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CHAPTER ONE
I am Waterfall Man.
The sketchy accounts I gave the docs about what happened November 10, 2000, were true as far as they went, but this is for me. Even though I'll write it to a stranger. Because that's what I'm becoming.
I remember how the magic started. A road smoking with frost, trees trunks like naked thighs in a steam room, the sky just a rumor of light smothered in oily clouds, and the ditches like dirty moats full of melting snow the color of old soap. It was insane to try to ski the narrow band between the road and the creek. Every time I thought about it, the phrase "seriously dumb" ended the urge. But here was the magic all around me on the heavily wooded slopes outside Sheshebans, Minnesota, and magic makes me feel invincible. So I leaned a little. At the top of the mountain I leaned, recalculating the odds. I never did decide to go. My skis just slipped past the point of no return and gravity did the rest. Coming down, the hiss of acceleration rose like applause.
I guess I knew from the start I wouldn't make it, because I kept pushing off the right ski, feeling for the edge of the road, so that if I wiped out, it would be in the shallowness of the ditch. The baskets on the ends of my poles were punching through into sheer nothing. At the least, I was tearing up the bottoms of a new pair of Fischer cross-country skis, and I didn't care. If it hadn't been the first outing of the season, if I hadn't been intoxicated with the mist and all that crystal magic, I might have cut across the road and leveled off. But what I did was skate blindly into the descent.
Speed focused my field of vision, because trackless skiing through low-slung branches is like a grand slalom where the penalty for missing a gate is decapitation. I lost sight of the road. I lost sight of the creek. As the snow deepened on the lee side of the mountain, I carved my way faster and faster until I seemed to be skiing on light itself. The sound of the waterfall crept up on me too late. By the time I knew where I was headed, there were no more exits. I couldn't wipe out, because boulders were popping up like army helmets out of trenches. If I went down, I would break something. But there was a slim hope that I could skirt whatever lay ahead. And hope is part of the thrill you take to the White Room.
Nanosecond hope bursts over you, then fades. It sprints in your adrenaline, then drowns in your perspiration. And there is that oddly cool moment when you know you've lost control, when the looming tree or the precipice or the glare ice inform you that you have to abandon yourself to fate and faith. I've thought a lot about those odd moments, and I still don't know whether they represent remorse or arrogance. But they measure how close to death you come, and somehow that makes you more alive.
I went over the edge of something into the sanctuary of air. Boulders boiled beneath me. I didn't actually see the water. It was just the filler between the stones, the oily black background that took the place of the snow. My feet pushed as though my skis were levers, searching for a brake. My poles braced like Lilliputian pikes prodding a Gulliver of a mountain. The dance was short. A clatter of graphite and plastic, and a rough pirouette that shattered ice. The applause this time was the water cascading over me. Thinsulate and Gore-Tex, polypropylene and spandex, human flesh–all failed to stop the cold that squeezed me to the core.
My instinct was to scramble forward. I was still breathing, so the waterfall must have been ragged with air, veiling me but not forcing me underwater. That seems important now that I'm struggling to believe I'm really alive. The cold was something else. Those first sharp gulps of air stabbed at a glacier inside me with the ferocity of an ice pick. After that, I was numb. Likewise, the struggle to escape was brief. My left leg was wedged hopelessly in something that seemed to be chewing on it. Call it a maw, because by rights I should still be moldering into that mountain. Mercifully, the leg too went numb.
I was a dead man. Despite what I said about fate and faith and hope, I was a dead man and knew it. Faith has always been my weakness. I don't think I struggled at all after the first few seconds. Whether it was seconds or minutes, time became one more item added to things lost. And eventually in that limbo of lost time and paralyzing cold, a question formed dimly in my brain. Why was I still dying? Why was I still thinking? I didn't believe that this was actually death, that I had crossed over. I could see the world–murkier than before, a grotto of millennia-old boulders and silhouettes, sounds and smells–even with torrents coming down around me.
They tell me there was a bear. I never saw the bear. If it came there for me, it must have been very discreet about it. But I heard the bus whining down the grade, and the bus hit the bear. That's what sent the vehicle hurtling off the road and into the trees. Nineteen of the twenty-two aboard, including the driver, were killed. Unbelievable. Two life-and-death dramas in one hour in one little patch of mountain. That much, at least, was coincidence.
(continued on the next page)
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