Snowblind by Daniel Arnold

Author:Daniel Arnold [Arnold, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024991
Publisher: Counterpoint

PROUD LINE

I

THE CROIX VERTE hut was built on a flat step in the rock, level with the surface ice of the Gesner Glacier, during that brief time between the wars when the future could be imagined without alarm. The hut was designed so that the alpinist could step directly from the ice to the front porch, and with two steps more be inside and handed a cup of tea by the warden. But the glacier retreated and left the hut high above a newly born headwall. By 1987, the hut sat fifty feet above the glacier, with a sheer drop down to the ice.

Officially, the Croix Verte was abandoned, but rumor had it the hut was still used. Which is why Sam, having left his tent behind, found himself clambering hand over hand through the dregs of twilight up a knotted length of faded climbing rope someone had fixed to a porch beam long ago. Sam had left more than his tent. He’d left his home mountains, too. Back in Washington, he would have been climbing volcanoes on the Pacific Rim. Young mountains, those—cinder stacks, really, so recently piled they hadn’t yet been dismantled and tossed into the sea by their glaciers, even though Sam could practically watch them crumble out from under his boots. Later in the summer, he’d move inland to where the granite peaks pushed up through the fleece of dark, wet pines. At night he’d read—he always brought a book because otherwise on a stormbound day the tent walls closed in and his watch ran slow and his head filled with restless lunatics. Sam escaped into stories about Terray and Messner and Rébuffat. He liked best the time of the beginning, when men and women quit lumbering around the mountains like the upright apes they were and began instead to climb, putting their monkey hands to good use. The orange nylon disappeared from around him, and he’d share nightmare bivies on the Eiger or follow Joe Brown up wet gritstone with nothing but a hemp rope, a wobbly piton, and their fingertips between them and gravity’s hook.

From inside his tent under a volcano or a jag of Pacific granite, Sam made plans to go into the country of his books. Now that he’d arrived and was swimming up out of the twilight toward the hut, he saw everything doubled, the images off the page overlapping the real mountains around him. His hands yarded on the sun-bleached fixed rope, but there were other hands too, probably some he had read about, on the rope, on the rock. The shadows of the past roamed around him. Sam reached the porch, pulled himself over the edge, and had a seat. Perched there, he could have been a gargoyle on a battlement. His face was gaunt, all hollows and bones, a contradiction to his youth people found unsettling. He looked feverish. Sam tossed a few words down into the darkness to let his partner know it was his turn.

Five minutes later, Tyson surfaced and heaved himself up beside Sam.

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