Three Dances

The Glacier

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when the glacier swallowed my foot.

I had time to regret putting my boot down and time to try to pick it back up again. I had time to notice that my other foot was sinking too, and that my whole body was moving downward and the snow around me was turning a nasty shade of grey and blue.

But I couldn’t reach anything solid.

I couldn’t do anything but fall.

The sky shone a dazzling sapphire blue over my head. Three sharp black peaks loomed in front of me, like the bent points of ancient iron spearheads, pitted and spotted with streaks of reddish rock and rubble. Snow clung to fingerlike couloirs on their flanks. Below them, the glacier stretched higher up the valley between the peaks.

Somewhere behind me was my friend Rick, the reason I had come into the valley in the first place.

The snow gave way. I shouted a warning.

And then I was gone.

Two hours prior, I had been sitting atop a knife-blade ridge, wondering how far I would slide if I fell into the valley. A peanut butter sandwich mashed beyond all recognition had lain abandoned in my lap, and I’d been tearing hunks off of blocks of salami and cheese and eating them instead. The wind tugged at my face, my cap, and my hair. Rick, puffed up by a banana-yellow parka, squatted next to me wearing a knit cap, a pair of cobalt blue, wraparound sunglasses, a few days’ worth of stubble, one and a half chins, and a grin roughly the size and shape of the state of Montana.

We were in the Austrian Alps, climbing the lower, easier part of a route called the Sveikönigsberg. We had gone as high and as far as we planned to go, and we were lunching in a relatively flat place between the two peaks the climb was named for, both of which were too steep and too snowy for us to even dream about attempting. We had no gear with us more technical than hiking boots and Rick’s hundred-dollar sunglasses.

Rick was wearing jeans that were soaked to the knee from the climb up. I was nervous about that, but it was still early, and the day was warm, and the forecast called for clear weather. We only needed to go four or five miles back down the way we’d climbed up: a short, steep descent over slushy snow a few feet deep, streaked with trails from Austrian ski tourers.

We talked about a lot of things. About old times and new ones, and about the paths that had brought us there. Rick taught English. I didn’t quite know what I did yet. I’d only half-jokingly written “Adventurer” under “Occupation” on my customs form on the way over. We sat and we ate our lunch, and we drank water and talked about drinking beer, and we made plans to treat ourselves to something rich and fatty that night. We had the place to ourselves—we had turned left when the ski tourers had turned right and left them all behind about midmorning.

I remember thinking that was a little dangerous.

When we stood up to go, Rick lost his footing. He went to one knee and sprawled ungracefully in the slushy snow, and then that started to give way too. I had time for one brief look at his panicked face before the slush slid away completely and took him feet-first and bellowing into the valley between the three peaks.

I don’t think I’ll ever know how far I fell when the glacier took me. I remember screaming and trying to reach the sides of the crevasse with my hands, as if somehow I could stick to them or dig my fingers in and stop myself like a superhero. I remember thinking that if I’d only had a helmet, my chances of survival would have been a lot better. I remember thinking that I didn’t have an ice axe or a beacon or even a cell phone that worked in Austria. I remember thinking that I was going to die.