Читать книгу Flood Moon - Chuck Radda - Страница 9

I mentioned before that I had great respect for mountain weather, for the elements in general. Growing up on the Cape had something to do with it: you learn early on the difference between a boater who is reluctant to sail when a squall threatens and a sailor who knows enough not to. The reluctant ones don't come back.

But it is a later incident in the mountains that haunts me more. For a short time right after college, I lived in New Hampshire, having accepted a position at Harrison Academy teaching history (world, American, and ancient—none of which I knew very much about). If you've ever read A Separate Peace or seen Dead Poet's Society, erase those images from your mind. Harrison was not some hallowed and fabled hall of academia steeped in decades if not centuries of tradition. It was merely a twenty-acre receptacle for young men—and in this case women too—who were not fully ready to acclimate themselves to a formal learning environment. Or that's what the brochure said, among other euphemistic assessments of anti-social behavior. But the kids weren't horrible, and they weren't stupid by any means, forcing me to read like crazy every night to try to stay ahead of these so-called reluctant learners. Luckily, most of them were quite content to drift along next to or just slightly behind their teacher...much as I myself had done years before.

But with the workload and its being my first real job, I felt harried all the time and looked forward with an almost lustful enthusiasm to Sundays, especially since one of my Saturday responsibilities was coaching the Harrison girls' field hockey team. If there was something I knew less about than the Gadsden Purchase or the siege of Stalingrad or the Peloponnesian War, it was field hockey. It seemed like no more than a skein of shrill whistle-blowing for some mysterious infraction or other. After a while, though, I found the sounds reassuring: every play stoppage meant 1) nobody would score on us and 2) nobody would be injured and taken away in an ambulance. The team stunk. I stunk. We meshed perfectly. And Sundays remained mine.

My apartment in Elam Hills, a small mill town in the shadow of the White Mountains, was about sixty miles southwest of Mount Washington—not the highest peak in the world, not even the highest in the United States, but one of the most treacherous. A confluence of competing wind currents and temperature zones, along with the proximity of the often-frigid North Atlantic, produces some of the most extreme weather in the world, and it does so on a fairly regular basis. Countless photographs of the rime-covered weather station and legendary tales of anemometers being ripped from their standards and blowing off onto the moraine have enhanced its mystique. That autumn—my only autumn in New Hampshire—became a magnet for unprepared hikers, overconfident backpackers, and even some impatient early-season skiers. Eleven of them died before Thanksgiving. Eleven! Not just brash and bulletproof teenagers, but adults too—the oldest having just retired from a municipal position in Concord. The last three died on the same day. In the phrase "Live Free or Die"—the New Hampshire state motto—the "or" could easily have been replaced with "then."

On Labor Day weekend, I lost two friends of my own (and almost myself) on the Presidential Range. One was Kurt Bevens, "Kurt from Keene" had been his alliterative nickname forever—brilliant student, math genius, self-proclaimed though not very proficient outdoorsman. We weren't close friends but his brilliance made him persuasive, and whenever he came up with a plan, nobody wanted to be the killjoy. The other was Stevie Marotta, a roommate my sophomore year until a convoluted series of botched dorm assignments separated us. He was an unassuming and docile kid, kind of the anti-Kurt.

Like me they had graduated the previous May, but they had both stayed in the Boston area hunting jobs in the business field and pondering grad school. Near midnight that Friday, Kurt called me with the plan. He was leaving at six in the morning and driving to Mt. Washington. You coming? I'll pick you up, he said in that imperious tone that implied that something was seriously wrong with anyone who wasn't coming. His plan came together as we spoke—you could sense his mind working—there by ten, on the mountain by eleven, back at the base by six, in some bar by eight, drunk by ten, laid by midnight, on the road back to Boston Sunday morning. The premise was rock-solid: there existed a drastic need to get in one more event for old time's sake. I had not received my coaching assignment yet, and Stevie would never say no.

The calendar may have read September, but the weather was mid-summer when we arrived in Conway and ate breakfast outdoors in the damp warmth of a Saturday morning, clad for the beach in t-shirts, shorts, good hiking boots, and all the paraphernalia scramblers would bring with them for a July ascent. We had heard the forecasts, knew of an approaching cold front, and prepared for temperatures that might drop into the forties at elevation. As a precaution against a worst-case scenario (though we planned to be back at the base well before dark) we each had laughingly packed a light fleece pullover, though the thought of that fabric rubbing against our clammy skin that stifling morning made me cringe.

We were not stupid people. Neither were the forecasters. But in the mountains, things sometimes go awry. Shortly after noon the sky, streaked with advancing cirrus all morning, lowered rapidly. The cold front slid through with a quick burst of rain that hardly even dampened my shirt and a noticeable wind shift, but instead of clearing the area and cutting off the light showers that had accompanied its passage, the front hung up along the coast just long enough to extend the precipitation and allow the incoming cold air to mix at high altitudes. I say this not from any great meteorological expertise, but because I practically memorized the subsequent explanation. All we knew at the time was that it was getting cold.

We welcomed the initial reprieve from the heat—hiking on a hot day is a killer— and dug out the fleece. We were surprised at how ineffective it was at stopping the cold, but we were still working hard and keeping warm. No problem—until the tapping of sleet brought us up short. I read later that partiers in the valley smiled as ice pellets bounced off their gas grills on Labor Day weekend. I didn't smile. My Cape Cod weather sense told me to get the hell out. I felt miserably uncomfortable, and because the climb had taken us longer than expected, we were losing daylight fast. But Kurt said no—we had another half mile to the point he wanted to reach.

I'd like to say we discussed it, but we didn't really. Kurt and I were both dug in: he wasn't going back; I wasn't going farther. Kurt never liked being contradicted, and when Stevie hesitated too, Kurt berated him for "wanting to retreat with your buddy." Retreat worked better on Stevie than me: I had been willing to retreat an hour earlier. The two of them continued up. When I reached the base, found a phone booth (cell phones were rare), and called the police as a precaution, the department had already been overwhelmed with similar panicky calls about loved ones.

At the lower altitude, the period of sleet lasted ten minutes at best, engendering talk of a hard winter. But for the two boys on the mountain, the sequence of tragic events was subtle but inexorable: first the rain soaked them, then the wind chilled them, and finally the sleet—once it covered the ground—made the footing especially treacherous. Stuck on a west-facing crag, unable to find shelter or even rig a makeshift tent out of the extra clothing they did not have, they pushed some rocks into a small windbreak which rescuers later found, then waited for the weather front to clear the area. It didn't happen fast enough. At dusk the sleet turned to snow and coated the ground. When it tapered off an hour or two later, the sky cleared, the wind died, and the temperature plummeted. Around midnight a reinforcing cold front blasted through and by dawn it was blowing a gale. The sun rose to a temperature reading of -8 Celsius—about 10º of frost—not brutally cold by any measure, but cold enough to chill wet skin into hypothermia.

The next afternoon a rescue team found both of them, found them on a day of defiant clarity and sunshine when the temperature hovered near 50º and gentle westerlies blew over a talus of treacherous debris. Stevie was dead, his body cut and bloodied from what may have been a last desperate attempt to run somewhere, an effort culminating in one final plummet onto some jagged rocks below. His flesh has been ripped open, but he could just as easily have died from exposure, lying tattered and still in that cold. And Kurt from Keene, the mathematician who had calculated a way to survive, had lapsed into a near catatonic state. His clean and unbloodied body—tangible proof that panic had never quite penetrated him—was airlifted to a hospital in his hometown, where the medical staff was able to save most of his fingers and toes.

I visited him twice, and both times he upbraided me for leaving him there. He never asked about Stevie and I was never sure if the doctors were keeping the news from him or if he knew and it didn't matter. After all, Stevie had proven himself, and maybe in Kurt's mind had shown true friendship and passed the ultimate test—the one I had failed. My being alive and whole was proof. So I lost two friends—both losses were permanent, but only one was final.

People often claim to have nightmares over events like that one. I never did. Maybe that's because the event occupied enough of my waking hours that year to allow my nights to pass unencumbered. Not a day went by when I didn't replay that afternoon and think about the decision I made. "You did the smart thing"—that's what everyone said, but aside from my parents, I always had the feeling that most of them were quietly criticizing my cowardice for leaving two friends to die. At Stevie's wake his father took me aside and assured me that his family bore no ill will towards me. "Ill will"—his words. And I thanked him, though my gratitude made me seem somehow complicit in their deaths. I'm not. Kurt was there too, battered and bandaged and sitting alone. We didn't speak.

I rehashed the entire event on my first night in Sage, not because I feared dying of exposure—that concern had disappeared when I knew for sure I would not be sleeping under the cowboy sign—but because Walter Trucks's comparison of my arrival to an impulsive jailbreak preyed on my mind. Kurt Bevens had been impulsive and he was dead. Carelessness doesn't always lead to a dramatic and tragic end, but it seldom leads to anything good either. And I didn't know that night that three decades after the Mt. Washington debacle, another friend's death lurked—another death for which I would not be responsible but would feel so anyway.

But temporarily at least I was safe in my charmless motel room. I had dug through my bag and pulled out a pair of boxers and a terminally wrinkled gray Red Sox t-shirt that would serve, actually had served for most of my adult life, as sleepwear. I entertained a passing thought of trying a shower—a hot shower—but decided against it. Finding the thermostat behind the closet door had been difficult enough, and I did not feel like puzzling out some equally abstruse method for "unlocking" the hot water. Instead I took a leak, made a pass or two with my toothbrush, then settled into bed under a pleasantly suffocating layering of blankets.

With the lights off the sound of the rain seemed to increase, pelting the undersized windows with a renewed fury—a reminder of what I had escaped. This jailbreak then had gone all right. I had a place to sleep, and even a place to eat with credit coming for three more meals. If I could now find some way to earn money and keep myself busy, I might survive another day...or longer.

I was almost asleep when I heard a creaking sound and then that sure smell of winter, the bone-dry funk that furnaces hoard all summer long only to let loose on that first cold night. In New England it's as indicative of seasonal change as any array of pumpkins, any pot of mums, or any Friday night pep rally. I removed two of the weightier blankets and felt my lungs expanding enough to breathe normally. Just in time, too—I was beginning to feel like Giles Corey in The Crucible—the old guy whom the townspeople accuse of witchcraft but who, when his persecutors pile stones on him to crush him to death, looks at them defiantly and says "more weight!" Whenever my classes studied that play, I liked to read his part. First off, nobody else wanted to play some weird old coot; second, and more important, I had the line memorized.

Natalie used to get on my case because I was always doing that—quoting from some novel or play whenever the thought occurred to me. She claimed that I relied on books too much, that our lives were new and hadn't been written about yet. I liked the thought, but she's wrong: everything actually has been written about. I still quote from literature when I feel like it, and she escaped my tedious references by rediscovering Don who probably never bores her with lines from long-forgotten poems—unless he took up reading in the asylum.

I think I was just dozing off when the room went quiet—no rain, no wind, no radiator. For no particular reason I wanted to see the town without rain obscuring it, so I braved the cold floor and looked out the small window. A few lights on in a few buildings, a pickup heading towards that kiosk, and a streetlamp flickering through a now-fuzzy halo. The rain hadn't stopped; it had merely turned to snow. Mrs. O'Leary had been right…and Brenda would not be back to retrieve me for a good long time.