Never Fear Read online

  APOCALYPSE THEN

  Lisa Mannetti

  “Scientists have long observed the seeming mystery: You can will yourself to die.”

  -Laurence Gonzales

  “Under stress, you don’t invent new strategies. You revert to automatic behaviors.”

  -Laurence Gonzales

  Mt. Denali: June 23, 2020

  We thought it was just the wind.

  The wind—ceaseless, screaming, bearing frozen death—had already kept us pinned for two days in the snow cave we’d dug at 17,900 feet. A storm no one predicted had suddenly raged out of nowhere and caught us out after we summited. We were only 700 vertical feet above our last camp, the one we’d used as our launch pad to gain the top of Denali, but in a whiteout you can’t tell sky from mountain—and the last thing you want to do is step off an unseen, unsensed precipice that will only stop your fall thousands upon thousands of feet lower: stop you, that is, after the initial shocked shout; after the frantic, futile grab at mere air; after the hideous cartwheels and the final doomed spiral down and down and downward still.

  “It’s not that far to the tents,” Drew shouted at us. You have to yell—practically in peoples’ earholes—to be heard at all when the wind roars like that. All four of us knew that the tents meant safety and warmth and plenty of food. But we also knew that most fatalities on big mountains happen on the descent. At 20,310 feet, that’s plenty big. The altitude—in this case where less than half of the oxygen available at sea level is around to stoke you—plays havoc with your mind. You think you’re being logical and you’re not. You think you’re still strong, but your body is weakening—consuming itself—with every step, every second you spend at altitude. For a second, I started to turn away and follow Drew, but Allen pulled at my shoulder.

  “We don’t have a choice,” he screamed. “We have to dig in or we’ll die!”

  I blinked at him and he shook my arm. “Reese,” he said, “it’s not just the cold; we could all of us be blown right off the mountain if the wind gets any stronger.”

  Suddenly, the excitement (read “adrenaline”) of standing on top of the tallest mountain in North America was gone. Now I was only tired, and worse, drained.

  ***

  All four of us had hacked and chipped at the ice with our axes to hollow out the small cave. Penny and Drew were inside shoving snow and ice back through the entrance. Allen was trying to make the tiny space slightly larger—but not too big or we’d lose whatever heat our bodies could generate. The wind began to swirl and gust and the temperature began to plummet. Just before I ducked inside I glanced at the thermometer that was clipped to the fastening on my lime-green parka: It read -30 degrees Fahrenheit. Allen, I figured, by insisting we dig in to get out of the wind and the killing cold had just saved God knew how many toes and fingers, God knew how many lives. When the actual temperature plummets below -20 F (not including the wind-chill factor) your chance of getting frostbite rockets up to ninety-five per cent. My mother always told me I had graceful hands and pretty feet and I’d seen too many pictures of what frostbite did to any kind of fingers and toes—pretty or not—like massive swelling to the point of grotesquerie (imagine a hugely bloated sausage that’s a finger ballooned up around a tiny, thin, nearly hidden wedding ring). Yes, plenty of images. Photos of hands and feet: marble white and dead black. Pix of the gangrene setting in, of the stumps after amputations of dead digits… and sometimes not just digits, but calves and forearms and noses and ears…. I had a dread approaching phobia when it came to frostbite… the worst, I thought, would be the hope you might retain those taken-for-granted appendages, that blood flow would return to the deadened flesh, that nerves would be regenerated, that what had been burned by cold could be saved. You’d wait in hope when doctors shrugged a non-committal maybe, convincing yourself it would be all right. Right up to the moment they told you that the formerly known and loved section of yourself was going to be cut off and thrown away. Permanently. Wake up from the anesthesia and part—or even, God forbid, parts—of you are gone for good. And while the optimist in me maintains nothing is impossible (hell, I’d just climbed Denali aka McKinley!), another equally strong and loquacious element wondered if I could learn to manipulate toilet paper using a hook… wondered if puppies and kittens and small children would flee the monstrous sight of steel—where once there’d been a neat, pretty hand.

  Mt. Denali: June 24, 2020

  The start of our third morning in the small, hollowed out cave. The air—except when we unblocked the entrance partially to start up one of the stoves—was beginning to grow fetid from our mingled breath, from our unwashed bodies (it takes a few weeks—and there are no showers—to climb the fifteen miles of mountain), from the stink of the pee bottle.

  We had our packs with sleeping bags and a little food, snow and ice to melt for drinking water, but we all knew unless we could descend soon we were doomed.

  Someone—I forget who—said we ought to make a dash for the camp. But, the wind alone, Allen put in, was strong enough to blow any of us right off the mountain and the roaring, gale-force wind still had not stopped. Storms do blow in and out with great rapidity on the roof of North America, but they did sometimes last more than a week… and, sometimes up to two weeks…

  Drew argued it was something other, something more. “Just listen!”

  Allen snapped, “It’s the wind. It’s not a helicopter or a plane—you’re just making Penny and Reese more nervous, getting their hopes for rescue up—so shut up!”

  Unlike on Everest, where rescue up high is near impossible, on Denali planes and ’copters could make the trip—of course, not if there were high winds and blizzard conditions. Also, unlike Everest, they tried to remove as many bodies as was feasible. Some felled climbers were right on the standard routes up and down Everest and would-be summiteers not only saw them, but walked right past (and sometimes stepped over) the doomed and stricken. On our mountain, I think there were only about thirty bodies that remained—not like the more than 200 caught out on the highest peak in the world.

  After the small silence that crept in after Allen raised his voice at Drew, Penny tried to perk up our spirits. “But, wow, hey… wasn’t it something to be standing on the top? You can see a million pictures… but to be there… so incredible,” she said.

  There was another large boom and Drew said, “Didn’t you hear that?”

  “I heard it,” Penny said. He was my boyfriend, but lately Penny seemed more in sync with Drew than I was.

  “Ah, c’mon, it’s probably just thunder or sonic boom from a jet,” Allen put in. “Whose turn is it to fire up the stove and cook?”

  You couldn’t sit upright completely—the icy ceiling was too low—but I hunched forward and said. “I don’t know whose turn it is, but I’ll do it. My fingers feel a little numb.”

  “Okay, thanks. But like I keep telling you, Reese, wiggle your fingers and toes inside the bag. You have to—to keep the circulation going, keep your body temp up.” Allen lay back on his side, the top of his shoulder and biceps nearly scraping the ice above. We were like sardines in there, I thought, and at the other end the rough, triangle-shaped cave narrowed so that someone’s feet inside their sleeping bag were always on top of mine. I wondered if that would help or hurt them… inside my down booties they felt cold—but not numb… not yet.

  So, while I waited for the snow and ice to melt (only to tepid because I didn’t want to waste fuel to heat it to boiling which takes forever at altitude anyway) I thought about what Allen said, about what I knew about keeping your core temperature up to prevent hypothermia. Your body has this nifty automatic, unconscious trick to preserve what’s needed for survival. It’s called vasoconstriction and the body knows that for the organism (i.e. you) to function, it needs the heart, lungs and brain to have plenty of warm blood and oxygen. So, it has no compunction about sacrificing what is non-essential to live. That translates to the items I was petrified of losing: ears, nose, fingers, toes�
� Your body sends a “heigh-ho, here we go” signal and pffft! Blood begins to retreat from those areas because it has been determined the brain, the heart and the lungs must be saved. The problem for those caught out in the open is that with the creeping chill, muscles no longer function. After a while your hands and your feet just won’t work. You can’t move to save yourself. Some engineering god apparently forgot that part of the equation. Even if you want to move, you can’t. And moving is one of the few ways to keep your body temperature high enough to stop it from shutting down. You also have to eat—and more importantly—drink, too. So I was melting snow and Allen and Drew were keeping a sharp eye on how much fuel we still had and how much food was left in the packs. Fussing with the small stove and moving my fingers, I reasoned, might see me out of the snow cave all digits still intact.

  ***

  When you climb Denali, (unlike, say, Everest) you carry heavy loads and pull even heavier sleds with equipment and food. It’s pretty typical to heft somewhere around 150 pounds—only eighty or so on the sled you’re dragging. But we’d traveled light on summit day; the bulk of our gear, sleds and supplies and food were all 700 feet below us in our last camp. In the half-gloom of the cave, Allen wanted us to check through our packs for any food or provisions we might have overlooked. “One at a time… or we’ll just be jarring and jouncing and aggravating one another. Maybe,” he said, “a packet of powdered soup or dehydrated turkey slipped down to the bottom or meandered inside a pocket. Maybe you’ve got a few hand warmers or a couple of ‘Hot Rods’ stashed you forgot about.”

  Penny checked her pack first, hauling out some small items like a pair of goggles, ear buds, a neon blue balaclava, a dorky-looking flexible nose screen… She was slowly and—it seemed to me—haphazardly pawing through stuff no one really needed inside the cave. It was then I began to suspect not only that she wasn’t a team player, but that maybe she was keeping something back… hiding something more.

  That morning she’d been complaining about having a headache and feeling nauseous—the early symptoms of AMS, acute mountain sickness. Left untreated, it can be fatal. Fluid in your lungs can drown you; swelling in your brain can kill you. Allen had already culled through the pared-down emergency kits we’d brought when we were going “lightweight” for the summit, and come up with a couple of Diamox and some aspirin which can help thin blood so it doesn’t turn as sludgy with the cold and lack of movement.

  And while none of us had packed closed-foam sleeping pads, which would have kept our down bags a layer further away from the ice and therefore drier—she’d packed things I didn’t understand why anyone would include when they were trying to get up to the summit and back as quickly and easily as possible. The more you carry up, the harder it is to make the top and get back safely. Cell phones are spotty on Denali—except a few places along the West Buttress like Windy Corners, but they were lightweight and thanks to technology, took great pictures. So it didn’t seem odd that she had the phone—what was odd was that for what was supposed to be a twelve-hour trip from high camp and back, she’d packed solar panels and the charger to power it. Did she think she was going to sit on the summit and wait in the freezing air till it worked so she could call her mother? She certainly wasn’t going to use solar power inside the cave or outside in a blizzard…

  ***

  The first time Penny started puking, Allen began to ramp up his efforts to radio the med camp staffed with doctors who were also mountaineers at 14,000 feet. “D-Rap calling Denali II, D-Rap calling… do you copy? Denali II, this is D-Rap, we’re pinned at 17.9… Denali II, are you there?” D-Rap was an acronym of our initials—every group that climbs the mountain comes up with their own moniker.

  He’d been trying all the lower camps the past few days, but no one had answered and we thought maybe the blizzard and the wind was interfering with the signals. Maybe the storm wasn’t as localized as we’d speculated and people in the lower camps had fled down to base at Kahiltna glacier and, for all we knew, scurried right off the mountain.

  “Med-group at Denali II, we have a sick climber. Do you copy?”

  Even I could hear that concern that was moving toward panic had crept into this voice.

  That was just before things got a whole lot worse.

  Mt. Denali: June 25, 2020

  Penny was shivering in her sleeping bag. Allen told her—for about the fortieth time—if she’d stop keeping her face inside, her breath wouldn’t condense and therefore actually make the bag wetter, the down clump up and become less effective.

  “I don’t want to lose my nose. Just leave me alone,” she said, her face burrowed deep inside.

  There was another of those huge hollow-sounding booms; the wind still howled and there were times it not only shook loose particles from the ceiling of our tiny cave, but we could feel it like a series of thumps inside. It had seemed darker inside that morning; I was worried the noise or the wind had set off an avalanche above us. No one said anything, though. I told myself it was just anxiety—had to be—because the air was still moving around us. Some of those gusts swirled through the slitted entrance like daggers flicked from a knife-throwing expert’s fingertips.

  Nobody talked much since Allen had begun rationing the food last evening. It was Drew’s turn to get the stove going and we lay in silence listening to its thin hiss.

  I rolled over and the first thing I noticed was that even with the stove going it somehow seemed brighter inside the cave. I felt my heart give a little leap.

  “Allen, maybe it’s over, maybe it’s clearing. It’s lighter in here,” I said.

  Drew shrugged. “The stove—”

  “Brighter than just the stove, I mean,” I said. For a second the brightness seemed to arrow from the recesses of Penny’s sleeping bag and I wondered if somehow she’d accidentally turned on her Petzl—the headlamp she’d carried to the top as if we were summiting Everest instead of Denali where this time of year there was daylight twenty-four hours every day.

  But this light had… had color to it… and the Petzls were sun-white. Despite the altitude, my anoxically-fogged brain synapsed a few equations and came up with a connect-the-dots moment. “Penny, are you using your phone?” Allen had been very specific about saving juice that we might need to get out, to get rescued.

  “Facebook,” she muttered.

  “Oh, Christ. Give me that goddamn thing,” Allen said.

  “Just a little. I was bored… scared… I thought I might find something about us. I mean for us… Half the time, you can’t get anything at all…”

  A transparent lie as far as I was concerned. She was out of it, but she was probably on there anyway—as often as she could pick up a signal—counting how many thumbs ups and smilies she’d gotten for summiting Denali…

  “Hand it over, Penny.”

  He was about to shut it down when something caught his eye.

  “What the hell is this?” Allen said. “What the fuck! Yellowstone blew?”

  ***

  Now we take turns using our cell phones very briefly, earbuds plugged in because you can’t hear the news in the roar of the wind. There are a lot of facts to absorb, and in hushed, desultory voices we share what we learn…

  “I heard that after Tambora exploded way back in 1815, they called the next year—1816—‘The Year Without a Summer.’ In New York there was snow in June, frost in August. People starved in Europe because with the temperature dropping, crops failed worldwide….” I said.

  “Helluva way to end global warming,” Drew said.

  “It’s not funny,” Allen put in. “Yellowstone, they estimate, is fifty to a hundred times worse.” In the light of the softly hissing stove his lips looked blue. “The eruption spewed smoke and ash 80,000 feet into the atmosphere.”

  “When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, you could have covered Manhattan 200 feet deep with the material it blasted out—”

  “Can it will ya, Reese? That’s the past. More than a hundred years ago, for Christ
’s sake,” Drew said.

  “The past is the predictor of the future—especially when it comes to volcanoes, pal. Listen, from the last time Yellowstone spewed, like seventy thousand years ago, they found eight feet of ash they dug down to in Rapid City which is 400 miles away! Don’t you get it? The ‘breadbasket’ is gone. Gone! The ash in the air moves around the earth—hell, planes can’t fly because they get that shit in the engines, it turns into ceramic… it’s all gone.”

  “I don’t accept that—” Drew said.

  I shrugged. “Those huge booms we heard—those are nothing new either. The initial eruption from Krakatoa was heard more than 3,000 miles away. I mean it’s out in the middle of Indonesia and one-twelfth of the earth heard it; the shockwave alone traveled around the globe seven times. Seven!”

  “Not helicopters, Drew, not thunder, not avalanches,” Allen said, dipping a finger into the pot of melting snow to see if he could turn off the gas. “Shockwave.”

  “It can’t affect everywhere,” Penny said.

  “The pyroclastic flows instantly incinerate everything within hundreds of miles. Further away, buildings actually collapse from the weight of the ash. Nothing can grow. Animals—people—die from breathing that shit into their lungs. Even if it’s not superheated—”

  “It’s going to be twilight for five or six years,” I said.

  “People in bunkers—” Penny began.

  “You’re in a bunker, Penny, how’s that working for you so far?” Allen said.

  Mt. Denali: June 29, 2020

  In 1884, the year after Krakatoa, an artist named (don’t you love the coincidence) William Ashcroft sketched some 530 drawings of the blood red skies over London. Not unlike, I gather, those spectacular crimson displays when the good old USA played let’s-test-another-nuclear-weapon in the deserts out west back in the fifties.