David Patrick Moses, III
Watauga High School
Sponsored by William B. Watterson
Spring 2000

The Storm

He lugged his 80-pound backpack out of the back of his mother's shiny red Ford Explorer. The gravel of the trail crunched under his feet as he situated the load on his shoulders.

"Honey, please tell me you'll be careful, I'm starting to have second thoughts about this."

He didn't really hear her, only noticed her words so he could tell her 'Mom, I'll be fine. I'll see you in a few days." He turned back, seeing his mother truly worried about him. He walked around the front of the car, stepping over the muddy tire tracks, and gave her a kiss on her slightly made-up cheek. "I love you Mom. Bye."

Her eyes looked accusingly grieved, like he was hurting her on purpose. He didn't pay attention to the mother-speak she spouted before kissing him back. He said he would be careful, for the sixth time in as many minutes, before he watched her roll up her window, turn the car around and follow the headlights into the encroaching morning mist.

The mountains saw the teenage boy, entering their world, and wondered about him. He was lanky but strong, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and evidently in good shape. He was about five feet nine inches tall. The thickly stuffed pack fit well on his slowly broadening shoulders. The mountains watched as he took off his pack and put a jacket on over his thin shirt to guard against the chilly morning air. The mountain knew he did not know what was to come.

He shrugged. His mother loved him very much. "Sometimes she just drives me crazy. I know I'll be fine." But without the protection exasperation with her offered him, he realized he was alone, truly by himself He shivered in the mist. He got a jacket out of the top his pack, and put it on. He glanced at the old brown Forest Service sign in front of him: "Cascade Pass--35 miles." He walked off between the trees up the root-choked trail.

"I have two days... to make the pass, ...and then ... another one and a half ... to make the trailhead," he said to himself between altitude induced huffs. It would take a few hours to get used to the thin air. The furry black pine trees shrouded the forest floor as they towered into the mist on both sides of the trail. He was beginning to warm up with his motion; the rocks and roots of the trail were steadily passing underneath his boots. He soon stopped to take off his jacket. Sweat already stained his favorite T-shirt, a memento of one of the many soccer tournaments of his youth.

Only one hour on the trail, he had already left the stress of being himself behind. There was no homework, no soccer practice or vocab tests in the woods. There was only him and the trail, and the sweat was already smiling on his face.

The mountains bounded up the rocky sides of the narrow valley on either side of the trail. Tall ponderosa pines covered in thick beards of lichen and moss guarded the slopes like sentinels. Pine needles on the forest floor deadened noise and vegetation, although small clearings held rotting logs, dew covered grass, and small bushes with early spring flowers. The birds could be heard to sing up in the murky fog.

He stumbled over a large root as the trail began angling more steeply up the valley. His muffled curse caused a burst of motion twelve feet away behind a fallen log. A young fawn, white spots still on its back, bounded away up the valley through the trees into the mist. He smiled, to himself, to the mountains around him, He hoped the deer found its mother soon.

He took off the pack for some water, The next clean source, according to his trail map, was a small spring fifteen miles away, about halfway up to the pass. He was breathing harder than he expected. Must be the altitude," he said to the white limestone pebbles on trail. The trail began at 7,000 feet, and wound up the ever steepening valley to 14,000 feet to the high point at the pass, and then gradually fell away again as it followed the glacier melt down to the Snake.

The temperature seemed colder to him than when he had started that morning. Definitely not typical of June weather. Maybe it was just the attitude. "What a way to spend summer-break, all by myself in the woods," He slung the heavy pack back on, not noticing the unzipped pocket on the back. His hiking boots once again began crunching up the trail.

He hiked all day, up the steep trail over rotting logs and past granite boulders left by an ancient glacier. When the daylight began to dim, he realized the fog was beginning to get thicker. From the amount of light that pierced the thickening clouds, it seemed to be twilight already. He knew it was earlier than that, his body told him it was around four o'clock. He had been moving hard all day, past the ghost trees shrouded in mist. It had begun to drizzle a little after lunch, which had consisted of his only Power Bar and some water. His jacket was back on; the temperature seemed to have dropped quite a bit.

He stopped and shrugged off his pack onto a big, damp, rotting log. His sweat-covered back rebelled at the cold air. He shivered. "Map?" His hand felt around in the now empty pocket. "Damn." Now he had no idea to tell exactly how far he had been. He had passed the spring splashing out from underneath the boulder about an hour ago. That put him about 17 miles or so from where his mom had dropped him off. Plus, his legs' dull ache from exertion told him he had covered at least 15-20 miles. The lost map was no big deal. He could remember the general shape, and wasn't as if he was in any danger. Yet.

The mountains watched him hike, so slowly, so much slower than the wind blow up the valley, so much clumsier than the graceful eagle's flight above the trees. He was so new, he and the other slow walkers like him. They occupied a single second in the eons the mountains had watched life move and grow in the narrow valley The mountains noticed the boy's solitude. Not often did humans come alone to their slopes. They knew he would never make it to his goal, the pass. The stone was coming, and the mountains watched it come as the boy clambered slowly up the valley.

He hiked on, up towards the pass. It grew darker and darker. The drizzle started again. His belly began grabbing at him, telling him to stop for the night. By the time he found a relatively flat space among the fallen trees and granite protrusions, it was almost pitch black. He could tell he was getting closer to the pass, The dark shadows of the steep granite walls contained the narrowing valley as it loomed up into the deepening murk between the trees. Putting up his tent sheltered beside the trunk of a huge grandpa ponderosa, he noticed that he began to see his breath fog into the night air. It was cold now, not just chilly and damp, but really cold. "Nothing to worry about," he thought. "'Just the altitude, It'll warm up in the morning."

He got out his small camp stove and hydrated some beef stew in the dark shadows of the big trees. He ate in the dark cold, thinking how awesome it was to be in the woods by himself, away from his parents, from school. While packing away the stove with his now numb fingers, he noticed a small breeze for the first time that day.

He awoke in the middle of the night. The wind was howling through the trees. The North Face tent his dad had gotten him for Christmas was shuddering in the dark. He was for the first time slightly disconcerted. If it got worse, he could hike back down the way he had come to the ranger station a few miles down the dirt road from where his mother had dropped him off. He squirmed around in his sleeping bag to get away from the cold air and tried to go back to sleep.

The mountains knew the storm was coming They had seen it form over the Pacific Ocean, way off in the distance on the horizon. They had felt the cold air come down from the north as the clouds advanced on the tree covered slopes. The boy was senseless to be out in open under the weight of the coming violence. The mountains knew this, and they watched him, a tiny speck in the encroaching fury.

The night dragged on, with the growing cacophony of tearing wind and creaking trees outside the black walls of the tent. After a while, he stopped trying to sleep at all, but lay with his hands gripping the inside fabric of the sleeping bag with white knuckles, "I'll be fine," he kept telling himself. "I'll hike back down in the morning, when this slows down a bit." His heart didn't believe his head. It was pounding in his chest as the world was tearing itself apart outside his tent.

Light began percolating into the tent hours later. He had no idea if it had been morning for a while and now the sun had just broken through the clouds, or if the sun had just risen. He was stiff with cold, even in his sleeping bag. He couldn't feel his toes, and his nose was clogged with mucous. "It feels like twenty below." His voice shook with his shivers. The wind had slackened a little, but was still hurling itself through the trees. Lying on his back, he reached behind his head and grabbed at the zipper of the door. It was then he noticed a small sliver of brighter light along the very top of his tent.

His hand quickly unzipped the door, and cold wetness enveloped his head.

His tent was covered in four feet of snow.

He turned over and with numb hands cleared away a little tunnel to the surface. The wind seared through his wool toboggan as he stuck his head up through the small hole he had made. The very top of his tent was poking through the whiteness. The fog had risen, revealing a thick, dark gray overcast. Everything was covered in white. What yesterday had been brown and green and black was today nothing but white, The wind plastered the snow against everything, making even the trunks of the trees white. Huge drifts were everywhere, climbing up the trees ten, twelve feet.

He climbed back down into his dark cave. He only had five days worth of food, and that would last even less time in the cold. "No way I'll be able to make the pass." It was too cold and the snow was too deep to allow fast travel. His food wouldn't last. His only option was to try to hike back down through the snow the way he had come. First he needed his pack. He cursed and squirmed back outside.

His pack was somewhere underneath all the snow. By the time he found it, with his gloves, his jacket, and his warm pants, both arms were numb from digging through the freezing crystals. He quickly put on all the clothes he had and cleared out a place to set his stove.

He took out one of his water bottles so he could heat up some water, but realized that now all it contained was undrinkable ice. He banged it against a nearby tree to break up the ice inside, and then took out his small kerosene flask to light his stove. The cap was in two pieces, split apart by ice.

A small seam had filled with water and cracked when the water froze. The kerosene had leaked out all over the bottom of his pack.

He hurled the empty can into the snow.

The mountains heard the scream of the boy beneath the hurling wind. The mountains knew that now he grasped his dire situation, that he was beginning to see his mortality staring him in the face. The trees groaned as the wind tore at their branches, just as the boy screamed as the elements tore at his conception of himself, of his life in the world.

He was truly scared now. Ms heart pounded in his chest. He couldn't feel his toes in his boots. His fingers ached with the cold through his thin gloves. Without kerosene to power the stove, he couldn't melt ice or snow. Without warm water with which to add to his dehydrated, frozen food, there was no way to make it edible. He had nothing to eat without water, and without kerosene, he could not melt snow to make water.

He had nothing to eat. His face was raw and numb, and the wind tore through his light jacket. He could not keep himself from shivering. The only thing to do was to hike back down the valley, and hope that he made it before he froze to death.

He packed up his tent and his sleeping bag, trying to keep as much snow as possible out of his pack. He jerked the pack onto his shoulders. He looked up into the sky, past the snow-covered branches into the grayness above him. He pushed away the panic, the wild fear that was grabbing at the edges of his mind. How quickly things went from hope to fear, from seeing the world spread out in front of him to looking into the face of death. He rubbed his hands together to try and heat up his fingers. Nature was not a place to escape to; the mountains were not a retreat from his real life. He realized, staring into the mountains, into the sudden and freezing expanse around him, that his life could be over, that he could die now, that in a few weeks his mother and father could see his dead body in a coffin, see it lowered into the ground.

He had to grab on to his soul to keep from sinking to his knees and waiting for the cold to take him away. He had to decide to live, to live every moment of his life as if it were his last. He stumbled off into the white.

The mountains watched the boy grapple with the deep drifts all day. His cool weather jacket was not thick enough to keep out the cold and the wet. He struggled, the snow often up to his waist, with the wind tearing through the valley. When he fell, his heavy pack drove him to the ground, underneath the snow. He made progress at first, while his energy lasted, but soon, the wind drove his weak body to the ground every few steps.

The mountains knew he was the only thing moving in the valley; all other animals were huddled deep in caves or in warm burrows away from the cold and the wind. They wondered about this boy, without enough clothes to keep him warm, fighting against the storm, struggling through the wind and the snow. He was small and insignificant, but the mountains noticed him, they saw him struggle through the drifts down the valley They could see his fatigue, how slow he was moving, how his legs kept buckling underneath him. What a pity that death was so close.

His legs felt like icicles, frozen and stiff. Frozen mucous covered the lower half of his face, and his head throbbed with the knife thrusts of the wind. It had been hours since he had felt his fingers inside his gloves. The snow had started again a few hours ago, and the air was full of falling white. It was getting dark again, and he could feel the temperature dropping, He had never been so devoid of energy, never felt too tired to open his eyes. Like a robot, he struggled to move his arms to set up the tent. Ms stomach gnawed at him under his thin jacket as he dragged out his sleeping bag.

He had no idea how much ground he had covered that day, all landmarks were lost under the snow, and he could barely see through the swirling whiteness that covered his mind. He hoped that he had enough energy to make it down the next day, because otherwise he feared he would never make it. He squirmed in his sleeping bag, his muscles calling out feebly in pain, trying to generate some warmth for his aching body. He attempted to wipe off his nose, but it was raw with the cold and it hurt too much to touch. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling of his tent.

He began shivering, slowly at first, and then harder, He tried to stop, but his vibration became more and more violent. He curled up inside the sleeping bag with his head against his knees and closed his eyes. He was so cold.

He began to think about his parents. His mom would never forgive herself for letting him come. His dad would hate himself for encouraging him to do the trip. He had been so excited to leave home, to be by himself, in the woods, To get away for a little while, from the pressures of school and home.

He realized, lying there, shivering to death in the cold, how ignorant he was. He imagined what it looked like peering down on the tent from outside, how small his blur of nylon was in the huge darkness. He was tiny, insignificant. What was this home, this school that he was escaping from?

He smiled. It was rather funny, to die. These mountains would live for millions of years, and he would be dead after only sixteen, In the huge landscape of time, he wasn't even a pebble, a speck of sand.

But he was a sentient fragment of sand. He could think about how small he was, about his place in the vastness of time and space. Suddenly, lying in his tent in six feet of snow in a narrow valley in the Northern Rocky Mountains, on a speck of a planet circling one of a trillion trillion stars in boundless, eternal universe, he didn't care how small he was, he was just amazed that he was, that he had been alive. As he lay shivering in the bleak, unfeeling cold, his eyes closed to the vast obscurity, he felt content. He smiled.

He began to notice the darkness encircling his eyes pulsate in around his head. He suddenly felt warm and comfortable, comfortable enough to go to sleep. The wind was still shrieking, beating against the sides of the tent...

The mountains saw the Search and Rescue humans on snowshoes trekking up the trail. The severely hypothermic boy was pulled out of his snowbound tent, and rushed to the hospital far away

The snow soon melted into the mountains' streams, and it was a normal June again. The boy spent several weeks in the hospital, hovering on the edge of death. His guilt-wracked parents spent hours pacing beside his hospital bed, thankful that they had notified the Search and Rescue Unit as soon as the storm descended in all its fury.

The mountains blinked, and saw the boy come back to the valley He was much older now; his hair was white, he did not move as well as he had the last time the mountains had seen him. It was late October, and the animals were hunkered down for the coming winter. The boy again hiked the trail, and it took him four days to reach the pass. There, he rested for a day before continuing down the other side.

When the clouds rotted in and it began to snow, the boy looked up into the sky, then stopped and pitched his tent.

The mountains watched as six feet of early snow fell on its slopes. The boy's tent was covered. It took eight days for Search and Rescue to find the tent. When they unzipped the tent, they found the boy curled up in his sleeping bag.

A smile was frozen on his face.

This electronic edition © 2000 The Wade Edwards Foundation