by Jim Shepard
Early one morning I found my mother on my bed. When she saw I was awake, she remarked that Willi’s shoulders had been so broad that it made him appear shorter than he was. “And mine, too,” I said. “And yours, too,” she smiled. Somewhere far away a dog was barking as if beside itself with alarm.
I told her I thought I might have started the avalanche. She said, “You didn’t start the avalanche.” I told her I might have, though I hadn’t yet explained how. She reminded me of the farmers’ old saying that they didn’t make the hay, that the sun made the hay.
“I think I made the avalanche,” she finally suggested. When I asked what she was talking about, she wondered if I remembered the Oberlanders’ tale of the cowherd whose mother thought he’d gone astray and, enraged by having been offered only spoiled milk by his new wife, called on ice from the mountain above to come bury them both and all of their cows.
How old was I then? Seventeen. But even someone that young can be shocked by his own paralysis in the face of need. My mother sat on my bed picking her heart to pieces and I suffered at the spectacle and accepted her caresses and wept along with her and fell back asleep comforted, never offering my own account of what might have happened, whether or not it would have helped. The subject was dropped. And that morning more than anything else is what’s driven me to avalanche research.
Bucher’s a good Christian but even he gave up the long ski down to services after a few weeks, and instead we spend our Sabbaths admiring the early-morning calm of the mountains. The sun peeps over the sentinel peaks behind us and the entire snow-covered world becomes a radiance thrown back at the sky. The only sounds are those we make. On our trips to Davos for supplies, Bader and I for a few months held a mock competition for the affections of an Alsatian widow, who negotiated the burden of her sexual magnetism with an appealing modesty. Then, in February, I slipped on an ice sheet outside a bakery and bounced down two flights of steps. “So much for the surviving Eckel brother,” Ruth Lindner said in response from across the street.
What was she doing in Davos? She’d trained as a teacher and been reassigned to a new school district. How did she like teaching? She hoped the change of scene would help. What did her parents make of the move? They’d been against it, but lately she’d felt home was more like prison. We arranged to meet for coffee the following weekend, and back at the hut the group made much of my announcement of my withdrawal from the Alsatian sweepstakes.
I’d lost track of Ruth after Willi’s memorial service. My last words to her had been “I blame myself,” and her response had been, “I blame everyone.” Then she’d gone on holiday to her maternal grandparents’ farm near Merligen. That visit had extended itself, and my two letters to that address were returned unopened. When I’d pressed her father for an explanation, he said that the postmaster must have found them undeliverable. When I’d protested that he was the postmaster, he lost his temper. My parents had been no more help. Her few friends claimed to be equally mystified.
Over coffee she asked how I was finding Davos and then moved on to Willi: his poor grades and how he liked to present himself as indisposed to exertion indoors, and how outside he had no time for anything except his skis. She became misty-eyed. She asked if he’d ever told me that the high summits were like giants at their windows looking down at us.
“No,” I said. She wore a beeswax-and-aloe mixture on her lips to protect them, and the effect was like a ceramic glaze I longed to test with my finger.
“He told me that,” she said, pleased.
She asked if I remembered a winter camping trip some of our classmates had taken a month before the Sport Week outing. I told her I remembered it better than she imagined. I’d worked up the courage to ask if she was going and she’d said no, so I’d dropped out. Later I discovered that both she and Willi had gone.
“Had that always been the plan?” I wanted to know, pained even after all these years.
“I need you to listen,” she told me.
“What do you suppose I’m doing?” I answered.
“This is not easy for me,” she went on to say.
“Does it seem so for me?” I asked.
She told me that the first afternoon they’d pitched camp in a little squall of butterflies blown above the snowline by an updraft. That night a full moon had risen above their tents and their breath vapor had frozen onto the canvas above them. It had broken off in a sheet when in the predawn stillness she’d lifted the flap to slip into Willi’s tent.
“I don’t need to hear this,” I told her. But it was as if I’d claimed I did. She said that once they’d shed their clothes and embraced inside his sleeping sack, she’d felt the way she had years earlier during an electrical storm when her hair had lifted itself into the air and her hands, holding a rake, had sung like a kettle with the discharge.
We sat across from each other and our coffees. Why does anyone choose one brother and not another? I wanted to ask.
“You have his facial expressions,” she said instead.
“Twins are like that,” I answered.
“He told your mother when he got back,” she added, addressing my silence. That part of the story seemed to affect her most of all.
“Told her what?” I asked.
“That we were in love,” she said.
A truck outside the window ground its gears. “And you got pregnant,” I suggested.
“And I got pregnant,” she said. She seemed to be considering our hands.
Carousers clattering skis and poles came and went. “Did my mother find out?” I wanted to know.
“I assume she guessed,” Ruth said.
“I have to get back,” I told her.
At the door, while I bundled against the weather, she said she was sorry, and had so much more to tell me. She asked if I would see her again. When at first I didn’t respond, she removed one of my mittens and placed my hand against her cheek. But she already knew what I wanted. She already knew what I felt. It was as if there’d never been any point in pretending otherwise.
The position in which she left me brought to mind the subject that Haefeli insists should be absorbing our every waking moment. The American W. A. Bentley was the first to have photographed snow crystals, having recorded over six thousand different forms before conceding that he’d only scratched the surface, given the number of types that must exist. Such crystals are formed when water vapor in the cooling air condenses onto particulate matter in the atmosphere and then freezes, the ice particles growing as more vapor attaches itself in a process called sublimation: that small miracle, Bader reminds us, as we dig cores, in which a substance transforms itself from gas to solid without having passed through its liquid state. The variations in design are as infinite as the conditions that govern the crystals’ development, but each as it reaches the ground is subject to a change of environment: from having been a separate entity, it becomes a minute part of the mass and begins to undergo a series of changes in its nature, all of which will reflect on the stability of the area of which it’s a part. When new snow alights, its crystals interlock by means of their fine branches and spikes, but the strength of this cohesion is undermined by destructive metamorphism as the branches and spikes regress under the pressure of rising temperatures or the snow’s weight. It was Professor Paulcke of Innsbruck who first observed a particular kind of degraded crystal that because of its shape constituted a noncohesive mass in the snow cover: such crystals were excessively fragile and ran like loose pebbles; they formed, wherever they were found, a hugely unstable base for the other layers above. He called them “depth hoar” or “swim-snow.” My mother recorded the same phenomenon in her journals and called it “sugar snow” because it refused to bond even when squeezed tightly in the hand. Haefeli loved the term. A stratum of such crystals is like a layer of ball bearings under the tons of more recently fallen snow on a slope, requiring only the slightest jar to set the mass in motion.
We spend the afternoon, after my coffee with Ru
th, cutting blocks of snow out of various slopes and tapping the tops to test the frequency of layer fracture and collapse. Bader wears an out-sized dinner jacket over his cardigan, claiming it’s the only material he’s discovered to which snow doesn’t cling. He looks as young as I do, in his beardlessness reminding everyone of a cleric or a shepherd. Before Professor Niggli found him, he’d lived a life circumscribed by the peaks at either end of his valley.
I’m teased for being love-struck because of my silence, then teased further for failing to react. But throughout the day, my heart roams in and out of my chest as though tethered to its own misery. Of course my mother knew—that was the source of her Oberlander remark—and in my newly reconfigured map of that time, everyone knew everything, except Willi’s endlessly oblivious brother. Had she had the baby? Of course, but how could I have left without asking if she’d had the baby?
“I need to go back down,” I finally told Haefeli as we hiked back from a northeastern ice wall. We’d been sampling under a nine-meter cornice.
“Not right now you don’t,” he answered.
“Now he’s pouting,” Bucher informed the group, half an hour later.
“What are you going to settle today?” Haefeli wants to know once we’re all back in the hut for the night. The sun’s a vermilion line along the western ridge. “Are you going to go down there and profess your undying love? Haul her back up here for your wedding night?”
He’s working by lantern light on what he calls a penetrometer: a pointed steel tube a meter long for measuring the firmness of strata. He has the two virtues perhaps most important to such a place as this: presence of mind and affability. In his own casual way he combines for us the functions of priest, guide, and hotelier. Once, during a rockfall in a narrow gully, he stepped between me and a head-sized stone that appeared out of the snowcloud, and deflected it with the handle of his shovel much like a cricketer bats a ball.
“Go if you have to,” he finally tells me later that night, in exasperation, into the frigid darkness above our hammocks and blankets. “Go. Go. Go. God knows we don’t need you up here.”
Of course it occurs to me only as I finally reach Davos the next morning that she’s in school and will be for most of the day. I have little money to spare but waste some anyway on coffee and a sweet roll to get in out of the cold. The lunch rush comes and goes. My nose to the window, I man the chair farthest from the door with the unsettled vacancy of an old dog left home alone.
At the awaited hour I’m outside her school, the dismissal bell ringing, and shouting and happy children stream past, looking no different than we were. “What are you doing here?” she wants to know. Somehow she’s come out another door and come up to me from behind.
“So you had the baby?” I ask.
“This is my supervisor, Frau Döring,” she tells me.
Frau Döring and I exchange greetings, and she appears to be hoping that whatever I’d just asked will be repeated.
“This is the brother of my late fiancée,” Ruth informs her. It’s as if the world’s been filled with unexpectedly painful things.
Once back at the coffee shop she asks, “Why do you think you’re so in love with me? What is it that you think you love?”
“You never answered about the baby,” I tell her.
She looks at me, gauging my reaction, and makes a let’s-get-on-with-it face.
“You gave it to an orphanage,” I tell her. “Some convent or other. The Sisters of Perpetual Help.”
She continues to consider me. I’m not weeping, but I might as well be.
“What is it you want?” she finally asks. “You want me to say that you’re as nice a boy as Willi?” After a silence she adds, “I always thought of you as the sort of boy who pinned the periodic table over his bed, instead of pictures of girls from magazines.”
An older couple at an adjacent table has grown quiet, eavesdropping.
“I thought about you more than Willi did,” I finally tell her. “That camping trip when you were with him, I thought about you more than he did.”
It angers her, and that’s at least something between us.
The eavesdropping couple resumes its conversation.
She talks a little about her work. She remarks how her loneliness has been exacerbated by her fondness for children. At least here she slept better, though. Maybe that’s what relocation was: a balm for the faint-hearted.
“You said you had more to tell me,” I remind her.
She puts a hand around my coffee cup. “I’ve always liked you,” she says. “I’ll put the question to you. Do you think you were Willi’s equal?”
She’s sympathetic and tender and would sleep with me if she weren’t sure it would lead to further tediousness. She’d like to help but she’s also sure of the justice of this injustice, just as the English believe the poor to be poor and the rich rich because God has decreed it so.
“You’re not really still unable to get over this, are you?” she asks.
“What we’re doing on the mountain is more important than any of this,” I tell her, and she’s relieved to hear it.
“How’s your mother?” she wants to know.
Outside she turns and steps close and presses her mouth to my cheek and then lets it drift across my lips. “There’s no reason for us to stay angry with one another,” she says, as though confiding this to my mouth. The couple from the adjacent table emerges, fixing their collars and hats, and excuse themselves to get by.
My mother and I had both dealt with our devastation in the months after Willi’s death by devoting our free time to the library at Lauterbrunnen. We seemed to have arrived at this attempted solution independently. We went mostly after chores on Saturdays. Sometimes I’d take the bus and discover, having arrived, that my father had driven my mother in the car. Sometimes I’d search for a book in the card catalog and discover that she’d already signed it out and was leafing through it on the other side of the reading room. There was very little written, then, about the properties of snow, and we were continually driven back to geographies and histories of the high Alps, there to glean what we could. We encountered Strabo’s accounts of passes subject to the collapse of whole snow-mountains above them that swept his companions into abysmal chasms: passes he described as “places beyond remedy.” We found Polybius’s account of Hannibal’s having had to witness the eruption of a slope that took with it his entire vanguard. Saint Bernard’s of having stepped out of a chapel to relieve himself when his fellow pilgrims inside were scoured away by a roaring river of snow, and his prayer, having been saved downslope in the branches of a pine, that the Lord restore him to his brethren so he might instruct them not to venture into this place of torment. Early one rain-swept evening my mother set before me a memoir in which one of Napoleon’s generals related an anecdote of a drummer boy swept into a gorge who drummed for several days in the hope of attracting rescue before he finally fell silent. The librarians, intrigued by our industry and single-mindedness, helped out with sources. We read how in ancient days avalanches were so omnipotent and incontestable that they were understood to be diabolic weapons of the powers of darkness. How else to explain an entire village smashed flat while a china cupboard with all its contents remained undamaged? A single pine left upright on the roof of a pastor’s house, as if it had grown there? A house so shattered that one of the children had been found in a meadow three miles away, tucked up into her bed as if by human hands? Each of these stories caused my mother pain. Each of them drove us on.
If one house was spared and others destroyed, it was because that house had been favored by the spirits. When I first came across that claim, I closed the book and circled the library before returning to it. And those spirits rode astride such calamities as they thundered down the slope. Erstfeld’s town history recorded a spinster blown from her house who, still in her rocking chair, negotiated a wave of snow into the center of her village, and who, as she was giving thanks to Providence for her life, was ca
rried to a clearing by her enraged neighbors, surrounded by a pyre, and burned alive.
How was my mother? I answered Ruth’s question before I left to return to my hut mates. My mother wasn’t doing so well. My mother, like everyone else in this drama, seemed determined to blame herself. My mother used to believe that we all could call the thunder down onto anyone’s head whenever we wanted.
“You’re just like Willi,” Ruth said in response, after a moment. And it was the first time that I saw something in her look like the admiration he must have enjoyed.
Those were the sorts of histories, reiterated for Haefeli and Bucher, that insured my success when I interviewed to join the group. Haefeli believes there’s much to be learned from such narratives, particularly when the phenomena described have been confirmed elsewhere. He collects his own and recounts them for us when he’s in the mood, once we’re swinging in our hammocks in the dark. They’re especially compelling when we reflect that we’re hearing them in an area that itself is an avalanche zone. “I think our friend Eckel wants to be blown out of his hammock,” Bader complains about my appetite for them.
As a compromise, Haefeli promises us just one more for the time being. A sixteenth-century avalanche just below us in Davos was recorded to have generated such force that it smashed through the ice of the lake—measured at a meter in thickness—and scattered an abundance of fish killed by the concussion out onto the snow. But then he can’t resist adding two more: one of a porter he knew, an Austrian, who stepped momentarily off his line of ascent to adjust a shoulder harness and saw his three companions blasted out of their skis by a snowcloud moving with such velocity that its sound seemed behind it. And another of an infamous pass called Drostobel, above Klosters, that came to be known as a deathtrap because of an extraordinarily large and steep catchment area that fed into a single gully. Drostobel, the French liked to say, was German for “Your fate hurtles down at you.”
