Gwendolyn’s stomach growled with such ferocity that it startled her. She whipped her head around to scan the landscape of ice and rock, just to discover that the only predator on this remote peak was her. There were no bears nor mountain lions nor goats nor antelopes, nor even rabbits at this altitude. Not so much as a blade of grass. Her stomach growled again.
She was at the top of Mount Sanford and nobody was looking for her because she wasn’t supposed to be there. She had booked an experienced pilot to take her over the mountain and circumnavigate it, but his flight plan had been denied by the tower at Glenallen Airport because of inclement weather conditions. One of Alaska’s natural resources is people who have no respect for rules or authority, so she found a bush pilot who was willing to take her up in his little Piper aircraft from the dirt runway behind his barn. She wasn’t willing to wait for the weather to clear because the weather was the very thing that she wanted to photograph.
Now her camera and her lenses and her pilot and his plane were at the bottom of a two-thousand foot deep crevasse, along with the radio equipment and all basic survival needs. Two divorces had taught her how to cut her losses and concentrate on what she did have instead of what she didn’t. The first thing she had was luck. When the plane had lost altitude and the wing had struck an outcropping of rock, the centrifugal force from the sudden change of direction had thrown her through the thin door of the plane and into a snowbank. She had removed her seatbelt to position herself for a shot. The rogue pilot was probably still strapped to his seat in the craft that was doubtless crushed like an empty beer can on the rocks almost a mile below her.
The other thing she had was extremely warm clothing from North Face. She had done a photo shoot for their professional line of mountaineering equipment and had received the items as part of her compensation. She had donned them so that she would look the part in her byline photo, never imagining that she would actually need them.
A C-120 cargo plane ferrying some snowplows and supplies from Elmendorf AirForce Base to Clear AirForce Base did not share Gwendolyn’s good fortune. It had to deviate its course to the west in order to avoid a storm. Lightning damaged the hydraulic mechanism that controlled its gigantic cargo bay door and it started to inch open. The crew in the back scrambled to winch the heavy equipment toward the front of the plane and moved the lighter cargo back towards the widening gap at the rear of the plane.
Gwendolyn heard an odd whistling sound above her and looked up just in time to see a large plastic crate impact the ground nearby, scattering MREs in every direction. They were delicious.
Literature in Small Doses 