This Is How It Really Sounds

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  He reached up and gave one lens of his goggles a quick swipe with the back of his hand. To his amazement, he could see something ahead. The air was slightly clearer, which meant he was getting ahead of it, but just as he thought that, the ground beneath suddenly slowed and began to shift. He no longer had any speed, because the field of snow he stood on was itself sliding, accelerating down the mountain. The slope had turned to churning boulders that he desperately poked and pushed with his poles in a bid to keep his balance. The front edge of the avalanche was only some fifteen feet ahead. It was all about staying on his feet now. If he stayed up, he might live.

  And then, in a horrifying instant, he felt the ground drop away beneath his left ski, and he went pitching to the side, riding the roaring mass with his head downhill of his body. He let go of his poles and began to flail in the snow. People talked about swimming in an avalanche, but there was no swimming in this. Around him he could see ice blocks the size of garbage cans and sofas, bounding down the hill beside him, rolling and leaping end over end with a crazed freedom, and mattress-sized rafts of frozen snow vibrating along. He felt one of his feet release from the ski, and he watched the red tip of it rise up from the mass and then slide along on top. He was sinking. His legs were buried now, and he kept trying to push his upper body out of the snow, but it kept sinking lower, even though the snow was moving more slowly. He was in up to the waist, his head still downhill, then up to the chest, and though the mass below him had stopped, there was still snow moving down the mountain from above, and he felt it closing over his head, deeper and deeper. The world had turned a dark gray. It was almost done now; the snow was beginning to set up, and once it did, it would be like concrete. He took one last gulp of air and expanded his lungs. In one final gesture of desperation or defiance he convulsed his entire body toward the surface, pushing downward with his arms with all his strength, and his head rose one last time three inches above the surface of the snow and stopped. The world was locked into a raw, broken silence.

  His arms were pinned downward in the snow and his entire body was gripped as tightly as if he was a fist in cast iron. He was sideways to the slope, and a large boulder of snow sat on his chest, compressing it so tightly that he could only take shallow, suffocating breaths, as if he’d just sprinted a hundred yards and was being held in a bear hug. But it was air, welcome and cool. He was going to get another chance.

  Then he thought of Jarrod and the boys up there, and the dread welled up inside him. He’d panicked when Guy had gotten caught; he’d jumped onto the bed of the avalanche and almost been killed himself. They might do that. Or there might have been a sympathetic avalanche that reached all the way to the ridge and sucked the boys down with it, and in that case there’d be no rescue, just five men dying in the cold, broken or smothered or fading out from hypothermia. With that thought, he felt a remorse that nearly made him sick to his stomach. Jarrod! He tried to call out but he couldn’t muster enough breath, and he heard his voice come out in a muffled gasp. There was only silence. He’d come up here to save his son and instead he’d let everything get fucked up beyond recognition. Like before: tried to be the big man and just wrecked it all! Lost his money. Lost his son! His goggles had been ripped from his face, and now the little plugs of snow in his eye sockets were melting and running down his face. He strained to catch sight of the boys, but he was locked in place, and his field of vision was nearly completely blocked by the frozen debris that pinned him. He didn’t know how to pray or who to pray to, but he tried to cut some sort of deal, offering things of little value in exchange for everything that mattered.

  Some time passed. The snow that had been pushed beneath his coat began to burn his ribs, then to chill them. He thought he heard somebody shouting, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then there was silence again. A few seconds later, he saw his son picking his way carefully down the bed of the avalanche on his snowboard, below the chute, and he tried uselessly to call out to him. He lost sight of him behind the debris piled up around his head, heard him yell, “I’ve got a signal!” then his footsteps scuffling over the debris.

  Jarrod’s head appeared in the air above his face. “Dad! Dad! Are you hurt?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. He heard it come out like a whisper, with barely any breath behind it.

  Jarrod turned and yelled to summon the others, then slipped his pack off and started taking out his shovel. He was kneeling beside his father. “Hold on. I’m getting you out of there.”

  He could read a lot in that voice. It was the voice of his son trying to be brave, trying to be a man, but he could sense the terror and the anguish. He wanted to hold him, to reassure him. “I’m not hurt,” he gasped. “Just get that thing off my chest.”

  His son had taken his goggles off, and his father could see the turbulent expression on his face. His eyes were wet and his voice was filled with pain. “Why, Dad? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.” Harry could feel the snow melting down his cheeks, and he realized his son would think he was crying. “I’m sorry.”

  Jimmie’s face suddenly appeared over Jarrod’s shoulder. He seemed to assess the situation instantly, and he put his arm across his friend’s shoulders and squeezed. “Jarrod, man, it’s all right. Your dad’s okay.” At this Jarrod lost all control and began to sob. “Let it out, man. It’s okay. That scared the shit out of me, too.” He turned back to Harry’s head poking out of the snow. “Mr. Harrington, you are one crazy dude!” He took hold of Jarrod’s shovel and offered it to him. “Here. Let’s get your dad out of there.”

  They had him out in less than two minutes. Jarrod said nothing, while the others concentrated on the details of digging or looked for his skis. One had escaped the avalanche and gone down the slope another two hundred yards, and TJ went after it. The other was found through luck: the top six inches were sticking upright through the snow. They never found the poles.

  It was just as well, Harry thought. His shoulder was pretty tweaked. The entire bowl had gone: the valley floor was a jumble of shards and boulders for hundreds of yards, an impassable debris field they would have to skirt.

  There was silence as they pulled their gear together for the ski out. Snowboards were disassembled into skis again, and skins were stuck back onto their bases for traction. He couldn’t separate his skins from each other because of his shoulder, and TJ offered to do it for him. As they readied their gear they would look up at the massive avalanche around them and study it, imagining themselves in its grip, awed at its power. Two-foot-wide trees had been snapped off at the snow line, while ice boulders the size of pickup trucks stood like primitive obelisks hundreds of yards across the valley floor.

  “I can’t believe you skied out of that,” Jimmie offered at last.

  “Almost skied out of it,” Harry answered.

  They headed out across the lower part of the bowl, eyeing the slopes above them with a mixture of reverence and fear. It was still snowing. There were still great overhanging cornices capable of breaking loose and thundering down on them. TJ took the lead and Harry followed without his poles. He was weak, and his shoulder hurt him. He was trying not to shake. Not much of a hero now, he guessed. He’d come up here to protect his son, to set a good example, and instead he’d made a complete ass of himself. The story would spread about what an idiot he was, how they’d had to dig him out. Humiliating. And his wife; that was going to be a whole other problem. He’d have to ask Jarrod to let him be the one to tell her.

  They got to where the high valley fell downward back toward the trailhead, and they posted up at a safe spot to transition their gear. Skins came off and snowboards came back together. Poles were collapsed and stowed. Jimmy decided to smoke another cigarette, and they all stood looking out across the whitened fuzzy space toward the bowl and the chute he had run. No Name was barely visible through the buzzing air, and he watched as the clouds closed down over it. He knew he had to say something.

  “Thanks fo
r digging me out, guys. I’d still be lying there if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Don’t mention it, Mr. Harrington,” Jimmie said. “I know it’d work the other way around, too.”

  “It would. But this time it worked this way.”

  TJ said, “It never would have happened if we hadn’t come out here.”

  “He’s right,” Jimmie said. “This was my fault.”

  “Yeah, well … we were all a little bit stupid today. But I set a piss-poor example of how to be a man, and I’m sorry for that.”

  The boys all looked at him. Jarrod was poking the snow beside his ski with his pole, leaving little circles with dark blue holes in the middle.

  Jimmie said, “You crushed No Name! And then you rode out a fifty-year avalanche event! I wouldn’t call that a piss-poor example; I’d call it freaking hero!”

  He suspected Jimmie was just trying to make him feel better, and for the first time he felt genuine affection for his son’s friend. But having done something so reckless and gotten away with it, he had the sense that he’d just signed Jimmie’s death warrant. He knew it wouldn’t be long before someone else worked up the nerve to try that chute, and someone was going to get hurt.

  “Nothing ‘hero’ about wrecking your family trying to prove something.” But that wasn’t it, he thought. That wasn’t what he needed to tell them. That was only part of it. He struggled for the words.

  “In a million years, I wouldn’t run that chute again. It’s a squirrelly, nasty little chute and there’s no margin of error. Maybe you could do it, or maybe that particular day you clip your ski on the way in, or you hit a little patch of glaze right at the turn, and then you’re fucked. Your friends have to try to save you and somebody has to pay to medevac you out of there, or do body recovery, and the bottom line is, it’s not really worth doing in the first place. You can’t see anything; you can’t style it. There’s no joy in it, except to brag that you did it—”

  He hesitated as he tried to get to the heart of it. “Some things aren’t worth doing. They look shiny and they impress people, but they’re stupid. That chute’s one of them. You want to do something? Get big air. Fly. Rip some five-thousand-foot line and make it look pretty. Go do something”—he looked for the right word, the unlikely word—“beautiful.”

  None of the boys answered. They stood in the silence, and the word hung there awkwardly, holding them.

  “So what are you going to call it?” Jimmie finally said.

  He’d forgotten about naming rights. He looked toward the chute, but it had disappeared now in a bundle of mist, so he could only imagine it back there, a lightning-shaped fissure of black stone pointing at the sky. “I’m not going to call it anything,” he said. “It just is.”

  Behind them, the clouds were starting to lose their light. “We’d better get going,” he said, and without another word they pointed their boards back over their tracks and glided down the ridge and into the secret, quiet forest.

  * * *

  Peter Harrington had been lucky to land, they told him. Most of the other flights had cancelled without ever leaving Seattle, and a couple had left Seattle only to bounce back and forth between Anchorage and Sitka without ever getting into Juneau. The snow was heavy and all the small-plane traffic between Haines and Juneau was grounded, something he’d never counted on as a possibility. There were no roads in this part of Alaska, and the next ferry north was in two days. It suited him.

  He was going to a small town north of Juneau called Haines, the seat of a famous heli-skiing operation, where skiers were dropped at the top of big mountains and navigated their way down endless runs of spines and glaciers. The real reason he’d chosen Haines was that he couldn’t admit to himself that he’d gone all the way to Alaska with the vague idea of skiing with someone he’d spent twenty minutes with two years ago. Now, if he found him at his hardware store, he could say, I was going up to Haines to do some heli-skiing. I thought I’d stop by. His name was Harry. That was all he knew about him. He might not see him at all. Now that he was here, it wasn’t that important. When he left Juneau, he would go on to Haines, and then maybe he would leave Haines and go on to Anchorage, then farther north, or farther west, to a succession of places that got smaller and more lost until the whole idea of Peter Harrington disappeared. When he reached the end, he’d go visit his son.

  His intention of kicking around tiny towns in Alaska in winter was aimless and weird, but Camille had encouraged him, for reasons that were intuitive to the point of nonsense and that he couldn’t resist. On the night before he left, they slept together, which left him more confused about her than ever. He knew he didn’t really live in Shanghai anymore. He didn’t feel he lived anywhere.

  For some reason, as he dropped down into the dark, hostile landscape of Alaska, he sensed he’d come to the right place. The taxi driver took him to a hotel owned by the local Native corporation, and he checked in beneath the gaze of wooden masks and strangely shaped blankets woven into eyes and beaks. For a moment the girl at the front desk seemed to recognize him, and he thought she was going to say something to him, but she finally dismissed it, or decided to keep it to herself. The snow was still falling outside, and he left his things in his room and went out to look around. Maybe tomorrow he’d ask where the hardware store was, but it didn’t seem that important anymore.

  The town was a warren of narrow one-way streets climbing upward toward the soaring two-thousand-foot cliffs that boxed it in on the land side. The low wooden buildings that lined the sidewalk retained the resonance of the gold rush that had put the town on the map. Christmas lights were still sprinkled in most of the windows, and on the wooden awnings and on the light posts. He passed Juneau Drug and the Ben Franklin five-and-dime, the kind his mother would have shopped at fifty years ago, passed the florist and the bookstore and several modest law offices near the small stately capitol building. Behind the town, he’d read, were miles and miles of ice fields, so the tiny city was closed off from the rest of the world.

  It was incredibly beautiful here. The vertical faces of the mountains were covered with frozen waterfalls that dropped a thousand feet, and above them his eye instinctively followed the steep, rounded fields of snow until they disappeared into the white fog. He had coffee at a café and watched the people come in and greet each other, flecks of snow on their shoulders and their hats. He had a second coffee at another place and did the same thing. The citizens dressed simply, in nylon rain jackets and rubber boots, but interspersed with them were the suits and ties of the lawyers and lobbyists who were working the little capitol a few blocks away. Even the politicians looked small-town, like they’d stepped out of an old movie. He imagined people’s errands and jobs, their cars parked along the snowy street, and the homes they would return to. The children and the dinner pots, the dogs in their favorite spots, the wet boots, the damp coats hung up by the door. All those half-imagined worlds.

  * * *

  By three thirty in the afternoon, the sky was dim already. He walked a few short blocks to the sea and wandered into a restaurant that had giant windows facing down the channel. Mountain after mountain sprang out of the black water, and he stared at the hypnotic view. He ordered a cup of coffee and a BLT. A couple of older men were sitting at a booth with a pot of coffee between them, talking something over in serious tones, and he could tell from their expressions that if he lived there and knew the people it would be of the utmost importance. Something about an avalanche blocking the road to somewhere and how you’d have to be crazy … It was good talk. Meaningful talk. He’d arrived at this strangely perfect place that filled him with a sense of well-being for no reason he could understand. A waitress with a pierced nose poured his coffee into a thick white mug with two green pinstripes and said the sandwich would be out in a minute.

  Shanghai felt irretrievably far away now. It was as if he wasn’t that person anymore, that financier. He was just a person in a small town in the distant north surrounded by mountains and
snow, and nobody knew his name. What he’d regarded as his greatest accomplishment now felt petty and vague, not something he could measure his life with, or anyone else’s. It seemed a bit silly, when you got right down to it. A fool’s errand he’d sent himself on, thinking it was some sort of quest. The mountain was massive, the mountain was mist. But at the bottom of the mountain was the town, and in the town were a thousand other lives, ten thousand, each of them alive and ever changing. Ten thousand far-off countries, ten thousand daydreams. Ten thousand mysterious journeys.

  It was night now, at 4:30. He decided, without really thinking about it, to simply walk up. He followed Seward Street to Fifth, then walked along it toward the mountain. He heard the rubbery whine of tires spinning against the snow, the beeping of the snowplow as it backed up and then scraped forward. As he approached the mountain, it got steeper, and the street ended at a stairway that went much higher, overhung by a single streetlight and the snowy branches of trees. He paused at the bottom of it and looked upward, but he couldn’t see beyond the light. He looked backward, and up again, then set his foot on the first metal tread and began to climb. After seven or eight flights he reached another street.

  It was a tiny neighborhood tucked away in a cleft in the mountain. All around it crouched the forest. The houses here were small and old and wooden, and some of them had stacks of logs split and piled beneath their eaves or their porches. The street was closed to traffic in the winter, and the children had turned it into a sledding hill. There were a half dozen of them, boys and girls, hurling themselves facedown onto slabs of slippery foam or plastic saucers. They had made a jump and were endlessly refining it with a shovel, building it up and patting it down, all with tremendous energy and purpose. He watched them run and slide, and though they were sliding at a modest speed, he knew that to them, with their noses just above the snow, it felt fast, as fast as a sports car or a ski run, as fast as a private jet. He listened to their boasts and their happy squeals, and he had the sense again of a life that had eluded him. The smell of wood smoke, the idea that in each of these houses was a mother or father cooking dinner, a warm stove, the ties to friends who had seen each other fail and succeed, where success didn’t mean amassing eight hundred million dollars but buying a house, cooking a turkey that didn’t dry out, building a deck, seeing your letter to the editor in the morning paper with your own name in black print. The air was dark blue here, the lights in the windows buttery and rich. In one of these houses there was probably a wife who suited him: Someone intelligent. Someone nice. He’d walk in and she’d be at the stove in an apron—no! She’d be sitting reading a magazine with a sweater on that had a few wood chips clinging to it from the firewood she’d just chopped. A wife eagerly waiting for him, filled with news of the day and waiting to hear his own report.