Pickets and Dead Men by Bree Loewen

Author:Bree Loewen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2011-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

7

* * *

KAUTZ, SOLO

IT WAS SNOWING AND I WAS CRYING, HARD. It was newly dark and there was still a blue glow down along the edge of the glacier where the ice met the sky. I was on duty, doing a patrol with Charlie, but he had disappeared an hour or so ago. I had gotten too far behind and had lost sight of the tiny indents in the ice where his crampons had left their marks. The plan had been to climb Ptarmigan Ridge in a day, a route I’d never done before. Charlie had the map, but I should have known the way regardless. I yelled for a while to see if he could hear me, watching the sun get lower and lower while dusk fell over the green hills in the valley. I turned my light on, and then it was the only light.

Charlie always listened to music when he climbed, so he might not notice for hours that I was gone. When he did notice, I wasn’t sure what he’d do. Maybe he’d come back, maybe he’d keep going. If he did come back, it would be good for me to be here, waiting. If he didn’t come back, in the morning—early, before the snow got too soft—I’d hike back to the car. I didn’t want to keep going up, not knowing if this was where the route went. I didn’t know why I didn’t know where the route went. I should have known. I wasn’t scared, I could always hike back down, I was just sad that I’d been left.

A week later, after Charlie had come back and gotten angry with me, and then forgiven me for being slow, and crying, and not knowing the way, I realized that I was no longer trying to prove to the world that I could do my job. I was just trying to make it through each day without losing myself, hurting anyone, or going insane. The work was amazing, but there was too much of it. I enjoyed talking to the public about route conditions, staffing the high camps, and patrolling routes up the mountain. If someone got hurt on a route, I went there and made it turn out all right, but I only got a full night’s sleep once every two or three nights. I fell asleep climbing, cooking, eating. My hands shook and my eye twitched all the time. I couldn’t recover, and consequently I was not a good partner or friend, and as a further consequence I got left.

After this Charlie scheduled me for a backcountry patrol by myself, and in a way it was a relief. I still had to get from point A to point B, but if I took a break it didn’t matter. If I couldn’t think of anything to say, it was OK. I wanted to be a good partner—a big part of why I wanted to be here was because I wanted kinship—but I’d also become good at self-assessment, and I knew if I tried to climb with Charlie again I would only fail again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.