The morning was so cloudy that the water-making pads were useless and I had to make do all day with shaking some crushed snow in the bottles. By now I was convinced that the raw meat was working; making me stronger, helping me walk better, taking away the lack of coordination caused by altitude sickness, and clearing my head. I continued to consider my meagre mealtimes a kind of sacrament, a purely physical version of Holy Communion, food that God had given me because he wanted me to live. It also somehow linked me to María. Perhaps this was only desperate rationalization but it helped to think of it that way.
Thinking was the one thing I did plenty of and, in my still weakened state, sometimes things came to me unbidden. Like photokeratitis, the technical name for snow blindness. I’d been trying to recall this term, off and on, for days. This morning, once I woke, it just popped into my head as if from nowhere. It felt like having bad sunburn on my corneas and more time outdoors would make it even worse. I had to do something about it. Apart from being damned painful, and frankly scary, there was no way I could stumble up and down a mountain near blind, with a permanent milky glare in front of my eyes. Patching up the broken sunglasses hadn’t worked and now I’d lost one of the lenses anyway. Best to give up on them entirely and try something else.
I pondered the problem for a while then took out my precious duct tape. It looked as if there was only about two or three feet of tape left on the roll. I would need every inch of it to attach some kind of snowshoes to my ankles, so I would have to be sparing now. But I had no other option. My Swiss Army knife had a tiny pair of scissors and I used them to cut off two six-inch strips of the gray tape. I stuck these together, sticky sides in, and then cut two narrow slits where my eyes would be. Lastly, I poked a small hole at each end of the duct tape double strip and threaded one of María’s shoelaces through them, tying knots to keep it in place.
Now I had an Inuit-style pair of homemade snow goggles. I tried them on and went outside. They worked pretty well, reducing my eyes’ exposure to sunlight and thus helping to keep my eyeballs from burning any further. I went back inside, cheered up and feeling I’d achieved something. And once again grateful to María for her provision.
In the evening I studied the night sky. In a few days there would be a full moon which would make walking at night-time easier and less dangerous. That’s when I would start my trek west. The surface snow would be hardest then and I could sleep in the sun during the day.
I shivered in the cold air, went back inside the plane and tried to get to asleep. As always, an image of María filled my thoughts and I dreaded dreaming about her again tonight. Instead I found myself thinking about favourite foods. The ones I would eat when I got off the mountain and back to civilisation. Even though I lived alone, I’d never been much of a cook but there were a few things I liked to make. I would sometimes make up a simple batter, using porridge oats, cover a few small fish with it, and pan fry them. Other times I would make a deep dish apple pie, using condensed milk to bind the sliced apples together inside the pastry. And then there were my favourite wines; Blasted Church, Therapy Vineyard’s Freudian Sip, delicious Hawke’s Bay whites from New Zealand.
By now my mouth was salivating and I worried that the release of digestive juices would make me sick, maybe even give me ulcers if I kept it up. By conjuring up an imaginary feast I was just torturing myself, causing myself suffering rather than joy. And what if I began dreaming about these fantasy meals? I pushed the images and made myself think about the reality of raw flesh and fat. It seemed to work and I eventually fell asleep.
I awoke to an odd sound of rumbling outside the plane. Immediately my heart started racing with stark, unconstrainable fear. I started to crawl to the door and then stopped dead as a torrent of what sounded like small rocks rat-a-tat-tatted against the fuselage. One larger rock hit the roof, cracking it, and made me duck my head in terror. The rock fall ended and I could now feel a low, trembling vibration in the distance. I pictured the Cessna’s GPS screen as I was coming down on my last descent and recalled that there was an active peak nearby, called the Tinguiririca volcano. Then that too stopped and I began to unwind my body and breathe more normally.
Even now I couldn’t settle. My nerves were on edge. I was completely strung out and panicked at every little sound, real or imaginary. Sheer loneliness consumed me, as if I was filled with it from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I started crying uncontrollably; convulsing in great spasms of sobbing, gulping, breathless, despairing grief.
I don’t know when or how I stopped. With the dirty rag beneath my head soaked in tears, I passed out in a welcome oblivion of the senses.
In the morning I slept late and awoke feeling strong and optimistic. My trauma of the night before, so all-consuming, now seemed distant and settled. I was now more determined than ever to brave the mountain directly west of me and descend the other side. After the volcanic tremors of last night if it had been possible to start out immediately I would have done so. Impatience, brought on by fear of another avalanche, was beginning to become a problem but I knew I wasn’t ready yet. I still had to get stronger, fitter, more limber after all the bruises, and my eyes needed time to improve too.
I also needed time to prepare my expedition, using everything available. Which meant utilising my natural ingenuity just as I’d done in making the sun shades.