IMAGINING AVALANCHES Bernard Mergen* George Washington University, Washington, DC ABSTRACT

IMAGINING AVALANCHES

Bernard Mergen*

George Washington University, Washington, DC

ABSTRACT: Most of the papers presented at this meeting describe avalanches in graphs, charts, mathematical formulas, and other dialects of the language of science. This paper surveys some fictional and poetic descriptions of snow slides by American writers from Helen Hunt Jackson and Mary Hallock Foote in the 1890s to Linda Hogan and William Dickey in the 1990s with a detour through the boys' fiction of Monty Atwater. An argument may be made that all descriptions of reality, verbal and mathematical, are simplifications, so we need the imagined avalanche to fully understand the literal.

The word avalanche does not nobility, punishments and rewards. 1 appear in English until the middle of the Two of the earliest writers to use the eighteenth century. The Oxford English avalanche as a symbol were Helen Hunt Dictionary cites a book published in 1765 in Jackson and Mary Hallock Foote. Jackson, which some travelers "perceiving a noise born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, towards the top of the mountains, look up was a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson and descried two valancas driving towards and is remembered today as the author of the village." (812) Using the Italian two books exposing the mistreatment of equivalent of the French word avalanche, American Indians, Century of Dishonor indicates two important points. English, and (1881) and the novel Ramona (1884). The subsequently American, awareness of snow unexpected death in 1863 of her husband, avalanches begins in the Alps, a direct result an Army engineer,may have inspired her ofthe first phase of modern tourism that sonnet "Avalanches," which uses the fact required Englishmen (and women) to visit that avalanches can occur in good weather classical Italy via Switzerland. Substituting a as a metaphor for any unexpected disaster. Latinate word for "snow slide" enhanced the Listen to what all Alpine records experience and made it sublime. The other tell, implication of this brief quotation is that Of days on which the avalanches snow slides, when they threaten life and fell. property, deserve a suitably awesome Not days of storm when men name. were pale with fright, Nevertheless, it took more than a And watched the hills with century for avalanche to come into common anxious straining sight, use. As late as 1796, The Rural Magazine: And heard in every sound a note or, Vermont Repository published a of knell; translation of an account of an avalanche in But when in heavens still, and northwestem Italy without using the word. blue, and dear, What made this story compelling was that The sun rode high,-those were three women were rescued after being the hours to fear. buried in their house under sixty feet of (Jackson, 421) snow for more than five weeks. Although Foote, who was born on a farm in they suffered from the cold, they survived on New York State in 1847, was well known in milk from a goat that was trapped with them. her life as a writer and illustrator. She lived Avalanches enter American consciousness in various places in the west with her mining as phenomena that are violently destructive, engineer husband, eventually settling in but often permit miraculous escapes. Boise, where he worked on irrigation Avalanches provided artists, novelists, and projects from 1885-1896. Wallace Stegner poets with parables of human folly and borrowed freely from her life and writings in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Angle of *American Studies Department, George Repose (1971). Foote's short story "The Washington University, Washington, DC Cup of Trembling" is about a wealthy mine 20052; e-mail: [email protected] owner's wife, Esmee, who leaves him to spend the winter with Jack, the mine Titled, "He ... flung the six pounds superintendent, in his cabin in the Creur of powerful explosive out into the great snow d'Alene. When her lover's brother, Sid, comb," Wyeth's painting for the illustration unexpectedly arrives while Jack is getting shows one of the eight miners (who have supplies, she hides until he goes away. After been working for days to open the road to Jack's return, his dog, who had been with the mine) tossing twenty-four sticks of Sid, comes to the cabin and Esmee dynamite into the snow. The twelve-foot confesses that she had refused to let Sid in. snow comb breaks away and the resulting Jack goes out in a storm and retums with avalanche fills a gulch, allowing the men to Sid's frozen body. The guilty lovers believe construct a road for their sled and bring that their sin has caused the tragedy; they supplies to their starving families. The brief have drunk from the cup of desire and story focuses on the struggles of the men to expect punishment. Jack leaves, and Esmee clear a path with shovels between is visited by a miner who directed Sid to the snowstorms. Wyeth's illustrations are cabin. He listens to her story and warns her characteristically detailed, with attention to to leave because it's "snow-slide weather" clothing, the big "No.2" ore shovels the men ~nd the forest above the cabin has recently carry, and the play of light and shadows on been cut. Instantly she sees this as a sign the snow. Wyeth made three trips west and sending him away prepares to meet her between 1904 and 1906, including a visit fate. Soon, there is: where he sketched and collected gear that A stroke out of a clear sky; later served as props for his models, but he a roar that filled the air; a burst of left no written record of any actual light snow mounting over the tree­ experiences with avalanches. The men in tops like steam condensed above a the story treat the dynamiting of the snow rushing train; a concussion of wind comb as a brilliant idea by the bravest of that felled trees in the valley a their comrades, but the practice dated back hundred yards from the spot where to 1879, according to Betsy Armstrong and the plunging mass shot down-then Knox Williams. (Armstrong & Williams, 149) the chinook eddied back, across the A letter from Outing editor Casper Whitney track of the snow-slide, and went to Wyeth in January 1906 commissioned storming up the peak, (Foote, 85) him to ''witness the blasting and shoveling Foote avoids making this a conventional out of the wagon provision trails to the moralistic ending by having the miners mining camps-such as Cripple Creek, discuss early in the story whether Esmee is Leadville, etc." indicates that triggering 2 worthy of Jack's love. The miner who warns avalanches with dynamite was well known. her to leave realizes too late that she is. Her The emphasis on man's power to suicide by avalanche may be required by the control avalanches, not on their random formulas of late nineteenth-century fiction, destructive force, is the new element. The but Foote means it to be unjust because avalanche as adversary becomes a theme Esmee accepts her fate with newfound self­ in men's fiction of the 1920s. The popular awareness. writer Courtney Ryley Cooper, a frequent What both Jackson's poem and contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, Foote's story demonstrate is that knowledge True, and other magazines and author of Go about avalanches, their causes and dangers North, Young Man! (which promoted was spreading beyond mountain travelers immigration to Canada), made an avalanche and mining camps to a wider public. In the climatic event in his novel The White January 1907, Outing, one of the most Desert (1922). In this complicated mystery­ popular magazines of the time, contained a romance, a young man journeys to Colorado short story titled "How They Opened the from Boston to claim his inheritance, Snow Road" with four illustrations by the thousands of acres of forest and a lumber rising young artist N. C. Wyeth, whose mill. In the course of the story he falls in distinctive pictures for children's books such love, learns he's being cheated by the as Treasure Island would make him world­ manager, is suspected of murder, and famous. One of the illustrations is, I believe, attempts to recover his stolen property by the earliest visual depiction of the use of setting up a rival saw mill to provide ties for explosives to trigger an avalanche. a railroad construction project. Before he

2 can recoup his fortune and convince his love camp that was wiped out by an avalanche in of his innocence, a blizzard closes the pass, 1889. The main plot involves the murder of trapping all the characters in a "white the former snow ranger by some bank inferno." (Cooper, 215) He joins the railroad robbers who use an old mine tunnel as an workers to clear the snow-clogged tunnels escape route, but there are numerous and snow-sheds. They are engaged in a war subplots, including a rivalry between Brad with nature. The climax comes when the and a French skier for the attentions of a locomotives pushing the rotary snowplows lovely American women's ski champion. finally break free and clear the section of Brad and his rival join forces to rescue her track called the "Death Trail," but the from the bandits during a blizzard-a vibrations from their whistles trigger an "sockdolager"-and Brad traps the villains in 3 avalanche. the tunnel by causing an avalanche. The Then, the blare of the whistles was description of the avalanche itself is drowned in a greater sound, a roar disappointing. that reverberated through the hills In the final volume of the Brad Davis like the bellow of a thousand adventures, Snow Rangers ofthe Andes thunders, the cracking and crashing (1967), however, Atwater lets his of trees, the splintering of great imagination flow more freely. While rocks as the snows of the granite attending summer school at the University of spires above the Death Trail loosed Montana, Brad gets a call from the Chief of at last and crashed downward in an the USFS in Washington. DC. The Forest all-consuming rush of destruction... Service has been asked by the CIA to send . while the hills sent back their an avalanche expert to Coracagua, a South outbursts with echoes that rolled, American country that is developing a mine one into another, until at last the for a secret rare mineral in an avalanche­ whole world was one terrific out­ threatened valley in the Andes. Brad not pouring of explosive sounds and only teaches the Caracaguans how to shrill, shrieking blasts, as though the control avalanches, he also prevents a mountains were bellowing their communist-led revolution by triggering an anger, their remonstrance at defeat. avalanche with a recoilless rifle that blocks (Cooper, 274-276) the guerilla army and demoralizes its troops. Part of the track is swept away, but the On the third shot the cornice trains and the men survive. The villain stirred. Soundlessly, majestically, confesses and the hero gets the girt and the two hundred yards of it peeled away forest. from its rocky anchorage. It leaned The contribution of Montgomery forward slowly. Puffs of snow smoke Meigs Atwater to avalanche studies needs came out of it. Gathering speed, it no review here, but perhaps his fiction is broke apart and leapt into space, less well known. Atwater wrote a series of thousands upon thousands of tons novels for young people whose central of snow. character, Brad Davis, becomes, over the A hollow booming sound course of half a dozen books, an avalanche came out of the pass, and the whole expert for the U.S. Forest Service. In the first alleyway leading to it disappeared in novel, Ski Patrol (1943), Brad is an a churning cloud of snow dust. Then eighteen-year-old college student who helps the booming stopped. The snow his uncles. a wildlife manager for the USFS cloud drifted out over the Leone and a state conservation officer, capture a basin, sparkling in the sun. The poacher. There are some good backcountry defenders peered into Smuggler's skiing and snowshoeing scenes, but no Pass. avalanches. Eight years later, Atwater The cornice avalanche had continued Brad's adventures in the novel fallen into the canyon well ahead of Avalanche Patrol. (1951) Now in his the leading invaders. It lay now in twenties, Brad has been to avalanche plain view, an immense wall of school in Alta. His uncles arrange for him to rubble mixed with house-sized snow fill the job of a missing snow ranger at a new boulders. Even at rest it was a ski resort called Snowhole. a former mining

3 • formidable barrier. (Atwater, 1967, feed their cattle and exchanging worried 187) comments about the weather and avalanche Atwater's boys' books are enjoyable danger. One villager, Albert Olinser, if a bit formulaic. His autobiography, remembered being invited in by a neighbor. Avalanche Hunters (1968), is better written Precisely at that moment and has better descriptions of avalanches. Albert felt a strong wind. The fog His contributions to the literature of snow was blown away. Albert didn't and skiing lie chiefly in emphasizing the realize then that it was not wind but visceral thrill and pleasure of skiing and a column of compressed air avalanches.4 The books that make the preceding an avalanche. He heard strongest claim to elevating avalanche "a crashing, swishing, roaring din," stories to a serious art form are Joseph as if a hundred express trains were Wechsberg's Avalanche! (1958), a factual coming down the slope. account of the destruction of an Austrian [The neighbors] looked up. village in January 1954, and Tom Lea's The What they saw took their breath Primal Yoke (1960), the story of the away. The Esch house, No. 40, psychological recovery and physical which stood below the road and destruction of a young Wond War" veteran belonged to Lorenz TOrtscher, a in the Tetons. brother of Senedikt-the fine, large, Wechsberg does for avalanche sturdy Esch house-was coming victims what Sebastian Junger did for sword straight at them, flying through the fishermen in The Perfect Storm. In fact he air! (Wechsberg, 116) begins his story of the avalanche that killed Just as the house is about to strike them it 57 of the 380 residents of Sions by implodes from the column of compressed air remarking that "Avalanches belong to that created a vacuum around the structure. mountains as storms belong to the sea." "Then a black cloud was all overthem, and (Wechsberg, 6) After reviewing the history of a terrific noise-a low roar and at the same Alpine avalanches and the work of the Swiss time a high-pitched Whistling, as an eerie Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche double-bass-and-piccolo-f1ute duet." (117) Research, Wechsberg describes the villages Albert was pulled up by the suction, clustered in the steep valley of the Lutz wrapped by a steel cable flying through the River in the Voranberg region where Austria, air, and thrown eight hundred feet across Germany, and Switzenand meet. He the Lutz River into a deep snow bank. mentions the sporadic efforts of the villagers When he recovers, Albert stumbles to protect themselves from avalanches­ back to where he had been standing, but they built snow racks every few years after finds "Nothing but snow-a horrifying desert 1903, but failed to maintain them.....,.yet of dead white snow. Stones, broken beams, concludes that these hardy, independent, tree trunks sticking out like overturned conservative peasants were generally willing gravestones and crosses in an abandoned to let fate take its course. Using extensive cemetery." (Wechsberg, 119) Whatfollows interviews with the survivors and notebooks are stories of desperate searches and by the schoolteacher and his daughter miraculous rescues. Many perished, more written shortly after the tragedy, Wechsberg survived. Months later the village is rebuilt, reconstructs the disaster almost minute by but some of the survivors move away. minute. Recalling the Falv avalanche, the school There were actually two avalanches teacher, Eugen Dobler, wrote in his diary: in Sions on January 11, 1954: one at 9:36 "Not a human sound from the white a.m. came down the east side of the graveyard. Only the storm howling its Eschtobel, a small stream that flows down triumphal victory hymn, as if it were mocking from the peaks of the Falv and the Montcalv us little people.... [the avalanches] may above the village; the other, at 7:00 p.m. on have some meaning, but we little people the west side where rescuers and survivors can't understand it. They made no sense from the morning were huddled. It had been whatsoever to us." (125, 234) Wechsberg snowing heavily for three days and does not moralize about the avalanche or remained gloomy, but on the morning of the behavior of the survivors, but his January 11 the villagers were out trying to concluding remarks appear scomful of the

4 Alpine peasants for their failure to take the Revealed above the easing simplest precautions and their bickering over crest of the hump ahead, first they compensation. He also notes that the saw a thick cornice of snow wind­ avalanche provided the children of the scoured against the sky. (Lea, 331­ village with a new game-treasure hunting. 332) For monthS after the disaster they pulled Just as they reach the plane the furniture, books, kitchen utensils, and clocks cornice falls and the avalanche carries Hank out of snow banks and the river. Dobler's to his death. In the final lines of the novel four hundred-page diary was scattered over Hank's father remarks to his remaining the valley, but every page was recovered. climbing partner that Hank had abandoned The perspective of Tom Lea's the mountains when he fell in love, to which splendid novel The Primal Yoke is different, his friend replies: "They claimed him before but complements Wechsberg's observations he got away." (336) This grimly misogynistic on the behavior of mountain dwellers. As I and naturalistic ending may account for the note in Snow in America, Lea tells the story generally negative critical reception of the of Hank Spuning, a marine veteran of Wond book. Lea, who was born in EI Paso in War 1/ who returns to his home in the 1907, is known for his illustrations of books Tetons, where his father is a guide. He has by Frank Dobie and his paintings of the been traumatized by combat and the death Southwest, as well as his popular novel The of his brother in the war. As he rebuilds his Brave Bulls. The Primal Yoke captures the life by helping his father, he falls in love with mood of impending doom in post-war the daughter of one of his father's wealthy America. In the context of the times, the clients. She is separated from her husband unstable cornice of snow may be a symbol and they begin a passionate affair. Guilt of Cold War tensions and nuclear drives her to return to her husband, causing annihilation. Hank to leave the Tetons to become a ski The literary and social revolts of the instructor at Sun Valley. Her husband's 1960s produced the first macabre comic suicide frees her to return and they appear avalanche novel, William Hjortsberg's Alp to have a happy future until her father's (1969). Set in a fictional Alpine gasthaus plane crashes in the mountains. Hank leads under the shadow of the north face of the the effort to retrieve his body. As the party unclimbable Juggernaut, the novel's bizarre edges across a glacier toward the downed characters, who include honeymooners from plane, Lea exhibits considerable skill in New York, climbers from Jackson Hole, the describing the unstable snowpack: unhappy guest house owner and his lustful Hank stopped once on the daughters, a blind witch, a perverted city winding way, to probe ahead with official, and a cannibalistic dwarf, provide his ax at a suspicious wale and the frenetic and absurd plot that culminates hollow of powder. It was firm. They in the triggering of an avalanche with a came gladly into the violet blue 75mm howitzer by the cuckolded husband. shade around the uphill shoulder of The sexually liberated bride and her Alpinist the dark tooth. Hank reached out lover escape. The dwarf too survives, his and touched with his glove the frost­ last act is the cutting of the strings of six gritted bareness of the stone. helium-filled.yellow balloons that mark the Up a sharp slot of corn­ burial places of the members of the snow, then wind-packed hard-crust, Avalanche Patrol. From Cup of Trembling to they came again into the stab of the Alp, the imagined avalanche still executes sun's white dazzle; they stopped to justice. Hjortsberg, novelist, screenwriter, unrope. The hump of the slope out and Montana resident, may expose justice ahead hid the face of the peak as a joke, but he's sentimental enough to let farther up... In tense and unspoken the guilty lovers escape. urgency now, the file of three men For the 1980s and 1990s, poetry plodded rightward, dimbing along a provides a variety of imagined avalanches. glare of greater and Because the literary conventions of lyric emptier highness, stopping often, poetry usually require brief, intense worried with the looseness of glittery metaphors that force the reader to deep powder underfoot. reconsider his or her normal perspectives,

5 these avalanche poems take us beyond the The next two stanzas provide some literal disaster of Wechsberg, or even the explanation. The poet loves a woman who cruelly ironic avalanches of Foote and Lea. does not return his love. Rejection for him is The Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan who lives like being frozen under ice and snow but he near Boulder, Colorado, compares the imagines being frozen with his lover, that sudden but inevitable mental breakdown of even in the crushing discovery of betrayal a woman to an avalanche: there is a lasting bond. The conclusion of Just last month the poem points back to the beginning so the avalanches like good women that when the couple are "chipped out of the were headed for a downfall. I saw glacier," that is, remembered and discussed one by their friends, the poet hopes her throw back her head accusatory "You" will make his smug and let go of the world. "admiration" for her believable. It's not the Hogan's brief poem ends with a note ofjoy, only possible interpretation of these lines, however, because the avalanche/woman but the point I want to make is that Dickey's knows: avalanche is about all those small things about the turning wheel of earth, that people do to one another over the years love, markets, and even the spring that finally, like a sand-pile model of coming soon with its avalanches, cause a collapse. Moreover, wildflowers. Dickey says, people need to classify and be (Hogan, 1991, 76) classified, to know that what they do has William Dickey was a western poet, significance. born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1928; he That in short is the final meaning of died in San Francisco in 1994. One of his the imagined avalanche. The avalanches last poems, "Avalanche," as a metaphor for created by Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary the struggle to hold things together, Hallock Foote, N. C. Wyeth, Courtney specifically a marriage. It begins: Cooper, Monty Atwater, Joseph Wechsberg, I have spent the whole day, or is Tom Lea, William Hortsberg, and the poets it twenty years, stand for many things-punishment, building up with you this challenge, sensual thrills, the collapse of conclusion, that totters order and belief. Yet all these possibilities over our heads. stem from one desire, to make sense of life, of nature. A goal pursued in metaphor as Let it slip, swing, the nominal well as graphs and charts and formula. body purse itself for a

second, and then I Although avalanche may refer to landslides, it discharge. is usually synonymous with snow slides. Since Ruin. How we have waited for it. they share many characteristics it is worth noting that Eric Purchase's Out ofNowhere: Disaster The chute, the white wave of and Tourism in the White Mountains (Johns massiveness Hopkins University Press, 1999) uses the when nothing can be understood example ofa rockslide in New Hampshire in or outvoted. 1826 to show how attitudes toward nature were evolving. Millennia later, we will be 2 Letter in possession ofthe Wyeth family chopped quoted in a letter to the author from Christine B. out of the glacier. You will be Podmaniczy, Associate Curator, N.C. Wyeth wearing Collection, Brandywine Museum, Chadds Ford, a sign saying "You." I will be PA, June 5, 2000.. wearing, 3 Sockdolager is an American colloquialism frozen, allowable, an admiration. dating from the early nineteenth century meaning an unusually large or exceptional person or We will each be classified thing. In this case a blizzard with thunder and according to our kinds. lightening. See A Dictionary ofAmericanisms (Dickey, 1994, 85) On Historical Principles, Mitford M. Matthews, ed. (University ofChicago Press, 1951, 1590).

6 4 The sensuous and sensual dimensions of avalanches are apparent in Dolores LaChappelle's "satire" on avalanches as a metaphor for love.

References Armstrong, B. R. and K. Williams, 1992. The Avalanche Book. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Books. Atwater, M., 1943. Ski Patrol. New York: Random House. . 1951. Avalanche Patrol. New ---York: Random House. . 196. Snow Ranger of the ---Andes. New York: Random House. Bruni, J. 1796. The Rural Magazine: or, Vermont Repository. December. Cooper, C.R., 1922. The White Desert. Boston: Little, Brown. Dickey, W. 1994. Avalanche. In the Dreaming. Fayettville: University of Arkansas Press. Foote, M. H., 1895/1970. The Cup of Trembling. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries.. Hjortsberg, W. 1971. Alp. New York: Ballentine. Hogan, L. 1991. The Avalanche. The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. Christopher Merrill, ed. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books. Jackson, H. H., 1891. Avalanches. Younger American Poets 1830­ 1890. D. Siaden, ed. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh. LaChapelle, D. 1993. Deep Powder Snow: 40 Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom. Durango: Kivaki Press. Lea, Tom. 1960. The Primal Yoke. Boston: Little, Brown. Mergen, B. 1997. Snow in America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Raine, W.M. and W. H. Eader, 1907. How The Opened the Snow Road. Outing. 49, 447-452. Wechsberg, J. 1958. Avalanche! New York: Knopf.

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