Winter In Zion

Skies pressed, gray and leaden, onto the peaks of Zion, flattening mountains. The air hung heavy with cold. My husband strode ahead, weighty boots leaving indentations in the snow. I stepped into them to trail him. His nylon pants flapped in the wind, revealing the contours of long, skinny legs. White vapors of breath curled from his mouth. He kept a steady, rhythmical pace as the path twisted, steep switchbacks coiling in impossible contortions. I fell behind. He shouted, urging me to hurry, the words whipping out of his mouth: we needed to reach the peak and descend before dark.

“We’ve just begun,” he called, though we’d been walking forty minutes. “Too soon to be tired.”

The trail sloped sharply. He squared his shoulders, long arms swinging with loose ease at his sides. I pressed my hands into my arched, aching back, straining against the angle that he ascended with the agility of a mountain lion.

At the first lookout, while I panted, hands on knees, he peeled off his gloves, setting them on his backpack, and took out his camera and wide-angle lens. Brushing snow from a flat boulder, he scrambled up to snap photos: white sky, snow-clad red rocks, glints of ice on the river where we’d started, a thousand feet below.

“Not much farther,” he said, rubbing a stub of chapstick against his cracked lips.

I pointed to a sign, partially obscured by a snowdrift, which warned hikers to avoid the Angels Landing trail in icy conditions. “Maybe we should turn back?”

“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

When the trail turned vertical, he sped ahead, jaw set, mouth in a thin line. I stumbled behind.

Two hikers, six feet tall and strapping, called a greeting when they passed us coming down. “I wouldn’t do that last section,” one man said. “Trail’s too icy.”

I paused; he didn’t stop.

The final stretch narrowed to an upright ridge strewn with slick rocks: vertebrae of the mountain’s backbone. Sheer drops plunged 1,500 feet on either side. With a gloved and confident hand, he clasped the chains lining the path; icicles broke off. He pulled himself up the chain, hand-over-hand.

“Come on,” he said. “View’s amazing at the top. Wait until you see it.”

Then, he slipped, his feet sliding from under him, dangling, for a moment, over the precipice with nothing but air below them. I screamed. Hanging onto the chain with both hands, he heaved himself back onto solid ground, breathing fast.

“Let’s keep going,” he said. “Just a little slip. Nothing happened.”

He didn’t look back to see my body trembling. I clutched the chain with shaking hands, inching forward, nauseous, dizzy from height. At the trail’s end, he dropped his backpack with a thump and gave me a broad smile, his arm sweeping in a semi-circle.

Clouds choked spires of rock beneath us: a landscape slowly suffocating.

* * *

There is a presence in absence, a claustrophobia in open expanses.

Snow drifts require balance; misplaced weight will shatter the crust, exposing hidden caverns. White envelops these mountains, masks fathoms of blue below. A blue so deep and cold, it enters the bones and stagnates the soul.

His footsteps are there, imprinted with the inevitability of divinity—each step, a God stamp. That is the way he walks—with precision and force, knowing I am bound to follow. The pattern trailing in his wake: lines of x and o, repeated across the silhouettes of his soles. A boot-print promising hugs and kisses from a boot not ashamed to lie.

I can see him in the distance, past vast tundra of ice, sharp as a hallucination. His shape: a slender stalagmite. Puffs of his breath mist and dissipate. Space gapes between us. I try to breathe, drawing in nothing; my lungs rebel, refusing air this treacherous, this alpine and fragile.

We are ringed by serrated circles of peaks. Together—though apart—he and I cover miles of rigid terrain, unyielding and frozen, death waiting, expectant, in every angle of stone, every flake of frost. Here, he is free. Yet I am smothered by a sky full of wideness.

Our bed is this way—an expanse of blue sheets veiled by a blanket of white that stretches as if a snowfield, dividing. I reach out; he cannot be touched.

He stands; the mattress barely trembles beneath me. When he moves, what I feel: a draft of cold air. He is shaving, a slant of morning light from the window shivers in strands of his hair. Outside, the sky is slate. Froth flicks from his chin, and there, in a glint of blade. In the mirror, reflected: steadiness of hand as it travels the dips and rises, the familiar planes of his face. His hand, with its tapering fingers. Fingers that brushed my neck, years before, when they lowered the zipper at the back of my dress. The low, slow buzz of the zipper. The shock of the coming apart, and then, the coming together. A vapor of heat released from my skin.

He finishes shaving, gets dressed. The door opens, closes. He is gone. Walls high and stark as impenetrable cliffs surround me. I am boxed in this blank square of fear. In his absence: unseen but not intangible—an echo, an ache, a wisp of shadow. A presence. An absence.