Soon the unseen stream filled my ears, only a few feet to my left. Now all I had to do was find a safe place to descend the bank and drink. Would it be safer—and sap less body heat—to scoop up handfuls of water or to lie on my belly and drink like a wild animal? My hands were already going numb, so I felt inclined to lie flat and put my face in the stream.
I was just beginning to anticipate the taste when I took a small step with my left foot and—for the second time that night—found nothing there. Odd: I’d been shuffling along, feeling my way with excruciating slowness, yet even so, the earth dropped away beneath me. I felt myself toppling, free-falling, and then landing in frigid water. Just below the surface, my left side hit a rock, and I felt a sharp pain in my ribs. But it was the gasp-inducing frigidity of the water that imperiled me. If my head had been submerged, I would surely have inhaled a lethal lungful of water. As I struggled to gain my footing on the slippery rocks, I realized how little time I had. I was already on the edge of hypothermia; the frigid water would surely push me over the brink swiftly. And for the first time, as I began to shiver violently, I wondered if I should give in, simply surrender to the cold and the exhaustion and the pain. Hypothermia was said to be a relatively swift and pleasant way to go, after all. If I remained in the water, or even crawled onto a rock and lay still, perhaps I’d drift off painlessly after only a few moments of cold. Would that be so bad, really, given the turns my life had taken lately? Jeff wouldn’t answer my phone calls, Miranda despised me, the TBI wanted to interrogate me, UT would surely fire me, Ray Sinclair wanted to ruin or kill me, and a federal fugitive was carrying my child. How much easier it might be to let go than to keep struggling and striving.
The river’s current washed me onto a small, rocky beach, and I crawled out and lay on my back so I could see the sky before my eyes closed. The Big Dipper had shifted dramatically from its position at nightfall, rotating a quarter turn around the North Star. The great wheel of life and fate would continue to spin long after I was gone. I found that comforting and hoped that life would bring abundant happiness to those I cared about: to Jeff and Jenny and their boys, to Miranda and Art, to the struggling Garcias. I even wished some form of peace to Isabella, wherever she was.
But as I lay there, sending benevolent wishes to the universe on behalf of those people, a small realization forced its way into my slipping consciousness. My death would not bring abundant goodness to my family, friends, and colleagues; in fact, it would surely bring deep sadness. When I was three, my own father had killed himself, and although that act had ended his own inner pain, it had created untold pain in those he left behind. If I simply gave in to the cold right now, instead of fighting for life with everything I had, wouldn’t that be a halfhearted, cowardly version of suicide? Did I want to let myself die instead of trying harder to live for the ones I loved?
I shook my head to clear it. I rolled onto my right side, then onto my stomach, and took a deep drink of the ice-cold water—the drink I’d come down to get, before my fall. Then I found a gnarled rhododendron branch snaking down the high, steep embankment, grabbed it with both hands, and pulled myself upward.
I found the pole star again, low above the opposite ridge. It was on my right as I turned downstream. That meant I was still heading west. Still heading for the highway. Still heading for life. I scrabbled uphill as quickly as I could, putting some distance between myself and the stream’s treacherous gorge, and as I did, the effort gradually took away some of the chill.
Eventually I felt, rather than saw, an opening ahead of me. I still couldn’t see my hand in front of my face unless I held it up to create a five-fingered silhouette against the starry sky. But the blackness ahead was suddenly less black than it had been. It seemed like open, empty blackness rather than forested blackness. Grasping a tree branch for safety, I used a foot to probe the ground ahead. It turned rocky, and then it turned to empty air. I was on the brink of another cliff, though I had no way of knowing if it was ten feet high or a hundred. If I turned slightly left, I could continue along what felt like the edge of the precipice—but that would be heading south, not west. Had I come to a sharp bend in the river gorge, or was this a side canyon, carved by a lesser tributary? If it was, then following it would take me back up into the mountains, and that would be disastrous. I had to stop until daylight. I hoped I could make it until daylight.