The Anonymous Premature Burial
Fate here to help someone buried in their own delusions of grandeur.
Fate,
I’ll try to keep this short, but basically, snowboarding was my life a few years ago. I was too old and too slow to do anything on a competitive level, but I had a job as an instructor at a resort. I soon made friends with some ski mountaineers who started taking me out in the backcountry once I’d done everything at the resort, including the Extreme terrain and stuff that you had to take a gate out of bounds to access, and gotten bored with it.
We were always safety conscious. My buddies had all taken avalanche safety courses, and they lent me the materials they’d kept around so I could study them, being too broke to afford to take a class myself. I was able to score some equipment (beacon, shovel, probe) off a sympathetic ski patroller who’d recently retired and was moving to Florida, so I was as set as my friends.
We also always checked the avalanche forecast for the area we planned to go riding. On the day I’m writing to you about, avalanche conditions were moderate, which is the second-lowest danger rating. Our route wasn’t supposed to go past any seriously steep terrain or in the direction where the forecasters cautioned the heaviest snow loading was said to have taken place, so we figured we’d approach with caution and only proceed if all looked good.
The first two miles or so were fine because they were all in the trees. The first couple slopes we crossed once we got near treeline, we went one at a time, and we all crossed safely. I guess that made us cocky. The third slope didn’t look any different from the first two, and while the first three of our group made it across just fine, when the last two of us went across maybe a little too close together, all hell broke loose.
I was swept off my feet instantly. No time to scream as the snow hurled me down into the trees. I could feel branches catching at my body and then snapping off as I flew past. I couldn’t grab onto anything, though, because of how fast I was going and how much snow was pressing in on me from all directions. I just knew I was going to die. What I didn’t know was whether it would be from hitting a tree at 70 miles per hour or suffocating when that snow settled on top of me.
It took me a second to realize that the snow and I had stopped, probably because I was so surrounded by white whether I was moving or not that I couldn’t tell the difference until my surroundings stopped hissing around me and pressed in hard. I instinctively took a deep breath, even though I knew logically that it would do me no good…and then had to take another, and another, and another, because much to my amazement, I could actually breathe!
I wouldn’t learn until my buddies homed in on my beacon’s signal half an hour later that the heavy, slabby snow had settled around me in such a way that there was a small fissure running across my mouth and chin, else I’d have suffered the same fate as the friend who’d crossed that slope at the same time I had. One of the Search and Rescuer team who eventually came to get us off the mountain said that my slope buddy had most likely died only minutes after burial.
I had broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken pelvis, two broken legs (in different places), and a slew of torn and twisted muscles. I had to move back in with my parents because I needed so much help over the next few months. When the next ski season started, I talked to my supervisor to see if maybe I could work in a limited capacity, just with very young kids who were raw beginners perhaps, but she said that while they’d be happy to have me back once I could pass the physical, liability concerns dictated that I’d have to transfer to one of the off-slope departments if I wanted to work that season.
I decided to take it as a sign that I was meant to go a different route. I’d heard so many stories about people who survived wilderness disasters that were meant to be unsurvivable, climbers on Everest and K2, that guy who had to cut his own arm off to survive a canyoneering accident. Now I had a survival tale of my own to tell that could, I hoped, be a lesson to others and also, I selfishly also hoped, maybe net me enough money that I wouldn’t have to work for the resort or anyone else ever again.
Outside of a couple podcasts, a brief segment on the local news, and the guys at the bar down the street, though, no one seems interested in my story, at least not enough to pay me in more than a free beer or two. Don’t get me wrong, I like beer, but…there has to be something more to this experience, right? Clearly you, or the Cosmos, or whoever meant for me to make a difference, or I wouldn’t have survived to do so…right?
For legal purposes, I meant - and mean - to do nothing that might cause bodily harm to any person or property, and therefore, any difference you might have meant to make is one you’ll have to make meaning for on your own.