This post first appeared in June of 2016, and in the hustle of living, I hope it offers a moment of sweet depravation.
Three years ago on about this day in early June I was stuck in a whiteout. Camped in an icebound mountain range in south-central Alaska, my buddies and I found ourselves pinned down for two days in near-zero visibility on an icefield. A heavy, snow-laden sky had come down and smothered us. As mountaineers say, it looked like being on the inside of a ping pong ball.
Packing up camp and skiing blind with sleds and ropes across snow-bridged crevasses seemed like an awful idea, so we stayed put waiting for the weather to clear. For two days we drifted inside a place with no up or down, the sun passing invisibly through the sky. Our faces lost their shadows. We saw nothing solid but our camp. In a way, I couldn’t have been happier.
I gravitate toward regions of sensory deprivation: deserts, icefields, open ocean. Elemental singularity illuminates my senses. It’s as if I can see the bones of the universe, where only the most essential components remain.
Trekking across a dune sea in northern Mexico, I discovered that my companions and I were seeing meteorites in the middle of the day. Without any point of reference for our eyes, just the sensual, infinite curve of dunes and their brain-like ripples, we relied more on peripheral vision than the middle of the retina. Leaning on the part of the eye responsible for night vision, most sensitive to light and motion, night skies seemed threaded with shooting stars. After several days, we realized we were having the same small daytime hallucinations, long silver streaks hitting the edge of vision, half a second at most. They were bright enough we kept turning our heads to see what was there. Once we understood what we were seeing, I wondered if we stayed in the dunes long enough, would we be able to see stars during the day?
The whiteout was a different level of deprivation. There were no shooting stars. At the most, a second or two of mountainside would appear, and for several more hours, nothing. The air tasted like ice. I couldn’t get anything more out of it.
My buddy Q and I were antsy toward the end of the second day, too much time cramped in a tent that smelled like crotch and fouled socks. We decided to head out together with a GPS and put our senses to the test. We rigged up a sled with some basic gear. As we snapped into skis, a man who knew more about ice than any of us pulled a zipper on his tent and stuck his head out. “If your GPS fails, don’t try finding your way back” he said. “Wait it out.”
Q punched a waypoint into the device and said, “We’ll be careful.”
Liquid compasses were useless on this icefield. A mineral anomaly in the rock buried hundreds of feet below us sent the needle swinging. Birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals have all shown what is called “magnetoreception,” the ability to detect and orient to a magnetic field. In 1992, Caltech researchers found crystals of the mineral magnetite in human brain tissue. If we as a species can feel our way along magnetically, on this icefield we were screwed.
Leaving camp, we could still hear voices behind us, but the tents were gone. Soon, the voices were gone, too, and it felt like falling into space.
Snow picked up in the wind, grains hissing across each other. Rather than skiing single-file, we were side by side, our senses as wide as we could throw them, taking in nothing but wind and the gray and blowing snow globe around us.
The air cooled, snow came on harder. Crystals turned from wooly bars to cold 6-pointed flakes, the kinds that reportedly never repeat their shapes.
Q stopped to look back. I stopped, too. Our tracks vanished 20 feet behind us. That was as far as our umbilicus reached.
“I think we’re hooking left,” he said through the wind.
“I thought we were hooking right,” I said.
I once visited a baffled, sound-proof anechoic chamber on the UC Berkeley campus, door sealed closed behind me and lights turned off. My body had no idea where it was. I realized how much I rely on echolocation. I was floating. I could hear a steady hiss in my head, which was either blood flow or 100 billion neurons firing nonstop like tiny spark plugs. Whatever I was hearing — not a ringing tinnitus but a steady, audible flow like water — I was listening to my most basic functions, more fundamental than even my heartbeat. Maybe it was my soul that I could hear, racing around the inside of my body like a hamster on a wheel.
Time in a sensory deprivation tank (known as “restricted environmental stimulation therapy”) appears to significantly reduce lactic acid levels in the blood, as well as perceived levels of bodily pain. Maybe it’s good for you and maybe not. For Q and me, it felt as if we were throwing the nets of our senses as far as we possibly could. We turned ourselves into antennae, live wire receptors skiing beside each other into oblivion.
After half an hour I pulled the GPS out of Q’s pack and handed it to him. Holding it in the air, waving at satellites, he punched buttons until the device picked up enough signals from space to tell us where we were. We’d come about a mile from camp and were 90 degrees off course, heading up a gradual incline which would lead us into a field of mountains, dead end avalanche chutes and wide-mouthed crevasses invisible in this storm.
Our innate sense of direction was not as fine as we’d hoped. Relying on a machine, no longer needing that wide, straining net, I felt my senses relax. My world got smaller. I had a reference point, even if it felt artificial. We turned back for the waypoint of our camp and a mile later, our tents emerged from the emptiness. They looked like life boats coming out of the fog, bright and strange to see.
Image: shutterstock
Photo: James Q Martin
Video: Craig Childs
White-Out-Ski-Clip2-1.mp4 (4.1MB)