A Winter's Tale

Afterwards no one could remember whose idea it was to start telling ghost stories. Funny, especially considering what came later. But here they were, the Prairie Land Ski Club, a mix of college students from MU, KU, K-State; young couples; the odd ski nut; a teacher here and there.

It was dark now; they had been traveling all night from Kansas City, and they were well into the mountains of Colorado.

Maybe the notion had come with the change in the weather, because even the most swaggering of the boys couldn’t help but notice how treacherous the going had become on 70 as they climbed out of Denver.

The snow had started at Limon, and thereafter it had been like driving into a white field, the snow dense as corn rows. Denver was socked in, seven inches already.

That left the driver with a decision, try to make it through – under normal conditions, Vail should only be two hours ahead – or find somewhere to ride the storm out…but no one wanted to do that.

He pressed on.

The highway underneath became uncertain – more than once you could sense the back tires of the bus drift ever so lazily as it rounded one of the switchback curves… and then right itself just as you began to wonder if you had felt it at all – and the gusts of wind came at the side of the bus like wind into sails at sea.

The driver, who had been the life of the party for most of the trip, was grimly silent now, hunched over the wheel, peering out into the whiteness coming at them.

Winter in the mountains, it was what they had signed up for and would result in near-perfect skiing, but for now – for now, which is where we all live…. For now – the sense of time had narrowed down to five minute increments; each one that passed was five minutes closer to…go ahead and say it… safety.

The bus had left Kansas City around five the evening before in dry sunshine from the Wal-Mart parking lot on Commercial. The way it typically worked, the riders would party and then sleep while the bus made its way up and into the mountains. By the time the sun and the sleepers both rose, they’d have time enough only to drop their luggage in the lobby of the motel and head straight to the slopes.

Now, nine hours later, it was no longer party time, and those that were awake spent their minutes looking out the window and worrying. The bus was darkened for the sleepers, with only small bulbs along the aisle lighting the way.

So the ghost stories came as something of a relief.

Not that they were any good, not that they were any good at all. But one by one they came out, stories heard around a campfire or fireplace sometime in youth, and these young men and women, sleeping and awake, seemed less like young adults with every story told, and more like the children they once were.

They told the story of The Hook, and the Haunted Sorority, and the Hag of the Prairie, and the Pitchfork Witch. All of them following the common outlines of the form: the spooky locale, the fog, the isolation, the friends who wandered away, the noise under the bridge.

“Very nice,” said someone sleepily, it might have been one of the KU kids, then laughing, “but not scary at all!”

From far, far back in the bus came a voice much wearier than any yet. “These aren’t ghost stories, not ghost stories at all. Now I will tell you a ghost story. But first, I must get warm, I must get warm.”

At the front, the driver started nearly upright and suddenly twisted the wheel to the left with a sharp intake of breath. The bus righted.

“Let me warm my hands,” said the voice, “if they will ever get warm…..It was a road very much like this one, and a night very much like this one. A carful of boys had driven all night from the prairie. Oh, they knew they should have stopped in Limon. And if not in Limon, then in Denver. And if not in Denver, then surely in Aurora! But no, they kept pressing on, towards the slopes. They intended to get there and have the mountain to themselves while everyone else chickened out.” He paused. “The bones in my hand feel like bones of ice.”

Outside the snow raged, they had been climbing for some time now, and there were plunging depths below them, to the right and to the left. The driver cursed to himself.

“The mountain to themselves,” the voice repeated, “yes, well, that is what they got. Just past the tunnel, as the highway streaks towards Silverthorne, the car went off the road, silently, immediately, and uncontrollably. It plunged, crashing against the snow covered boulders, and then crashing some more. Till it came to rest against the frozen creek bed.”

There was the sound of someone blowing on his hands.

“Cold that water was! And when the one boy turned to the others to see if they weren’t cold too…they didn’t answer. It didn’t matter what he asked them…they didn’t answer. Not one of them. So you see, the boy was suddenly in the saddest story in the world.”

The tires of the bus gave a bit, a bit, a bit under them...and then grabbed the earth again.

“The boy, the boy suddenly in the saddest story in the world, looked up, up all the way to the highway. It might as well have been to the moon! But he knew he had to try to climb it, or soon he would never ask another question again.

So he climbed, and climbed, and he fell, oh, he fell so often, and the snow, the malicious snow, the deceitful snow, you couldn’t tell what it was hiding! It might be a boulder, it might be a crevice, it might be a branch sharp as a spear! And his hands, they twisted with the cold, and curled in on themselves, till he couldn’t use them at all.

And when he thought he was half way, he was an eighth of the way; when he thought he was two-thirds of the way, he was a quarter of the way. Oh, just a boy!”

Most everyone was asleep, but those that weren’t edged up on their seats. “And what happened?” someone said.

But before the speaker could reply, the wind took a tremendous hit at the bus, exposed along one of the straightaways of the switchbacks, and sent it rocking. Several people gasped uncontrollably…and then the bus steadied and continued.

And then finally, there were the lights of the tunnel ahead!

The bus entered the tunnel.  

“But then, after putting himself up the mountain a foot at a time, and being oh so cold, then he finally put his hand up, his poor broken hand….and felt pavement underneath.” The voice stopped and seemed to have trouble going on, seemed to have trouble talking at all. There was a deep breath. “It meant so much to him! Simple pavement under his hand! You’d have thought he had reached up and grabbed the floor of heaven.”

The bus was now halfway through the tunnel, an entirely unnatural – unnaturally lit, unnaturally dry, unnaturally still – length of highway, then it was two-thirds through, then it was nearly all the way through entire, and then the storm came in at them from the other side like a tide.

“And the boy used that pavement to haul himself up, to bring himself upright, to step back onto the road and onto life itself, or so it seemed to him. And do you know, just as he did…”

The bus exited the tunnel now, into the howling storm, the snow came gushing down, the frozen equivalent of a flat-out summer downpour, the bus hugging the right hand of the pavement, veering along the margins of pavement just above the depths below.

“Just as he did…”

There was a sudden awful thump against the right front of the bus.

A deer?  Elk?  In this storm? Did they wander onto the highway in search of refuge, drawn by the light?

Or was anything even hit at all? Couldn’t it have been the heavy thud of snow leaving the tires, or the grind of the snowplow ahead?

But anyone listening would have told you that it was certainly the thud of impact.

“And then what happened?” someone asked.

“And then what happened?” a little sharper this time.

But there was no answer from the back of the darkened bus, no answer at all.