CONTRAILS VANISHED FROM THE SKY

I AM ALONE IN THIS WORLD

     The gale blew for six nights and six days.  Betula was killing time and trying to escape worry by reading and rereading passages from Mona's Journal.  An often-sardonic writer of precise and succinct prose, Mona seldom encountered surprises in her observations of the human condition, but the event that terrified Betula on her second afternoon on Mont d'Iberville would surely have been material enough for more than a paragraph.  The light went out.

     One moment the grounded seagull was rocking on its anchors and the storm was howling in a crepuscule hardly bright enough to read and the next instant there was a sweeping sound on the canopy, and everything died.  No light, no sound, no motion, the flyglider was immobilized in some sort of an otherworldly cocoon.  Betula thought she had been blown off and was in free fall, but the total darkness and the absolute stillness of her small world did not seem to match the expected chaos of a fall in a storm.  Then, she knew.  In a valley or on a slope above her position, a mass of that dry, light snow had reached a critical point and she had been buried in an avalanche.  In a panic she rose for a desperate effort to pull open her canopy, but a bucket-worth of snow landing in her lap made her realize the futility of the undertaking as she struggled mightily to slide the canopy back in its closed position.  What could she have done if she had succeeded in crawling out of her craft and struggled through feet, perhaps yards of the snow above her for a breath of icy air and what?  Dig out her flyglider with her bare hands?  No, this was it and a sad peace came to her.  How long did she have before asphyxiation set in?  Perhaps it was like Mona may have died.  Lost, exhausted, buried in a sandstorm, taking her last breaths and crying for her dog.  Two lives, taken too soon.

     It was not to be.  Time went on, unobserved.  Laid back in her reclined seat, taking slow, tentative breaths and vaguely wondering if she regretted the undertaking of this odyssey, Betula thought she heard some very faint scraping.  A rescue?  Absolutely impossible.  Yet, the scrapings continued, grew more persistent, soon to be close enough to her canopy to resemble the sweeping sound that initiated her burial.  Her enemy, the gale, was offering a truce.

     Abrasive as they were with their load of ice crystals, the winds that could carve sastruggis had veered to work on another curve, one that brought the fierce, howling flow close enough around her rock shelter to blow open her prison.  Betula dared to crack open her canopy for a noseful of icy air and ice crystals that gave her a sudden, disorienting headache, a rushing consciousness that made her realize how close she had come to her last breath.  Inhaling more of that harsh medicine behind the shelter of a hand reddening from a nosebleed, she recalled the tourbillions of snow that had welcomed her on the solid ice of her landing site.  Was the wind shift part of a pattern that could combine with the relief of the mountain to alternatively bury, then sweep some of its slopes?  Would the present episode clean the site down to the flyglider's anchors?

     In milder climates a gale of wind can show kindness by beating down a big old tree at the edge of a marsh and take a perch from the Red Tail hawk that glides down to easy pickings of frogs on lily pads or young birds flittering in reeds.  A gale can raise surf that will sweep a crab from a shoal and throw it high on a beach to tangle in flotsam and dry there for a raccoon's meal. But if the Mother granted souls to gales of winds she must have saved the shades of the most cruel beings for the sastruggi carvers eternally circling the poles and blasting their icy loads without much concern for the weathering of a nunatak's cliffs or the fate of a pitiful craft in its lee.  When a timid dawn's meager flare rose at the end of the brief Arctic night, Betula saw that her presence had altered the wind's flow at the rock face.  The landing site was swept clean at her craft's tail but much of the rest was still entombed in a dome of snow rising well above the wings to the base of the canopy.  Worse, the beating she had taken over the previous night had pitted areas of its supposedly abrasion resistant material.  She would be flying nearly blind, if she was to be flying at all.

     In bygone days, it was Fly who had raised the subject of winter jaunts.  Mona had chuckled, Fly was missing Antartica, she thought.  Betula also chuckled when she read Mona's account.  It wasn't just Antarctica Fly was missing, by now she was sure that it was those darn sastruggis. But Fly had good reasons to be concerned.  The work they had done to provide reliable navigation tools on the flygliders would surely take those on scientific explorations over far-flung regions and encounter hazards they had not been designed to face.  Winter flying was certainly of concern, but winter landings meant another strike to safety, winter take-offs. Flygliders needed only a relatively tiny space for landings and take-offs, but if they were caught in an unexpected storm there could be enough snow depth to keep them grounded.  Fixit had a Fixit answer.  The fleet of utility vehicles that once scurried around the sandy grounds of Area 71 with a folding three-foot D-handle shovel strapped to the driver side had been mothballed beneath a building just like the flygliders had been.  This is why Betula in cold-weather gear and balaclava found herself standing in waist-high snow, fortified with a double serving of dried protein and armed with a cute aluminum shovel with an eight-by-twelve-inch blade.  Wondering how her craft could possibly have grown larger and contemplating the snow bank that rose before her to top its forward cowling, she recalled the comment that Mona had faithfully transcribed.  "Motivation will be the driving force," Fixit had said.  He was right.

     By nighttime it was all she could do to climb back into her cozy home, peel off her sweaty, heavy gear and lean back in her seat with another protein ration.  Too tired to read she punched another disc out of her hoard into her deciphering machine.  It was one of these epics where a crew of Ancients venture to a planet where they shouldn't have gone and return to their ship with a small monster inhabiting the innards of one of the crew.  Of course the monster grows in size and ferocity and Betula would have fallen asleep if the antics of the vessel's cat and the rise of the skinny young woman who asserts herself as the others find death had not kept her interested.  The finale was beautiful.  The young woman vanquished the monster, put the cat to bed and appeared briefly seen from the back in a flimsy top and sagging briefs in a shot obviously put there for its titillating value.  'Cheesecake,' the Ancients called that, Betula recalled, and she laughed at she thought of her nearly exhibited remains in the fiasco of her first night of the summer.

     "So glad I'm alone in this world," she said to herself, as she wrapped a blanket over her frumpy underwear.

Next, I HAVE TO PUT MEAT ON MY BONES