The water was cold—gaspingly, achingly cold, so cold that my feet felt as if they’d been clamped in a vise. Within seconds, though, the pain gave way to numbness, which was better but also worse, making it difficult to feel the slippery rocks underfoot. Twice I nearly fell, when my numbed feet stumbled; both times I nearly lost my grip on my precious bundle of clothes. The water was deeper than I’d expected, too. It knifed its way above my knees and up my thighs. “Ow,crap, ” I said as the cold stabbed at my crotch.
By the time I reached the other side—probably only a minute or so—I was shuddering. Sitting on a chilly rock, I used my hands to squeegee the water down my legs, then rubbed my feet briskly with my socks to dry them and to restore circulation and feeling. I dressed as quickly as my shaking hands and quaking limbs allowed, then set off downstream.
As the darkness deepened, so did the growl of menace I heard rumbling in the water. Both sides of the gorge got steeper, the rocks became mossy, and the footing grew treacherous. The second time my feet slid out from under me, I decided to seek higher, drier ground. I could still follow the river’s course by ear, I reasoned, but I’d be safer if I didn’t need to negotiate every riverside boulder and ledge in the darkness. Overhead, in the wedge of night sky, I found the Big Dipper and the North Star, which confirmed that I was indeed headed westward, toward the highway. That knowledge was reassuring, but the absence of moonlight was disheartening.
Gradually the terrain I was crossing steepened, and soon I was reduced to side-crawling on all fours, scuttling blindly across the slope. Judging by the leaves beneath my hands, I was in deciduous forest of some sort—maybe tulip poplars, maybe oaks and maples. The leaves were dry; the winter snows that had fallen on this south-facing slope had long since melted.
The leafy soil under my hands and feet had just given way to bare rock when I took a step sideways and suddenly felt myself sliding off a ledge. Instinctively I flung out my arms, and as my legs and then my hips crossed the brink, I managed to catch hold of a small tree rooted in a crevice. Clinging to it, I prayed that it would hold, and I carefully hauled myself up onto the ledge. In the darkness I couldn’t see the cliff that nearly claimed me, nor could I see the tree that saved me. Guided only by the sound of the river and the feel of the mountainside, I groped onward.
The feel changed abruptly in the space of one sideways step, and the mountainside grew loose and crumbly beneath my left hand and left foot. I stopped and swept my hand across the ground in an arc, from my foot up to shoulder height and above. I felt no trees, no twigs, not even dead leaves—nothing but crumbling soil and loose rocks.My God, I thought,a landslide. How wide is this, and how unstable, and how in the world do I cross it?
I crossed it by inches, feeling for handholds and footholds before committing to a move. After half a dozen such moves, I came to a rock the size of a watermelon, half buried in the loose slope to the left of my head. As I edged beneath it, the rock tore free in my hands. I ducked my head, shifted to the left, and dug my left toe and left hand into the loose soil, praying that they’d hold. Sparks sprang from the mountainside as the rock crashed down—fifty feet, eighty feet, a hundred or more. It clattered to a stop on the heap of earth and rock and trees that had recently sheared off and slid down the slope. By the time I’d traversed the slide zone and reentered the forest, I was exhausted. I couldn’t see my watch in the darkness—I couldn’t even see my hand in the blackness—but I guessed it must be midnight or later, and my strength was gone.I need to sleep for a little while, I thought. Bracing my feet on a large tree, I lay down, though I was actually as near to standing as I was to reclining. Raking dead leaves from the dirt around me, I created a nest to retain whatever body heat I could. Just as I began to doze, I was awakened by my body’s shivering, mild at first, then violent. As long as I’d kept scrabbling across the slope, I’d felt tolerably warm in my thin shirt, except for the cold seeping into my hands. But with my internal engine now idling—and sputtering at that, given my lack of food and water—I couldn’t withstand the cold. I had to keep moving.
But I was growing seriously dehydrated. There was water, and in abundance, only a few hundred feet below me. I was reminded of its presence, and its power, as I crept blindly past each roaring rapid. Reluctantly, fearfully, I began edging downward, relinquishing my buffer from the wet rocks and the churning water.