Snowblind Read Online Free PDF Page B

snow. Rain. The typical Southeast Alaska stew. The radio makes electric snow, the same every time. Ann amuses herself by wrapping her fingers around it and imagining a throat. Her pilot goes from overdue to long overdue. Food’s running low, and the battery dies in her third mp3 player. Ann studies the map she tucked into the case with the radio. The ocean is only, what, twenty-five miles away? Someone will be on the water, fishermen. Ann’s heard of guys walking the glacier. And, goddamnit, how appropriate. She climbs the whole north face alone, and now she’s going to die falling into a crevasse without a dead weight on the other end of the rope to catch her. Screw it. She’ll get herself out on her own. She doesn’t need planes or pilots. It feels good to be thinking this way, taking matters into her own hands. Where they belong.
    Ann bundles all her food—little enough—into her backpack. She packs her rope and harness but leaves out the pitons and other rock gear, her GriGri, her helmet, one of her ice tools. Presents. Offerings to the mountain. Three dead music tabs weigh next to nothing, but Ann can’t bring herself to carry anything useless. She keeps the radio, still hoping it will come back to life and restore her to the outside world with a flicked switch—though she resents it and looks forward to ceremonially smashing the smug little one-note snake.
    The next morning delivers drizzle and hanging curtains of cloud. Ann throws a snow-clod and loses sight of it before it lands. There isno point staying, but it’s hard to go. She gives the pile of gear she’s leaving on the glacier a kick and walks away.
    Ann can’t see a thing. The world is opaque, impenetrable. Behind the clouds, avalanches fall to the edge of the glacier. The noise of each slide seems solid as the falling snow. The sound tumbles down off the mountains till the air quakes. Blasts of wind punch crosswise through the clouds. Ann tries to stay psyched, to let the roaring stir her up the same way as a lunatic on the drums, but the detonations are so inhuman they make her want to crawl under a rock and take shelter. Beyond the curtains hung round the mountains, who knows what might be happening? Anything.
    On the clear day, when she watched the north face come apart, did she see any planes at all? Passenger planes? Jets? Should she have? Ann can’t remember if flight corridors pass over this corner of the Alaska panhandle and didn’t bother noticing planes until now, when she wonders if there are any left in the sky at all.
    She keeps to the middle of the glacier, steering by the concussions of sound as much as anything. She’s below the firn line, and crevasses are scarce, but Ann feels sure one has her name on it, so she keeps her eyes in a vice trying to find it through the white-on-white of the clouds and snow.
    Whenever Ann goes into the mountains, she always half expects she’ll return to a changed world. Shakeups, revolutions, they happen. So when she does emerge to see the same people doing the same things, it surprises her every time, even though she knows better.
    Now something has happened. Ann can’t trust the loose-wire-in-the-radio theory. The sky has emptied out. Yeah? When’s the lasttime you saw more than ten feet overhead? All right, explain the radio. She chases her tail round and round. If all the world’s pilots have been put to some other use, what does that mean for her?
    For fuck’s sake, Ann tells herself. Volcanic ash in the jet stream. Malware at the FAA. The Apocalypse is only a song . But it’s hard to stay focused and believe in benign causes when megatons of snow keep banging down all around her. Damned hard to keep faith with stability while moving through avalanche country.
    Ann pushes down the glacier, blind to everything beyond the snow under her feet but pretty sure the Pacific Ocean is somewhere that way. Hours and miles pass.