A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (20 page)

Snoqualmie Pass was closed for an hour because of an avalanche, and the sun’s light was a dead-gray glow that barely filtered through the falling snow. 1-90 eastbound out of Spokane was a trucker’s nightmare; big rigs were either jackknifed in the ditches or sitting safely on the side, defeated by some snow-packed pass. In Idaho, at 3
A.M.
, the sky simply collapsed, and wind-driven drifts spread across the icy pavement. Dawn in Missoula, Montana, consisted of a certain hazy brightness under glacial skies. The last total eclipse of the sun in the continental United States in this century was due in three days, and meteorologists working on special forecasts set the chances of heavy cloud cover at
about 90 percent. The odds for actually seeing the phenomenon were dismal.

Locals took that news much better than those of us who had spent considerable time and money to be in Montana in the dead of winter. I was sitting in a bar all festooned with lumberjack paraphernalia, bitching over a beer, when a three-hundred-pound log peeler suggested that I could go through the door marked
GENTLEMEN
, turn off the light for several minutes, and get the same effect.

Not exactly true, I thought. There just isn’t all that much in the way of Grand Terror in the men’s room. Eclipses ought to be awesome, as they were for our distant ancestors. When the lights went out at noon, those folks surely figured it was a message from Mr. Big that He wasn’t entirely happy with the way things were going.

The sun-worshipping Aztecs liked to sacrifice hunchbacks and dwarfs during an eclipse, which was apparently their way of saying, “We’re sorry.” In 840
A.D
. when the moon got between the earth and the sun and its shadow fell on Louis of Bavaria, son of Emperor Charlemagne, his heart clogged up with a greasy sort of fear, and he fell to the ground, lifeless as a rock. Louis of Bavaria, like a lot of big-time kings of the day, interpreted everything personally.

The ancient Chinese were able to predict eclipses, but they preferred not to take any chances. Moonshadow or no, the appropriately forewarned populace hammered away on drums and fired arrows at the sun to frighten a celestial dragon bent on dealing with the sun as if it were a macaroon. Legend has it that in 2134
B.C
. two astronomers, Hsi and Ho, sampled local wines to excess and failed to predict an eclipse. They were subsequently beheaded for incompetence.

These days incompetents are seldom decapitated, and there are a growing number of people who go out of their way to be in the shadow of the moon as it sweeps across the earth somewhere on the average of once a year. I know three of these self-proclaimed eclipse addicts personally. One, an award-winning science writer, traveled to Africa—
to Mauritania—to witness a total eclipse visible there in 1973. Now, Mauritania is one of the most Godforsaken places on the face of the earth, a scorching, poverty-stricken, sandstorm-wracked desert hellhole where his lips cracked and his brain boiled and where he lost twenty pounds after getting amoebic dysentery. He returned to the States a shriveled, wind-burnt hulk who babbled, not entirely coherently, about the transcendental experience of totality.

The other two eclipse addicts I know have no special interest in astronomy. One is a lawyer, the other a Sierra back-country guide. None of the three has ever been able to explain to me just what it is they find so fascinating about an eclipse—or why they are willing to spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for a few minutes’ thrill. All agree only that a total eclipse is worth the effort; beyond that, they say, it’s a situation in which “ya hadda be there.”

This time I had arranged to be there, viewing it all through a glass darkly. After the dragon ate the sun and spit it out, I figured I’d know if there was anything to this eclipse-addict business.

The trouble was, the weather didn’t seem to want to cooperate. My science-writer friend and I had conferred on this point. He had been collecting a lot of material from people who spend a lifetime studying something called “eclipse meteorology,” and had decided to go to a little town in the rainshadow of the Cascades. The path of totality was a band of darkness about 170 miles wide, north to south. It would sweep in out of the west, hitting Portland, Oregon, then curve gradually north through Walla Walla, Washington, and up to Missoula, Helena, and Lewistown, Montana.

Montana looked best to me. Mobility would be the key. If short-range forecasts showed clouds west of the Continental Divide, I’d run for the east. If there were clouds there, I’d head up to the high plains of north-central Montana. I suggested to my friend that if the Cascades were socked in, he’d have no alternative viewing site. He smiled smugly and waved his sheaf of eclipse forecasts. As it turned
out, forecasts three days before the event indicated that a big Pacific storm was riding in on the jet stream and that both of us were shit out of luck.

The Eastgate Liquor Store and Lounge in Missoula is a good place to have a drink and complain about the prevailing cloud cover. But the bar chatter there wasn’t about the weather; it was about some poor guy from Seeley Lake who had died an awful death the day before. He had been plowing the lake in preparation for a snowmobile race, and his thirteen-ton Allis-Chalmers road grader had cracked through the ice like a bowling ball through the top of a glass coffee table. It was, everyone agreed, the kind of thing you have nightmares about. Imagine coming up under the ice, searching for the hole, feeling the burning in your chest, trying to control the overwhelming desire to gulp that frigid water into your lungs. The ice is no more penetrable than a layer of solid steel, but you hammer against it, weakly, knowing then, with horrifying certainty, that you are dead.

The peculiar thing about the entire tragedy, they said at the Eastgate, was that the driver, Edward V. “Mike” Kelley, didn’t have to go out on the ice. Everyone in town had told him not to. A much lighter bulldozer had gone down only two weeks earlier, and the operator had been lucky to escape with his life. I wondered why someone would take a chance like that—money, machismo, job pressure, what?

Grand Terror was what I had come to Montana to experience, and since it appeared that the weather was going to get between me and my attempt to unravel the mystery of eclipse addiction, I decided to make a quick forty-mile run up to Seeley Lake. Darkness under the ice was going to have to substitute for darkness under the Big Sky, and one man’s terror would have to do for everyman’s.

T
he road runs by the lake, which is long and narrow and deep. Mountains rise on either side. The winter community at Seeley Lake is quite small, and if you sat long enough in Barney’s Bar and Cafe, you’d likely meet everyone in town. The first person I ran into there was Roy Brown, a husky, slow-talking man who had been on the grader with Kelley when it went down.

“Yeah,” Brown said, “I went out with him because I didn’t want him to go. Everyone told him not to do it. But he was determined, and I decided to go along and keep an eye on the ice. As soon as we hit the lake, there were all these popping noises, from the ice contracting. We began working the snowmobile course, but on the first turn we started to go through. The wheels dropped through the first layer of ice.”

The Montana winter had been especially severe, but there had been a few thaws. By late February the ice was honeycombed with air pockets and was perilously thin. There were two major layers separated by air and slushy snow. The back wheels of the grader dropped through the first layer, but the second layer held.

Brown and Kelley decided to get off the ice—fast. Kelley brought the plow blade up and rammed the accelerator down, but before they reached shore, the grader broke through the ice again. This time it didn’t stop at the second layer.

“Both doors of the cab were open,” Brown said, “and I was standing on a little four-inch ledge outside. I shouted that we were busting through and yelled at Mike to jump. I jumped off, and the last thing I saw was Mike still sitting at the wheel, being thrown backward. When I landed, the front wheels of the grader were just going under. The thing went down like a concrete block dropped in a bathtub.

“There were bubbles coming up and a sort of whirlpool
effect, sucking down big chunks of ice. I thought about going in after him, but I thought I’d be pulled down by the suction of the sinking grader. It was pulling all sorts of stuff down with it, like the draft behind a big truck on the highway.”

Brown lay out over the solid ice and cleared slush and float ice out of the hole so Kelley could get up. He began pounding big chunks of ice around the hole to direct Kelley to the surface. (Because sound underwater seems to come from everywhere, this was not an effective strategy.) “I started clearing away snow from around the hole to see if he had come up under the ice,” Brown said, “but it was a cloudy day and you couldn’t see through the ice at all. So I waited by the hole, hoping to pull him out when he came up.” But Kelley never surfaced, and when the bubbles stopped, Brown ran for help.

O
ver coffee at Barney’s, I asked Bruce Copenhaver—a reserve deputy, a member of the search-and-rescue team, and a snowmobile racer—why it was necessary to have
anyone
clear snow off the race course. On a straightaway, he explained, hopped-up snowmobiles can do 120 miles per hour, and loose snow on the track can be extremely dangerous. Powder thrown into the air by the drive belts can cut visibility substantially. A clear ice track makes for a faster, safer race.

That’s why Copenhaver had been out on the ice with a bulldozer several days before the Kelley tragedy. Unlike Kelley, Copenhaver is an accomplished scuba diver with experience in the arcane art of ice diving. When his Cat crashed through the ice, Copenhaver took a long, deep breath. But the Cat sank so fast that he found himself pressed tightly to the canopy over the driver’s compartment, unable to free himself. The bulldozer settled in the silt at a depth of about forty-five feet.

In the sudden stillness, Copenhaver struggled free of the canopy. He was in big trouble. The sudden shock of the
cold water had upset the delicate membranes of his inner ear, and he experienced a sudden burst of vertigo from the rapid pressure change. His ears ached, and the cold water sapped his will like juice being sucked from a section of orange. There was no visibility at the bottom of the lake; it was as dark as Dracula’s crypt down there. In the icy blackness, Copenhaver thought of the lesson instructors drum into every new diver: Panic kills. There is always time to think.

“Luckily,” Copenhaver told me, “I found I was positively buoyant.” He had been wearing thermal underwear, jeans, and snowmobile pants. Air was trapped between the layers. Ordinarily, the pressure at that depth should have compressed his clothes and forced the air out of them, but he had gone down too quickly for that to happen. Still, he knew he had to ascend in a hurry, before the pressure turned his clothes into a dozen or more pounds of dead weight.

Assuming that the Cat had dropped straight and a perfectly vertical line could be drawn from the machine to the hole, Copenhaver began kicking, moving as well as darkness and vertigo would allow along that imaginary line. There was a thick layer of snow on the ice, and the sunlight did not penetrate it. At thirty feet, Copenhaver saw the hole. Sunlight on the water made it look dimly fluorescent. It was like being in a huge, windowless, unlighted warehouse with one small skylight, just at dusk. A shaft of dying light penetrated the water.

Copenhaver was on a slight angle to the light and kicked rapidly toward it. His confidence grew. He even exhaled a little air and saw with satisfaction that he was ascending faster than the bubbles. Every scuba diver knows that smaller bubbles rise at about sixty feet per minute. Making a quick almost unconscious calculation, he knew he’d be on the surface in fifteen seconds. He could do it.

It wasn’t quite that easy. Copenhaver came up under a huge chunk of floating ice. He sank back down, tried another section of the hole, and once again hit ice. He was as close to panic as he had ever been when he burst through
the water on this third attempt. He pulled himself to an ice ledge and gulped great drafts of frigid air.

Lying there with his wet clothes freezing on his body, Copenhaver couldn’t stop coughing and spitting up a bloody, pink froth. The pressure of the water at forty-five feet had ruptured some blood vessels in the back of his sinuses, but the injury wasn’t serious.

Mike Kelley had been an older man, and one untrained in the art of ice diving.

C
openhaver and others on the search-and-rescue team had made several dives, looking for their friend’s body. They wore wet suits and boots and hoods worn in cold-water ocean diving, and they coated the exposed areas on their faces with lanolin. The dives were meticulously planned. They went down in teams following a descending line, each team of two connected by a close-quarters buddy line. One member of each team was tied to a line held by a tender on the surface. Fanning out for the search, they tied a pivot line to the descending line, and when they worked their way around an obstacle, one team held the point. Three sharp tugs at any time and the diver was pulled rapidly to the surface.

They found the grader at sixty feet, sunk into a soft layer of silt. Even with high-powered diving lights, visibility was a mere thirty-six inches. A thick cloud of mud and silt hung over the bottom to a height of about ten feet. One diver worked his way into the cab of the grader. Kelley’s body wasn’t there.

A former Navy diver who had seen too many bodies and who no longer worked with the search-and-rescue team devised an ingenious method of dragging the area where the grader had gone down. They hooked the body on the third pass. It was some fifty feet from the grader.

Another team dived to the grader and attached a cable. Five hundred yards away on the shore was a huge heel-boom crane, anchored to other heavy machinery and trees.
The cable was dragged over the ice and fixed to the crane, which strained against the weight of the twenty-six-thousand-pound grader. The cable sawed a line through the ice, and when the grader was close enough to shore, volunteer labor from the community cut huge blocks of ice and pulled them up with tongs. When the hole was large enough, they pulled the grader out of the lake. It came up front-end first, then twisted ponderously on its back wheels. Blue-black lake mud dripped from it, like some monstrous and alien thing.