I AM SO GODDAMN DESPERATE HERE'S A STORY

Donner SummitOct. 31, 1996 Cigarettes might save us. Because of John’s habit—which I’ve lectured him about, since Nana died of emphysema—we have his Bic lighter that Brandon’s been using to relight the fire. We dug up dry twigs and branches under the snow—so much of it this early in the season. I kept an eye on the weather before this trip and knew an off-shore depression headed our way. I thought we’d get rain and told the boys to pack their rain gear. But not snow. Boys. I still call them that though John’s thirty and Brandon’s twenty-six. I can’t help feeling like this is all my fault. This was supposed to be our time—the men’s time—to bond. After all those years spent backpacking, teaching them everything I know—yelling at them each time they screwed something up—it comes to this: John and I haven’t spoken in a day. 
Nov. 1stBreak in the snow this morning, but no sun. Wind out of the West. John just returned. The snow’s too deep. He’s flushed and wet, rubbing his lobster-red hands together and holding his armpits. He still hasn’t even looked at me. That was his second attempt to reach the pass around Mount Judah. If we can make it there, he thinks, it’s all downhill afterwards, and only two miles back to Donner Summit where the car’s parked. It’s been a series of screw-ups. First, choosing the time for this trip. We’ve always gone in October, our favorite time of the year in the Sierra. The mosquitoes are gone, the weather’s still warm, but not the scorching heat of summer, and stunning yellows and reds paint the willows and aspens. But we’ve never gone this late in the month, and we’ve never seen snow, until now. These early storms come in sometimes, though. I wasn’t thinking. The boys said they wanted to skip the trip this year. I couldn’t get out of work because the dealership ran an end-of-summer blowout sale that ran over two months and after that we had inventory. But I wouldn’t hear of missing our annual backpacking week. We haven’t missed this trip in sixteen years and I would be damned if a little rain stopped us. I talked John into going late in the month and he scheduled the time off work. Brandon’s still in school (who knows if he’ll ever finish), with an otherwise open schedule. So this became the week. I wanted me and the boys to be together. We should have just skipped it. 
Nov. 2ndFroze hard last night after it rained in the afternoon. Terribly cold. To think how beautiful the weather was when we started. Sixty-five degrees that morning and by afternoon we’d just come around and down the windward side of Mount Judah when a cold rain fell, which felt good after the hot hike up and around the mountain. Little did we know that while it rained at six thousand feet—the temperature dropping into the forties—at seven thousand the snow piled in drifts. By night it sifted down in thick flakes. We thought we’d get a dusting; in the morning we had eight inches of powder, and still falling. Today John complained about wanting a cigarette. He ran out.
Nov 3rdBrandon just said that he, and not I, had spilled the pot of boiling snowmelt while trying to feed the fire. I’m grateful to him but guilty all the same. John took it well. He said that’s a problem, but we’re not going to let problems get the best of us anymore. I wonder how he’d have reacted knowing that I spilled the water that put the fire out. The snow’s very deep and there’s a crust over it. Today’s windy, out of the southwest. 
Nov 4th Donner Summit. If there isn’t irony in this situation then I don’t know what irony is. The Donners got caught in the snow at the lake here, about a mile from us as the crow flies, over a thousand feet below us in elevation. They wanted to get to where we’re stuck now, and beyond, down the windward side of these mountains into the Valley. The snow got too deep and without enough food they fell to eating from dead bodies to stay alive. Now we’re stuck up on the mountain and we want to get down to where they camped winter-long, beside Donner Lake, in Truckee, where there are heaters and warm clothes and hot fast food. Right now no blue skies, but there’s been a break in the storm.
Nov 5thFinally blue skies that lift our hopes. But it’s so damn cold, and the snow: dazzling white and endless like a diamond-covered desert. I stayed in the tent, unable to walk, the snow blinding me. Today John made another attempt to summit Mount Judah. We cut pieces from the tent’s rain fly to wrap around our boots in a futile try to keep them dry. John wants to know how the fire went out even though that happened two days ago. If he’s delirious he might be getting hypothermic, so we huddle together for warmth. 
Nov 6thSnow started again last night and carried on to this morning. It’s piled up around the tent and windy. I still can’t help thinking I got us into this mess. It might snow for a week or ten days. In that kind of weather they don’t even snowplow Old Highway 40 where the car’s parked. Even if we made it back we’d have to dig our way in. And then what? Dig ten miles out to Interstate 80? The first morning when we awakened to the snow, Brandon went to start breakfast but mis-punctured the propane canister for the backpacking stove and our fuel wheezed into the air. John was upset but asked if I’d remembered to bring both stoves. And I had brought both canisters, but only one stove top. How was I supposed to know one stove took a certain canister and the other an entirely different kind? You’re supposed to double-check all your gear, remember? John said. I knew that, of course. I’d yelled at them to do just that when they were little. I’m kidding myself and it is my fault that we don’t have a working stove. So, instead of the eggs and oatmeal we’d packed in for breakfast we munched granola bars and decided to head back to the car. We thought there couldn’t have been that much snowfall overnight, but halfway back up the mountain we were in it to our waists. We’d lost the trail and twice Brandon slipped on a submerged rock or fallen tree and almost broke a leg. My own legs cramped up and then we ran out of water. We found this clearing in the pines and Brandon and John stamped the snow down and packed it and we pitched the tent again. 
Nov 7thIt’s got to be 10 degrees out here and, because it was seventy-something when we left for this trip, the only layers we have are t-shirts, sweaters, and raincoats. The fire’s what kept our hopes alive. I’m worried about John getting frostbite, the way he’s been trekking the snow in jeans and rain fly-wrapped hiking boots. He keeps saying, “I just wish I had a fucking cigarette.” The pines bend under the snow weight like angelic question marks. The snow, when it seeps to the skin, so cold it burns, tightens the muscles like frozen rubber. Ice gathers in our nostrils, on our whiskers, our breath pumps out like smoke from our smoldered fire: blue, cold, dead. For hours John has been short with me. Come on, Dad. We don’t have that far to go. He rants about trying to make it to the summit, but he’s wrapped, naked in his sleeping bag. Now he’s talking about the stove again. If only he’d been there to make sure I packed the right gear, he says. It’s his own damn fault for living in Reno. His mother and I have wanted him back in Sacramento since he graduated, but he met that Barbara of his, whom Louise can’t stand. I think Barbara’s just fine, maybe a little bossy. I don’t understand why he’s always spending Thanksgiving with her family. He could spend it with us once in a while. Maybe this year. 
Nov 8thSnow’s stopped. I thought I heard distant voices calling, a helicopter’s blades behind the icy wind. But we can’t tell with the storms in these mountains. We think we hear anything hopeful. I expect that even if we can’t get out of here rescue teams will look for us. Louise knows we were on the Pacific Crest Trail, and so would Barbara, I assume. Jesus save us. If they haven’t heard from us after news of the storm they’d call the authorities. We can’t find any wood, and Brandon never got the fire relit. Twice John has looked back at me where I sit here writing this. His look is sad and tired, maybe lost. No anger, disgust, or fear. I’ve become the old man I always swore I never would, when he was little, after he awakened in the middle of the night and walked, crying, to the family room where Louise and I watched television and he complained of his nightmare where I got old and died. 
Nov 9thWe ate the eggs—cooked once we got the fire going—and all of our granola bars. Food left: a bag of trailmix each, and a large bag of beef jerky. Enough to last a few days, maybe five, if we ration. 
Nov 10thJohn no longer talks of trying to reach the summit. He and I bickered over the stove, and he gets upset (even though he won’t say so) when I can’t move as easily as he and Brandon. And though I know Brandon’s feeling sorry for me—which is why he took the blame for the fire going out—he must feel some resentment too. He even thinks a cigarette might make him feel better, if only he had one. I can’t feel my feet—hardly my hands while I write this. For the longest time my feet killed me with burning pain, like the pins and needles shooting when your foot falls asleep. But for the last four hours I haven’t felt a thing in my feet at all, so I took my frozen boots off. The two small toes on my right foot were yellow, turning black. John retreated to the tent to wrap himself in his sleeping bag. He cursed Brandon—you’ve got to be careful about the fucking fire—still going on about that. Fucking fire fucking fire.     
Nov 11thThey found us! This morning Emergency Search and Rescue came over the ridge above us—four men on snowshoes! They airlifted us out and got us down to Truckee—thank the Lord! In the hospital right now. Snowblindness and frostbite, they say, but I seem to see just fine. Now there are my kids to deal with. Things came to a head when my legs cramped. I’d been scooping red-skinned handfuls of snow to melt in my mouth for water. I can’t make it, I said. Yes, you can, John said. It’s only a little farther, he said. Just hang in there. Then Brandon started to cry. He’s always been overly sensitive, wet his bed until he was ten years old. No wonder he can’t graduate from college and still lives at home. We’re not leaving him here, he blubbered. Of course not, said John. He pulled me to my feet, which hurt like hell and I yelled and struck out, pushing John who stumbled in the snow and fell down the slope, flakes sprinkling his hair like massive dandruff. That’s when he got up and started back up the mountain. I could give a shit about him, he said to Brandon. He’s the reason we’re in this mess. 
Nov 12thHaven’t seen the boys yet, though Louise and Barbara have been in to see me. I hate hospitals. Louise knows that, so she brought me some hot creamed onions, like Nana used to make—my favorite. They’re calling us extremely lucky—a miracle, even—on the news. They say that John kept saying he went on to the pass but the snow got so deep he was unable to find the trail. Brandon says, “Snow storms are dreadful to us now.” All I can think is that it froze hard last night, and what if we were still up on that mountain, the three of us losing it? It’s very cold this morning, even in this hospital bed. But the sun shining brilliantly through the window renovates my spirits, praise God. Barbara asked if the reporters had been in to see me. And they have. I told them: “We prayed the God of mercy to deliver us if it be His will.” When the reporters asked what I would have done had the rescuers not come for another day, week, etcetera, I couldn’t say, but thought about how some of the old folk, they always say the snow will be there until June. Louise said, holding my hands, teary-eyed, that Thanksgiving will be extra special this year. We’re so lucky, she said, to have each other.