Fourteeners Read online

  “Was anyone hurt?” I asked.

  He smoothed down his grizzled beard. “Not sure yet. Once the sun’s high, we’ll be seeing lots of slides. Any of you planning to summit today?” We all tentatively raised our hands. The ranger grimaced. “It’ll be dangerous. Personally, I’d hold off for the next climb.” There was a collective groan.

  “Think we could still make the technical on the North Face before the day heats up?” asked Hector. The technical was the most difficult portion of the climb, where all the vertical rock wall training came in handy.

  Ranger Rick squinted at the massive face, still a midnight blue hulk in the early morning hours. “It’s your risk to take. You’re looking at a good five to six hours minimum, if you decide to do it. That’d put you up there ‘round noon. Then there’s the descent.”

  “We’re gonna slide down the Keyhole route for the descent,” said one of the Canadians.

  “Right on.” Hector fist-bumped him. A rabble of butterflies excited in my stomach at the thought of descending after the summit. Sweet Tom, it would be an unbelievable rush. I gazed up the vast snow slope. That summit beckoned me, all craggy ice, thin air and audacity—a siren song to a woman who battled giants. A bushy-tailed fox picked its way over the snowfield and disappeared into what was left of the night. I stared after its path, mind-boggled. This was the sort of thing I loved about mountaineering—something unexpected defying textbooks, nature. Finding life in the middle of nowhere. A Kit Kat bar tucked away like buried treasure. Huffing over rope and axe, higher and higher until there’s nothing higher than me—physically and emotionally—in a white, windy place in which humans had no business inhabiting.

  I wanted it. Badly.

  Could we summit Longs? We’d have to hoof it, push our bodies hard before the sun turned solid snow to fallible slush. No time for pictures or Kit Kat detours; heck, we’d barely have time to slick on sunscreen before we absolutely had to leave.

  Hector’s bright eyes met mine, making the same calculations. He gave me a nod. “Let’s climb it.”

  Luca jumped in, an eager puppy. “I’m in.”

  “In,” said the Canadians.

  “Heck no!” from Molly. Cassady declined, too. All eyes turned to me.

  “Trilby? Don’t you dare bail on me now.” Hector’s grin masked the deep disappointments he’d endured since I’d discarded him for Samuel. “You promised me Longs if I was your date for Angel and Danita’s wedding.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? On Longs Peak?”

  “All in, Kaye. No time for pussyfooting like these two.” He jabbed a thumb at Molly and Cassady.

  Cassady held up his hands. “I know when to let sleeping dogs lie, man. Longs Peak obviously doesn’t want to be messed with today, and I figure I’d better listen to her growling.” He gave me a pointed look that said I’d be smart to do the same. I fretted with the shoestrings of my Tevas.

  Hector’s face was bright as adrenaline coursed through his veins. I’d basked in his life-loving warmth for so long. Too long. Something had shifted in me, slipped away with all the hurt and bitterness I released when I’d embraced Samuel again.

  With his shaved head and spiraling kaleidoscope of tattoos, Hector was scary at first glance. He’d scarred his chin in a mountain biking accident when he was nineteen, and women tended to clutch their purses tighter when they passed him outside Paddler’s. But his dark, soulful eyes lured them back. Then he further ensnared them with the way his body contorted in godlike stunts off ski slopes, or with a grip so strong, it carried his entire body weight as he dangled from a mountain face.

  Hector danced on the wild side of life, and it made people desire to breathe the same exhilarating air he breathed. Women wanted him to risk his heart the same way he risked his life, and each believed she was the one to tame him. But he played those naïve, dreamy females like Morrison played the front row of a Doors concert. Messing with hearts carried a hint of sliminess. Once, I told him as much.

  “Mamacita, don’t be jealous. There’s not a girl alive who has guns like yours. I’ve seen you do things to punching bags that made my balls shrivel.” Crudeness and flattery enwrapped laughter so infectious, no wonder his former girlfriends had trouble getting him out of their systems.

  Samuel, on the other hand, was Hector’s polar opposite. He knew his appeal but was so careful not to give his followers the wrong impression, they couldn’t get enough of him.

  In my mind I saw Samuel, hunched over his movie script at base camp, thousands of feet down, below the ice and snow, swathed in green. Jaime, Hector’s insane sort-of girlfriend, had probably tried to shave his head by now. Yet he was still there, holding me up. Samuel, with a faith in God and in me that was simple and solid, despite the colossal complications of his life.

  His love allowed me freedom. He trusted me to come back, and I meant to keep my word.

  That summit was not meant for me. Not today.

  “I’m out, Hector. Sorry.” I wasn’t sorry.

  Even though we’d ducked out of the summit, the snowfield just beyond the boulders was still a mess of melting ice crevasses. Occasionally we’d hear another tell-tale boom reverberate between cliffs and cleavers, and I hoped no one was buried beneath ten feet of snow. On edge, we passed time with a dice game, though our gloved fingers made things difficult. We chatted up other mountaineers playing it safe at the high camp—one who’d even lived through the horror of an avalanche.

  “I was bent over a tree branch like a towel flung over a clothesline, stiff from the cold and ribs cracked from the impact. Snow swept around me, beneath me, over me…” He waved his arms around his torso to illustrate. “It was so cold, I knew I was going to die. But I was lucky the snow wasn’t hard-packed around the tree. I wriggled around, like swimming in sand, until I made enough of an air pocket to wait for the Ski Patrol. Then I screamed ‘til I heard voices somewhere above my ass…” No thanks.

  Around one in the afternoon, Ranger Rick returned with his two-way radio. “Ranger station said to hang tight until things freeze over. You all got headlamps? Night gear?” Most of us nodded. “If not, you got no business being up here, but we’ll keep you until we can get you down in the daylight.” Man, this guy made me miss my no-nonsense mom. “Is there a Kaye Trilby here?” he asked around a mouthful of orange slice.

  “Right here.”

  “Got your boyfriend at the station harassing the rangers, asking about you. Don’t burn up the two-way.” He placed the radio in my quaking hand.

  “Samuel?”

  “Kaye. Thank God!” His voice was warm and melodic, even entrenched in static. When he was emotional, like now, traces of a Spanish accent trickled through. “Tell me you didn’t try to summit the mountain.”

  “Hector and Luca are up there, but the rest of us are safe. Molly just handed me my tail in Yahtzee. We’re playing for power bars.”

  “You have no idea how relieved I am to hear it. I know you promised you’d be careful, but from what we’re hearing, the entire mountain is awash with snow today. Just…please stay at high camp until it’s safe.”

  I rubbed my palm against my chest, quelling the ache Samuel’s loving concern stirred in me. “I promise. Hey, I need to ask you something. Something really important.” Ranger Rick gave me a stern glance and tapped his wrist. I held up my finger for one more minute.

  Crackling static. “What was that?”

  “I want to ask you something really important and I need to do it now before I lose my nerve.”

  Another flare of static. “Can you still hear me? I said go ahead.”

  “Okay. You said you wanted to date awhile and take things slow. Then yesterday, you said you needed me but didn’t want to be clingy. And these past few weeks, we’ve definitely been more…erm…committed than just dating. Are you still with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I said again. My palms were sweating beneath my gloves. Ranger Rick gave me the wrap-it-up finger twirl. “I was thi
nking—well, Molly suggested I should just ask if I didn’t want to wait—because I’m kind of a modern girl and all…”

  His beautiful laugh. “Firecracker, just spit it out.”

  “Okay. I think we should get married again. Whew.”

  The laughter ended. Then, nothing. Even Ranger Rick looked embarrassed for me as the silence widened, his emaciation of an orange slice grinding to a halt.

  “Samuel?”

  A shuddery breath. “I’m sorry, I thought you said… Could you repeat that?”

  “I think we should get married again. No, wait. That was crappy.” I was botching this, big time. I pushed back threatening tears and began again, more slowly. “What I meant to ask was this: Will you marry me?”

  Another breath. “Are you serious?”

  I tried not to be insulted. “Look, Samuel, I already have ‘I love Samuel Cabral’ smeared across my forehead. The least you could do is give me a ring to match. Don’t you dare second-guess this. Us. Second guess us.”

  And then the beautiful laughter was back. “Oh Kaye, I’m not patronizing you. If you could see my face, you’d know I’m simply shocked and…and beyond elated. I never imagined… I love you, beautiful girl, so damned much.”

  “I love you too. You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Yes. I want to be yours again. But then, you know I’ve never been anything but yours.”

  “Yours,” I echoed, the tightness in my chest unwinding. I glanced at Ranger Rick, whose eyes were suspiciously glassy. “Okay,” I said a fifth time. “Well…I’ll see you soon. Tonight, hopefully.”

  “Don’t rush. Take your time, watch your footing. I’ll still be here with Betty the Campervan and the devil’s Latina cousin when you get back.”

  I laughed. “I’ll be safe. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  It began with a teeth-rattling boom, followed by what could only be the earth cracking and splintering, rending apart.

  Molly had just swiped another power bar during our dice game, which we’d moved inside the tent, when it happened. Our faces froze in horror as the entire mountainside crumbled and tumbled around the manmade rock walls of the Boulder Field.

  Cassady cursed as we fell to the tent floor and covered our heads with our hands. For long, tenuous seconds we cowered as shadowed blue nylon sagged and rumbled around us. The gear rattled. Power bars and dice bounced around the makeshift table and onto the floor. One, then two sides of the tent popped up, but settled again, thank God. Light no longer poured through canvas—the entire rock shelter dimmed like nightfall. And then, as the snow settled, it was utterly quiet. The idea that the world had ended flitted through my mind.

  “What. Was. That?” Molly ground out, her glasses dangling from one ear.

  I groaned. “I think it was an avalanche.”

  “Seriously? We play it safe and seventy-mile-an-hour snow still finds us!”

  “I don’t think it was a direct hit, or we’d have tumbled down the field,” said Cassady.

  I pushed myself off the tent floor. “We’re lucky the Canadians gave us the prime rock wall.” Then, in dreadful unison, we recalled that a dozen or so people were not protected by rock walls, but had been boulder-hopping the cobbled field. Leaping to our feet, we jerked on outer garments and gear and zipped open the flap. A wall of snow up to our waists spilled into the tent.

  “Cassady, do something!”

  He tried to hoist himself onto the snow shelf, only to sink through in a spectacular show of awkwardness. “What do you want me to do, Molly? Build a snow fort?”

  After digging and tunneling, eventually we were able to scoot through the opening and up onto a bed of silver.

  Straight away, I noticed the snow was not as deep on this side of the field as it was elsewhere. The second thing I noticed was that to the right, just below the Face, the field had been swept clean of equipment, tents, and people. Bright flashes of color peeked through the snow, destroyed by the heavy tidal wave. A handful of climbers pulled themselves out of fresh drifts and tested their limbs. Some already crouched on hands and knees, digging for survivors trapped beneath, frantically shouting for help. Struggling for clarity, I dug out my avalanche beacon and switched it to ‘receive.’ The sudden pulsing signal from the other buried beacons shot straight into my pounding heart.

  “Come on!” Molly grasped my elbow and dragged me toward a tableau of annihilated rock and snow. I fell into step behind her, and we dropped to the snow at the first weak cries for help. “It’s been seven minutes,” I muttered to Molly. Seven minutes meant the beginning of brain damage. Tears streaming down our cheeks, we burrowed and clawed into the packed snow until we found a knee, then a leg, and finally, the torso and face of a terrified man. Blood trickled from a gash in his head, then grew sluggish and froze as it reached his ice-numbed cheek.

  I turned my face from his cracked lips and frost-bitten cheeks, only to spot a blue glove poking through a snow bank several feet away. The glove wiggled and scraped at the surface. With dawning horror, I saw that it wasn’t a glove but the bare hand of a woman, her skin freakishly bruised by cold.

  “Help!...Help!” The feminine voice was weak but unmistakable. I tugged Molly with me and clutched the woman’s fingers. She squeezed my hand in return.

  “We’re going to get you out!” Together we dove back into the snow, fighting time and physics and fatigue to rescue the woman…then another man….and another woman.

  Sometime later, overhead, the faint thud-thud-thud of helicopter blades echoed off the craggy walls, coming closer and closer until the sound ripped the air overhead and drowned out the moans of those who had been buried in the snow. We covered our ears.

  ‘Search and Rescue,’ Molly mouthed. The heli landed on the flat of the field and the rescue team poured from its body, laden with equipment and stretchers. Two black Labradors put their noses to the ground and weaved wildly over the terrain. Jaime’s dogs flashed through my head, and I absurdly wondered if Samuel would like one of her puppies someday.

  “I’ve got this one.” Two medics knelt next to the woman we’d yanked from the snow. Molly and I stood by helplessly as the team searched long and hard for a pulse, shook their heads and grimly placed a blanket over her face.

  Twelve people were buried in the avalanche at Boulder Field. Amazingly, despite severe hypothermia and eventual amputations, all but one of them survived. But that was one life brutally taken by the mountain I loved and, once I saw this young woman with her smothered face and mangled limbs, her last breath snuffed my longing for the wild backcountry.

  Two hours later, Hector, Luca, and the Canadians returned, miraculously in one piece. Even the might of Mother Nature hadn’t exposed their hubris, the cliffhuckers. They were all smiles and high-fives until they saw the obliteration of the tent city.

  “Where’s our stuff?” Luca asked, slack-jawed. My stomach turned. Cassady beat me to the head-smack.

  We bid adieu to the Canadians. Then we wearily began the six-hour trek down Longs Peak beneath a smattering of emerging constellations. I picked out a proverbial string of stars; Aquarius was bold tonight. If I’d made the summit, my limbs and brain would have been just as leaden. Yet that lost life ate at me. Like a mindless automaton, my body trudged along behind Hector’s chuffing shoulders, crouching when I needed to crouch, scooting when I needed to scoot. We broke for water at a marker, and when I realized the ranger station was still a half-mile away, tears of exhaustion rolled down my cheeks and froze onto my scarf.

  Then, sometime around one in the morning, I collapsed into Samuel’s arms, pressed fervently against his fleece-covered chest. He rested a glove on the crown of my head. “When I heard about the avalanche, I prayed harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life that you were safe.”

  “I was. Lots of others weren’t.” I sighed into his scarf, blocking the image of the woman’s blue hand piercing the white of the snow.

  “I was afraid for you. Ay Dios mío,
you’re frozen through.” His hands grasped my shoulders, waist, cheeks, assuring himself I’d returned in one piece. Satisfied, he tucked me beneath the warmth of his jacket. “Marry me,” he rasped into my hair.

  “I already asked.”

  “Then allow me a turn. Please firecracker, marry me?”

  Despite pain and fatigue, I smiled. “Mmm-hmm. Yes.”

  Only Cassady’s agonized cry broke through our blissful haze. “What did you two dog ding-a-lings do to Betty?”

  Samuel hissed through his teeth. “Oh man, I forgot.”

  Jaime dashed out of Betty, Cassady hot on her heels. “How were we supposed to know the mountain would vomit all over you?” She ducked as Cassady launched a ball of sweaty socks at her head. “Around mid-afternoon yesterday, Cabral and I got tired of weather reports, so we put my law journals to good use!”

  “Who would have thought that Jaime and I would find common ground wreaking havoc in our mutual boredom?” he added ruefully, running a hand through his hair. “Poorly timed, though—we should have cleaned it up. Sorry, Hippie.”

  I peered into the maligned vehicle…it must have taken hours. Every inch of Betty’s interior was papered in pages of Jaime’s law journals. Shag carpet wall…steering wheel…brake and accelerator…even the beaded curtains were wrapped like ghetto gifts. I shuddered at the sheer number of neon tape flags it must have taken to play such an intricate, exhaustive prank.

  Who carried that many office supplies with them, anyway?

  Cassady pointed a bony finger. “After you two juvenile delinquents clean this up, I better not find a single booger of tape residue on that sweet ride, so help me. You better remember, nothing goes over the devil’s back that doesn’t come under his belly.”

  “I think he means ‘what goes around comes around’,” I whispered into Samuel’s ear. He kissed my temple and got to work tearing away Jaime’s law journals. It wasn’t as if she used them, anyway.

  An hour before dawn, as the others slept, I flopped around fitfully and woke with a crick in my neck. We had wrapped ourselves in quilts and crashed on the floor behind the pseudo privacy of Betty the Campervan’s beaded curtain. Through the dull blue of morning, Samuel’s eyes glittered back, a soft, serious smile on his lips.