Читать книгу White Planet - Leslie Anthony - Страница 11
Оглавление“There’s nothing really can touch skiing, is there?” Nick said. “The way it feels when you first drop off on a long run.” “Huh,” said George. “It’s too swell to talk about.”–—ERNEST HEMINGWAY,
“Cross-Country Snow,” 1925
THIS STORY starts with a volcano. Or maybe it’s that one story ends there and another begins. Or maybe it’s just that a volcano, with an umbilical attachment to the core of the Earth, is the perfect metaphor for a gateway to another world. Either way, if there’s one thing you can usually count on with a volcano, it’s a hole on top.
This Mexican version, however, was proving maddeningly elusive. The lip of fractured ice wavering above us like salt crystals ringing a margarita glass had got no closer in the last hour. Was it that the slope was steepening? Or was it the moonwalk we were executing to make certain our crampons found firm footing on the glacier’s marble surface? Was it our zigzagging around the blue yawn of each small crevasse and resting, so it seemed, every thirty seconds? Or was it simply due to failing brain function at 18,000 feet, an altitude few accomplished skiers would ever contemplate and most North American mountaineers would never encounter and the fact that my friend Merl and I—hitching along with no clue, no rope, frozen feet, and hallucinogenic half-breaths—were neither?
Very likely. As in, all of the above.
Still, when there was enough oxygen to formulate the thought, I figured we should be making progress. And then suddenly, progress appeared. We were staring into the crater, the mix of ice and lava underfoot now more like the salt-and-peppered rim of a Bloody Mary, I thought, in the abstract way you entertain irrelevant ideas when you are high—or very high. And I could see why gaining this purchase had seemed too slow: the crater’s edge wasn’t level but sloped radically at some thirty degrees. Stumbling through the crevasse field, we’d actually been contouring the volcano in the direction of its rising rim. We’d breached it on a false summit about halfway around; far below to our left was the lower margin of the crater, its adjacent snowfield a mess of ashen streaks, volcanic dribble on a white bib, while above to our right was the summit. Which meant more climbing. Which probably wasn’t a good thing given the nausea, violent headaches, and dizziness we were experiencing— but really, how much farther could it be?
An hour later we were finished, literally and figuratively. Just shy of the rim’s highest point—a crenulated mannequin of brick-colored lava—we were too cold, hypoxic, and exhausted to go farther. Merl was talking but he sounded like Donald Duck, or someone sucking on helium. I couldn’t understand and laughed hysterically at him, which made my head hurt so badly I wanted to cradle it. He thought I understood perfectly and laughed back. Then he threw up. That’s what I remember, but maybe it didn’t happen; by that point I was already beginning to hallucinate. We look a picture—one of those photos climbers are famous for, with the camera held out at arm’s length and aimed toward our conjoined faces. I pulled an inscribed Frisbee from my pack and hucked it far into the crater to honor a friend who’d died in an oil-rig disaster off Newfoundland the year before. In the rarified air, the disc arced across the crater for an awfully long time before spiraling down into the toxic miasma rising from a vent encrusted in lurid yellow sulfur.
That seemed right: a petroleum-based product swallowed by the very earth that generated it; a fitting farewell for someone who’d been in service of that substance when he slipped quietly into hypothermic slumber, bobbing in the roiling North Atlantic, never to be found, returning to the sea from whence we all came.
These were the kinds of thoughts I had while skiing.
THE VARIOUS TRAILS I’d followed to the summit of Pico de Orizaba—Mexico’s highest mountain and North America’s loftiest volcano at 18,504 feet—had started in my parents’ living room as an adolescent. Years after my first time on skis, I’d come across a unique juxtaposition in a coffee-table book about Mexico: a full-page, black-and-white photo of an old Spanish church with a massive, snow-covered volcano— pulled preternaturally close by a telephoto lens, I now know—looming behind. Snow in Mexico? Wow. Could you ski on something like that? It planted a seed of secret desire.
In high school I’d taken up skiing in earnest with Merl and a few other friends. The lift-serviced partying that essentially defined the sport in the hard-packed conditions of Eastern Canada was for us both social activity and healthy conduit to dissipate teenage energy. We’d jumped in just as the ever-evolving sport’s context was shifting yet again.
In the late sixties and early seventies, North American youth challenged every aspect of the status quo. Nothing was sacred, even the supposedly footloose sport of skiing, longtime poster child of the hedonistic, jet-setting nouveau riche. An overzealous, corporate-minded ski industry was focused on lifts, groomed runs, and fancy condos at the expense of the gravity-driven, wind-and-snow-inthe-face sensations that attracted people in the first place, and young skiers railed against this packaged experience. They rejected the strictures associated with alpine racing and constipated European ski technique, innovating with mogul skiing, aerial maneuvers, and ski ballet (later re-branding it “acro-skiing” didn’t postpone its extinction), a troika collectively known as “freestyle.”
Freestyle skiing essentially put the boots to technique— damning convention and embracing invention—liberally fueled by the passing of weed and jugs of wine. This fit with the rebel-id of every teen, and our bedrooms were papered with requisite posters of freestyle antihero heroes like Wayne Wong, “Airborne Eddie” Ferguson, Suzy Chaffee, and Scott Brooksbank sporting short, colorful skis, science-experiment bindings of questionable security, and sloppy, equally questionable rear-entry boots (back-buckling boots that made it easier to slip your foot in but that destabilized the overall boot structure). We also dressed and acted the part by skiing gang style in logo-adorned lab coats, bright-green gaiters, and the occasional top hat, executing ridiculous tricks like Tipstands and Wongbangers (a front flip between your poles) in lift lines where they were sure to effect maximum annoyance. We rode our skis in the backseat (i.e., on their tails), eschewing style in favor of simply wiggling our asses to turn, built illegal jumps in full view, got upside down off them when we could, and, for our considerable trouble, were thrown off every mountain we visited. If freestylers were skiing’s punks, we’d aimed to be the Sex Pistols.
Ardent rock climbers and canoeists, Merl and I also shared a more conventional outdoor interest that had been piqued by school ski trips to the American West’s larger mountains. There we’d gazed longingly at the bowls and faces staring back from beyond the ski-area boundaries. We weren’t alone: skiers were ducking ropes, climbing peaks, and taking helicopters and snowcats into the great white beyond to rediscover the joys of fresh, untracked snow that had begotten the sport. We thus found ourselves with eyes widening simultaneously toward the open rebellion of freestyle and the quieter freedoms of open back-country. Like Alice through the looking glass, I eventually stumbled across a perfect portal into both on a magazine rack in the Toronto subway system one slushy day in the mid-seventies.
In 1972, David and Jake Moe, Seattle brothers living in Sun Valley, Idaho, set out to capture the new vibes flowing through ski country with an experiential, literary, and visual homage called powder: Journal of the Other Ski Experience. Despite bad poetry, stream-of-consciousness writing, and a surreal cover depicting skiers tracking up the moon, the magazine would redefine the sport in the eyes of many. As Steve Casimiro, powder editor from 1987–98, put it in his introduction to the twentieth anniversary issue:
powder embodied the soul of skiing and the spirit of those fighting commercialism and searching for lost ideals. To understand its impact in 1972, you have to understand what came before: not much. Other ski magazines were boring and bland—establishment publications that mirrored the mainstream and painted the world in black and white. powder ripped the lid off. All of a sudden there was a world in Technicolor, a world of backcountry lunacy, of powder so deep you choked, of speeds so fast you could die. It was a world alive, a world that existed in the acts of madmen and idiots, a world that seethed and surged and finally found legitimacy in a weird little publication from Sun Valley.1
Leafing through a copy of what had since become powder: The Skier’s Magazine, I was captivated by its unique ethos, embodied literally and figuratively in the title. The issue’s cover featured a close-up of a wool-toqued hippie, snow crystals constellating his hat, ice clinging to a beard encircling open-mouthed joy that clearly said “best run ever.” It was unusual fodder for an action-sport magazine but brilliant and effective: I instantly wanted whatever it was the dude had just experienced. I was also impressed by the magazine’s focus on the unexpected places (both mental and physical) that skiing could take you, including, in another issue, a colorful story about climbing and skiing Mexico’s highest volcanoes by the infamous (I was soon apprised) American ski-adventuring duo of Tom Carter and Alan Bard. Whoa.
The long-buried seed began a silent, stealthy sprouting.
AFTER A YEAR at southern Ontario’s University of Waterloo— undertaken mostly to convince our parents we were serious enough to possibly return—Merl and I executed a familiar ritual for young eastern skiers: heading west for a winter in the Rocky Mountains. We spent the first part of the ski season cringing at –40°F on the slopes of Banff, Alberta, then road-tripped in our converted van around the western states well into spring. Following our freestyle heros in cutting a swath of beer, bongs, babes, and bumps (our passion was moguls at the time), we had the adventure we’d hoped for and more. But after landing dutifully back in school, we found our newly minted alpine savvy constrained by funds and time. To continue our love affair with snow, we took up cross-country skiing and telemarking— the latter an arcane but rapidly re-popularizing downhilling technique that uses Nordic-style freeheel bindings in which your boot is anchored only at the toe. (Alpine bindings have lock-down heels.)
Freeheel alpine skiing, as this combination is more correctly referred to (the telemark is simply a drop-kneed turn accomplished on any freeheel ski), was suddenly the new freestyle, attracting skiing’s always edgy and inventive fringe. Ski freaks flocked to it in droves, tweaking, reinventing, and putting a twentieth-century stamp on the genre, propelled by powder and the growing popularity of ski videos. Freeheel equipment was light, maneuverable, and versatile, turning tiny hills of any stripe into challenging— albeit wobbly—descents and allowing skiers to climb freely (physically and financially) up the slopes at commercial areas and ski down. It was, however, a rural backcountry knob that became the center of our nascent freeheel universe: a mere grassy pimple rising from surrounding cornfields, an oblong blip on a 1:25,000 topographic map, Killer Hill nevertheless loomed large in local mythology.
KILLER HILL POPPED up about ten thousand years ago, when the retreating terminus of a continental glacier hesitated long enough for meltwater to deposit a load of silt into a massive ice cavern. When the glacier moved on, a mound remained where the cavern had been. Geologists called it a kame; local ski-touring guru Chris Hart used another name.
No one had actually died there, but several people had seen God—and there wasn’t always smoke or wine involved. We were hard-pressed to squeeze three turns down its miserly, sixty-foot flanks, and yet Killer Hill held its own innate challenge. The icy boilerplate snow of the perpetually scoured windward side could send us rocketing out of control, legs akimbo, at the slightest provocation. The more desirable and usually powdery lee side was overhung by a massive cornice, and the bottom of the hill ended in an electrified barbed-wire cattle fence that, depending on snow depth, stood ankle- to knee-high, incapacitating more than a few unfortunate skiers.
Starved for downhill turns in this soporific landscape, we’d taken—with trepidation—to these skinny cross-country boards and their three-pin bindings (three upright metal pins fit into three holes under the boot’s toe, clamped together by a pathetic metal bail). However, on my first outing with Hart one November, he’d climbed me up all 300 feet of Mt. Chicopee, the still-shuttered regional ski area, linked my arm through his for balance, said “just do what I do,” and led me on a hitherto unheard-of telemark descent through the pulsating mists of snow guns.
“That, grasshopper,” he’d intoned didactically at the bottom, “is where it’s at.”
And so it was. We dug into old ski literature to learn more about the technique, analyzing grainy photos of pipe-smoking gentlemen in tweed jackets genuflecting over heinously long and heavy wooden planks. Then we set out to plumb the paltry powder stashes of the countryside on our “pins”; our thirst for vertical undiminished, we merely added it up in smaller denominations. Maybe we were drawn to Killer Hill’s isolation, appearing as it did on the horizon no matter from which direction we approached. Or maybe it simply represented the essence of skiing as we’d come to understand it: getting out there and manufacturing fun with some element of risk—even if the danger was only a couple of strings of rusted barbed wire.
I’d also learned from Hart how folks crouched atop Killer Hill in every season, the burning-hay incense of homegrown marijuana curling skyward while they watched maples bud into spring, sway green through the torpid days of summer, morph into fall’s familiar colors, then drop the entire palette in a clamor of wind and rain to leave silver branches naked and frosted and reaching. Waiting, as we all were, for snow.
There was a collective belief—of the type exacerbated by incense—that truth and beauty dwelt on Killer Hill. Or that its vistas of farm, forest, and fence somehow formed a crucible of creative realization—like the shallow summit depression we mythologized as a meteorite crater. Atop it, picnicking with a date on a halcyon summer day, I’d find myself anticipating a winter that couldn’t return soon enough. Daydreaming of downcast TV weather forecasters visibly unhappy over the arrival of Arctic outflows they were reporting, I joyously imagined those same air masses bearing down, plucking moisture from the Great Lakes (proving these polluted water bodies were still good—er, great—for something), forming flakes, and enveloping this very spot. I thought about the phone call that would inevitably come on a crisp morning after a heavy snowfall.
“Hey,” Hart would mumble in the low, conspiratorial tone that was his wont, “I know you’ve probably got work to do, but why don’t you blow it off and we’ll go out to Killer Hill?” Inevitably, the girl I lay in the grass with would catch my preoccupation.
“What are you thinking about?” she’d whisper.
Whiteout. A swirl of flakes blowing drifts across a cornfield and obscuring my vision. Cold air stinging my nostrils.
Squinting along fence rows, straining through the blizzard for Killer Hill’s looming, lopsided form. It was always there, hovering in the howling distance.
“Nothing,” I’d reply with a grin that started somewhere back in the Pleistocene era of high school ski trips and stretched into whatever adventure the future held. “Just hills.”
CHASING GR AVITY WAS our food; finding it the flavor. Being only a bite-sized thrill, however, Killer Hill kept us hungry, and our appetites increased in kind. By autumn 1983, a year into a master’s degree, I’d photocopied the volcano from my parents’ book and mailed it to Merl, labeling it with one word: December. Some form of affirmative drifted back. Then we waited for a green light: the first snowfall.
For me, those first flakes that fell each year were cause to run (often embarrassingly) onto a porch or into the street screaming. The Zen of Winter started with eagerly tracking a lone flake to Earth, then another, and another. I was mesmerized to see how and where these crystals found purchase: leaning against a tiny pebble on the road, deliquescing on the hood of a car, wedged between two blades of grass. At night I’d pull a chair to the front window to watch snow explode in every direction, dramatically illuminated by the glow of streetlamps. I enjoyed and even sickly craved driving at night in heavy snow, flicking on my high-beams to create an even more disorienting effect. I thought cable television’s new Weather Channel—with its enthusiastic, meteorologically savvy hosts and blinking red warnings—was the best fucking invention ever.
It was all about snow, man, and snow was special. Not so much for nonskiers though, who more often dreaded a big snowfall’s travel delays and traffic gridlock, and the effort required for its removal. They did have a point: snow could sometimes be a yin-yang proposition.
On the day we were to leave for Mexico, a blizzard descended. Merl and I were, as usual, enthusiastic about the snow in a late-night, beery kind of way—until it dawned on us that we could be trapped. Already people’s cars were sealed in their driveways, and we needed to drive several hours to make our flight. We’d have to start early. In the dark, we knocked on my neighbor’s door. Our plight unspoken, Kenny the Snowblower simply nodded understanding, disappeared inside, then reemerged adorned in his Toronto Maple Leafs toque and windowpane glasses to release our truck from its tomb with his new machine. It was a task he relished, and, honor among snow men, we saluted him as we fishtailed up the street into the maelstrom.
AFTER FAILING TO recruit Hart or other local adventurers for the Mexico mission, Merl and I had zeroed in on the two highest volcanoes on Mexico’s Central Plateau and gathered what beta we could. We’d made sketchy photocopies of even sketchier road, climbing, and ski routes. We raced stairs, ran distances, lifted weights, and practiced crevasse rescue on ropes hung from trees. The latter exercise proved moot: we accidentally left the rope at home in the mad, hungover, pre-dawn rush to get to the airport.
“I thought you said you had the rope,” became our instant running joke.
According to Aztec legends, Popocatépetl is a warrior god. According to everyone else, it’s a big frickin’ volcano : North America’s fifth-highest peak at 17,802 feet. In either case, it has inspired many to ascend its lava and ice flanks: the Aztecs threw human sacrifices into the smoldering maw; Hernán Cortés lowered men into the crater to fetch sulfur for gunpowder; climbers use the easily accessed high altitude to train for Himalayan expeditions; and, every once in a while, adventurous skiers turn up at the orange-roofed Vincenzo Guaretta hostel at 13,000 feet. Picture a 150-bed Howard Johnson motel with picnic benches at Everest Base Camp, and you can see why it’s a good place to acclimatize and make friends with people who have acute altitude sickness and digestive problems. We settled in to eat fiery huevos rancheros and drink cheap beer, the country’s only certifiably safe liquid.
After a couple days, our heart rates below two hundred beats per minute (barely), we were ready to climb the volcano. Six hours later we were at the top. From the powder article, we knew it to be a challenging but exhilarating descent down almost 2,000 feet of forty-degree slope. Could we keep our wits about us? In fresh snow it would be a heavenly plunge, but our introduction to volcano skiing didn’t quite measure up.
To start, it hadn’t snowed in months. Our chattering, popcorn-light, first-generation telemark skis were never meant for such tired, rock-hard surfaces—though having learned to ski them on eastern Canadian ice offered some hope of salvation. Falling in these conditions would mean a high-speed slide and eventual launch onto the razorsharp vestiges of a lava-edged glacier. The upper slope was veneered in volcanic dust, and the sulfur-redolent plume rising from the crater billowed downward to engulf us. But, young and foolish, we were ready for anything that even remotely resembled skiing.
On top of unpleasant respiratory conditions, we’d picked the most popular climbing day of the year to be on Mexico’s most popular summit. The feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a national holiday on which scores of weekend alpinistas, oblivious to the thin, odiferous air, pilgrimage up the vólcan’s icy slopes brandishing homemade crampons and ice axes. Half of Mexico was on top of Popo that day, and all of them were watching in disbelief as we stepped onto our skis. Separated from the lava fields by bulletproof ice and pock-marked, sun-crusted snow, we adjusted our equipment, readjusted our nerves, and pushed off. Gasping for air and unsteady on my toothpick skis under a massive, swaying pack, I felt like I was skiing for the first time ever. Merl, too. He tripped up within a few turns, immediately rocketing down a lava-studded snow patch toward certain mincing. Climbers are trained to self-arrest such falls by digging the tip of an ice axe or other equipment into the snow, but Merl somehow stopped himself by dragging his fingers. Warned, we composed ourselves and continued the descent.
The skiing was difficult, and we really only adjusted to it as we neared the bottom of the pitch. Puzzled brown faces peered down from the crater rim while below, tan desert rose to meet us; there would be no lift-line backslapping at the end of this run. Eventually we stood in the lava field, dazed, hearts racing, altitude headaches replaced by adrenalin buzzes. To the east and barely visible stood Pico de Orizaba.
After conquering Popo we beat a hasty retreat, bouncing our rental car east down the mountain on streambed roads to the edge of the Caribbean slope and Tlachichuca, a mining town whose walls still display the bulletholes of Emiliano Zapata’s socialist revolution. We dodged piles of garbage and raced tumbleweeds down dusty streets to the home of Joaquín Canchola Limón. As the owner of the only four-wheel drive truck in town, Joaquín was in the business of ferrying climbers to a small stone hut at 14,000 feet on Orizaba’s northern flank. We pitched our tent in his yard for the night, then as we enjoyed (for the moment) his wife’s special Our Lady of Guadalupe tamales, Joaquín pointed out a notation in his dog-eared register by none other than Alan Bard and Tom Carter, who’d first conquered these peaks on pins in the late seventies.
“Sharpen your edges and your minds,” it read simply.
The entry seemed pertinent; it was only two weeks old.
“It doesn’t say anything about a rope,” Merl offered.
In the hut on Orizaba we endured a fitful, heart-pounding, rodent-ridden night. At some point I dreamed I was with Cortés’s men when they’d descended into Popo’s crater.
“Señor, can you throw me a rope,” a silver-helmeted conquistador cried up to me as I gazed down from the rim.
“I thought you brought the rope,” I called back through cupped hands.
In the cold dark of 4 a.m., we tamped down ominously churning bellyfuls of intestine-eroding tamales with raisin-and-rat-turd-peppered oatmeal, then started our summit bid.
We climbed through a spectacular fuchsia sunrise, not a sailor-be-warned portent of any approaching storm but merely the supercharged murk of distant Mexico City’s ever-lapping smog. Reaching the toe of the glacier around 6 a.m., we changed from (freezing) canvas running shoes into (freezing) leather telemark boots and ill-fitting crampons and began the long, upward slog toward Orizaba’s ragged rim. As we stood wobbly atop the volcano around 10 a.m., we looked east to the blue of the Caribbean, while behind us, reclining elegantly in cinnamon sheets on the western horizon—smoking seductively—lay Popocatépetl.
We stood there for what was only a moment but seemed like forever, foolishly enjoying the dangerous hubris of having ascended with no rope, before one of us came to our senses.
“Let’s get the fuck down,” said Merl.
Our wheezy breathing and occluded thinking were possible signs of deadly high-altitude pulmonary and cerebral edema, and it was indeed clear we had to get lower in a hurry. Moving fast, however, was neither possible nor a particularly good idea: mountain descents—whether by foot or on skis—are notorious for exploiting and claiming victims of exhaustion, inattention, and, particularly, hubris.
My crampons were strapped onto my boots in a series of figure eights, and fumbling them off with frozen hands took forever, stowing them an eternity. Bending to slip the toe of one flimsy telemark boot into the always difficult rat-trap ski binding, I nearly blacked out and had to sit down. Merl was having similar difficulties. Getting our skis on was like repairing a watch while drunk. When we were finally ready, maybe, we checked each other for loose objects. Sanity seemed the only thing not locked down tight.
I had the honor of going first this time and was determined not to repeat Merl’s fall on Popo. But Orizaba was a different story; its extra 1,000 vertical feet of glacier were steeper by far. My first few turns on its linoleum surface were on close to a fifty-degree incline that dropped me mockingly into a crevasse field. I made one heart-pounding hop turn, then two, followed by a quick but unsteady traverse to avoid a couple of crevasses. Legs shaking, I stopped to hang over my poles and catch my labored breath. Another vuelta and then . . . disaster. Setting up for the next turn, I caught the edge of my inside ski on a tiny, unyielding piece of rock embedded in the ice and was thrown off balance; before I could react, the weight of my pack carried my center of gravity past my feet and tipped me over, downhill. Just like that I was sliding headfirst out of control.
Damn, we should have been skiing on a rope here!
Of course it was too late for that kind of thinking—or any thinking, really. Instinctively I wormed my body around on the snow, working to get my head uphill and my feet below me. Even with that accomplished, the edges of my skis found no purchase on the slick surface. With no ice axe at the ready to self-arrest with, I struggled a mittened hand out of its pole strap and slid it down the pole’s metal shaft, grasping it above the basket with both hands, rolling onto my belly, and digging the metal point in with all the strength I could muster. My clothing bunched up, exposing my stomach to the abrasive ice and rock, but I could feel myself slowing, giving me impetus to dig even harder by pulling myself toward the pole basket with flexing elbows. And then, miraculously, I simply stopped and it was silent.
I lay hanging onto the pole, huffing lips pressed to the snow as if, somehow, more oxygen might be found there. I had the presence of mind not to try changing positions, pending evaluation. Looking down, I saw that my ankles and skis hung over the edge of the crevasse that, while not large enough to disappear into completely was big enough to snap a leg.
Merl skied down tentatively.
“Touché,” he said in the understated way naïve idiots often respond to anything of consequence. We were Dumb and Dumber before it was even fashionable: still alive in spite of ourselves.
After this incident, things improved. The slope mellowed below the crevasse field, the skiing became easier and our turns wider. The surface had softened enough in the muted sunlight to send small sprays off the tails of our boards as we arced slowly toward the toe of the glacier. Our frozen feet, pounding headaches, and dizziness evaporated at around 17,000 feet, and back at our starting point, we suddenly felt strong again. When we took off our skis and looked back at our tracks—kindergarten finger-wiggles through the soft icing of the lower glacier—a huge sense of accomplishment enveloped us. Bard and Carter may have been here first, but we were the first Canadians to descend Orizaba on freeheel gear, and second best was always good enough for us.
Back at the hut, Joaquín awaited, as promised, with cold beer. It was Miller time, Mexican-style. Bouncing toward Tlachichuca in the back of his truck, I stared after the massive form of Orizaba hunched on the horizon, and all I could see was Killer Hill’s gentle shoulders. Skiing really could take you from your backyard to something that approximated the moon. After a long, winding, snowy road of some ten years, the seed planted by my parents’ coffee-table book had come to fruition. A quest fulfilled.
Or had it only started?
