Ray Gorham - 77 Days in September

Unencumbered by his cart, Kyle stumbled down the road, moving faster, but unsure where he was headed. A mile up the road he came to a pickup and pulled at the doors, but they were locked. He pounded on the windows with his fists, succeeding in sending intense shocks of pain along his arms but doing nothing to the windows. He looked in the bed of the pickup and found a short 2x4 in a mound of snow. On his third swing with the 2x4, the side window shattered and glass exploded in every direction. Kyle clawed at the inside handle and opened the door, then struggled to climb inside, his frozen legs barely able to bend. Once inside, he slammed the door shut, slid across the seat, and huddled against the opposite door.

Kyle pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his dripping sleeping bag around himself. Out of the wind, he started to warm up, but still couldn’t control the shivering that racked his body. Pulling the sleeping bag even tighter around his torso and head, Kyle stared out through a narrow gap in the folds and watched the snow rush past in the howling wind and blow in through the broken window. His mind numbed by the raging storm, Kyle stared vacantly at the snowflakes, watching as they drifted softly down to the floor of the truck, free from the grips of the howling wind outside.

Kyle watched the snow for several minutes as his shivers subsided and his temperature slowly rose. Tired, sheltered, and warmer, he felt his head bob down as he started to drift off to sleep, a state he was afraid to succumb to. He shook his head vigorously, forcing himself to stay awake and assessing his surroundings, trying to keep his mind active. Wet, cold, tired, and with no external heat source, Kyle knew his situation was terribly grave. Even the sleeping bag he was wrapped in, while it helped to keep the wind and snow away, was soaked and cold and far from an ideal covering. As a young man, stories of frozen hunters, hikers, and skiers had appeared in the newspaper every winter, making him so wary of the cold that he had always over-prepared for any kind of winter excursion and had become the butt of plenty of jokes at the hands of his friends. How ironic, he thought, that he was now stuck in the middle of a fall blizzard with next to no equipment and unlikely to survive for more than a few hours.

Kyle inventoried the truck for anything that might be useful. The dash yielded a couple of screwdrivers, and the glove box held nothing more than a dead flashlight and an owner’s manual. Kyle reached behind the seat and felt a tire jack and some kind of cloth. He pulled hard on the fabric and, after a short struggle, pulled loose an old, grease-stained cotton jacket. Thrilled at this small bit of good fortune, he stripped off his wet shirts and replaced them with the jacket. It was cold and stiff, and had likely been in the truck for years, but it was dry and that was all that mattered at the moment.

With the sleeping bag removed, Kyle could see that his pants were soaked, but his legs were so numb that he hadn’t known. With stiff fingers, he removed his shoes, then pulled off his pants and draped them over the seat with his shirts. He wrapped his sleeping bag back around his body, curled up on the seat, and tried to block out the sound of the blowing wind and the fear that gnawed at the back of his mind. Reaching down to rub his legs, Kyle felt the wet sleeping bag on the back of his hands and realized that it was nearly as wet as the clothes he’d removed.

Kyle shifted and found a drier section of the sleeping bag, and tried to keep that part closest to him, having to twist awkwardly to keep the wet areas away from his body. He lay back down on the seat, and tried not to think about the cold, but with every passing minute he felt it sinking deeper and deeper into his bones. A hard shiver shook him, nearly dumping him onto the floor of the truck. He pulled his wet clothes from the back of the seat and spread them on top of the sleeping bag, trying to add layers to block out the cold. Instead, his cold, wet shirt fell against his face, and snow drifted onto an exposed leg, all while the wind whistled even louder outside. A second hard shiver racked his body, and Kyle sat up, panic taking hold.

Trying to clear his thoughts, Kyle shook his head again and let out a fear-filled yell, the noise a distinct contrast to the steady drone of the wind. As Kyle looked out through the broken window at the swirling snow and pondered his predicament, he had an idea. He slid one of the truck’s sun visors off its rod and wedged it in the opening of the broken window. He grabbed the second visor and repeated the process, successfully blocking off most of the opening.

Next Kyle used one of the screwdrivers from the dashboard to tear at the covering on the seat. If he could remove that, he decided, both the cover and seat padding would provide some protection. He slashed at the seats, breathing in deep, panicked gulps as he worked. The seat-covers resisted his efforts, and it was several minutes before he loosened an edge enough to get his hand under it. Rising up on his knees, he jammed his hand under the flap and pulled as hard as he could, finally hearing a rip and feeling the fabric give way, but as the seat cover tore, Kyle lost his balance and fell against the door, knocking the carefully placed visors out into the snow.

A gust of icy wind swept through the broken window and wrapped its cold fingers around his neck, then down under the collar of his jacket, around his face, and seemingly into every pore of his body. Shivering, Kyle fell onto the bench of the truck and pulled the sleeping bag down over himself, the cold, wet fabric like sheets of ice against the bare skin of his legs. Shivers coursed up and down his body, his teethed rattled, and tears of pain and frustration ran down his face.

Beyond discouraged, Kyle yelled out and shook his head to clear it again, trying to rouse himself to action, any kind of action, and knowing that if he stayed in the truck without a way to stay warm he wasn’t going to last the night.

With great effort, Kyle dressed in his stiff, wet clothes placing the driest layers closest to his body. He opened the door of the pickup, and an icy blast of wind hit him in the face, as if challenging his efforts to escape. Ignoring the affront, Kyle jumped to the ground. Pain shot through his frozen legs and up into his hips, but he disregarded the agony and forced himself to move forward, taking slow, painful steps. A dozen cold and difficult steps away from the truck, Kyle looked back and reconsidered staying in the truck to last out the storm, but the long, unbroken blanket of heavy, gray clouds extending beyond the horizon convinced him to move on.

With no good shelter behind him, Kyle moved forward towards a rise that was a half-mile north. From there he would determine the best course of action, whether to seek shelter in another vehicle or try to find shelter in a nearby home.

In his desperate state of affairs, moving gave Kyle purpose, and the flame of hope that had nearly been extinguished in the pickup flared again. With renewed determination, the wind didn’t seem quite so cold, nor the snow so deep. Even his arms and legs somehow felt warmer. At the top of the rise he scanned the area ahead of him using his arms to shield his face from the wind. He could barely make out the snow-covered mounds of a few small cars close by, and the hulking shape of a semi-trailer beyond the cars. Just past the truck and to the west of the highway was a house part way up a hill. To the east of the road and a little further along, lay another house, which was sheltered by a windscreen of trees. Kyle thought he could see more trucks even further down the road, but with the wind, snow, and growing darkness, he couldn’t be sure.

Neither house showed any signs of life, so Kyle set off for the truck, making his way as fast as he could in the ever deepening snow. By the time he reached the truck, his feet had lost all sensation, and he only maintained his balance by taking carefully focused steps.