Crazy for the Storm

Did they see you? called Sandra.

No, I said.

She asked more questions, and I was fixed on something way way down below. It was barely visible over the clouds bottled up in the chute. My eyes settled on a flat meadow. The flat spot was unnatural and improbable in this jagged landscape. The round bed of snow glowed woodless and I thought that if I made it there I would be okay. My eyes stuttered, gobbling up the terrain that led to the meadow. How to get there?

Below my feet the chute disappeared under a long blanket of fog. Several hundred feet lower the fog bent with the easing grade and a sparsely wooded slope emerged. As my eyes traced the slope downward the trees gave way to a steep, bald apron of snow. It nosed away so that I could not see how far down it went. The fog made the terrain difficult to follow but I filled in the blanks. As if I were water I flowed with the various gullies and ravines for thousands of feet until the mountain’s creases and bulges all seemed to feed into a tight gulch, sandwiched between two walls of glacier-scathed rock. A massive ridgeline grew out of the gulch. It would take hours to climb over it, and it looked too steep, too slick. But the gulch might squeeze through or around the massive ridge. If Dad and I were skiing back here we’d flow right into that gulch and find a way through.

Then I saw a rooftop. It was not far from the meadow. Looking down on it from a couple miles away, I almost did not believe it. My eyeballs strained to segregate the clean smooth man-made shape from the sawtoothed woods. It was definitely a roof.

The woods surrounding the roof were thick except for a furrow that cut toward the meadow. It was some kind of road, a passageway through the dense woods between the roof and the meadow.

I retraced my route down to the meadow. The chute, the wooded section, the long apron of snow curving away into the gulch, the massive ridgeline, then the flat meadow where we could rest before stumbling through the woods to find the shelter chiseled a map in my mind, fixing the meadow as my true north.

I took in the rooftop one more time to make sure. Looks like a ghost-town building, I thought. We can get warm there.

The storm heaved like two waves closing in on each side of me. The respite was over. Bales of mist crawled over both sides of the chute and collected in the middle. I stared at the roof. Mother Nature waved her wand and the roof turned to vapor and it was suddenly hard to trust that it was there.

Are they coming back? said Sandra.

The helicopter noise was long gone.

I don’t know, I said.

I heard her complaining from under the wing. The wing and the trunk receded behind fog. Her voice was lost in the wind. I came to all fours and stared at my hands, the wet air stuck to them, and I could feel it on my face. It crept under my ski sweater and down my socks, and the wet seemed to bite at my skin. The resurging storm was dark and angry. I was five feet from the wing when I finally saw it again.

I saw a cabin, I said.

They’ll come get us, she said.

I huddled against her. Snow piled up fast beyond the edge of the wing and I imagined the well-worn trail back toward my dad evaporating, obliterated by the wind and snow. I stuffed my hands into the cup of my armpits. I looked down to make sure they were there because I could not feel them. The tip of my nose stung and my forehead ached the way it did diving under a chilly winter wave at Topanga.

I turned my back on the cold and buried my face in Sandra’s neck. Should we wait here in case they come back? Or should we go?

CHAPTER 16

IN THE VILLAGE Dad and I drank water and coconut milk out of the coconuts and ate bananas and more chicken. I gnawed the meat to the bone this time. An elderly woman squeezed aloe vera onto my dad’s laceration and he thanked her. We finished everything they gave us and thanked the villagers and went to our hut to hide from the sun.

I could use a siesta, said my dad.

Me too, I said.

We rested on our blankets and I felt the salt on my back and the crusted salt on my eyelashes.

Where do waves come from exactly? I said.

He stared into the dark cone directly above us.

Storms. Wind.

How does it make a wave though?

The storm creates pressure on the ocean. Plunges it kind of, he said. The wind is really strong. Violent. And it drives down into the ocean. Pushing waves out.

And they travel across the ocean?

Yes.

Waves are like a piece of the storm?

That’s right, Ollestad.

He turned and the light seeping through the slit washed over his face. We eyed each other, holding on to the beautiful piece of storm.

We were invited to a village gathering that evening. The kids looked at me differently now. And they sat close to me without grabbing me or firing questions at me. We rested on woven mats in a big circle around a fire with pots hanging over it, and they moved the pots with sticks. All the vaqueros spoke to my dad now, not just the one with the mustache. I knew my dad was describing the drop-in and the inside of the tube. They kept asking him something over and over and he didn’t seem to understand. Then he said, Ah, and stared into the fire and thought about how to say what he wanted to say. He shook his head. He turned to the vaqueros and everybody stopped moving or talking. Papaya appeared in her T-shirt and white dress, clean and bright. She sat between two elders and her black eyes were riveted to my dad.

Then she spoke to him, startling me.

He answered her. Posible.

One of the vaqueros shifted uncomfortably and my dad and Papaya both turned and began speaking to whomever was next to them.

Later when we were eating I whispered to my dad. What were they asking you?

They wanted to know what it was like inside the wave.

What did you say?

I just described what it looked like. But that’s not what they meant.

What did they mean?

They meant did I see another world. Spirits and such.

I thought to myself that from the outside we must look like a streaking comet in the drape of the wave.

The girl said it best, whispered my dad.

What did she say?

She said it was a doorway to heaven.

Oh yeah! I said. Don’t you think?

I was in heaven so I guess so, said Dad.

The razor-sharp reef flashed across my mind.

But you could get crushed and shredded, I said. Maybe even die.

That’s life, Ollestad.

I turned and stared at the flames. Beautiful things were sometimes mixed up with treacherous things, they could even happen at the same time, or one could lead to the other, I thought.