everything into the one perfect moment. I was with him when he felt the slope cutting loose and realized he had been wrong about everything.
As we watched them load the kid’s body onto the helicopter, Casey was grim and distant, keeping me away with a cold look. After they lifted off and the noise of the rotors died away, silence settled over us with the falling dark. We skied out to the road without saying a word. Back at the parking area, I looked up and saw a film of high clouds moving in. They had just come even with the moon, which scribed a half halo in their leading edge. I wanted to point it out to Casey, for us to be excited about a new storm coming. I wanted to tell her I would do anything to make it work out between us, even grow up if I had to.
But the grim look was still drawn across her face like a veil, and I knew it was too late. I wanted something little — a little family in a little mountain town, a warm core I could build my life around, the way a good house wrapped around a woodstove. Casey wanted just the opposite, to go out into the wide world and lose herself, spending eternity in a perfect set of turns, rhythmic and beautiful, endless. Endless.
Rick Craig spent a dozen years as an itinerant wilderness instructor. He now lives with his family in Missoula, MT, and is at work on a novel.
