Cold and Alone and Autobiographical

He had expected the fall. Not before he began to surmount the glacier certainly, but a few minutes before it. Before he began he knew it was a possibility, but he put its probability in the low single digits. You could hardly call that expecting something. No, he had expected it when the winds had burst on him from out of nowhere like hell had turned on a blow dryer special made to freeze it over. He began to see sheets of ice falling from off the mountain and finally saw the ice where his own supports had been placed break away and he with them.

It was only seconds between when the wind started and when he fell, and it was in those seconds that he expected the fall.

He had not expected to survive it.

Somehow he had landed veritically, but he was buried in the snow, he could only move his arms, but he was in too deep and too weak to pull himself out. And he was freezing. He looked up at the sky that had been so welcoming earlier that day, and had like a dangerous lover recovered its kindly and smiling face now after it had wrecked its violence.

He thought of yelling, of screaming, of shrieking for help, but what good would it do? What good other than to be an embarassment when he finally gave up his own ghost and made the final ascent to join the frozen explorers who had proceeded him. Surely Mallory and Sandy would be waiting for him to join them in their endless treks through eternity.

Then he saw the golden head of his mother coming towards him. But this would be impossible, she was far away at home. And yet now he could see her coming closer and now he can feel her hands so much stronger than his under his arms as she pulls him out of the snow bank.

Damn these deep Provo gutters and damn the men who dug them so deep. He would have said, but would not have the prose to utter that curse for years to come.