Avalanche

Surviving an avalanche in the backcountry, considering death, and accepting suffering.

A week ago, while skiing backcountry with a friend, I was taken out by an avalanche, and seconds later was “cemented in” by a crushing weight of white.

The suddenness and the power of an avalanche is astonishing. Though it was brief, everything slowed, and a careful examination of life and death happened. I was OK to die, I realized, but I should not, as I had children who wanted a mother.

J.M.W. Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

A little later, a phrase that a rejected lover wrote to me came to mind:

Death is shocking.

Each breath.
Each beat.

How did I mistake
It’s you who me complete?

Death is shocking. “But we are better at it than we think,” said a soldier friend. Well, I was far from dead. I was closer to losing consciousness from the crushing weight, but I was able to free my chest and call to my companion who stood further down the mountain, frozen in shock. Together we got me back on skis —only a pole is buried until Summer sun clears the hillside— and I skied, high on adrenaline, back to the car. What a miracle our bodies are. What wondrous design. I felt very little until an hour later, when the physical pain set in. I began to tremble, as though I had been it by a truck. Or avalanche. Pain and the possibility of death are important for us to sense —recognizing the fragility of life, and hopefully living like we’re dying.

Vive ut Vivas is chiseled into the granite arch above a neighbor’s door, calling since centuries to all who read it to live in order to fully live.

Death is our closing out of this party here on Earth, and no party or adventure should go on forever. We must actually embrace death in our thinking in order to embrace life in our daily actions. That is the paradox. Nothing is simple. The proximity of death does not bring life, even if the juxtaposition clarifies it, as Klimt’s painting shows so effectively:

Gustav Klimt, Death and Life

Yet sometimes, death is preferred: inflicted by some, and self-inflcited by others. Daniel Kahnemann ended his own life last year, here in Switzerland. And my grandfather was a founding funder of (infamous) Exit, but in the end fought for life and did not choose to “Exit.” And the gorgeous, excellent boy I dated when he worked a season as a ski teacher in Saas Fee and I worked as a dirndle-wearing waitress at Gletscher Grotto, was just buried a few weeks ago after he chose to end his [seemingly perfect] life. He left behind a beautiful wife, children, and a loving extended family —all are crushed by a far greater weight than any avalanche. How do they view life, when their beloved has fled it? Will their will to live be dimmed or strenghtened? My adopted son lost his mother similarly, and wrestles with how to approach life, which he faces daily.

Turner again… Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm

After the avalanche, I thought exposure therapy —facing the fears, and in this case, wanting to prevent them from forming— would be good. So a few days after the avalanche, I headed back out with the same friend, despite my misgivings about the weather. “It’ll clear up. It looks good on the radar,” he said. My own eyes said it didn’t look very good, but I did not want to operate on fear. So off we went into the void— a void which only got brighter in it absolute whiteness.

The photo below was taken when we were still optimistic about the sky clearing up. But soon a total white-out socked us in. And I felt each sound that the mountain made, in every fiber of my body. The occasional grunt from the mountain caused my mind to conjure the sudden appearance of rushing, tumbling snow. Each shot of fear passed through and out into the otherwise deafening silence. We waited in the silence, hoping for some visibility, but we were eventually forced to backtrack. Backtracking, giving up, letting go… it is an unpopular response in this age of pretense and progress.

“Exposure therapy” 3 days later

Would we chisel calls for Life, Vive ut Vivas, over our doors today? Nay. We are not sure what life is. We know only that we must make progress, and this itself is driven by a fear of death. How unwilling we are to admit this aloud! Fear of death is an effective motivator; but it is imperative that exactly at this point in the human story we grapple with death and suffering’s role in our existence. I am speaking mostly of an approach to life –an “Einstellung” to borrow from German— that we must express, hold, and preserve, if we want to live fully in an age of ever more optimized “living.”

Artificial intelligence promises massive leaps towards reducing suffering and avoiding death. AI even brings us closer to an artificial version of eternal life. This seems wonderful in the short term on the individual level. But we must ask ourselves what the unintended consequences might be of negating death. Life is not a mere negation of death. Death is a negation of life, but life is far more than a negation of death.

We are in a time of thinking of death is a technical glitch; but death offers us perspective of life; in its face, we can develop courage, a will to life, a recognition of the glory and beauty. There are those, like Brian Johnson with his movement Don’t Die, who really believe that should be our mindset.

This is a natural human inclination, but death and suffering, too, are natural. What is natural should not be dismissed or eliminated without earnest consideration. While avoiding death and suffering is a natural inclination, it ought not to be the main pursuit of our lives. Our main purpose should be vive ut vivas —live in order to fully live, happy to face the fullness of existence, suffering and all. Small moments of discomfort (in today’s weak society, discomfort is equated with suffering), like a cold dip (when the river is frozen over, I like to fill the bathtub with cold water and sit in there for a while), strenghten us. I mean, we are physcially strengthened. Not merely psychologically toughtened. Apparently dopamine and serotonin are released in cold water immersion, which helps us modulate stressors in other situations in life. Deeper discomforts that do us good include examining ourselves and addressing our pathologies.

Leonard Cohen’s song “Avalanche” has an avalanche of references and possible interpretations, and it is difficult to understand. But it leaves me every time with a certain pressure on my soul —it takes some time to shake the song from me, each time I hear it— because it confronts me with my halfheartedness, my weakwilled attempts at truly living. How often do I deal with the magic of life as though it were a load instead of purest wonder? (A favorite book is I asked for Wonder.)

A moment in life, in a rental house, between homes

And how much do we do, forgetting that each action is actually spiritual action? The line from Cohen, “You strike my side by accident,” seems a reference to the Roman soldier piercing Christ’s side when the soldiers wanted to hurry up the dying process of the three crucified on Golgotha, but found that He was already dead. The Roman soldier had no idea that he did this to fulfill a prophecy; he did it “by accident.” How much do we do “by accident” that is loaded with meaning, if we were but more aware?! Our imminent death should call us to see life as something deeper than a mere negation of death.

You who wish to conquer pain
You must learn what makes me kind
The crumbs of love that you offer me
They're the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential here
It's just the shadow, shadow of my wound

-Leonard Cohen, “Avalanche”

Let us embrace discomfort and suffering. And when we are confronted by death or even the mere possibility of it, let us choose life. Over and over again.

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Dead and gone. Two antlers in the entry of my latest house. Photo by Matt Kennelly.

PS. I was not wearing an avalanche backpack on last week’s tour, but now that I have desperately “swum” to keep my head above the torrent of snow, and struggled to breathe from the crushing weight, I will only ski with one of these. As that link states, “optimize your chances in the backcountry.” We are only speaking about optimizing chances, but that’s all we can do in life anyways. There is not absolute certainty. Only of death, eventually.