The Indifferent Stars Above (18 page)

They were now into the fourth day of what they had thought might be a six-day journey, but they were only about fourteen miles west of the lake camps. They had just two more days' rations of beef, and Johnson's Ranch was still more than fifty miles to their west. Late in the afternoon, they stumbled down into deep blue shadows
lying along the frigid bottomlands beside the Yuba River and made camp. Once again it was an hour or more before a dazed and exhausted Charles Stanton finally trudged into camp.

Sunday, December 20, the fifth day out, began ominously. Though the skies overhead were again clear, dark clouds were gathering on the western horizon, far out over the Sacramento Valley toward which they all yearned. As Jay and the rest of the party began to move down the Yuba, Sarah and Mary Ann hung back, trying to fix a problem with Mary Ann's snowshoes. When they had made the repair, Sarah started on ahead to catch up with Jay. As Mary Ann began to leave, though, she noticed that Charles Stanton had not departed with the others. He was in fact sitting quietly nearby, resting his head against a snowbank, puffing on his pipe, making no effort to get going. Mary Ann asked if he was coming along, and he said yes, he would join them shortly. She hesitated. Stanton gazed in her direction, but his snow blindness had severely damaged his vision, and he likely could not see her. He did not get up. Finally Mary Ann turned and hurried away to catch up with the others. Stanton continued to sit there smoking. Five months later a party traveling eastward found his bones in a hollow stump near the same spot.

 

I
f a modern coroner had conducted an autopsy on Charles Stanton's body, she likely would have found that—weakened by long-term hunger and malnutrition—he'd died of hypothermia as a result of sitting still in the bitter cold. Chances are his core body temperature simply dropped gradually below the 90-degree-Fahrenheit threshold at which shivering stops and the final symptoms of hypothermia begin to kick in—amnesia, clumsiness, difficulty speaking, mental confusion. At about 86 degrees, his skin would have begun to turn blue, his respiration and pulse would have slowed, major organs would have begun to fail, and finally his brain would have died.

But Charles Stanton probably died psychologically before he died physiologically. As John Leach points out in
Survival Psychology,
science has long recognized that under some circumstances people are able “to die gently, and often suddenly, through no organic cause.” In
other words, we are able, sometimes, to will ourselves to death, or at least to cease willing ourselves to live.

In 1972, in a situation much like that which Stanton, Sarah, and the other members of the snowshoe party faced, Nando Parrado had a kind of epiphany, as he relates in
Miracle in the Andes.
It came to him in his moment of maximum despair. He and his fellow rugby players, trying to hike out of the location where their airplane had crashed high in the Andes, scaled a steep ridge that they thought separated them from safety, only to find that snowy peaks stretched away from them in all directions. Aghast at their predicament, Parrado fell to his knees in the snow and took in a staggering realization. Death was the rule, life the exception. Life was at best a transitory dream, set in a universe that was entirely indifferent to his fate. Whether to cling to that fragile dream, Parrado realized then and there, was up to him as it is up to all of us, moment by moment. Whether to embrace what we are all thrust into, squealing with astonishment and rage, or to fall back into the comfortable, dark, quiet realm of the insentient. Nando Parrado decided to fight for the dream. Charles Stanton, it appears, after all his heroic efforts to aid his fellow travelers, had chosen to slip back into the darkness.

 

T
he snowshoe party traveled down the Yuba toward an abrupt granite knob now known as Cisco Butte. There they left the river, turning south to climb and cross the eastern flank of another peak, then turning west again. From time to time, they paused at high spots and scanned the snowy landscape to their rear, looking for Stanton. They were increasingly apprehensive about losing him, but they knew they could not afford to stop so long as the weather held out. Each time, failing to see him, they pressed on into the still and silent whiteness. They crossed bridges of snow twelve or fifteen feet thick arching gracefully over streams. They passed places where springs lay twenty or twenty-five feet deep at the bottoms of wells that the water had melted in the snow. In the afternoon they finally descended into a flat piece of terrain now called Sixmile Valley. It had been a hard day, nearly eight miles of tough snowshoeing, and it had exacted a heavy price from them.

They had by now spent four nights lying out in the open in the high Sierra, where nighttime temperatures in December run in the low twenties or high teens. They had not yet even begun to descend below the snow line, but their supply of dried beef was already nearly exhausted. Hunger cramped their stomachs and clouded their thinking. Their boots—soaked and tattered before they had even started—had now begun to fall to pieces, and as a result their feet ached from continual exposure to snow and ice. The men in general seemed to be faring worse than the women. Sarah's father in particular was growing weaker, and even Jay was having a hard time keeping up with Sarah. She began to hang back with him, traveling a bit in the rear of the rest of the party.

When they made camp that night, setting fire to a dry tree and gathering around it as had become their habit, they wondered again, more urgently now, how they would find their way forward from here without Stanton and whether “here” was in fact where they were supposed to be. But they had bigger problems than they yet knew. As they sat around the burning tree that night, changes were under way high in the upper atmosphere, changes that had been months in the making.

 

I
n certain years, years when La Niña conditions prevail in the southern Pacific, a meteorological phenomenon known as the Madden-Julian oscillation is sometimes born in the Indian Ocean. The MJO, as meteorologists call it for short, carries vast amounts of relatively warm and very wet air from the Indian Ocean into the central Pacific. When cold low-pressure systems move south out of the Arctic, as they regularly do, they siphon this wet air northward from the central Pacific, drawing it toward the Pacific Northwest. If the cold air from the Arctic collides with the wet air from the central Pacific, enormous amounts of precipitation fall along the West Coast of the United States. Those of us who live in the Northwest usually get the brunt of this phenomenon, which we not so lovingly refer to as “the Pineapple Express,” but sometimes the storm track sags to the south, carrying the moisture-rich air into California. The result of such scenarios is
typically widespread flooding in the lowlands and, sometimes, epic blizzards in the high Sierra.

One such record-breaking storm hit this section of the central Sierra Nevada in January of 1952, dumping more than twelve feet of snow on Donner Summit within a few days. While it was just one in a series of storms that produced a total of sixty-five feet of snowfall that year, this particular storm generated news around the country. On January 13, enormous windblown drifts trapped a westbound passenger train, the City of San Francisco, at Yuba Gap. At first the 226 passengers and crew made light of the situation. Many of them were servicemen on their way to San Francisco to be shipped off to the Korean War, and they had no objection at all to sitting in one place for a while, eating the railroad's food and drinking its liquor. But after thirty-six hours the diesel fuel ran out and temperatures in the passenger cars began to plummet. Food began to run short, and tempers began to flare.

Hundreds of volunteers worked with shovels to reach the train, but it took them seventy-two long hours to get there. As the passengers finally hiked out along the path that had been cleared through the drifts for them, many of the children wore on their heads pillow-cases with eyeholes cut in them to protect them from the frigid winds still slicing through the mountains. No one knows if any of the passengers thought about the Donner Party as they sat on the train for those three days, but they might well have—the spot where the City of San Francisco was stranded at Yuba Gap was not more than a half a mile from where Sarah and the snowshoe party likely camped on December 20, 1846.

 

A
t the lake camp, on opposite sides of the log partition that separated the Graves side of the cabin from the Reed side, Margret Reed and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Graves were engaged in preserving the lives of their children. To stretch the little beef they had left, to make it last as long as possible, the two mothers had begun to cut strips from the hides of the oxen that had been slaughtered. They held the strips over open flames, singeing off the hair, then boiled them
until the collagen separated from the hides and formed a thick, unpalatable, but reasonably nutritious glue. This glue they rationed out to their children, who gagged it down unhappily.

Things were even harder for the souls huddled miserably in wet tents and under brush shelters at the Donners' Alder Creek camp. The robust young men who had wrangled cattle, cut brush, driven oxen, and rolled boulders out of the paths of wagons for the Donners and Reeds for months had begun to die, unable to subsist on a diet of roasted mice and strips of toasted buffalo robe. James Smith, Sam Shoemaker, and Joseph Reinhardt were all dead. As he lay dying, Reinhardt had confessed to Doris Wolfinger that he had murdered her husband back at the Humboldt Sink.

Jacob Donner was also dead. He had been the first of them to die. Never very robust, he had descended into a state of nearly complete inaction almost as soon as they became entrapped. For weeks he had dwelled in despair, doing little to help himself or his family, until finally one day he sat down at a table in the tent, bowed his head upon his hands, and sat motionless until he died.

B
y the morning of the snowshoe party's sixth day out, December 21, it had been snowing hard through much of the night. As daylight arrived, snow continued to fall, shrinking their world down to a circle twenty or thirty yards in diameter. Beyond that distance everything faded into a blur of white snow, gray rock, and dark green conifers. Without Stanton to guide them, they turned to Luis and Salvador, but the young Miwok men were no more able than the rest of them to see beyond the white curtain enveloping them all. Finally, with no other real choice, they strapped their snowshoes back on and set out again.

They managed to hold a generally westward course through the morning. There was a strong, relatively warm wind out of the southwest. From time to time, the snowfall lightened a bit. During one of these intervals, Mary Ann Graves, looking down into a deep gorge to the north, believed she saw smoke hanging in the air. She began to holler at the top of her voice, but there was no answering cry. She prevailed upon the men to fire the flintlock rifle, but it drew no response.
She implored the men to turn to the north and descend into the gorge to investigate the smoke, but Luis, who spoke a bit of English, said it was not the right direction, so they trudged on toward what they believed was the west.

Before they had gone much farther, though, they again ground to a halt. They stood in the falling snow talking, arguing. Their stock of dried beef was nearly gone; they did not know where they were, nor even with any certainty which direction they were going. The parents among them desperately wanted to hold their children again. Some of them argued for turning around, but it had taken them six days to get this far, with provisions. With no food to sustain them, attempting to return seemed suicidal, though going forward seemed no less so. Mary Ann Graves said she would rather die than return and watch her brothers and sisters starve at the lake. Luis and Salvador outright refused to go back. The two Miwoks turned and resumed walking. Mary Ann followed them. Then Sarah Foster fell in behind. Then everyone else did as well.

Sometime that afternoon they made a catastrophic mistake. As they left the western end of Sixmile Valley, they approached a low ridge to their northwest. If they had climbed it, they would have found themselves precisely where they needed to be, on the established emigrant road at Emigrant Gap at the point where it dropped some seven hundred feet into Bear Valley. From there they would have had a relatively easy, gradual descent to Johnson's Ranch. But the ridge screened their view of Bear Valley, and instead of ascending it they turned left, to the south, skirting the ridge and beginning to follow terrain that led inexorably and invitingly downhill.

Immediately ahead of them now was the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, other than the Yosemite Valley perhaps the most dramatic feature of the Sierra Nevada's western flank. A steep-sided fissure carved out eons ago by glaciers and by the river that tumbles among granite boulders at its bottom, the canyon is, for much of its length, more than three thousand feet deep, in places four thousand feet. To this day, stretches of it are inaccessible except by river rafts and helicopters. The deep side canyons that run into it are similarly steep-sided and impressive. It is a place of breathtaking
beauty both in summer and in winter, but for anyone on foot, particularly in winter, it can be a world of pain and desperation at best, a death trap at worst.

 

B
ut they were traveling blind; they had no idea what lay ahead. They forged on for only another mile or two, following the path of least resistance, down along one of several ridges paralleling one of the American River's tributaries, the North Fork of the North Fork. They didn't travel much farther that day, though. It was the shortest day of the year. Before the sun set at 4:39
P.M
., they set another dead pine afire and made another miserable camp in the snow.
*

Sarah and Jay wrapped themselves in blankets and stared into the flames. They chewed on the last few shreds of dried beef from their packs. Occasionally, as the fire climbed higher into the tree, flaming limbs broke off and plunged to the snow, landing among them, sputtering and hissing. They were so exhausted and dispirited that they made no effort to move out of range of the falling firebrands. William Eddy dug into his pack to find something and came across a small parcel wrapped in paper. Written on the parcel was a simple message: “Your own dear Eleanor.” Inside was about a half pound of bear meat. As Eddy ate, the rest of them began to ponder what kinds of choices they were about to face.

It snowed all night again, and on the morning of December 22 a few intermittent flurries were still falling. The snowshoers again shoved their bruised and aching feet into cold, wet, and increasingly tattered boots, strapped on their snowshoes, and set forth. But a warm southwest wind had come up, and it made for softer, wetter snow, which clung to the snowshoes in heavy clumps that rendered it nearly impossible to make headway. Within a short time of setting out, they struggled miserably back to their campsite and resolved to
spend the day there. They gathered firewood and tried to build a new fire, but the snow was honeycombed now with rivulets of water. Every fire they managed to start simply sank into the mush and was promptly extinguished.

None of them, except for Eddy, had had anything to eat that morning. As the day wore on, their blood-sugar levels began to drop, making them anxious and irritable. Hunger pains gnawed at their guts even more ferociously than ever. Their heads pounded. Their bodies were beginning to burn protein instead of glycogen for fuel, accelerating the process of wasting that had been slowly resculpting their bodies for weeks. Their heart rates increased, their blood pressures fell. They were increasingly clumsy, inclined to fall down and disinclined to exert themselves. Their cognitive abilities were also beginning to decline—their alertness, concentration, and ability to focus on a task were all failing them.

So they sat motionless in the snow, their bodies slowly losing heat. The afternoon rapidly dissolved into another cold, wet night. In the dark they shivered and shook under their blankets, each of their bodies starting to fight a renewed and more desperate battle against hypothermia.

 

J
ust how insidious hypothermia is, and how long the odds against Sarah and the snowshoe party were now growing, is underscored by a tragedy that unfolded almost exactly 160 years later. On November 25, 2006, thirty-five-year-old James Kim and his wife, Kati, and their two daughters found themselves snowbound in their Saab station wagon after making a wrong turn onto a logging road in Oregon's Coast Range.

For more than a week, the Kims remained in the cramped, cold confines of their car. They ate berries and rationed a small supply of baby food and crackers. When the food was exhausted, Kati Kim breast-fed both her infant, Sabine, and her four-year-old, Penelope. James Kim ran the car's engine at intervals in order to provide heat, until the gas ran out. Then he removed the car's tires and burned them one by one. They huddled around them for warmth in the stench of
burning rubber and waited for someone to find them. And in fact rescuers were beginning to close in on them, using signals from the Kims' cell phone to get a fix on their general location. But the Kims did not know that.

After more than a week in the car, James Kim, like Franklin Graves long before him, decided he had to get help for his family. He studied an Oregon state road map and concluded, incorrectly, that the town of Galice was just five miles away. Early on the morning of December 2, he built a final fire for his family and then set off on foot with his map in hand, telling Kati that he would be back by 1:00
P.M.
He was dressed in extra layers of clothes, but he wore only tennis shoes on his feet.

Two days later a helicopter search team spotted Kati waving an umbrella just as she was herself setting off from the car with her children in search of help. James had not returned. Kati and the kids were promptly rescued, and after a night in the hospital they were fine, other than for some minor frostbite on Kati's toes. James Kim, meanwhile, had been waging a desperate battle against the elements.

He had headed south and west at first, traveling about three miles before he entered the drainage of Big Windy Creek. He then apparently decided that the creek would lead him to Galice, or at least to some form of civilization. He followed the creek back eastward, in the general direction of the car, through rugged, steep terrain broken by narrow ravines and abrupt cliffs. He tore off pieces of the road map and dropped them along the way, presumably to mark his trail for searchers, or for himself if he decided to reverse his course.

As Sarah and her companions had been 160 years earlier in the Sierra Nevada, Kim was weak from days of near starvation. And, as in the Sierra, nighttime temperatures in the Coast Range were well below freezing, and not much above it during the days. He had no shelter. His feet were wet from snowmelt and from wading back and forth across the creek. Then James Kim began to remove his clothes.

Forensic pathologists call it “paradoxical undressing.” In addition to the disorientation, mental confusion, and cognitive challenges that come along with the final stages of hypothermia, many victims experience, toward the end, a sudden, overwhelming sensation of warmth. In earlier stages of hypothermia, the blood vessels of the extremities
and the skin constrict in order to shunt blood and warmth to the core of the body. In the final stages, though, the process is often reversed, as vessels in the extremities—deprived of vital glucose and energy—give up the ghost and relax. Blood begins to flow rapidly away from the body's core, back out to the face and extremities, and the victim suddenly, and paradoxically, feels flushed and warm even as he or she freezes to death.

Toward the end James Kim started to shed layers of clothes, dropping them along the way. Then he lay or fell down on his back in the icy waters of Big Windy Creek and died. He never knew that he had circled back close to the car, never knew that Kati, Sabine, and Penelope would survive. But he had done what countless mothers and fathers have done through time—reached deep inside himself, marshaled all his energy, exercised his wits, and finally hazarded everything for the sakes of those whom he loved.

 

A
ll fourteen of the surviving snowshoers made it through the night of December 22. On the morning of December 23, their eighth day out, they set off again, moving in single file downhill. It was a bit warmer now, and snow flurries began to give way to cold showers of rain. The terrain grew steeper, falling away off to their south as they traveled on. This country was nothing like what Stanton had told them to expect. They had been looking for a sharp drop-off to the northwest, with a flat-floored, oval valley at the base. Salvador and Luis were clearly as bewildered as the rest of them were.

At some point that afternoon, they stopped to rest. They sat in the snow, leaning against trees, studying one another's faces for signs of hope but finding only despair. They began to ask one another, “What will we do? What
can
we do?” The questions, and the answer that many of them had likely already begun to contemplate, hung darkly in the air for a long while. Finally Patrick Dolan, the merry Irishman who had sacrificed all his beef for the women and children back at the lake camp, gave terrible weight and form to it. The men must cast lots, he said, to see which among them should die to provide flesh for the others.

It was an appalling solution, and in some ways a surprisingly premature one. Though they had been on scant rations for a week, they had been entirely out of food for only hours. Most, if not all, of them were to a greater or lesser extent Christians. Dolan himself, an Irishman, was likely Catholic. And even without religious considerations, the moral imperatives against taking another life, let alone the almost universal taboo against consuming the victim's flesh, were powerful inducements to continue suffering rather than to take such a step. And yet they sat in the snow and discussed it, and the proposition began to make headway.

William Foster would have none of it, but Dolan and the other men persisted and finally carried the day. They tore up strips of paper, and the men somberly took turns drawing them. Sarah and Mary Ann had to sit and watch with dread as Franklin and Jay took their turns. Sarah Foster did the same as her husband took his chance. But it was Patrick Dolan himself who drew the fatal strip.

Dolan didn't have long to react. The men gathered around him and studied him, then looked one another in the eyes and realized that none of them was willing to put the flintlock rifle to the young man's head and pull the trigger. Dire though their straits were, murder was still murder, and, for now at least, a gnawing stomach could not supersede their moral codes, nor simple human compassion. William Eddy pointed out that one or another of them was bound to die pretty soon anyway and that they could then decide whether or not to consume the body.

They pushed on and made eight miles that day, camping somewhere on the northern flanks of the canyon of the American River's North Fork. They were utterly exhausted. They had not eaten in forty-eight hours now, but they were burning calories as if they were competing in an Olympic biathlon competition. And all the while they were sliding deeper into a topographical funnel.

 

F
rom the time they had departed St. Joe until they arrived at Truckee Lake, Sarah and her companions had had one principal aid to navigation—the tracks and ruts left by hundreds of wagons that had
preceded them west that summer. But once the snows of late October covered the tracks leading over the Sierra Nevada, they had in a sense been blinded. In an age when maps of the West consisted of little more than pencil sketches drawn from the recollections of trappers and explorers, and the navigational advice dispensed in guides like Lansford Hastings's was often equally sketchy, they'd had nothing more than Stanton's, Luis's, and Salvador's memories to guide them forward. Before they left the lake camp, Stanton had requested the loan of a compass from the Donners, but Milt Elliott had apparently not returned from Alder Creek in time to hand it to Stanton before they set off on their snowshoes.