Winter Night in the Mountains

 

 

~ Winter Night in the Mountains ~

The Confusion Range, an obscure mountain range in obscure west-central Utah, is so named for its rugged isolation and confusing topography.  It is surrounded by Snake Valley (to the west), Tule Valley (east), the Great Salt Desert (north) and the Ferguson Desert (south).  The nearest town is Petra, a near ghost town some twenty miles away.

Christmas Eve and the wind blowing like pure hell, driving snow before it like pellets from a riot gun.  I light my lantern, exhale hugely for the small thrill of seeing the thick plume my breath makes.  I know that the lantern and my breathing will warm my small A-frame tent soon.  I’m not sure if I’m glad about this or not.

I listen.  Is it only the wind that I hear moaning, or is it something else?  Christmas Eve, and I’m not sure of anything anymore, not sure if I hope it is only the wind…or the something else I came here either to flee, or to face head on.

The sky has grown deep blue with twilight, early as is its wont this time of year.  The lantern, warm, bright, smelling of kerosene, makes a bright, warm glow around me, and I think of how cool my tent must look from a distance, standing alone as it is on the open side of a barren, treeless, obscure mountainside, think of how her living room lights and the lights from the Christmas tree and the mantle beside it looked glowing out onto the snow just one year ago, one year ago on this very night,  think of how she looked, standing in the window, mug in hand and wearing the red scarf I had given to her the night before even though her house was hot and even though talking with her extended family made her hot and uncomfortable.  She had looked divine.  I had stopped on the sidewalk, on the edge of the driveway and the snow-covered yard, briefly torturing myself, feeling like a ghost from another world who could look upon her beauty but not touch it.  In less than five months, I would be.

I pop the top off a can of cocktail wieners and fish in my pocket for my Swiss army knife and pull out its small fork and begin eating. The wieners are cool and salty and very good after my long hike up from the small, abandoned cottage I had holed up in last night, some ten miles hence, itself some fifteen miles from where the bus left me off in Perry.  I begin to sing, an obscure Christmas carol called “Pat a Pan” that Steph had loved, had played the hell out of all the Christmases I knew her.  Something like a cough rises up in me and threatens to manifest as tears, but I shake my head and the impetus passes.  I eat.  The lantern hisses warmly and I cannot see my breath.  My sleeping bag, I know, will be plenty warm.  Steph: Good God, how I wish you were here to share it.  But I know that if you were still with me, we would be in Key West or Cabo San Lucas or some other warm place, not in the godforsaken wash of Utah’s Confusion Range.

As I eat, I think: the fact that I brought food and water and a warm sleeping bag and a good-for-winter A-frame tent, etc., means that 1. I am still thinking practically (and thus want to spend my Christmas holiday in the Confusion Range in relative comfort) and 2.That I don’t really want to die. It is an irrefutable fact that I don’t really want to live, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that number two is true, too.  Somehow, the two facts are not mutually exclusive.  This might well complicate matters…

One year ago tonight: after all her family had left, we made love, and she had worn only the scarf I had given her, and the only light in her bedroom was from a strand of old-time Christmas lights that lit her up beautifully, and though there was no snow, the starlight had shone through her window in a way that was undeniably wintery.  I love you.  And I you.

I finish the wieners, start on a cup of peaches in lite syrup.  I unfold my topo map of the Confusion Range, endeavor, in the lantern’s warm, even gas-smelling glow, to determine where I am.  I think I have it.  I am on one of the lesser humps leading to King Top, just above a delineation named Cowboy Pass.  “Do I know how to party or what?” I whisper, smiling sardonically. 

Finishing the peaches, I crush the cup into the can of wieners and, quickly unzipping the tent, place them outside.  In that brief second, I feel how much warmer the tent has become.  I think how unpleasant getting out to piss will be.  Ah well. I lie back and pull my mummy bag around my feet, up to just below my shoulders.  The thought of a hot bath no longer seems so imperative.  The thought of sleep seems suddenly more so.

A gust of wind, pellets of hard snow hitting the side of the tent like manic Morse code.  I strain my ears, but beyond the lantern hissing soporifically, the wind, the snow, and the moving nylon of the tent, I hear…nothing.  No pun intended.  I think that, perhaps, this is too desolate a spot even for him.

I think of the last time Steph and I made love, in a small, rundown motel just outside of West Lafayette, Indiana, in May.  We were there for her sister’s graduation.  The room was too hot and smelled very stale and we almost didn’t do it, especially after I made a crack about breaking out the blue light and scanning our bed.  Three days later she went to Costco (we were back home by then) and never came back.  The driver who hit her was texting.  Steph didn’t die on impact.  She died in the helicopter on her way to the University of Chicago Hospital.  I guess they still billed her family $9,000 for the helicopter ride, because Steph didn’t have insurance.

*

The Nothing came nearly every night after that.  In dreams.  Moaning softly through rainstorms at dawn.  Peering through my screens at me as I slept.

I lie back and stare at the wavering ring of light on the tent ceiling.  I recall when I first became aware that there was truly something in the world that I could call The Nothing.  (I had been aware of him (and had always thought of it as a him) for a long time, viscerally at least, but had always believed I was just imagining things, making, through some strange internal cognitive process, a metaphor manifest.  After all, haven’t we all endeavored to personify the strange, inexplicable feelings of loneliness and sadness and depression that sometimes beset us?)  It was on the night in the spring of my senior year at Millsville University when I found out my first girlfriend had been cheating on me.

I dreamt a dream that night…one of those deep, lucid ones that stay with you forever.  The night was humid and unseasonably warm, and I had left the window above my bed open.  Something in the way the air flowed in moved me in a profound way, and I knew, with that feeling, to expect dreams.  But that one…man, that was a doozy, even for me.  I was riding somewhere out west, on a bike trail that was covered by a semi-transparent tunnel-like roof, a roof lit by some unseen source.  I was moving with terrific speed, and the lights of the tunnel above and around me blurred with this speed.  A vast, moaning wind was blowing, one that I could hear but not feel.  I was alone, knew, somehow, that there was no one within many miles of me.  And I was afraid. Though there was nothing outwardly wrong with my surroundings – in fact, I would normally have found them amazing - I felt a great terror rising up within me.  Furthermore, I realized that I was racing something…no: that I was fleeing something.

And that was when I became aware that it was not the wind making the moaning noise, but rather a figure, just on the other side of the opaque tunnel, moving at the same speed I was (though I knew, undoubtedly, that he could move much faster should he so desire). I couldn’t see him clearly, but had the sense of some deep, concentrated darkness, like thick, amalgamated mist, gaping holes of deep blackness upon lesser blackness approximating features. 

This was The Nothing.  I woke then, to the year’s first thunderstorm, sweating, shaking, hearing thunder, the wind, the rain…and what I would soon come to know as the call of The Nothing: a moaning similar in tenor to the wind, but lonely in a way that the wind could never be.  I realized, without surprise, that I knew The Nothing well. The dream had not revealed anything new to me, but rather brought to light some inherent knowledge I had had buried deep within me, like the face of a corpse quietly surfacing in a stagnant pond.

The Nothing, not evil but terribly imperative, moves with terrific speed always, moaning emptily always, fixed not on one target, but many.  He is, indeed, a metaphor made manifest, the perfect personification of loneliness and despair.  He is drawn to other nothings, to people who have lost not only their sense of purpose, their sense of identity, their every modicum of hope, but also (and most importantly) their desire even to recover.  To them The Nothing comes, with vast, imperative speed over cracked earth, over endless plains, moaning, moaning.  And when he arrives…

…that is what I am here in the Confusion Range on Christmas Eve to find out.  A rough calculation puts me twenty some miles in all directions from the nearest person…puts me, thus, alone in a 400 square mile radius.  Is that enough?

I wonder, again, if the fact that I brought all my backpacking equipment means that in some way I have not lost all hope, that some small kernel of optimism still lies dormant within me.  Could that mean that The Nothing will bypass me, find some other worthier – or less worthy – target?  I hope not – or do I hope?

I think of Steph, wearing only her red scarf. And I sing:

 

“When the men of olden days
Gave the King of Kings their praise
They had pipes on which to play

 

Tu-re-lu-re-lu, pat-a-pat-a-pan
They had drums on which to play.
Of the joy of Christmas day”

 

as I move to the rhythm of the wind, move myself back and forth against the fabric of my sleeping bag.  The light magnifies, doubles, as I finish.  I lie for a long time afterwards, spent, empty, at a standstill, listening. 

What is that I hear?  Only the wind again.  Damn.

After a long, long moment of indecision and a long, internal debate, I wiggle my way out of my sleeping bag, pull on my boots and make my way out of the tent into the freezing darkness.  The wind is a monolith, the snow impelled before it stinging my exposed skin like wasps.  Head down, I move through the sagebrush, up the side of the mountain a ways.  Turning with my back to the wind, I piss, looking down on my little distant glowing tent.  It is beautiful, so beautiful.  It stands just above windy Cowboy Pass, a physical, illuminated manifestation of hope.  The blue has gone from the sky.  The tent looks very bright against the dark.  It hurts my heart, badly, to look at it, yet I find that I cannot look away. 

Something within me gives; it seems sudden, but I know that it is not, that it has been giving for a very long time, like a seawall that goes with a whoosh but had been weakening, crumbling inwardly for years.  Something within me gives, and gives hard.

How does it feel to fall apart?

A thing like a cough rises up in me, manifests itself as a long, low moan.  It is a sound that I have heard before, on the edge of dreams, on the night I saw my first girlfriend getting into a car with another man and kissing him hard, on the afternoon I saw Steph, wearing my scarf and my engagement ring, lying in state, so heavily made up as to look fake.  Turning my back on my tent, into the wind, I stare up at King Top, looming, monolithic, a deeper darkness silhouetted on a sky almost wholly devoid of light, of hope. 

And, moaning, I begin to run, faster than I ever thought possible, up and up, the terrible rhythm of “pat a pat a pan” repeating on and on in my head.

 

January 3, 2014

Miami Beach, Florida

Based on an idea by Patricia Brugioni