AIMEE LOWE | THE CREVASSE

AIMEE LOWE | THE CREVASSE

It began with 23-year-old me having been dumped by Scott, my high school sweetheart of six years. As I recall, I deserved it in a variety of ways but didn’t actually know how to live without him.

Nights, I drive past his apartment to see the light on in his window. By day, I take routes on campus that might throw us together. I guess you could call it stalking, but that’s too energetic for a hungry ghost with half her substance gone.

I ask around and am told he’s seeing another woman who, like him, is in medical school. I myself never seem to get my shit together and have changed majors more than once before chipping away at a BA in English. Also like Scott, the new girlfriend is from a backpacking family and their breaks from school are filled with fun campouts.

I love nature, sure. Summer swims in Lake Washington. Botanical gardens. But the wilderness felt vaguely dangerous to a child of parents more comfortable with books and cooking shows than pitching tents. Scott had encouraged me by planning our trips and organizing supplies. He had smiled when I called him the “pack animal,” sweating under the weight of our food, sleeping bags, and cook stove while my own small bag carried the sunscreen and a paperback. He batted away bugs for me, coaxed the fire and gave me the thicker of our two sleeping pads. He introduced me to mindstopping moments of beauty, yet me and the wilderness never went beyond a cool distrust.

But after the break-up, it comes to me: To win him back, I need to pull off the greatest makeover of my life. I will become an outdoors woman. The Navy Seal of outdoors women, in fact: a Seattle Mountaineer.

The nine-month training course begins with an introductory class. The woodclad walls of the old Mountaineer clubhouse are lined with photographic portraits of prior classes dating back to 1912. Those first women Mountaineers wear brimmed hats with netting tied under their chins and long wool skirts atop lace-up ankle boots. Couldn’t be too hard if they scaled mountains in skirts. As the portraits move from left to right, woolens give way to modern sunglasses and polypropylene jackets, but all graduates share the zesty gleam of adventure, a proud lineage to which I am now a part. I like myself better already.

We take our seats in the lecture hall. There’s one woman for every five men, and none besides me wearing make-up or carrying a purse.

The instructor has handsomely-weathered skin and a strong profile, itself a small mountain range. He wears a close-fitting Capilene top that reveals a fit torso and pants with multiple pockets and loops with bits of dangly gear. He hikes up his pants before sitting on the edge of a table and looks out across the group with eyes that have seen a thousand trails, have been humbled by majesty.

He skips the introductions and gets right to it. “Given time, every one of you will come to know someone who has died in the mountains. Hypothermia. Sliding off a sheer face. Hidden crevasses swallowing a body whole.”

Loving his humor, I turn to the woman next to me and chuckle.

Her eyes stay fixed dead ahead on the instructor, who swings his focus onto me. There’s no rebuke in his gaze, only a solemn, laugh-at-your-ownperil look.

“We’re going to learn safety in this course, people,” he says. “Safety.”

In the next three months, I learn new words, muscular words. Crampon. Piton. Carabiner. I spend two years’ savings on equipment, buying the latest and sleekest of everything. I get a gym membership and labor like a penitent on the elliptical with sandbags in my backpack. I tie knots, learn self-arrest with an ice axe and study elaborate diagrams of ropes and pulleys for crevasse rescue.

Glacier Day arrives and the group meets in the parking lot at the base of Mt. Rainier. We don our crampons and glacier glasses, the ones with side shields that protect against the blinding white. I’ve waited months for this. Not for the glacier, but to finally wear my badass glasses and look like a Mountaineer. We crunch through the icy snow about an hour up and join the lead team who has located a suitable crevasse for practice. Here, we will take turns controlling ropes and being lowered into the ice cave.

From a safe distance, the crevasse reminds me of a wide, pale blue ribbon thrown playfully across the ice. Not so bad while I’m tucked between instructors in the sunlight, watching others go first.

Then it’s my turn. My legs are threaded through a figure eight of rope that cups my buttocks from below. A carabiner clasps the rope to a harness at chest level. I crunch ahead to within a few feet of the crevasse and suddenly see it’s wider than a man and three times as long, its shape defined by yawning jigs and jags. The snow crust gives way to a sickening sheer drop with no bottom in sight, dark as twilight.

I laugh, my eyes wild behind the sunglasses.

I feel dizzy and have to sit down in the snow.

“You’re doing great,” the instructor says with gusto. “Nearly there.”

I turn onto my knees to crawl away. “I don’t think I can—"

“Over you go,” he says and blocks me with his legs. For the first time I wonder if he has a military background.

The scene attracts some attention; the excited chatting quiets and a couple of classmates murmur. I turn back to sitting and scoot one hip forward at a time, feeling the rasp of frozen snow under my butt until I’m close and ease my legs over the edge.

“Good. Good. We’ve got you.”

I lower my glasses, letting them hang from my neck, and glance back at the classmates training on belay. If they don’t “got me,” there’s no coming back. I grab the rope with both hands at heart-level. My heels give one tiny push and I slide over the lip, falling weightless, a pinched-off whimper in my throat. Then the rope tightens and pulls me up short.

I dangle in mid-air, lowered jerk after jerk as my team strains against the heft. The rope that had once seemed indestructible now feels like a wisp of spider silk and the only thing between me and certain death. On all sides, I’m dwarfed by giant glossy wedges of ice rising up around me. They drip and creak and all fissures point down into the cold deep.

The glacier absorbs every color of the spectrum but blue and blue is refracted by an infinity of crystals, creating its otherworldly hue. It absorbs my body heat, too, drawing it out bit by bit until my teeth chatter and my skin is colorless. No life can exist here. The glacier sleeps eternally in the pale blue dream of her own melting and creaking and shifting and refreezing, in what I now feel is a truer form of hell: indifference. She doesn’t care about my warm animal body or that I’m alone or if my rope snapped, I’d fall too far to retrieve. The dream is all.

I look up at the golden slice of sunlight, remote as heaven, remote as being happy and Scott loving me again, and start to cry. The tears roll out warm but freeze halfway down my face.

Unable to let go of the rope, I let my nose run and cry in little shudders, a shaken snow globe of sadness, loneliness, and fear.

The rope begins to move again and hoists me back up over the lip. I slide the glacier glasses on before crawling onto the snow.

“Nothing like it, right?” The instructor beams.

I come to standing and flash my brightest smile. “Wow,” I say.

One month later, I climb to the summit of Mt. Rainier, a shallow basin framed by a sloping spine of andesite and basalt rock. In the end, I did not win Scott back or even score points for trying. But this time, the mountain is not indifferent.

From basecamp at 10,000 feet, we awaken at 2:00am for the final ascent. Big talk of “bagging the peak” has died away, as each now knows only the mountain can grant safe passage.

That night, Rainier is crowned with a ring of stars and a full, perfect moon that pours light over us as we cling to her side, roped together in single file. Below, thousands of feet of sheer drop are washed in sparkling ghost blue. Above, she is all massive folds and swirling geometries. We stop to take it in.

When our breathing eases, the air is as hushed as the suspended moment before a kiss, and I fall deeply in love with her.

She loves me back. And for one shimmering night, that’s all that matters.

When an injury ended a promising career as an under-employed actor, Aimee Lowe embarked on journeys to the summit of Mount Rainier, the feet of an Indian guru, teaching English in Japan, and becoming a hospice nurse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she resides. Her writing draws from a deep well of embarrassing life choices that—through the magic of writing— become stories to share with new friends.