True darkness gave birth to nightmares that didn’t go away upon waking. This one had started as a family excursion, a backwoods cross-country ski trek to a remote cabin, just Vance, Pete, and their father. On that post-holiday January weekend, the world belonged to them alone. At the hideaway they hunted deer, barbecued venison, read books, and moved around the one-room shack in the comfort of their own spare company.
In the evenings, by the light of an oil lamp that gave off greasy fumes, Vance read a biography of David Fisher and copied various perspectives of the architect’s Dynamic Towers into his sketchbook, which was filled with efforts to mimic his idols. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the Dubai Marina, and Frank Gehry’s floppy Lou Ruvo Center took up most of the pages. Pete slouched on the sofa over his electronic notepad, toggling among NASDAQ, the Wall Street Journal, the beginnings of an undergraduate thesis that he claimed would get him into the Harvard Business School, even though his freshman year of college didn’t begin until the fall, and a fourth site that Vance believed had nothing to do with his intellectual acumen.
Eventually, when their father tired of his own book, he brought out the poker chips and a brown bottle of Jim Beam, his one modest indulgence, coaxing his sons away from their solitary pursuits. They were lured by the stakes: the cot by the fireplace went to the winner, extra chores to the loser.
Pete was the loser the night before they packed up to head home. Vance wondered for years if Pete’s soreness about this defeat explained any part of what happened after.
They skied out on a Sunday morning, intending to beat a blizzard that was rolling in earlier than expected. Their father towed a sled carrying the buck they’d felled, and even then, Vance had trouble keeping up with his pace.
The sky was still blue over the hills of virgin snow when they reached their truck at the trailhead. The only marks in the white ground were the ski tracks they’d made three days earlier and rabbit prints in a ruler-straight line from one tree to another. A breeze that felt like springtime pushed puffs of fluffy snow out of the towering evergreens’ fingers and dotted Vance’s yellow-tinted goggles. He felt irritated that an incorrect forecast might have cut off their adventure prematurely. He said to Pete that it would have been better to be stranded out here than stuck in a stuffy high school classroom, and Pete agreed with him. It might have been the last time they agreed on anything.
The snow started falling an hour later, while they were still on the tipsy dirt roads of the high country. The fierce winds were crouched behind the ridge and sprang out at them like a mountain lion as they came around an exposed bend.
“There she is,” their father had said of the weather. Snow clouds riding the back of the wind came up behind the trees without further introduction, dimming the sun like lights going down in a theater. The speed with which the blizzard came up was startling to the brothers, but their father showed no concern for it, having traveled the mountain roads in wintertime often throughout his life.
He drove them down from the rugged peaks safely and didn’t find trouble until their truck flattened out on the valley floor, where winds tangled with each other, dropping snow and then lifting it into the air again, tossing it into ten- and twelve-foot drifts against the foothills. Dad pulled over twice when the swirling storm became a white blind across the windshield.
After the second time, when they had a fleeting view of the county road that turned off to the south, toward home, the truck would not rise out of the slush. All four wheels became mired in snow and ice, spinning against the slick surfaces even with the four-wheel drive engaged. Snow already was piled up to the bottom of the wheel wells. They tried to rock the truck out but only dug themselves deeper. They tried digging but didn’t have anything to put in front of the wheels for traction. Pete and Vance climbed into the truck bed with the dead buck and their cross-country ski gear. The protective tarp that wrapped the venison was white with snow, and ice was piling in the corners. They jumped and slipped and jumped some more, trying to bounce the vehicle out while Dad floored the gas.
After twenty minutes of this Pete fumbled his way back into the cab, and Vance dropped onto the jump seat by going through the rear window. His sweat was freezing into a thin sheet of ice under his bangs. He took off his knit cap, breathless, and sat sideways behind his father’s seat. Dad joined them, shutting out the icy wind with a slam of the door.
“We could walk it,” Pete suggested.
“Better to wait it out,” said Dad.
“It’s only two miles more to the junction. We’ve got the skis.”
“Might as well be two hundred in this. Take one step away from this truck and you won’t be able to find your way back to it.”
“I hate not doing anything,” Pete huffed, putting a foot up on the dash.
“Who says that waiting isn’t doing something?” their father said.
The silence the three men sat in now lacked the restfulness of their tiny cabin.
“Long as it takes,” Dad said.
Snow jammed the tailpipe like a rag and would fill their shelter with deadly gas if they ran the engine too long. Pete said they were more likely to die from gas produced by Vance, and Vance accused him of trying to divert attention from his own contributions to the sour air.
They started in an optimistic cycle of Dad clearing away drifts from the back of the four-wheel drive, scooping out the tailpipe with a stick, then running the engine and heater for fifteen minutes or so with the windows cracked. Within a couple of hours the effort to keep the car warm seemed pointless, though they tried to preserve a sacred space around the truck with their one small emergency shovel, a squat thing with a two-foot shaft and a nine-inch-wide metal blade. They scooped snow away from the truck at regular intervals. The exercise was a bit like breaking out of prison with a spoon. They brought sleeping bags, food, and water from the truck bed into the cab. They spent precious minutes scanning the radio stations for weather reports but picked up only static. They took turns doing the work outside as it became more difficult to stand up under the windy blasts. Visibility dropped to inches, and the precipitation became heavier and wetter. Sometimes the battered truck rocked like a cradle.
It was a great story in the making, Vance thought. He’d probably miss school on Monday after all. Their father told stories and Pete made up goofy lyrics to old camp songs. One hundred snowflakes are froze in my nose, one hundred snowflakes are froze. If one of them should happen to thaw, ninety-nine snowflakes will shout out, “That blows!” Vance ate an apple for lunch and, inspired by the core, sketched a design for a modern skyscraper. He ate a bag of chips for supper and read his book on David Fisher as long as the light lasted without once feeling anxious about their situation.
As the daytime temperatures dropped, he pulled his bag up over his head and cinched the tie around his nose and mouth. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep without a place to stretch out his legs, and the very expectation seemed to hold real rest at arm’s length. He got stuck in a shallow doze, aware from time to short time of a door opening and a frigid gust elbowing its way into the cab. He heard the low tones of his father and brother talking to each other but didn’t catch their conversation, wasn’t interested in it, took a careless and meandering mental walk away from it.
When Vance woke, the air of the cab was black except for the huffing clouds of breath pulsing in front of his father’s and brother’s mouths. The digital clock on the dash was too faint to read. The midnight hours were heavy and thicker than he’d expected them to be. His right foot was tingling, and when he shifted to free whatever nerves he had pinched, he kicked his father’s seat.
Dad gasped and was awake.
“Sorry,” Vance mumbled.
“What time is it?”
His father was closer to the clock than he was. Vance turned his face to the back window and worked his shoulder into a tolerable position.
“Father in heaven,” Dad whispered.
Vance lifted his chin. “What?”
“It’s eight in the morning.”
“Can’t be.”
“According to the clock.”
Vance wormed his own hand out of the sleeping bag and punched the light button on the side of his wristwatch. By the green glow, the truth was plain as the darkness encasing them: while they slept, the snow had hemmed them in and blocked the daylight.
Vance stayed silent, expecting his father to have answers. Pete stirred.
“Pete, where’s the shovel?” Dad asked.
After a few groggy seconds, Pete pushed the shovel at his feet over to his dad’s side of the floor for another routine round of cleanup. He came fully awake when Dad started the engine.
“What are you doing?”
Dad punched on the dome lights, and when Vance’s eyes stopped squinting, he could see the surprise in Pete’s eyes and wondered if the anxiety was as obvious in his own.
The engine was on only long enough for Dad to roll down the window. The snow on the outside kept its shape as a glistening pebbled wall that looked like shattered safety glass. By the dim light of the cab, Dad started chipping away at it with the narrow shovel, which was almost too big for the task, showering the driver’s seat with ice that melted quickly under his body heat.
As Dad made progress, the heaping became lighter and less wet. He was standing on the seat, leaning up into the vertical tunnel he’d created, when he reached the surface. Morning light turned the snow tube a pale blue-green. A howl of chill wind dropped straight down into the cab. Vance sank into his bag like a cowering turtle.
Standing on the door’s window frame, Dad’s waist was finally level with the new surface of the earth. He stood there for a dreadful minute before coming back in, his face red and wind-bitten and contrasting with his bright blue snow bibs.
“It looks like there’s a break in the storm,” he announced.
“You mean there’s more coming?” Pete said.
“Hard to say. But for now, this valley is under a clear sky.”
Dad handed the shovel over the seat to Vance. Pete leaned away from the blade as it passed by his head. “Vance, I want you to dig into the back and get my skis. I put them right on top yesterday, right in front of your window.”
“Did you know this was going to happen?” Pete asked.
“I hoped it wouldn’t.”
Vance felt clumsy working in the tight space, with nowhere to put the snow but on the truck’s bench seat. Much of it fell off the shovel and littered the back. Dad and Pete scooped it into a plastic bread bag and toted it out the tunnel, but the progress was sloppy and took a long time.
“Where are you going?” Vance asked.
“I’m going to make a run for the junction,” Dad said. He opened the glove box and pulled out a compass.
“I’m coming too,” Pete said.
“You boys stay here, stay together. Where’s the survival kit?”
“Back here,” Vance said. The red plastic box was stowed under the second jump seat. He hesitated, not sure whether to go after his father’s skis first or the kit.
“We’ll both come with you,” Pete said.
“No. The truck’s sheltered. You can stretch our food and water for three more days if I’m not dipping into it.”
Vance felt guilty for his indulgence of the chips the night before.
“We don’t really need each other’s help to sit around,” Pete argued. “But what if something happens to you?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me. C’mon, Vance. Let’s have those skis.”
When Vance found the first ski tip, he put the shovel down and pried the ski out, feeding the great length of it toward his father and out the front door before it had fully come in the rear window. Dad stood it up on the door, the front end poking up into the sky.
“You’d think that in this day and age meteorologists would be smarter,” Pete complained. Vance thought he was trying to sound like their dad.
“They’re not the problem,” Dad said. “The real stinker is that in this day and age we think we know more than we really do. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded now and then how little we actually control.”
The second ski was easier to get through, but as Dad pulled it forward, Vance’s jacket caught on the toe clip and pulled him off his unbalanced knees. He fell into the front seats and snapped the ribbon-wide ski in two.
“Nice move,” Pete said.
“You come do it,” Vance retorted.
“Just get another one,” Dad instructed. They were all the same size and, for the situation, interchangeable.
By the time a complete pair stood in the tunnel with their poles, Vance’s fingers were burning with cold. His gloves were wet and useless. He took them off and shoved his hands under his armpits to warm them, feeling uneasy about his dad’s departure.
Pete shoved a water bottle and a bag of peanuts at their father, who tucked them into his jacket.
“Stay here, stay together,” he repeated. “The minute you leave this truck I don’t have any way of knowing where you are.”
“If you’re not back in a day I’m coming after you,” Pete said.
Dad zipped himself all the way up to the neck and pulled his face muffler off the dash. “Are you a boy or a man, Pete?”
“C’mon, Dad. Really?”
“Prove it to me by doing the smart thing. The hard thing. Stay put.” He pulled the muffler down over his nose and mouth. A wink at Vance was his only good-bye, then he climbed out of the truck.
Pete and Vance didn’t say anything to each other while they listened to their father kick his boots into the toe clips and find his balance in the deep snow. The powder would make for tough progress. Pete sulked.
Vance clambered over the seat and hefted himself out of the cab with his numb hands. His father was already headed south, looking small like a lost blue jay in the snow-covered landscape, where the trees seemed to have no trunks and the county road had disappeared. He should have been gliding, skimming the top of the snow. Instead, his moves looked more like a shuffle. The shiver that passed through Vance was not from the cold.
The sky above him was a weak blue eye plagued with gray cataract clouds. They swirled in impatient turns at the edges of clarity, threatening to press in on anyone who dared to pass. Vance watched his father until the clouds swooped in behind him like a flock of vultures and the wind started shrieking again with hungry cries. Their terrible bird droppings of white snow came down thick this time, smearing the distinction between land and sky, and quickly filling in the tunnel that rose from the truck.