Thunder In Her Body (51 page)

With poles digging deep for speed and traction, the five men moved with breakneck speed down the mountain, trying to stay ahead of the cascading avalanche.  But, with the snow moving down at as much as one-hundred miles an hour, there was no way to outrun the flow.  Beckoning with one ski pole, Blaze tried to lead the group to the side of the avalanche in a futile attempt to get out of the oncoming rush, but it caught up with them and all five disappeared in the white cloud.  Then as fast as it had begun, the snow stopped moving far below where the men had been trapped – and all was silent.

The expert group of ski rescue personnel, which included several of Blaze’s Apache tribesmen, suited up their rescue dogs and organized an immediate search party.  As far as they knew, there were only five men on that run.  From the air, red jackets appeared to move back and forth in a systematic pattern, searching for the trapped skiers.  The dogs hurled themselves through the deep snow, sniffing periodically and moving on.  The rescue team stuck long poles down into the snow hoping to touch a man.  After more than two hours, one of the veteran dogs started digging furiously at a site.  The rescue team pushed her aside and began digging with their bare hands.  A ski pole was the first object to appear, and beneath it was a yellow and black gloved hand, then another.  Now digging with small snow spades, the upper torso of a man appeared.  He yelled that his friend was beneath him, and the rescue team began digging the hole wider as the first man was extricated.  As his boots exited the hole, they could see the orange and black knit cap of the other man.  In a matter of seconds, the second man was up and out of the hole.  Higher up the slope, two of the dogs alerted on another spot, and began their characteristic digging.  At about twenty feet apart from one another, these two more men were dug from beneath the packed snow.  But where was Blaze?

Using lanterns and torches, calling and punching holes in the snow, the rescue teams of men and dogs continued to search for Blaze long after darkness overtook them.  The command from headquarters was to cease the search until daylight the next day, and it was Aaron who took the call from the slopes.  With no hat or gloves on, and his jacket wide open, Aaron appeared white-faced at Lynette’s door.

“What’s wrong?” she immediately asked, seeing the terror on Aaron’s face.  “Say something damn it, what’s wrong?” she asked again impatiently.

“It’s Blaze.  There’s been an avalanche.  They haven’t found him yet,” Aaron said breathlessly.  “Now don’t panic.  They’ll find him.  They just had to call off the search until first light in the morning,” he tried to assure Lynette.

She stood looking at Aaron in disbelief.  She neither moved nor spoke.  She just stared at his face.  She kept staring as if she was trying to tune into something, but she never spoke.  Slowly she walked away from the door.  Stopping momentarily, she looked back at Aaron, who was truly dismayed by her behavior.  He thought she should scream or break down in tears, but she did nothing.  She just stared at him.

“Lynette, did you understand what I said?” he asked, not sure what to do or say.

Her eyes began to move sideways, back and forth, back and forth, the way a person scans the ground with a metal detector.  She was looking for something, Aaron could tell, but he wanted a response from her.  This was not normal.  Lynette walked slowly out of the foyer, down the hall and into her bedroom where she stood in front of the huge glass bay window.  She stared up at the silhouette of the mountain, but still she said nothing.

“Goddamnit Lynette, say something,” Aaron demanded as he followed her into

the room.

Still she did not speak.  Aaron advanced toward her to shake her, to make her say something, but before his hand touched her shoulder, she said, “Don’t! Don’t touch me.”

Aaron withdrew his hand quickly and shoved it into his coat pocket.  She placed her hands up over her face, covering her entire face, and she began to breathe deeply.  Four or five times she breathed deeply, raising her shoulders high, then letting them slowly relax.

“Take me up the road to the slope,” she said to Aaron, with no emotion in her voice.

“That road is hell at night, Lynette.  You know that, and they probably won’t let anyone up there until everyone is found,” he protested.

She didn’t argue with him.  Reaching beside the night stand, she picked up her purse and pulled car keys from it’s inside pocket.

“Oh no you don’t, damnit woman, you ain’t gonna tackle that road at night,” Aaron protested futilly.

She turned to him with a look he’d only seen on her face once before.  It was cold, mean and determined.  Her eyes squinted into narrow slits.

“My husband is on that mountain and there’s not a motherfucker in this world that can keep me off it,” she spewed at Aaron.  Knowing Lynette, he knew she was right.

“OK, shit, I’ll drive,” he relented.  “Get your coat or you’ll freeze your ass off,” he directed.

At no time did Lynette utter another word on the scary forty minute drive up to the ski slopes.  From the reflected glare of his headlights, he could see her eyes moving side to side, scanning for something.  When they reached the office where the assembled rescue team was disrobing and tending to the dogs, she walked like a zombie through the door.  Two of Blaze’s rescued companions stayed at the shack with the rescuers, waiting to see what they could do to help.  The other two were sent down the mountain to the hospital. They looked ragged and worn, but the two men stood immediately when Lynette entered through the wind-driven door.

“Where did you find the men?” she asked in an eerily calm voice.  The team leader took her and Aaron over to the large map on the wall and pointed to the two spots where the men had been extricated.

“Mrs. Snowdown, there’s nothing else we can do tonight, ma’m.  We’ll start out at first light in the morning.  I’m sure we will find him one way…” and his voice trailed off.  Lynette stared at the oversized topographical map for a long time, as if reading something from the swirls and rises, then turned abruptly and walked out onto the wooden deck of the headquarters shack.  She stared up the slope and she just stood still. 

“Talk to me Blaze,” she said in her mind. “Call me.  Speak to me.  I won’t let you go.  Talk to me.  Talk to me,” she kept demanding in her mind.  Aaron stepped up behind her.  “Don’t touch me,” she said in a strange whisper.
  For over an hour, she stood exposed in the freezing night.  Ice crystals clung to her hair and her ears were red and burning, but she stood, looking up at the mountain.  The men inside kept urging Aaron to bring her back inside where it was warm, but he knew not to touch her, even if he didn’t know why.

“Blaze.  Blaze.  Blaze.  Blaze, call me,” she was now screaming in her mind.  All of a sudden she wheeled around and burst back through the door into the brightly lit shack.

“He’s up there.  He’s alive.  We have to go get him
now
,” she shouted.  “He’ll die up there if we don’t.”

“Ma’m we can’t go back up there in the dark,” the team leader protested.

“Yes, by God you can,” she insisted angrily.  “You have snow cats.  You have plows with lights on them.  You have snow-making tractors.  I’ve watched them moving up and down these slopes too many nights from my bedroom window.  You’ve got snowmobiles.  You can get a vehicle up this damn mountain.  You will!  You will!” she demanded.  “I know where he is,” she shouted.  She moved quickly over to the map and placed her open palm on a part of the mountain not too far off the run where the avalanche took place.  She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and bowed her head.  “He’s here – he’s somewhere in here,” she said, certainty in her voice.

“Mrs. Snowdown, there’s no way you can know that.  There was no trace of him anywhere near where we found the others.  The dogs would have alerted,” the second team member spoke up, keeping his voice soft and controlled.  Aaron spoke up.

“Listen man, I can’t tell you how I know she’s probably right, but trust me, if she says he’s somewhere up there, and he’s alive, you’ve got to trust her.  Damn the cost to the county.  I’ll pay whatever are the expenses for the fuel, the drivers, whatever it costs, to fire up those damned tractors and go where she says,” he insisted.

Within 45 minutes, after much mulling and radio communications for permission, two of the tractors with the snow blowers on them were laboring slowly up the slope.  Ten, twenty, twenty-five minutes passed as the groaning machines inched slowly up the uneven slope, then she screamed, “Over this way, over this way, over there!” and she pointed to some trees obscured by the blackness.  Climbing down out of the cab with the vehicle still inching ahead, she fell flat into the deep show.  Before the tractor driver could halt the yellow monster and come around to pick her up, she started clawing and crawling toward the stand of trees.  She was screaming, “Blaze, talk to me.  Blaze, Blaze talk to me.  Call me.  Blaze!”

The tractor driver reached to pull her up by her arm out of the enveloping snow.  “No-o-o-o-o,” she shrieked – a horrifying shriek - as though someone was about to brand her with a white-hot iron, “Don’t touch me – don’t break the connection.  N-o-o-o-o” she shrieked again.  The piercing sound unnerved the driver.  He’d heard it in
Iraq when one of his buddies stepped on a land mine and lay wounded with parts of his body blown away.  She jerked away from his outstretched hands and pointed, “Over there!  He’s over there!”  The second big cat driver turned his search light over to where she pointed.  There was nothing.  “Over there she kept screaming!  Over there!” and she kept pointing to the trees as she tried to bring herself upright.  The two men pushed past her and struggled forward in the waist deep snow toward the spotlight-lit trees, with the one dog trying to get ahead of them.  The dog stopped.  He turned in a circle right next to a huge Ponderosa Pine, its rough trunk buried up to the second level of branches.  He sniffed hard.  Again he spun in a circle and started digging.  Lynette began to scream – a scream that was heard over the roar of the engines of the tractors. “Blaze------!!!”

The men began to dig furiously.  The dog barked incessantly. The snow-covered, sturdy shepherd-mix dog pulled up a hat - Blaze’s muskoxen knit hat they bought in Anchorage, Alaska on their honeymoon.  Trying with all she had, she surged forward, swimming, for her, in shoulder deep snow drifts; falling into depressions, clawing, beating at the snow, pulling herself to where she knew her husband was trapped.  Beneath the hat was a deep, dark hole, then Blaze’s shiny, wet head reflected from the searcher’s flashlight.  With tears and snot freezing on her face, her hair a mass of frozen mess and the buttons torn off the front of her coat, Lynette collapsed into the snow and  began to sing softly,
“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me…he once was lost but now he’s found …”

Blaze had taken a terrible blow to the head as the avalanche carried him downhill.  Tumbling out of control, the surging mountain of snow slammed him into first one, then a second larger hidden boulder.  The ski helmet shattered like a dropped ripe cantaloupe.  There was nothing to protect his head but a soft, woven knit hat.  The force and direction of the snow pushed him nearly 300 yards further down and the distance of a soccer field to the north of the slope where his companions were found.  When he woke the first time, he was covered by feet of suffocating snow and couldn’t tell which way was up.  He knew to spit, and gravity would pull the spit downward toward the earth, no matter which way he was suspended.  Beneath where the spit landed was the tiniest bit of a tree limb. Digging sideways, he found the trunk of the tree and used it to scratch and pull his way upward for the slightest bit of oxygen.  Once oxygenated, and with the snow out of all of his cranial orifices, he hunkered down against the rough trunk into a makeshift snow cave to protect himself against the blowing night wind.  As a Seal, he had learned how to survive in all climates.  This was a delayed test.  Then he fell back into unconsciousness.

Each time he lifted himself out of the debilitating haze into minimal awareness, he thought about his wife and son.  He was determined to survive.  He told her he’d never leave her.  As the hours passed, he shivered from the cold, but there was a warmth within him as he thought about Lynette – how she wrapped herself around him as they snuggled together each night.  He laughed at how hot they had been in that hotel in Beaver Creek – and how cold he was now. Where was that bear with all that warm fur now, he chuckled in his delirium?!  And he thought about his handsome son – and the strong blood that coursed through his veins.  He would live.  He had to live.  He had so much to live for.  His body hurt everywhere, but mostly it was his head.  It pounded and throbbed like a warrior drum being beat in a frenzy.  Suddenly, the pain went away and again the blackness of unconsciousness overtook him.  His body went limp and succumbed to the numbing cold of the frozen winter night.  He was helpless and the unconsciousness rendered him unaware that in his condition, he would die that night.  He could not call to his beloved Lynette.  But, his last conscious memory was the words
my wife.

The winds swirling mercilessly around the mountain at that elevation were too strong to call in a helicopter, so Blaze was slowly taken back down the mountain in the jerking and lurching snow-plow.  Up in the heated cab of the tractor, with his head wrapped in a bandage and neck supported by a bulky brace, Lynette wrapped first one, then a second blanket around him, then she wrapped herself around him and kept kissing his ice cold face.  She heard a cheer over the remote radio as the driver announced that they had found Snowdown and were bringing him down.  After securing the padded neck brace properly in place, the EMS paramedic bundled Blaze up under heat-warmed blankets then took vital signs as Lynette rode in the ambulance with Blaze.  By the time they made their way down the twelve-mile ski road, and the fifteen additional minutes to the County Hospital emergency room, Blaze was trying to sit up, and joked groggily with the paramedic.  In a spate of absolute vulgarity, so uncharacteristic for him, he joked with slurred speech that he didn’t worry so much about his feet or his hands freezing, he kept his hands tightly covering his dick because with a wife like his, that was the most important thing to protect!  The paramedic looked embarrassed and didn’t know whether to laugh or not with Lynette right there.  She smiled softly at the man who loved her so much and placed the tips of her fingers gently on his cold lips.  He touched them with the tip of his tongue, before his head involuntarily leaned back into the pillow and his weary eyes closed.