Suzie Eckl
avalanche weather
I.
Sea-level-ish. A cottonwood canopy. A dirt path stumbling up, up, up, over boulders and roots that overlook the Taiya River. The trees are rubbed raw where hikers have long battered their way upslope. And at the base of the hill, the trailhead just ten minutes back, Lauren hunches against a tree.
Our Lauren has never hiked before. Not really. She’s plodded about in the woods. She’s car-camped with friends and drunk herself stupid under a starlit canopy. But backpacking? Real, honest-to-God hiking with a fifty-pound pack? Today is the first for that, and Lauren can’t help but ask herself why she’s wasted her so-slow-to-accrue PTO on a vacation like this one. Especially now. With everything going on, the whole world spinning backwards, unraveling.
This hot July morning is the first and supposedly easiest of Lauren’s five-day hike along the historic Chilkoot Trail. The elevation map tells of a mostly-level trailway, and Lauren has spent the last few months extending its narrative in her mind: that of conquering the coastal Alaskan landscape with ease, of ending the first day with herbal tea by the fire, her imagination unchecked by the knowledge that fires are forbidden in camp. She’s young, after all. She’s buoyant and determined and strong. But where did this hill come from so close to the trailhead? And why’s it not on the map? Someone ought to do something about this. She, who is so powerless in other respects, should take charge here. Yes, she’s thinking to herself, I ought to call my senator. (That makes her feel a bit better.) Resolved: When my phone can once more commune with others of its kind, I will demand that money be earmarked for the betterment of park maps.
So, here we are. Hunching against a tree. Catching our breath. Glowing the neon glow of the newly-kitted. There’s irony in sweating so profusely in Alaska. It’s kind of funny, and in spite of everything—in spite of literally everything—Lauren manages a grim smile. She considers taking off her pack and removing the jacket she wears underneath, but she doesn’t. The thought of uncinching and unbuckling, of letting the thing fall to the ground only to have to heave it right back up again—the thought of succumbing to that humiliation—no, she won’t do it. Instead, she unzips her jacket’s armpit vents in the hope that air will rush in. No good. The air is too sticky, too thick. It clams to the outside of the jacket while a rivulet of sweat drips into the band of her—
—sports bra. Yes, her sports bra.
We might as well come out and say it.
Two weeks ago, Lauren Phiferman met with our doctor. She disrobed, put on a paper top, and leaned back. The exam table was situated beneath one of those deranged cat clocks whose eyes and tail rock back and forth. Lauren watched it, but the cat did not watch her back. Neither did the doctor, who trained her gaze on a spot just over Lauren’s shoulder as she prodded us—right and then left. Her fingers were dry, their tidy nails buffed and dull. She kept pressing us and poking us and massaging us and—
“Is there a problem?”
Thirty-two years old, our Lauren. Thirty-two years old and a few weeks ago she found a pea-sized lump in one of us. A few days after that, she mashed us between metal plates for a mammogram, closed her eyes as a doctor wanded us during an ultrasound, clenched her fists as another stabbed us for the biopsy. And then, just three days before her vacation to Alaska, she received her diagnosis over the phone: stage-one, non-invasive, ductal carcinoma.
Lauren hasn’t taken off this restrictive elastane bra since the diagnosis. She can’t stand to touch us. Can’t stand to see us. These appendages (her words), which have adorned her for half of her life—she’s now aware of us at every moment, feels us as distinct from her, as if we’re not a part of her body but are instead foreign objects that have been improperly tacked on. No wonder we’ve grown into our new omniscience. She even keeps her bra on in the shower. Her eyes, her back, her heart—she wonders which will be the next to fail her.
Weeks ago, she’d have been sure to make it up this ungodly hill. Even thirty pounds over her goal weight, she’d have had confidence in her ability to hike thirty-three miles overland, all the way to Lake Bennett, and that conviction would have spurred her on. But after the first appointment, the follow-ups, and the phone call, she refuses to believe the doctor’s extremely optimistic prognosis. She realizes in this moment that whatever trust she had in herself is gone. That she couldn’t possibly have prepared for this: her body, mutinous.
* * *
We’d like to mention another character in our story, Max Reinhorn, in town from Pennsylvania.
He’s just now arriving at the trailhead, hours later than intended. Last night he slept at an outpost a mile down the road, where the only availability was a room with bunk beds. This morning he’s grouchy and his shinbones ache where they stuck out across the wooden footboard. He drank too much last night—he is now a man who drinks too much—and is hungover and ready to be disappointed. Everything disappoints him these days, ever since his wife asked for a divorce.
Max passes the trailhead. He gains on us.
* * *
Lauren has proceeded another twenty agonizing minutes up the trail, where she lets a group of day-hikers pass. They bob their heads hello and then quickly vanish further up the path. She stares out at the Taiya River where it rumbles over rocks, splashing white and turquoise, full of glacial silt. She thinks she sees a woman crouched at the riverbank—but when Lauren blinks, the woman is gone. She is alone. What possessed her to come here alone, always so fucking alone, after all that happened last week? After all that happened and she has no partner to talk to (they broke up), no best friend (they drifted apart), and she hasn’t even called her mom?
At the top of the hill, pausing.
Shutting down her mind.
Forgetting her mom.
Forgetting us.
Forgetting every stupid thing.
And listening.
Letting the listening fill her with something other than herself.
A silt-laden river—insects in the moss—mosquitoes, all leggy and emaciated, dancing their war-dance for blood—a remembered voice rises in the distance—and it’s Shelly, her colleague: “Hiking? Really?”—(You?)—How dare Shelly act so appalled!—the PET scanner—metal detectors at the airport—scans of her body, de-shoed, illuminated on a screen—security personnel tittering—bored, maybe—they’ve seen better—and were the doctors also nearby?—fat tissue like a halo—got to lose those thirty pounds—ribcage—and there it is, the—does her heart show up on those scans?—the round mass of the—doctors surely laughing at the sad, rancid one of us—yawning, bored by her tragedy—they’ve surely seen worse—and when word of her condition gets around at work—whispers floating down the hall—She’s only thirty-two, can you believe it?—Lauren, stoically enduring—rueful smiles each time she enters the conference room—she’d give them all the finger!—Fuck you!—a knife slicing us open—I quit!—Shelly would lay it on thick—what a cunt—just so freaked out for you—praying so hard—I knew the sweetest woman who got breast cancer, like stage eight or something, and she really rocked it. Like, embraced it and psychologically didn’t let it get the better of her, and she kicked its ass, you know? And I think you’re really, really brave—
“You okay?”
Lauren whips around.
How quickly Max Reinhorn has overtaken her! Narrow, scruffy, a little older than she—thirty-five, to be exact—and wearing a thin black jacket and hiking shorts zippered off at the knee. His weather-beaten pack strikes Lauren as too small for the journey ahead. Carabineers hang from it like Christmas ornaments, hooking on a mug, a bandana, a hiking permit, a pair of flip-flops. The man oozes the contempt of a trail regular who’s come upon a goddamned car camper (thinks Lauren). He is malicious and pleased to witness her moment of desperation (also Lauren).
“Need a drink?” He shakes his water bottle. “It’s whiskey.”
“Are you okay?”
“Touché.”
He doesn’t accuse her of rudeness. And a good thing, too. Our Lauren deserves to be rude! She shouldn’t have to be so polite all the time. Not when the world is so hell-bent on screwing her over.
She cinches her waistbelt tighter. Grabs the tube that hangs down her neck and bites the end of it, filling her mouth with water. She is, of course, pretending she only needs a moment to readjust. In reality she feels like an idiot under this man’s scrutiny. She has Velcroed a bear bell to her pack—a glorified jingle bell those jerks at the outdoor suburban superstore mark up and sell to first-timers like her—and she hates that it jangles with her every move. She imagines this man’s distaste, wonders if he might launch into a lecture about a woman hiking alone or some patriarchal bullshit like that. He doesn’t. He doesn’t even smile.
After taking a sip from his bottle, Max continues past Lauren and in less than a minute disappears from sight, around a bend and over a hill and through the foliage or whatever. Lauren sighs, trying to forget him but knowing she won’t. Knowing, actually, that she will obsess over this encounter for the next several minutes, if not several hours, until she reaches camp.
Because she feels like a fool, bow-backed and sweating. Because surely he’s judged her when he doesn’t know the first damned thing about her. About us.
* * *
There’s one final character we haven’t yet introduced. Without realizing who—what—she was seeing, Lauren glimpsed her by the riverbank, ghostly and diaphanous. A remnant overrun with desire, watching hikers as they pass. Who knows what has tethered her here so long. What massive, enduring feeling. She’s a tremor in the air, blue eyes filled with want. Like Lauren and Max, this woman has problems. Foremost: she’s one hundred and nineteen years dead.
II.
Lauren considers sitting on a rocky outcrop and giving herself over to the scavengers that would nourish themselves on our carcass. But then, upon a thin tendril of breeze: a voice. And then another. She follows them into camp.
Trees overhead. River rushing along the site’s western edge. Tents pocking the campground. A fit young couple stabs tent stakes into the earth while nearby a gaggle of older women huddle at a picnic table, playing bridge or euchre or canasta or whatever. Lauren feels wistful just looking at them. They each belong to someone else, have someone to share a tent with, to take their photo at the tumbling streams or beaver dams or hillsides draped in devil’s club. Every one of them seems to have something she doesn’t. What? If she could just figure it out—
But the balls of her feet ache, and a bright spot on her right big toe grows warmer. She’d give anything to lie down.
Lauren locates the bear lockers. Everything with an odor—hygiene kit, granola bar wrappers, freeze-dried food packs—she loads inside. Three times she tests the locking mechanism to make sure no animal can get in, not even the clever ones. (Our Lauren has great respect for the resourcefulness of hungry animals and has for years admired the squirrels that have thwarted her mother’s every attempt to fortify the bird feeder.) Her pack is lighter now. So much lighter. She carries it with her to a chortling run-off where she sees the man she now calls Whiskey Drinker squatting at the bank. He fills his water bottle directly from the stream, heedless of the National Park Service’s directive to filter water along the trail.
Lauren stares. She’s not one to flout the rules, and while she’d never call herself naïve (though, of course, she is), she’s always surprised when others do. She hesitates. Bites back the exclamation You’re going to get giardia! Because in this moment a curious shame returns to her. It forms a pit in the center of her chest. She wants to be invisible. If she were invisible, she wouldn’t be talked to, wouldn’t have to come up with something to say. She wouldn’t be pitied or explained to or, worse, comforted. But it’s too late—not only has Max seen her but he has given her a curt nod. And now she must acknowledge him in return. Stupidly (she feels), she holds out her water filter in his direction—an offering—but when he grunts without taking it, the pit in her chest grows to the size of a fist.
She drops the hose into the run-off. Aims the pump over the rim of her water bottle. She pumps carefully, apologetically—and then changes her mind. She stops pumping. Fills her water bottle directly from the run-off and takes a great big gulp.
“I don’t know,” says Max. “You might get the runs.”
“So might you.”
“I’ve used up all my bad luck.”
“How do you know I haven’t?” She’s surprised by the anger in her voice.
“Touché,” he says again, this time with a salute, and the pit diminishes somewhat. In fact, she feels a brief spark of kinship. One powerful wingbeat.
Water bottle filled, she leaves Max and heads away from the loose knot of people gathered at the center of the campground. In the camp’s loneliest quadrant, our Lauren—lover of people!—banishes herself, for though she aches for human contact, our disease has led her to seek isolation. She has been stuck in this negative feedback loop of desire and loneliness and shame for days now. But at least over here the sound of the rushing Taiya pleasantly dampens her thoughts. It takes her three tries to erect her tent, and when she finally gets it right, she snaps the rainfly into place and pulls it taut. Inside, she attempts to turn the narrow space into something of a home, where every object has its place.
No sooner does she settle in, than her stomach grumbles. She resists its cries. She doesn’t want to traipse across camp to get her provisions, doesn’t want to boil water and rehydrate spaghetti and meatballs over her bell-shaped camp stove, which, if she’s honest, she fears will blow up in her face. She fears most of all tomorrow’s headlines: Ignorant Car Camper Killed in Propane Explosion, or Cancer-Ridden Hiker Disfigured in Freak Accident. Fumbling to her knees in the narrow tent, sleeping pad crinkling, she pulls a magazine from her pack and unfurls it over her lap. Lauren has always preferred magazines with big, glossy photographs of living rooms, or women’s journals with names like Femme and She Goes. Aspirational, we would call them (and we would know). She reads about thin, adventurous women, more beautiful than any she has ever met in the flesh and therefore unknowable. Unhateable. They are emotionally mature women. Tatted up women with high cheekbones and nose rings and PhDs in anthropology and/or linguistics. She reads about women who travel the world alone: sightseeing, backcountry skiing, abseiling, midwifing. The articles are always more visual than verbal, rife with sunsets.
Lauren brought half a dozen magazines on the hike and stores them in her pack’s outer pocket. Their pages have dampened and curled and now pull apart with a smacking sound. She wishes desperately she had left them at home because they are heavy and her back aches and we ache and the tumor inside one of us announces itself in a malicious little voice: Whatever you pack in you have to pack out, ya boob! What moron brings magazines on a hiking trip?
Thinking about the four days ahead, Lauren’s throat thickens and her cheeks warm. Panic! And then—with sudden force it occurs to her that she can quit. Can head back down to the trailhead first thing in the morning and thumb her way to town. Change her flight and fly home. No, not home, but to her mother’s house in Storm Lake, Iowa, where there are no glaciers, only the memory of them: scars across the land that have filled with water, have become placid and beautiful and safe.
She pulls a mid-level Canon DSLR from her pack and tries to photograph the blister forming on her right ankle. Then she turns the camera onto herself, onto us, but the lens is too long for such close-up work and the shutter refuses to snap. But even if the photo took, she wouldn’t be able to make us out. We are bra-enshrouded. The disease inside us invisible. Insidious. She crawls inside her sleeping bag just as a light rain begins to fall, pattering the cottonwood leaves above. She listens until its noise becomes silence.
* * *
Let us leave our Lauren alone for a while. She’s nestled in her tent, dreaming of a rapidly filling inbox. Trying to open those emails from her doctor—every one of them about us—and when she clicks them, the error message: Prognosis not found. Poor dear. Let us tell you instead of where we are, and of the ghost who haunts this place.
Lauren first encountered the historic Chilkoot Trail in the December issue of She Goes. She was riveted. In the following weeks, she reached out to a few college friends, asked around at work. No one wanted to join her. She’d even asked Shelly—shallow, cunty Shelly—and Shelly had said no. Everyone Lauren knew was married or nearly so. Some had already sacrificed their youthful, svelte bodies to childbirth. All of these once-friends had no time to give her, had to share their vacation days with partners, spread them over double-the-number of visits home, double-the-number of weddings, and add in a romantic getaway or two to boot.
Still, Lauren could not stop researching the trail online. Originally a Tlingit pass through the mountains, it was overrun by tens of thousands of gold seekers during the Klondike Gold Rush. Spelunking deeper inside this internet wormhole, she eventually came upon the story of the ghost. There are dozens of legends about her, and no single one is exactly alike. Yet, every legend ends the same way: this young woman disappeared in the Palm Sunday Avalanche of 1898, just two days up the trail from here. She has haunted the area ever since.
The sound of campers must be so enticing. Must remind this ghost of the Gold Rush days, back in ’98, when it’s said she followed a man up the trail. Because she loved him. Or was it because she hated him? Or did she travel north because she wanted to, not because of some man but because of her own desire to cross the mountains into Canada, to see what was on the other side?
If this were a different story—a ghost story or historical fiction or even investigative journalism—maybe we could answer these questions. But the fact is, we are a pair of boobs—Lauren Phiferman’s boobs—and only the ghost knows the way her life really was.
However, what we have learned from Lauren’s extensive research is that on that fateful Palm Sunday, the native Tlingit packers would have told this woman to turn around. They warned everyone of avalanche weather: periods of warmth and rain that could loosen the drifts. Send them tumbling into the pass below. (Oh, yes—our Lauren read about the avalanche with great avidity, too. She has always been attracted to stories of disaster, when they are not her own.) Though the Tlingit packers would not ascend the pass, the gold-seeking white men were allergic to reason. They pressed onward, upward, and she—now nameless, voiceless—went with them.
The more Lauren read about the ghost, the longer she stared at the historic images of the famed Chilkoot Pass—men with crates strapped to their backs, snow to their knees as they trudge up a nearly forty-five degree slope—the more convinced she became that she had to go. She had to prove to herself she could do it. That her body—thirty pounds above her goal weight—could do it. When speaking to the doctor over the phone, she heard someone say, Do I need surgery right away, or can I schedule it after my trip? and was startled at the tenor of her voice—so measured and rational—how it sounded separate from her.
Although she doesn’t know it, our Lauren is trying to find herself in the wilderness, even if she’s mistaken that the wilderness holds any answers. We can’t blame her. Don’t people look for themselves in the wrong places when they’ve thought themselves lost? Don’t people bulldoze grasslands and wetlands and forests, emit carbon by the megaton? They publish studies that reveal toxins residing in our bodies—in us—pesticides and flame retardants and jet fuel concentrated in our milk. No wonder a pea-sized tumor has curdled inside us.
But this isn’t an environmental story either. It is not political. We’ll leave the calling of senators to Lauren and get on with it.
* * *
Behold: Max Reinhorn. Awoken in the night by a full bladder.
Just a few hours ago, he finished the fifth of whiskey he’d packed and now curses himself for not bringing more. He does not want to walk to the outhouse. Instead he stands—unstable—just outside his tent and aims for a tree. He’s always envied the public way in which dogs mark their territory. He takes small pleasure in marking his own right now. The moon illuminates one side of his flat, hairy ass, but he doesn’t care if anyone sees him. Take a good, long look.
He thinks of his wife. Conscious for, oh, not even two minutes, and here she is again: his wife who plays the banjo in a local bluegrass band. Who once snorted coke with him and swore she’d never do it again. Who’s ascended the corporate ladder despite tattoos on her shoulders, at the base of her neck, along the ridges of her pelvis. On the crescent of skin behind her right ear, two cherries are joined by a wishbone stem.
Maybe this isn’t the hike he’d hoped for. He liked the idea of a historic route, thought the trip might help repair something gone wrong between him and his wife. When she asked for a divorce, he decided to come anyway, thinking a challenging hike might dull his mind. Distract him. But the trail is too easy. Once, he hiked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal with his soon-to-be ex. That had been tough. That had quieted the both of them, exhausted them, and how good it had felt to be quiet together.
She still called him Mister back then, for his initials, M.R. A year ago, when she began to call him Max, he knew things were bad. Knew his identity had changed in her mind. Two months ago when she left him, he found her favorite wristwatch behind the dresser. His first instinct was to call her. He’d been looking for any excuse. She’d torn the house apart looking for her watch, and now he could be the hero. Instead he gave the watch to his friend Natalie, whom his wife never liked. It felt like a kind of revenge. But he hadn’t thought things through; he never fucking thinks things through. Now every time he sees Natalie he notices the watch and thinks of his wife. He also notices Natalie’s arms for the first time, how long and thin and pale. He imagines them clutched around his neck as he fucks her, the watch on her strange wrist, tickticktickticktick.
The cool night air raises bumps on Max’s skin. He is shirtless and his nipples harden, we can hear them. How cold is it? Mid-forties probably. But he does not return to his tent, not yet. He inches closer to the riverbank. He notices the water level, still high from snowmelt. His eyes gradually adjust until the contours of the river become visible—and then, on the opposite bank, the ghost.
Max has watched his share of ghost-hunting reality shows, more his wife’s passion than his own, but he has always loved sitting next to her on the sofa—the warmth of her thighs through his jeans—has loved making fun of those fools on the television while his wife protests, saying there is more to this world than we can possibly understand. After all those stupid shows, surely he can recognize a ghost when he sees one—and yes, he thinks he sees one.
He squints, trying to make her out. He doesn’t feel fear, just sadness. Intense sadness. A whole world full of lonely people. And even the dead are lonely. He raises his hand in silent greeting, but she does not return the gesture. After a few moments, she retreats into the trees.
The next morning Max will wake with his bladder completely full. So full he’ll question whether or not he got up to pee in the middle of the night, if the woman he’d seen was a dream, the result of his slumber-drunk mind reaching out for his wife.
III.
Look: we don’t want to belabor the point. We feel no need to expound upon another gruesome day on the trail. Enough to say the second day is much like the first, with the path winding over wooded terrain. A gradual, rolling ascent. Lauren remains weary and sore and despondent. She keeps thinking that she can feel our cancer growing (she can’t), that there’s a bear around every bend (there isn’t), that she should have called her mother before leaving town (yes, yes, she should have!).
We merely want to mention her arrival in Sheep Camp that evening, where she’s been told a Park Ranger will give a short presentation. Lauren finds a seat in a plastic-tarped pavilion. The pavilion’s wooden beams are yellow and fresh and still smell of sap. She recognizes many of the faces around her—the men and women she saw in Canyon City campground the night before and who have overtaken her throughout the day. They’ve pooled here in Sheep Camp before the journey’s longest, steepest, and most dangerous leg. She spots Whiskey Drinker, just there, and nearly waves at him but doesn’t.
The Park Ranger is brown-haired, slope-eyed, and beautiful in the way twenty-year-old men often are when they’ve made the outdoors their home. He smiles, and Lauren can tell he likes how the attention settles on him. He commences his speech, explaining that they must all summit no later than noon the next day in order to avoid the risk of avalanche. “Avalanche?” someone in the crowd says meekly. The bright-faced ranger smiles even more brightly. He assures everyone that at this point in the season, the likelihood of an avalanche is low. And the weather has been good, there’s nothing to indicate trouble ahead. Nevertheless, he recommends people get an early start, as it will take a while to hike to the base of the pass and then cross over it. Everyone must summit before the sun has loosened the pancakes of snow that cling to the mountainsides.
Lauren shivers. In reading about avalanches, she has learned how, if she gets caught in one, her bones will not break but pulverize. Even if she survived the initial bombardment, she would likely suffocate under the weight of rocks and snow.
That night, Lauren closes her eyes for only a moment. When she opens them again the next morning, she feels that time has passed in the way her muscles have relaxed and in the light’s loosened tension. She is surprised by how her body—our body—has continued to record time even when her mind fell away.
At four a.m. the sky is a milky gray though the sun will take hours more before it rises above the peaks. Sufficiently terrified by the park ranger, by the elevation map, by her malfunctioning muscles and ligaments that might prevent her from reaching the pass on time, Lauren quickly dismantles her tent. She eats her breakfast hash, rinses her titanium spoon with biodegradable soap, cinches her pack down tight. And she’s off—off through the gray morning landscape, passing gray picnic tables, gray tents, gray bushes, out into the gray, wide-mouthed valley, the sounds of men snoring following her like ghosts.
She hardly thinks of us.
Today she will summit the famed Chilkoot Pass, the highest point along the trail and the boundary between the United States and Canada. From there her journey will be mostly downhill or flat, all the way to Lake Bennett, the trail’s northern terminus. She’s spurred by the concern she will take too long to reach the pass and a ranger will refuse to let her cross. With her luck, she thinks cheerily, she’ll make it on time but be killed in an avalanche anyway.
The trail crossing a creek. The creek running down from the mountains. The sun rising, turning the peaks orange, and the orange sinking until it fills the entire valley, warming her face and black-spandexed legs. For four hours she ascends, her mind quiet, and for the first time she’s happy she’s come here, alone.
Just ahead, the trail appears to peter out at the base of a mountain. But no, the trail does not end. As she continues forward, her pace quickened, she discovers it simply becomes mountain. When Lauren beholds the upward route, she feels very small. It looks as though a giant, from his lofty perch, has spilled a jar of marbles. A wall of monstrous boulders, straight up.
Lauren has seen black and white photographs of the Golden Staircase that date to the days of the gold rush. The most famous images of it were taken in wintertime, when it was covered in a thick mantle of snow. But in all her research, she has never encountered an image of the Golden Staircase bare and rising out of a talus-strewn valley, and so she has no idea it looks like this: impossible.
“Fuck,” she says. And with an additional “fuckity-fuck” for good measure, she pulls on her gloves for protection and stores her trekking poles, not wanting them to catch in the rocks and pull an arm out-of-socket. She puts her right foot onto a boulder and instinctively leans in.
How many people died in the Palm Sunday Avalanche of 1898? A few dozen? Lauren can’t remember. But she can imagine each one of them: one moment, at the pinnacle of health, on the adventure of a lifetime. And the next—buried and gone, crushed or suffocated or both. Oh, but now she’s getting a bit morbid, isn’t she? And she, of all people, wants nothing less than to think about death right now.
So—
We’re leaning forward.
We’re balancing.
We’re stepping, right and then left, and up.
We’re clinging to the side of a mountain.
The rocks jab into her bootsoles as she counts each step. Counting pushes away her other thoughts, like a meditation. But the words fatten in her mouth. Too many syllables. She worries she’s skipping some numbers by accident, and then she loses count entirely. The heavy weight of her pack threatens to topple her backward as she pauses on a wide, flat rock. Her hands are a little raw, but she’s glad to have these gloves, had only packed them at the last minute. She takes a drink from the hose dangling over her left shoulder, and looks out—
Oh, how far she has come already, our Lauren! The boulders humped on every side. The sky stretching out, and it’s beneath her now, it lifts her up. On a nearby peak, a bright blue glacier pulses like an amulet. She feels unsteady now that she has a sense of the altitude. She grips the boulder in front of her and is careful not to turn her head too far over her shoulder. The pack asserts itself, and she feels in danger of falling. The first time she rode a rollercoaster upside-down, she shook so hard, her mother sat her on a bench and rubbed her back to calm her. You’re okay, her mom said. You survived it.
Lauren breathes deeply and starts over at one. One, two, three. This time she counts not steps but heartbeats. Her heart, thumping against her ribcage. Against us. Our soft tissue a blue halo of light. The doctor pointing, explaining, feigning concern. He must do this every week, every day, even. Our cancer is nothing special. How many women do we personally know who have had cancer? A dozen at least. Probably many more. Ja’Nice at work. Aunt Cathy two years ago, now healthy as can be. Grandma Jo, the victim of a lifetime of cigarettes. Shelly’s mother. Shelly weeping in the bathroom at work, and Lauren finding her there, telling her everything would be okay.
When her counting slows, Lauren continues the climb. She’s careful to press all of her weight forward. She knows that what’s above her—where the earth disappears and she sees only sky—is a false summit, not the finish line. But she’ll take it. She just wants a short rest. Just a little further—
The slope evens out under a crusty blanket of snow. Snow in July, she thinks. Crazy! She fumbles with her backpack, loosening the straps. It drops to the ground, and then she, too, falls back on the snow and stares. She is lucky, she knows. It’s a clear day, and the sky above is a sharp, heartless blue. Her exhaustion gives way to giddiness, and she realizes how hot she is, the way the heat shoots through her body and into her cheeks, compelling her to snag open the buttons of her flannel and strip it off. Beneath she wears only a thin hiking tank, but it’s fine. We feel just fine with the cold licking our skin now and the icy snow a bed beneath us.
Just another minute, Lauren thinks. Just another minute more. And then she will rise. And then she will work her way across this flat square of snow until the mountain again takes over and forces her to climb once more. She looks out over the land she traversed this morning. Streambeds and scraggly trees and meadows and boulders and grasses and the mountains bowing at valley’s edge, one after another. And even further she can make out the ribbon of boreal forest where she walked the trail those first two days. It looks like Eden.
She rises. Stuffs her flannel into her pack and remounts it. The ground beneath her is covered in snow, but the mountainsides on either side of the pass are exposed black rock. Lauren wonders what kind of rock it is. Whatever it is, it is new. Brand new. Look how sharp these rocks are, as if newly formed, unsmoothed by time. They are so dark and elemental. She sees how these rocks absorb more sunlight, how the icy plain she walks across shies away from these rocks that stow the sun’s heat.
Lauren knows she is the first to step here today, but yesterday’s footprints remain. Deciding it wise to follow the route of those who successfully summited, she steps in the same tracks. Her path hugs the rightmost edge of the icy plain. She feels she makes good time. Her brief rest sprawled on the snow has re-energized her.
Again, she admires the black rocks jutting upward to her right.
And then we fall through the snow.
* * *
Oh, we should have mentioned:
This morning, when he heard movement, Max peeked out of his tent. We detected his male attention, of course; we always can. He thought the sounds he heard might be the ghost, but instead it was another hiker (our Lauren!), that sad, mopey one (his words). The one he can’t help but feel sorry for—and yes, remarkably, he has leftover pity even after all he has lavished upon himself. He watched as we trudged out of camp.
Just when he was about to re-zip his tent and try to sleep for another half hour or so, he paused. There: the ghost, also flitting along the track with the light passing through her so that she was difficult to perceive. Quickly he wiggled into his pants, drew on his socks. He pulled on his boots and a shirt and collapsed his tent. He thought for a second that perhaps he could catch her, and he would tell his wife about it, and oh, how jealous she would be! But he lets the thought go. He and his wife, they don’t share anything anymore, and this ghost—she’s his alone.
* * *
At first, dazed, we lay here, six feet below where we stood just moments ago. I’m in shock!, Lauren thinks, but it’s not shock. It’s adrenaline, and it soon recedes. Pain sharpens in her ass, on the heels of her hands, in her teeth. Luckily, her pack has cushioned her fall, and she thinks wistfully of the Canon and lens and whether they have survived. What will the newspapers say? For once she can’t think of anything.
From this vantage she understands what has happened. It wasn’t an avalanche. The ice has hollowed out from below, where the black rocks have absorbed the sunlight. She hasn’t fallen far, but the icy snow juts out at an odd angle above her. She languishes in the negative space between mountainside and ice pack with no way to pull herself up.
Shelly’s voice wafts down the pass. Hiking? Really? And Lauren has to agree. The beach. She should have gone to the beach.
For twenty minutes, maybe more, we sit here. At first Lauren is unafraid, but her panic mounts with every passing minute that does not produce a rescuing hiker. She curses herself for leaving camp so early, for hiking alone in the wilderness, and she is still cursing herself when she hears the unmistakable crunch of someone trekking through the snow.
“Hello?” she says meekly. “Is someone there?”
She thinks she sees a ghostly face peering over the edge of the snow-bank. The ghost says nothing, and Lauren is struck not by the young woman’s beauty—for she is not beautiful—but by the intensity of her gaze. Then the ghost disappears.
“Wait!” Lauren calls. “Please!”
Again, a face—
A man leans over the edge of the precipice so that just the top of his head is visible to Lauren.
“You okay?” he asks.
Lauren flinches. Whiskey Drinker. Yet again he discovers her in an embarrassing situation. “I’m good,” she says and then thinks that, quite possibly, it’s the stupidest thing she’s ever said.
“Did you just see—” He doesn’t finish his sentence.
For a long moment, Lauren and Max look at each other, and then he disappears behind the ledge. She can hear him as he takes off his pack. He reappears, on his stomach this time, spreading his weight so as not to fall through the snow himself. He reaches an ungloved hand, and braces with the other. His hand is warm and rough when Lauren takes it. Forgive us: we can’t help but imagine it upon us.
* * *
If we were telling a different kind of story, our male and female heroes would, in the moment of successful rescue, become aware of their attraction. They would discover some incredible coincidence: that they are from the same town perhaps. What are the chances! What a small world! Lauren would notice his semi-broad chest, his height, how nicely his hair falls into his face. Later, in the slow twilight of a northern summer evening, she would hear his muffled footsteps in the pine-flecked dirt, perceive his vague outline through the fabric of her tent, hear him whisper through it, “Are you awake?” And she’d invite him in. If we were telling a different kind of story, the ghost might fulfill her purpose and achieve eternal rest, and those still living—Max and our Lauren—might walk away with a clear sense of how to better live their lives.
But in this story, the two hikers will take turns politely snapping photographs of one another at the top of the pass. Lauren will shyly offer the use of her Canon, which Max will eventually accept, seeing how eager Lauren is to repay him. She will cajole him into scrawling his email address in her still-empty notebook. Will earnestly swear to send him the photos but never will. Years later, cancer-free and scrolling through the digital images, she will click on one of Max, whose name she will not remember. She will stare, discovering for the first time just how handsome he was, if a little funny looking, the shape of his face slightly lopsided so that the left side appears heavier than the right. She will, for a couple months, return to his image again and again, feeling as if she has lost something, until one day she decides her behavior is irredeemably creepy and deletes every photo of him from the reel.
In this story, Lauren and Max will take turns using the summit port-a-potty, each delighted to discover that Parks Canada (for they have crossed into Canada at exactly this point) provides toilet paper unlike the U.S. National Park Service, and Lauren will add a talking point to the list of things to discuss with her senator. They will continue to cross paths over the next couple days but will do nothing more than nod or smile at one another. In the whole of their lives, they will never speak again.
In this story, she will think of him, once, twice, when she sits with her mother at the hospital, debating between a mastectomy or a lumpectomy and ultimately deciding upon the latter, for the first time grateful for those extra thirty pounds, which, in part, will be redistributed to one of us, and oh, how glad we’ll be that we are still here, if a little lopsided, the right slightly heavier than the left.
In this story, the ghost will continue to wander the Chilkoot Trail for centuries, long after humankind self-immolates, and she will just be one among billions, these remnants of desire that long outlive the bodies—the female bodies—in which they once dwelled.
* * *
Lauren and Max sit beside each other at the top of the pass in their base layers, their forearms bared, their skin pinking from exertion and cold. They sit so close their skin almost touches. Max offers Lauren Reece’s Pieces in the palm of his hand, and she takes a couple. She offers a pack of pistachios, and he plucks one or two from the bag.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer.”
She speaks of us with a measured voice. And he nods solemnly.
“My wife wants a divorce.”
“Touché.”
They both begin to laugh.
“No lie,” he says, “I think this trail is haunted.”
“The Palm Sunday Ghost?”
Again, she surprises him. She can tell in the way he stiffens beside her. “The who?” he asks. But she doesn’t respond.
Instead she turns to look out over the landscape, and suddenly our Lauren’s chest fills with feeling, a yearning that balloons so quickly she cries out in her mind, Oh! Look at what you’re missing! She does not know the you she addresses, but the optimism in her thought nearly bowls her over. That a you exists. That one day she will meet you. That there is, unquestionably, a future with you in it—and, of course, by extension, with her still in it. She feels this excess heat and feeling expand beyond her body like a halo until it catches the wind and gently untethers.
She will get through this.
Canada unfurls below us, stark and sharp and draped in snow. In the valley, the sun glitters in a slate blue lake and in another lake beyond that and in another. On both sides of the valley, great drifts cling to the razor-edged peaks. There, thinks Lauren. There is where the avalanche would come from. Rock and snow amassed in a stony cradle, loosened, weakened, made precarious and then tumbling down the mountains, obliterating everything in their path. The sun is shining, the sky is clear, but it’s not avalanche weather, we’re sure of it.
Suzie Eckl’s work is published in Kenyon Review; Nimrod International Journal, where she won the 2020 Francine Ringold Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry; and Bat City Review, where she placed runner-up in the 2019 Short Prose Contest. She received her MFA at the University of Virginia and her BA at Davidson College as a Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholar. Currently, she is working on a collection of stories set in the American West.