Mckay Jenkins - The White Death

Prologue

For unless human nature has changed
considerably through the ages, what is
considered news, and therefore may be
remembered when the normal events of daily
life are long forgotten, is the unusual,
particularly the violently unusual. And what is
more violently unusual than a natural
catastrophe?

Dorothy Vitaliano,
Legends of the Earth

One of the stories we have come to tell about wilderness is that disasters are only disasters when people are killed. If a hurricane hits a Caribbean beachhead that has never been developedno homes destroyed, no cars overturned, no electricity knocked outthere wont be any footage of a reporter in foul weather gear, standing out in the rain, describing the terrible scene. If a tidal wave rolls across the Atlantic and fails to flip a single boat, the human community will never hear about it. If a fifty-thousand-ton mud slide obliterates an unpopulated slope somewhere in the middle of the Andes, well never know. Yet the simple point is that these terrific forces exist, and always have; they are as much a part of the interplay between weather systems and geography as sweet sunshine and summer rains. Natural forces become natural disasters only when they get in the way of human endeavor; danger is only danger when it is filtered through the human imagination. This is as true for inanimate forces as it is for so-called dangerous animalswolves, grizzly bears, great white sharkswhich have been systematically sought out and destroyed to eliminate human fear. The trouble with hurricanes, and tidal waves, and mud slides is that they cant be hunted down and shot.

There are few more dangerous places on earthfew places where it is easier for people to diethan the high mountains. Pilgrims looking for God, miners looking for gold, mountaineers looking for both: all have found mountains unmoved, indifferent to their noble intentions as well as their base ones. Throughout recorded history, legends abound detailing the dangers that come to those foolish enough to test the worlds high places. Russian, Czech, and Slovak folklore tells of mountain creatures with the face of a woman, the body of a sow, and the legs of a horse. When storms raged in Germany, villagers believed that the ghostly Wild Huntsman was abroad with his pack of baying hounds, riding furiously and slaughtering everything in his path. In the fifteenth century, mountain travelers were often led through the high places blindfolded, since the Alps were thought to contain visions that might drive them mad. Residents of the Swiss mountains believed that atop the Matterhorn was a ruined city inhabited by the souls of the dead. The East African Mountains of the Moon, given their name by Ptolemy, were thought to be so enticing that whoever looked upon their snowy peaks would be drawn to them as if by a magnetic pull, and could only be released by death. Echoes were the voices of ghosts, storms the carnal revels of Satan and his witches.

For centuries, Europeans avoided climbing mountains, for fear of upsetting the dragons they knew to inhabit them. Some of these beasts were thought to look like serpents with the heads of cats, others had bat wings and long, hairy tails; an eighteenth-century scholar gathered depositions, given under oath, about these beasts. There are dragons with and without wings, it was reported, with and without legs, with and without crests; dragons with cat faces, with human faces, and with nondescript faces; dragons that breathe fire and that do not breathe fire. An Alpine traveler named Johann Scheuchzer wrote in his 1723 book Itinera Alpina that although surely some dragons were fables... from the accounts of Swiss dragons, and their comparison with those of other lands, such animals do exist. Early Europeans were content to leave the mountains be, to live by the rivers, travel the valleys, and, only when necessity compelled, to cross high passes. When wars or pilgrimages or the search for new horizons demanded that they cross these passes in winter, travelers often found their greatest fears realized. The old myths were right. Dragons did exist. Not as fire-breathing beasts, but as avalanches.