Below Freezing by Anderson Donald;van Herk Aritha;

Author:Anderson, Donald;van Herk, Aritha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Entr’acte

Bare-handed, I crushed white snow against the wounds, the snow blackening, not altogether unpleasantly, in my hands. But that done, the darkness about me swelled, and my hands went cold, and hunkering alone in the frozen trail, I would have settled for any sign of another’s life other than the trampled snow I bent in: a trace of granola, a butt, an oil leak, the visible track of a bird.

I pictured ravens, then redwing blackbirds, large as crows. I pictured white ponds. Sloughs. Frozen, ratty cattails. When a blackbird attempted to perch, the cattail snapped. Near frozen inlets, I pictured turtles, on their backs. I stopped myself, took hold, inhaled, rubbed the backs of my hands on my nose. I forced deep breaths, felt things catch in my chest, slow. I wished that I hadn’t been drinking.

As a child, snowshoeing in a storm, I had fallen behind my father, and had fallen. The snow gave to the curve of my back and my beetle weight and I’d bellowed for my father. He tramped back, stooped, grasped my wrists. “Stop flailing. You look foolish,” he said. “Like a bug.” He held onto my wrists, not to raise me, but to remove my gloves. He shook snow from them. Having bared my hands, he instructed me to choose and unhitch one snowshoe which I was to use to support my weight as I rolled with it pressed to my chest. It worked, and I stood.

“Now rehitch it.”

But my hands were cold and the leather thongs of the snowshoe were frozen. My father ungloved his hands and rehitched the shoe. Then, as if I’d not fallen and I’d not cried and he’d not bent to assist me, my father turned and broke trail.

A father myself (and older by years than mine at the time we’d hiked that snow), I rose and pursued the fire road, knowing it to soon turn and rise in its final, short push for the low summit of our civilized wild ridge. Then there Alex was: Alex and a single bag of food—the size of a year-old child—which she clutched to her chest. She walked, staring down. My heart jumped. Seeing her touched as deep a feeling as I’d ever known gaping at her. The day she’d been born, I’d gaped. Our first time together had been without the mother too—just Alex (weightless in my arms) and me in a corridor in a polished hospital at dawn, in Utah. Then, too, there had been a full moon.

—DONALD ANDERSON, “Fire Road”

At the same time as the boys dug into the snow in search of the buried bodies, the corpses that they had preserved nearer the surface began to suffer from the stronger sun which melted the thin layer of snow which covered them. The thaw had truly set in—the level of the snow had fallen far below the roof of the Fairchild—and the sun in the middle of the day became so hot that any meat left exposed to it would quickly rot.

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