My muscles convulsed, futile, but then my hand moved and I realized that my entire left arm and shoulder were free, encircling my face. I located the rest of my body. Right arm pinned across chest, legs bent at knees, toes wiggling in boots. Intact. With my free hand I probed the cavity. Walls were solid, cement. I pushed, panicking, then willed myself to stop and clamped my mouth shut. Don’t waste air. Slow small breaths. Get the cadence.
So dark. I’d never seen such darkness with my eyes open.
I clawed at the snow, digging until my fingers stung.
Oh you fool, which way is up?
Well flip a coin. Just dig, what else can you do? I clawed one side of the cavity, fingers on fire, then clawed the other. I put my fingers in my mouth and tasted blood. And a thought came, a gift. I dug out a chunk of snow and put it in my mouth and mashed it, melting it, then opened my mouth and let it out. Snowmelt ran down my right cheek. I’m lying right-side down. Up is to my left.
I dug. For minutes — hours? although it couldn’t have been hours because there wasn’t enough air to survive hours — I dug, and the cavity filled with loose snow and I compacted it into the downhill wall. Trying not to breath too much, trying not to think. And then came a time when I was digging mechanically, hope long since gone, just digging because it was something to do. Finally it hurt too much to continue.
Fear got me around the throat and I cursed myself for that note to Jimbo — such a clever note making sure he wouldn’t worry — and if he could have heard my scream right now I’d scream my head off.
I did not have the air to scream.
So cold. So dark. There was a part of me that was already so cold and tired I thought I was approaching an accommodation to death.
You fool, you reap what you sow.
Fear seized me again, and I began yanking my right arm, which was pinned to my ribs. The arm moved, snow scraping the back of my right hand. It moved, millimeters at best, but that was something and I yanked and yanked and my arm moved back and forth. Skin stung. I yanked, and torqued my body just enough to give the arm clearance. I moved it up my breastbone and felt my heart pounding on the other side of that hard wall. Arm was coming free.
Two hands free. One was on fire and the other was numb.
Shifting my shoulders, I placed both palms against the snow roof and shoved. Pounded. Nothing moved. I screamed, clawing and digging, calling myself every name in the book and foolish was the kindest of the lot.
There was a rumbling and my icy bed was ever so gently rocked.
Quake. I froze. What’s the effect of a quake on snow? Loosen it, right? I began to pound again, digging now with my knuckles.
Snow avalanched onto my face.
The roof had cracked and there was light. I cried out and reached up to widen the crack and more snow came loose and I was laughing and crying and, now that there was light, finding it very funny that I had drooled my way to digging in the right direction.
Cold dry powder drifted in. Snowing outside. How long had I been buried? I enlarged the fisthole that had let in light and snowfall. Indeed it was snowing and the flakes landing on my raw hands tickled uncomfortably. The light was dawn gray. How long? I tore at the remaining snow roof and pushed up onto my right elbow, trying to see above ground.
And then I screamed for Lindsay.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ash peppered into my mouth.
In a thin and silky rain, ash was falling, ash so finely scattered that it appeared to have been sieved, and it seemed that this sieving could never cover the ground, but it had, for the ground and snow and trees and rocks were all the uniform pearl gray of that desiccated rain.
There was noise, the fitful roar of a faraway crowd. Ash congealed in my mouth like paste.
Dreams do come true.
There’s blood everywhere and I’m tearing at the ground and fighting the snow. My hands are finished but I’m out, and I get to my knees and then to my feet. My legs are mush but I can stand on the rigidity of terror.
This looks like a dream world in which the sun is in eclipse and trees and rocks have familiar shapes but no definition, as though they are in danger of dissolving and disappearing from sight altogether.
I couldn’t find a horizon.
My parka was gone. My cell phone was gone. My watch was gone. My yellow sweatshirt was wet and gray, growing woolly with ash. My hands were gray and ash clumped where the flesh was torn and it looked as though I’d grown thick gray scars.
An observation formed itself like a cloud at the top of my head: this is a very light ashfall. This ash is the consistency of dust. This ash is cold, light gray. There is no yellow tinge of sulfur. What do I do now, Lindsay?
She says the obvious: Find shelter, honey.
I took a few steps upcanyon but upcanyon was veiled in ashfall. Can’t walk through this to the car. Too far. Ash veils everywhere. Where’s it coming from? Red Mountain. I stood stunned, in the helicopter’s flight path, waiting for the worst.
But the ash above Red Mountain was the same as the ash everywhere else.
What’s erupting?
She won’t say.
I decided to go find Walter.
There was no trace of skis or poles, nothing but an annular depression in the snow where I had lain. I set off on foot downcanyon. The ash was shallow; I’ve skied deeper powder than this. Ash kept falling and I couldn’t keep it out of my mouth. I turtled inside my sweatshirt, setting my hands on fire, and got my bra free and tied it like a surgical mask around my face. I descended through the dream world and when the ground shook I braced for another avalanche, but here the canyon had broadened and its walls held their cover. There was just the incessant feathering of ash, blurring the topography, turning hemlocks into people. There was no reason Walter would have come this way, so far from Pika Canyon. Nevertheless, I scrutinized each hemlock as I passed. The forest thickened, and in time I came to a great round empty field. Lake Mary: site of the 20K biathlon race, site of Krom’s evacuation drill. What foresight. I didn’t need a drill. I knew the way. Three miles to home. I hugged the lake’s shore, coming around the east side until I hit the wide gray ribbon that was the Lake Mary Road. As I have done a thousand times, I headed down the road toward town.
The road edged the eastern slope of Mammoth Mountain, which humped its ash-softened shoulder at me: still here?
The faraway roar lowered in pitch.
Ahead, I could make out chairlifts in the sky. Beginner runs there. Watertank, Christmas Tree, Lupin. Skied them almost before I could walk. The road ahead tucked into a tunnel that cut beneath the ski runs. There is a viewpoint just before the tunnel, from which one can see all the way down into Long Valley, into the caldera. I turned, thinking maybe the ashfall will be thick enough to block the view.
It wasn’t.
I had known, of course, that the ashfall originated somewhere but I couldn’t believe in the eruption — not fully — until I saw. You can’t believe there is a snake in the sleeping bag with you until the hissing starts, and even then you aren’t willing to believe but finally you have to look and you find in raw shock the very thing you knew all along was there.
Through the screen of ash, I saw. Boiling clouds of black and white, black metamorphosing into white, black lobes splitting open like mouths and breathing white puffs. The white clouds climbed and the black fell.
I saw the core, a black column that anchored earth to sky. It swelled, contracted, swelled, and pulsed. The snake. Not creeping on the ground but risen to strike.
I saw how the thing was put together, snake cloaked in clouds. The vertical black jet threw off black clouds and as they rose and split, dark rock debris fell back to earth and the white water vapor rose higher. Steam white.