Rising from the Ice

It took Corbin a little while to remember where he was & what was happening around him. When he had first opened his eyes—or at least thought he had—everything was dark..., & his head hurt. But he seemed to be sitting up, blanketed for the most part in something wet & cold. He reached beside him & felt another seat covered in frozen, cracked vinyl. Fumbling around he found his set of keys, a pair of gloves, flashlight & what he guessed was a headrest.

With some difficulty, he managed to pull his left side free from what he now assumed was snow (though he was having trouble feeling with his bare hand). He picked up the flashlight & switched it on. Supporting it with his left wrist (as his fingers & thumb didn’t seem to be of much use yet), he flashed it around the cab. Clearly, he was in his pickup, buried in a wall of white all around.

He was beginning to remember—the storm, the drive, parking on the lawn which turned out to be the pond, falling through the ice….

How was he not dead? Even assuming the ice had held & was now frozen solid, shouldn’t he have died of exposure or asphyxiation?

He remembered having put the tool on his keyring together…, no…, he’d never picked one up. He checked his keys—only those to his pickup, apartment, office & cabin. He’d used the headrest from the passenger seat to break the window, just as he had seen on Facebook.

So why did he have such a distinct & clear memory of using a breakout tool?

He’d have to figure that out later. Right now, he needed to get himself out of there before he really did succumb to the elements. He tried moving his feet, but they were stuck. He tried again, pushing down with the left while lifting with the right. He heard a crack, like that of a sheet of rock candy being broken in two…, or a thin sheet of ice.

Kneeling in the snow which had drifted into the driver’s seat, he began digging with his bare hands, only to jerk them back as it felt like razor blades slicing into the tips of his fingers. He brushed the snow from his forehead with the back of his wrist & discovered the source of his headache—a huge knot over his right eye. When had he hit his head? And why was he taking time to think about it? His first order of business had to be freeing himself from this icy tomb. He reached back to grab his gloves. As he put them on, he noticed fresh blood smeared across them. The ice really had cut his hands!

Newly armed with stiff leather, Corbin began scooping the snow behind him into the cab. He fashioned little footholds for himself as he proceeded ever upward, digging toward the sky. When he finally broke through to the surface, he wasn’t sure he had. The snow continued to fall so heavily all he could see was dark white. But then he felt a rush of cold air & heard the wind as it howled over & through the pines.

He poked his head above the snow to find himself atop a ten-foot drift which covered the entire cab & part of the bed. The wind had helped create an architectural phenomenon, the snowbank cresting like a great wave above the truck while leaving half the bed nearly clear. If he’d known which way to dig, he could have saved himself a good five feet.

He could tell it was daylight, but the blizzard made it impossible for him to know what time of day. He could have several hours to find the cabin, or it might just be a few minutes. If it got dark again, it would be a lot more difficult & dangerous.

He could see some of the provisions he’d brought along in the back of the truck—they wouldn’t be too bad to dig out—but he couldn’t see the cabin. He knew it had been on his right as he drove in & that it wasn’t too far. He hoped if he headed off in that direction, he would find it before completely losing sight of his tailgate.

He climbed atop the snowbank & immediately pulled up his hood. He’d worked up quite a sweat digging himself out, & now, combined with the temperatures, snow & wind, that sweat was threatening to turn him into a deep freeze. If he didn’t get into the cabin soon, it wouldn’t matter that the pond hadn’t claimed him.

Corbin stepped out onto the crest of the snowbank & immediately fell through, sliding down several feet before falling rump-first into an air pocket. He wasn’t sure which was worse—the difficult time he had extricating his hind end or the fact that the pocket extended over two feet back. “Make that seven feet I could have saved,” he muttered to himself as he slid the rest of the way down the bank.

The snow at the bottom was still a good three feet deep, having completely covered the wheel wells & most of the side of the bed. Looking out toward where he believed the cabin to be, it appeared that three feet might well be the shallow end. Of course, he couldn’t see very far. Maybe it got better. Right!

He had nothing to tie to the truck to keep him from getting lost, so he didn’t dare just wander. He would have to do his best to maintain a straight line by busting through the mounds of snow in front of him. The good news? Busting through deep mounds of drifting snow should leave a nice trail back to the truck. The bad news? Given the snow & wind, that path wouldn’t last for long.

Corbin hooked what he had begun to call his left claw on the side of the truck, then took his best guess as to where the cabin should be. Using his right arm, he marked a line in the snow for him to follow, then worked his way through. He intended to use the tailgate as his reference point for maintaining a straight line for as long as he could see it. After that, he would have to rely on the path itself, a much shorter frame of reference in a blizzard than that of a jet-black pickup truck.

His progress was slow & arduous. When he got to the point where he found himself wishing he was back in the cab of his truck, thinking he would have been better off just staying there, he decided he should begin thinking about the other end of this journey. If he didn’t find a way to motivate himself, he would soon give up & surrender to the elements.

He thought about the fire he would build & how good it would be to feel warmth again. When that dissolved into a realization that the chimney would probably be blocked by snow & who knows what kinds of nests & debris & how he would ever get it cleared, he turned to fantasy.

What if Heather had said yes? He wouldn’t even be out here right now. They would have been married; both would have finished their doctorates & been teaching together in some university. They’d probably have a couple of kids by now, & the fireplace would already be lit. They would be sitting on the couch, arms around each other, drinking tea or hot chocolate, watching the kids play & talking about what they were going to have for supper. Blizzards can be good for that sort of thing.

When he could no longer suspend his disbelief over that scenario, he turned to other what ifs. Like, what if Leah had taken his hand instead of laughing & said, “That sounds nice, but can I take a raincheck? I have to get home tonight.” He would have moped some, but he also would have been anxiously awaiting getting back to work so he could make good on that promise. Or better yet, what if she’d said, “Yes”? They would have had coffee, talked for a while & gone home. During the storm they would have called on the phone just to make sure the other one was alright, but they would have been free to talk for hours.

And by the time he arrived at the inevitable, “Yeah, right! She was never going to go out with you. She laughed in your face & ran out the door,” he would be to another drift, trying to decide whether he should attempt to go over, through or under (you know, dig a tunnel). On the other side, he would begin with a new set of names. Once, he even thought about Clarisse.

He managed to keep himself going for hours in this fashion, though every fiber of his being cried out with exhaustion. He knew that what he had already accomplished was inhuman. It simply wasn’t possible. Yet there he was, telling himself, “Just one more step, one more scoop, just one more…,” & thinking about the fantasies he knew would never come to pass.

But what he faced now was completely disheartening. The mountain of snow in front of him ascended beyond what he could see. The blizzard continued to rage so fiercely that at most he could tell ten feet of trail behind him. He had not found the cabin. He hadn’t even run into a tree. For all he knew he was still on the pond, fighting through the same drifts over & over again. And now he could see that the little bit of light he had enjoyed was diminishing.

Looking at this Leviathan standing before him, he felt helpless. He plopped himself down where he stood, barely noticing that the snow in which he was now sitting still came over his ears. His lower lip would have been trembling if the frostbite had not worked its way in so deeply as to keep it frozen in place. He would have wept if his tear ducts had not already turned to ice. What’s the point of taking one more step when each step you take gets you nowhere?

Even so, after sitting there for a few minutes, he forced himself to his feet. “One more step, just one more step.” He’d run out of names for his motivational fantasies. He’d used most of them more than once. Now, all he could tell himself was, “Someone is waiting for you, they’re waiting for you to come home. Maybe not Heather, or Leah, or Clarisse, or anyone else you have ever known, but someone is waiting for you. There just has to be.”

The rest of the way would have to be in the dark. The light of day was gone. He pulled the flashlight from his pocket & turned it on. He directed the beam up the snowbank in front of him. This wasn’t just Leviathan. It was Leviathan & Behemoth both, just waiting for the opportunity to devour him.

And so, he began one last pointless climb. He couldn’t imagine there would be another. He shouldn’t have made the last five. Heck, he shouldn’t have made it out of the cab.

Fifteen feet up, he felt the snow give way beneath his hands. His chin hit something hard, snapping his head back & splitting his lip wide open. He tumbled through the snow, crashing violently to the bottom.

Whatever he landed upon that finally put him down, it wasn’t snow.