The Horses

8Feb2010

I felt the horses before I saw them,
nightvision clipped as it was
by the headlights of an oncoming car as I crossed the highway
Left me blind in the snow
Just felt the presence of something big and dark
and there it was.

rough day. left Uppsala at 3... 
didn't get in to the hostel until 1930... 
a one hour trip max dragged out into 4 and a half hours.

When I left it was warm. Warm on my face. Didn't wear gloves, or a hat. Boot sole broke again halfway across town and had to clomp to the train station. Arrived sweating.
The train was supposed to leave at 1509... so i killed the twenty minute wait sitting on a bench... 10 minutes later they called it delayed.... 10 minutes after that they cancelled it... 20 minutes after that I caught the next train, but the connector to Sodertalje got messed up... ended up in Sodertalje Syd... 4 km from the center... only 1 mile from the hostel... thought about walking... but there's no road.

Choices were to head into the center or try to wing it overland, hugging the train tracks around Scania or trespassing... or taking a blind azimuth and trying to slug it out uphill through the forest. Warmer dressed and in a better mood, without three bags weighing in around 30 kilos, I might have chanced it... instead I managed to miss the local train by about 20 seconds, got to watch it pull away from the deck... and had to wait another 20 for a bus... which dropped me off 2 minutes too late to catch the ride to the hostel... ate at a kebab shop and then sat another 40 minutes waiting in the cold. I'd sweated through my clothes repeatedly in the strange heat wave and with all the walking under weight, so the freeze was quick. Fingers first, then my cheeks and nose, then my foot started to go where the snow had gotten in through the break. Fucking perfect application of Murphy's law.

so it was with shivering frustration I tried a new route from the bus stop to the hostel, seeing if could cut the last km overland by aiming down a lightly walked path I'd seen the week before.

How the horses do it, I do not know. Standing there, dark and silent, in the freezing night air. If the day had teased of spring, night reminded me that I was still in Sweden and it was still deadly cold. I imagined what might have happened if I'd chanced the overland route and turned my ankle or lost the boot. I probably would have survived, crawled downhill through the trees to the road... but the frostbite would have been a bitch. And if I hadn't, it would have taken a long time to find the body, frozen in the forest behind the test yard at Scania, lost somewhere in a forest no one ever goes in, where no one ever would have cause to go...

There's several missing people on Mt. Marcy... in the caul on the backside, a low flat area beneath the summit. At least they are presumed to be in there, beating retreats off the top in bad weather, heading for low ground, bailing out as we say. But the pines are so thick and unnavigable, the terrain so harsh, that a body could lie a meter from you, with a bright red pack, and you would never see it.  

There's more like a 100 disappeared bodies somewhere on Mt. Washington. Random too. Some poor bastard left the weather station to go take a piss in a snow storm and never came back. It's weird up there, above treeline. You'd think you could spot a body. But the tumbled rocks are treacherous. Likely everyone missing up there scrambled down hill, hoping to find a drainage and follow it out to a road... likely, otherwise they would have been found... but in the night, in the winter, they succumbed, either just inside the treeline, or somewhere in the snowfields... where they were promptly buried. In the woods, I'm sure they lie there, rotted skeletons in mountaineering gear, long picked over. The others, in the snowfield, were carried down and under and out by the spring thaw and who knows in what sharp bend of the river their waterlogged corpses have found final rest.

But at least they died on a mountain. To perish in the woods behind Scania, in the flat forest of Sodertalje would be a stupid fate. So as pissed and angry as I was, the bus rides were better than huddled under some tree in an army blanket, cursing my own stupidity while the cold burrowed into my bones.

The horse... he bothered me. 
He was beautiful. I did not try to touch him, just stopped a moment to look. And then there were more horses, as my eyes adjusted. Dark deep blackness that materialized against the snowy forest. what patience and reserves of fat they must possess, to weather the night like that. Short, stocky swedish horses were also there, seemingly too small for riding, just... for whatever people keep short stocky horses for. Silent. Unmoving. Uninterested. Weathering the night. I would pass them everyday now on my new shortcut to the bus. and they would remind me.