You Think That's Bad (13 page)

Pretty soon it would be dark. Anything we tried to do besides sit tight would be blind and probably of no use. I would be the perimeter. Maybe Leo would be too. When they came down the trail they'd be coming over us first.

We'd all heard the stories of how quiet they could be, creeping through the timber, easing over rocks drenched in rain. They had special rubber boots with separate big toes. They had night-camouflaged bayonets with serrated top edges.

They could see where we couldn't. Once they were on top of me they'd see bodies all the way down the hillside. Guys who were
all mud, bearded to the eyes. Guys who could barely move. Guys who hadn't asked to be there but if left alive the next day would get to their feet and follow the artillery in and try to kill as many Japs as they came across. Guys who'd think,
The way they are, they deserve it
. Like the Japs who'd crouch over Leo and me. When they rolled us over they'd be shocked to see what we'd come to. Shocked to see what they'd done. Shocked to feel the ugliness we felt every single day, even with those—especially with those—we cherished the most.

We call ourselves
die Harschblödeln:
the Frozen Idiots. There are four of us who've volunteered to spend the coldest winter in recent memory in a little hut perched on a wind-blasted slope of the Weissfluhjoch 3,500 meters above Davos. We're doing research. The hut, we like to say, is naturally refrigerated from the outside and a good starting point for all sorts of adventures, nearly all of them lethal.

It's been seven years since the federal government in Berne appointed its commission to develop a study program for avalanche defense measures. Five sites were established in the high Alps, and as Bader likes to say, we drew the short straw. Bader, Bucher, Haefeli, and I wrap ourselves in blanket layers and spend hours at a time given over to our tasks. The cold has already caused Haefeli to report kidney complaints.

He's our unofficial leader. They found him working on a dambuilding project in Spain, the commission having concluded correctly that his groundbreaking work on soil mechanics would translate usefully into this new field of endeavor. Bucher's an engineer who inherited his interest in snow and ice from his father, a meteorologist who in 1909 led the second expedition across Greenland. Bader was Professor Niggli's star pupil, so he's our resident crystallographer. And I'm considered the touchingly passionate amateur and porter, having charmed my way into the group through the adroit use of my mother's journals.

It might be 1939 but this high up we have no heat and only kerosene lanterns for light. Our facilities are not good. Our budget is laughable. We're engaged in a kind of research for which there are few precedents. But as Bader also likes to say, a spirit of discovery and a saving capacity for brandy in the early afternoon drives us on.

We encounter more than our share of mockery down in Davos, since your average burgher is only somewhat impressed by the notion of the complexities of snow. But together we're now approaching the completion of a monumental work of three years: our
Snow and Its Metamorphism
, with its sections on crystallography, snow mechanics, and variations in snow cover. My mother has written that the instant it appears, she must have a copy. I've told her I'll deliver it myself.

Like all pioneers we've endured our share of embarrassment. Bader for a time insisted on measuring the hardness of any snow-pack by firing a revolver into it, and his method was discredited only after we'd wasted an afternoon hunting for his test rounds in the snow. And on All Hallows' Eve we shoveled the accumulation from our roof and started an avalanche that all the way down in Davos destroyed the church on the outskirts of town.

I'm hardly alone in being excessively invested in our success. At the age of eighteen Haefeli lost his father in what he calls a scale 5 avalanche. As to be distinguished from, say, a scale 1 or 2 type, which obliterates the odd house each winter but otherwise goes unnoticed.

His scale 5 was an airborne avalanche in Glärnisch that dropped down the steeper slopes above his town with its blast clouds mushrooming out on both sides. His father had sent him to check their rabbit traps on a higher, forested slope and had stayed behind to start the cooking pot. The avalanche dropped two thousand vertical meters in under a mile and crossed the valley floor with such velocity that it exploded upward two hundred feet on the opposite hillside, uprooting spruces and alders there with such force that they pinwheeled through the air. The ensuing snow cloud obscured
the sun. It took ten minutes to settle while Haefeli skied frantically down into the debris. Throughout the next days' search for survivors, there were still atmospheric effects from the amount of snow concussed into the upper atmosphere.

The rescuers found that even concrete-reinforced buildings had been pile-driven flat. When he finally located a neighbor's three-story stone house, he mistook it for a terrazzo floor.

Fifty-two homes were gone. Seventeen people were dug out of a meeting house the following spring, huddled together in a circle facing inward. Three hundred meters from the path of the snow, the air blast had blown the cupola off a convent tower.

But when it came to a good night's sleep I had my own problems.

In my childhood it was general practice for Swiss schools around the Christmas holidays to sponsor Sport Week, during which we all hiked to mountain huts to ski. My brother Willi and I were nothing but agony for our harried teachers every step up the mountains and back. He was a devotee of whanging the rope tows once the class hit an especially steep and slippery part of the hillside. I did creative things with graupel or whatever other sorts of ice pellets I could collect from under roof eaves or along creek beds.

We were both in secondary school, and sixteen. I'd selected the science stream and was groping my way into physics and chemistry, while he'd chosen the literary life and went about fracturing Latin and Greek. Even this surprised me: when had he become interested in Latin and Greek? But given the kind of brothers we were, the question never arose.

I claimed to be interested in university; he didn't. Our father, to whom such things mattered, called us his happy imbeciles, took pride in our skiing, and liked to say with a kind of amiability during family meals that we could do what we pleased as long as it reflected well on him.

He styled himself an Alpine guide, though considering how he
dressed when in town, he might as well have been the village mayor, complete with watch fob and homburg. He always spoke as though a stroke of fate had left him in the business of helping Englishmen scale ice cliffs, and claimed to be content only at altitudes over 3,000 meters, but we knew him to be unhappy even there. The sole thing that seemed to please him were his homemade medicines. Willi considered him reproachful but carried on with whatever he wished, secure in our mother's support. I followed his moods minutely, even as disinterest emanated from him like a vapor. We had one elder sister who found all of this distasteful and whose response was to do her chores but otherwise keep to her room, awaiting romances that arrived every few months via subscription.

Willi's self-absorption left him impatient with experts. On our summer trek on the Eiger glacier the year before, we'd been matched for International Brotherhood Week with a hiking group from Chamonix. They spoke no German and we spoke no French, so only the teachers could converse. At one point the French teacher brought the group to a halt by cautioning us that any noise where we stood could topple the ice seracs looming above us.

Willi and I had been on glaciers since we were eight. While everyone watched, he scaled the most dangerous-looking of the seracs and, having established his balance at the top, shouted loud enough to have brought down the Eiger's north face. “What's French for ‘You don't know what you're talking about'?” he called to our teacher as he climbed back down.

We were to base our day around one of the ski huts above Kleine Scheidegg. The village itself, on a high pass, consists of three hotels for skiers and climbers and the train station and some maintenance buildings serving the Jungfraubahn, but our group managed to lose one of our classmates there anyway—a boy from the remote highlands where a cowherd might spend the entire summer in a hut, with his cows and family separated only by a waist-high divider—and by the time he was located we were already an hour behind schedule. We were led by one of the schoolmistresses
who held a ski instructor's certificate and her assistant, a twenty-year-old engineering student named Jenny. They had as their responsibility fourteen boys and ten girls.

In summer, the ski run to which we were headed involved a steep climb along the edge of a dark forest broken by occasional sunlit clearings, before the trees thinned out and there were meadows where miniature butterflies wavered on willowherbs and moss campion. Immediately above sheep and goats found their upland pastures. Above that were only rocks and the occasional ibex. An escarpment above the rocks was ideal for wind-sheltered forts. We'd discovered it on our ninth birthday. Willi said it was one of those rare places where nothing could be grown or sold, that the world had produced exclusively for someone's happiness. In winter storms the wind piled snow onto it, the cornices overhanging the mountain's flanks below. And the night before our Sport Week outing brought strong westerly winds and a heavy accumulation on the eastern slopes. Avalanche warning bulletins had been sent to the hotels an hour after our departure.

We spread ourselves out around the bowl of the main slope. Some of us had climbed in chaps for greater waterproofing and were still shedding them and checking our bindings when our schoolmistress led the others down into the bowl. The postmaster's daughter, Ruth Lindner, of whom Willi and I both retained fantasies, waited behind with us while we horsed about, setting her hands atop her poles in a counterfeit of patience. She had red hair and pale smooth skin and a habit, when laughing with us, of lowering her eyes to our mouths, and this we found impossibly stirring.

The skiers who'd set off were already slaloming a hundred yards below. We'd been taught from the cradle that however much we thought we knew, in winter there were always places where our ignorance and bad luck could destroy us. A heavy new snowmass above and an unstable bowl below: in this sort of circumstance our father would have cautioned us, if uncertain, to back away.

“Race you,” I said.

“
Race
me?” Willi answered. And he nosed his ski tips out over the bowl edge.

“See if you can stay on your feet,” I teased him from above, flumphing my uphill ski down into a drift.

There was a deep cutting sound, like shears tearing through heavy fabric. The snowfield split all the way across the bowl, and the entire slab, half a kilometer across, broke free, taking Willi with it. He was enveloped immediately. Ruth shrieked. I helped her pole herself farther back. The tons of snow roaring down caught the skiers below and carried them away in seconds. One little girl managed to remain upright on a cascading wave but then she too was upended and buried, the clouds of snowdust obscuring everything else.

Guides climbing up from the hotels spread the alarm and already had the rescue under way when Ruth and I reached the debris field. The digging went on for thirty-six hours and fifteen of our classmates, including Willi and the schoolmistress, were uncovered alive. The young assistant Jenny and seven others were dug out as corpses. Two were still missing when the last of their family members stopped digging three weeks later.

My brother had been fifteen feet deep at the very back edge of the run-out. They found him with the sounding rod used for locating the road after heavy snowfalls. He'd managed to get his arm over his face and survived because of the resulting air pocket. A shattered ski tip near the surface had aided in his location. One of the rescuers who dug him out kept using the old saying “Such a terrible child!” for the difficulties they were encountering with the shocking density of the snowmass once it had packed in on itself. Not even sure if he was down there, we called for Willi to not lose heart. Ruth dug beside me and I was taken aback by the grandeur of her panic and misery. “
Help
us!” she cried at one point, as if I weren't digging as furiously as the rest.

He was under the snow for two hours. When his face was finally cleared, it was blue and he was unconscious but the guides revived him with a breathing tube even as he still lay trapped. And when
someone covered his face with a hat to keep the snow from falling into his mouth and eyes, he shouted for it to be taken away, that he wanted air and light.

He was hurried home on a litter and spent the next two days recovering. I fed him oxtail soup, his favorite. His injuries seemed slight. He asked about Ruth. He answered our questions about how he felt but related nothing of the experience. When we spoke in private he peered at me strangely and looked away. On the third night, when I put out the lamp, he seemed suddenly upset and asked not to be left alone. “You're not alone,” I said. “I'm right here.” He cried out for our mother and began a horrible rattling in his throat, at which he clawed, and I flew down the stairs to get her. By the time we returned he was dead.

The doctor called in another doctor, who called in a third. Each tramped slush through our house and drank coffee while they hypothesized and my mother trailed from room to room in their wake, tidying and weeping until she could barely stand. Their final opinion was contentious but two favored delayed shock as the cause of death. The third held forth on the keys to survival in such a situation, the most important being the moral and physical strength of the victim. He was thrown bodily out of the house by my father.

The inquiry into the tragedy held that the group leaders—the schoolmistress and her dead assistant—were blameless, but the parents of the children swept away decided otherwise, and within a year the miserable and ostracized schoolmistress was forced to resign her post.