This Is How It Really Sounds

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  VI

  The Unnamed Line in the Distant North

  The snow came down whispering, ceaselessly whispering in Harry Harrington’s ear, in a cold, insinuating voice that made him go quietly, secretly insane.

  It had started three days ago, a heavy, wet, ten-inch dump that had loaded down the slopes and sagged longingly toward the valleys. It rained after that, saturating the snow at the lower elevations and then cooling down and freezing as hard and smooth as porcelain. The avalanche center reported the hazard as “moderate.”

  Then it started snowing again, fine snow shaken out of a hard silver sky at temperatures near zero, and Harry watched helplessly as the tiny flakes fell around him, flakes so light he could scatter them with his breath. It leveled up at sixteen inches, crouching on the shoulders of the mountains and hissing down the steeper slopes in little unseen sloughs. The avalanche center reported the hazard as “high.”

  The following day, Friday, the sky went dark and fretful with the heaviest snow of the year, lashing two feet onto the mountains in less than twenty-four hours. Strong winds moved it across ridges and left it hanging on the lee sides in massive slabs. Cornices hung above steep mountain slopes like the crest of three-thousand-foot waves. Millions of tons of snow settled and stretched and fissured at invisible stress points. The avalanche center raised the hazard level to “extreme.”

  * * *

  “Dude, we’re naming No Name today.”

  Jarrod Harrington felt a tiny thrill go through his stomach like a guitar riff, but he took his time, then spoke into the phone in a low, monotonous rumble. “Who else is in?”

  “You and me. Brandon, Lucas, TJ. The boys!” Jimmie kept up in that promoter’s voice of his. “C’mon J, how often do we get to ride together? I’m out of here tomorrow.”

  He peered out the window at the delicate ridge of snow balanced ten inches high on the railing of the back deck. “The avalanche hazard’s gotta be ridiculous.”

  “Not in the steeps. Anything that could slide already has. It’s self-controlling.”

  Self-controlling. Jimmie was resourceful in coming up with crap like that. “Lucas said he’s in?”

  There was a slight hesitation, then Jimmie said lightly, “Lucas’s in. I just need to talk to him.” His voice suddenly lost its wheedling tone and became matter-of-fact. “No Name’s never going to be better, J. You want to ride immortal, you gotta live with some risk.”

  He’d heard Jimmie spout crap like that a hundred times over the years, and little alarms went off whenever his friend started working him. But the truth was, Jimmie did ride immortal. He’d won a half-dozen big-mountain competitions and had a sponsor that kept him in gear and spending money and sent him to South America in the summer to ride on. He could read about him in Transworld getting heli-bumps in Haines or partying at somebody’s secret Bugaboos hideaway. “Lemme think it over.”

  Harry Harrington’s only son hung up the phone and looked out the window. From the kitchen table he could see across the water to where the clouds were swarming over the tops of the mountains. Jimmie was full of shit about it being self-controlling. The avalanche hazard would be insane. But for all his bullshit, Jimmie was right about one thing: they’d never have better conditions for dropping No Name. And whoever dropped it, named it.

  Jarrod lived with his parents in an old wooden miner’s house perched in the part of town where the streets sliced up the side of the mountain so steeply that they had to be closed in winter. His great grandfather had built it in 1932, a little house with three tiny bedrooms and a potbellied stove. With its steeply peaked roof and its deep eaves it looked a bit like a gingerbread house, just like the other houses on the street. He supposed that it might be his someday, or his sister’s, but he didn’t care much. He had bigger destinies in mind.

  His gear was hanging in the corner by the hot woodstove: huge black boots, waterproof pants, and a baggy snow jacket. He thumped down to the basement and came back with his board, a cherry-red big-mountain splitboard from Canada that stretched a foot longer than anyone else’s and was made exclusively for going at high speeds in deep, untouched powder. An expensive and fairly exotic piece of equipment, it split apart into two skis for the ascent, then fitted together into a snowboard again for the ride down. A high school graduation present from his father, which, like most things from his father, came without a lot of words.

  Jarrod loved the splitboard. It matched his tall, thin body and looked competent and slightly dangerous, like an electric guitar in a stadium, except his stadium was an amphitheater of snow and wind. The board was his battle-ax and his shield. He was invincible when he strapped it on, could drop any cliff and straight-line down even the steepest pitches, pull out into a turn, and feel the powder explode up into his face. He could fly off a little knoll and land it sixty feet away, then keep on going, like it just didn’t matter. And that was the essential thing about life, among the wondering about what work he’d do someday or if he’d finish college: that at bottom it just didn’t matter. If you could go fast enough, and fly far enough, you were free.

  He laid the board on the floor and began tightening some screws in the bindings. So there was some avalanche hazard. Sure. There was always hazard. But the boys would all be there, and just that fact meant it would turn out okay. No matter what kind of crazy shit they’d taken on over the years—jumping off the bridge, driving shit-faced, free-climbing the cliffs above the glacier—it always turned out okay, while the bad stuff happened to other people. Besides, the hazard was on the slopes, while they’d mostly be in the woods and then on the ridge until they got to No Name. And Jimmie was probably right; the steeps usually were self-controlling, and No Name was the steepest thing around.

  Then his little game ended and he thought of No Name itself, and the avalanche talk just felt like a cover for his own fears. No Name was the real player here. From some angles the chute looked doable, but from others it didn’t, except if there was a lot of snow. The only way to know for sure was just to drop in, and then you’d know. No Name was the blank stare; it was sudden death—and, as he thought about it, either of those would be good names for it if he managed to be the first to drop it. Or maybe he’d name it Jarrod Harrington Dropped This Chute and Nobody Else Had the Balls. That would look good in Transworld Snowboarding.

  He’d had a few photos in there already. When Jimmie won his first competitions, Brandon’s pictures of him started showing up in Plank and Transworld, and then he’d been able to start selling shots of the others, too. Images of them getting insane air or launching off of snow-covered trees into the sick blue void, accompanied by their names and the words “in Juneau, Alaska.” The ski lodge displayed the pictures in a glass case, and everybody in town who rode looked up to them. Him, Jimmie, TJ, Lucas. They were the local boys—this generation’s big dogs.

  There was another generation of big dogs, though. The last generation. Now they were carpenters and contractors, worked in the city assessor’s office. Nursing ruined knees and paunches, they skied hard, but not as hard as they used to, and mostly on weekends. Twenty years ago they’d been the ones getting dropped off in scary places in the ice fields, making first descents on gear that had seemed exotic and hypermodern at the time but were now antiques, yesteryear’s thousand-dollar boards seen only in some anachronistic corner of the used ski swap with a $1 price tag on them. Peter “Harry” Harrington was the biggest of those old dogs, walked now into his kitchen and glanced at his son adjusting the bindings on the big red board.

  Harry Harrington was long and lean-faced, like his son, but heavier at the shoulders and wider in the middle. His sandy hair was dulling to gray on the sides. His picture was under the glass at the ski area, too, though the colors had yellowed a bit.

  He was a quiet, intense man who rarely raised his low voice but radiated a calm authority. Even Jarrod’s friends admired him. They’d all watched the few ancient videos of him posted on the Web. They joked about the funky ski outf
its and ridiculously long grand-slalom skis, but he did things on those skis that were hard to do now on the fat new gear that made everything three times easier. He’d still go ripping through the ski area, moving with an almost frightening speed, dropping eight-footers without slowing down and blowing through the trees like a freight train. Even the Boys went silent when he whipped past. Dude, they might say, your dad can ski! They’d all seen the old photos and heard the stories: how he’d dropped a hundred-foot cliff in Utah and how he’d skied a line in a competition that the guy after him had been killed trying to follow. But stuff that had happened twenty years ago seemed archaic, like that old gear. And the world champions of before would just be pretty good skiers now. Wouldn’t they?

  “I’m making some oatmeal,” the father said. “You want some?”

  “I’m good. Here in the twenty-first century people eat breakfast cereal.”

  “You think it’s old-fashioned. It’s not old-fashioned. Oatmeal kicks ass all day long.”

  “I’m good, Dad.”

  He put some extra in the pot anyway. Sometimes the boy said no, then ate some after all. Butter, brown sugar, raisins: it was like sliding a nuclear fuel rod into your stomach.

  He walked over to the board to check out the bindings. “Hey!” he said. “How about I go skiing today and you go in to work for me?”

  “Old guys are supposed to work. It’s the way of the world.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’re not sure yet. We might end up setting up a jump on the back side of the ridge and practice spins, I’m getting my ten-eighty dialed in.”

  It was a fairly transparent misdirection; the splitboard was completely unsuited to those kinds of tricks. It was his son’s way of telling him something was up. “Where else might you go?”

  The boy answered with an irritable groan, then reluctantly offered, “We’re thinking about going out to the Wedding Bowl. There’s a chute there we’ve been wanting to hit.”

  The Wedding Bowl was a huge hollow in a mountain that took two or three hours by snowshoe or ski to reach. Its upper rims were sheer cliffs, split by fissures that had eroded over the millennia into near-vertical chutes that could be skied when they were full of snow. Some were wide enough to make an easy side-to-side descent. Others narrowed to three feet, where the only option was to point it down between the jagged rock walls and try not to panic until it widened out again.

  Harry had skied most of them as a teenager, but now the kids used different names: Shit for Brains, Cropley Extreme … “Which one were you thinking about?”

  “We just call it No Name. No one’s ever done it before.”

  The older man nodded slowly. He had a nearly photographic memory for difficult runs, but even without a description, he knew which chute they were talking about. It hadn’t had a name in his day either. They’d called it That Other Chute.

  “Second to last one out on the east side, right? It’s narrow at the top, cuts left around some boulders, then seems to cliff out at a narrow gorge so you have to line it up perfectly, drop about twelve feet straight down through the throat, and land it without turning your skis. Then there’s a second cliff, maybe thirty feet, with a good landing zone.”

  Jarrod raised his eyebrows, impressed. “That’s it.”

  “Except you can’t really get a good look at it. Unless you got a helicopter.”

  “No,” his son said.

  Harry remembered it clearly. The closest he’d gotten was to stand up at the top of it for a half hour one day. His buddies had been silent on that one: no cheering, no jokes. Not even impatience. He stood there, and then the clouds started to move down, and the light got flat, and it started snowing hard, and someone said they could get whited out pretty easily. He finally did the next chute over, and they’d skied home without much talk. He’d always felt he could have done it if he’d taken that first step, but there was no payday in it; just a nasty, dangerous little chute that maybe forty people in the world knew about.

  He shook the memory off. “This one of Jimmie’s ideas?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” his son muttered. “And mine, too.”

  “Have you thought about the avalanche hazard?”

  “Jimmie says it’s self-controlling.”

  He swung his head back and forth, irritated. “Let me tell you something about Jimmie: he’s the kind of friend who’ll get you killed. It’s all fun and it’s all cool and rah rah, let’s go for it, boys, and then somebody’s lying there with a broken femur and all Jimmie can do is say, ‘Oops! Sorry, dude!’ I’ve seen plenty of guys like Jimmie. Who else is in on this?”

  Jarrod looked to the side and frowned, reciting the usual crew. They’d all been on boards since they were toddlers. TJ, a wiry little ski-racer whose father had been Jarrod’s dentist, and Brandon, a Filipino kid who had started selling his pictures to magazines. Lucas, a low-key, polite boy who said little but had taken a wilderness EMT course and would be the one with the radios and the first-aid kit. If Lucas was with them, there’d probably be a degree of good sense exercised.

  And then there was Jimmie, a reckless half-wit who’d already been busted for drunk driving and was the one kid in Jarrod’s little gang that Harry had never liked. He was slick even in grade school, always in the middle of the problem and always with a good excuse for why it was someone else’s fault. He could ride, though: he’d won a bunch of big-mountain competitions and had been in some movies pulling double corks off sixty-foot cliffs: stuff they hadn’t even invented back in Harry’s day. He’d shown up on the cover of a magazine last year going huge in Valdez, and that seemed to cement his position as leader of the pack whenever he was in town. With Jimmie there calling the shots any jackass stunt was possible.

  “Yeah,” he looked to the side before he spoke, gathered himself. “I wouldn’t go out there today. The lee side of the ridges are going to be wind-loaded, and there’s still that layer of glazed snow that all this lighter stuff is sitting on. Wait a few days for the snow to consolidate, then hit No Name, or whatever it is.”

  “We’ll all have avalanche gear.”

  “Does that include a backhoe? Because if I was buried under ten feet of snow I’m not sure I’d want to bet my life on how fast Jimmie could dig me out with his little aluminum shovel.”

  His son hesitated before trying to negotiate. “How about, we go check it out, and if it’s too unstable, we’ll come back.”

  “After a two-hour climb you’re just going to turn around again? I don’t give Jimmie credit for that much brains.”

  “We’re not talking about Jimmie; we’re talking about me!”

  He backed off. A little too vehement there. A little too Dad. He brightened up. “Why don’t you guys ride in-bounds today? The powder’s going to be awesome. Or go set up jumps on the backside of the Ridge, like you were talking about.”

  “We’ve been up there a thousand times. Nobody’s ever dropped No Name.”

  “Yeah, well…” His son was glaring at him. He was nineteen now, barely stopping in at the house to sleep. He didn’t have too many direct orders left. He said flatly, “You’re not dropping it today.”

  Jarrod went back to his board without answering, and his father took that as acquiescence. He was a sensible kid.

  The oatmeal was bubbling now, and he went over to the stove and slid it off the burner. “I made a little extra, if you want—”

  “I said I’m good!”

  “Hey!” He quieted his voice again and said, “You’re going skiing. I’m going to swing a hammer all day. On a Saturday.” He mixed in some raisins and walnuts, then added some more butter, just in case. Maybe he’d go up in the afternoon and do a few runs, if he finished up in time. He always told himself that.

  He looked at his watch. “Shit! I’m late!” He put on a jacket and a hat and brought the bowl of oatmeal with him. When he stepped out the door, his foot sank into ten inches of new powder. Light snow. God’s-grace kind of snow, covering up the
dog shit and the litter and making the world fresh and perfect. He stopped there, paralyzed, as an agonizing remorse swept over him. In that moment his whole life felt useless and defeated. He should be up there, where it was white, angelic. Instead, he was going in to work.

  He looked up into the woods behind his house. The forest floor was covered under the lumpy cushion of fresh snow, leaving only the dark gray bark of the hemlocks rising out of it in columns. He could imagine coming down the mountain and doing a perfect tree run, cutting into his neighbor’s backyard, and then popping off that little roller between the two houses, landing it in the street and spraying a big rooster tail right into the back of his truck. He’d done that before, a long time ago, when it was deep like this. Did it with Guy, flailed through waist-deep snow for an hour and a half just for a one-minute run, and Mother had met them at the door with a cup of cocoa in a blue-enameled tin cup. He remembered the metal hot against his lips. Must have been twelve. Didn’t worry about avalanches back then.

  He thought of the boy again, then turned back to the house and walked in as far as the entry to the living room, still carrying the bowl of steaming oats. Jarrod had gotten his short board out and was smoothing wax on it with the iron. The big board was leaning against the wall next to the basement door. His son kept smoothing the wax, silently, but Harry felt a wave of gratitude and affection for him. “Thanks, Jarrod. When conditions are better, you want to do that chute, I’ll go with you. Maybe I’ll do it myself.”

  Jarrod didn’t answer, and Harry started again, “Hey, I said when conditions are better—”

  His son cut him off. “I got it, Dad. Go eat your oatmeal.”

  He clenched his jaw and went out again. Across the street, his pickup was softened by a thick cake of snow. He’d grown up in this house, knew every board and shingle on this street the way he knew every pillow and turn on his favorite runs. The Caspersons had lived in that green house back when it had been white, then the Sundquists, who had the palsied kid, then the Heberts and that young couple who he never got to know. Now it was Rajiv and his family. He could do that with every house on Kennedy Street, like he was lazing down a not-particularly-difficult line whose gullies and drops descended through the last forty years. He was a local, not just to the town or this neighborhood, but to this southern block of Kennedy Street.