The hand that was clutching Jacek to my chest seems to have disappeared. I hold the glove up to the darkness but the fingers refuse to move.
He asks for some water and then doesn’t drink what I pass him. He recites my name and then, some hours later, Krystyna’s, until we pass beyond words some time during the night. We doze and wake and the difference seems hard to parse. When my eyes refocus there’s a strange shimmer all around us, as if the light is coming off the surface of the snow itself.
Agnieszka! I want to tell her. The mountains have brought us together, as well. They’ve always been the authors of our development. They’ve allowed us to see what no other human beings have ever seen. They’ve siphoned away the warmth, down to our core and beyond, as payment. They’ve left you and our child the notion, never correct, that you were alone all along. They’ve ensured that we’ve progressed this far, and no farther, when constructing our connections to this wild and beautiful earth.
Acknowledgments
Most of the stories in this collection could not have existed, or would have existed in a much diminished form, without critically important contributions from the following sources: the Municipality of Rotterdam’s Waterplan 2 Rotterdam; the Royal Netherlands Embassy’s Pioneering Water; Deltapark Neeltje Jans’s The Delta Project: Preserving the Environment and Securing Zeeland Against Flooding; Rotterdam Climate Proof’s The Rotterdam Challenge on Water and Climate Adaptation; Leo Adriaanse and Tjeerd Blauw’s Towards New Deltas; the Netherlands Water Partnership’s Climate Changes and Dutch Water Management; Hans van der Horst’s Rotterdam Discovered; William Z. Shetter’s The Netherlands in Perspective; the Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat’s Storm Surge Barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg; Stadshavens Rotterdam’s 1600 Hectares: Creating on the Edge; Dutch Delta Solutions’ Made in Holland; the Dutch Research Program’s Knowledge for Climate 2008–2013; the Port of Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte 2: Space for the Future; Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change; Jan de Hartog’s The Little Ark; Colin White and Laurie Boucke’s The Undutchables; Willem Elsschot’s Cheese; Jules Archer’s Jungle Fighters; Eric Bergerud’s Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific; John Ellis’s The Sharp End; George H. Johnston’s The Toughest Fighting in the World; James Jones’s The Thin Red Line; E. J. Kahn’s G.I. Jungle; Samuel Milner’s The War in the Pacific: Victory in Papua; Ian Morrison’s Our Japanese Foe; Peter Schrijvers’s The G.I. War Against Japan; Stephen R. Taafe’s MacArthur’s Jungle War; and the Historical Division of the War Department’s Papuan Campaign; Richard Ellis’s Sea Dragons; Eileen Powers’s Medieval People; Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft; Reginald Hyatte’s Laughter for the Deviclass="underline" The Trials of Gilles de Rais, Companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc (1440); Jean Benedetti’s Gilles de Rais; Marjorie Rowling’s Everyday Life in Medieval Times; Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Rivière; Gareth J. Medway’s The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism; Frances Winwar’s The Saint and the Devil; Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; G. R. de Beer’s Early Travellers in the Alps; Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps; Colin Fraser’s Avalanches and Snow Safety; Fergus Fleming’s Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps; Ronald Clark’s The Early Alpine Guides; Nicholas and Nina Shoumatoff’s The Alps: Europe’s Mountain Heart; McKay Jenkins’s The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone; Betsy Armstrong and Knox Williams’s The Avalanche Book; Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos; Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages; Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos’s Skunk Works; Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me; Philip Taubman’s Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage; Freya Stark’s The Valley of the Assassins, The Southern Gates of Arabia, and The Zodiac Arch; Lieutenant-Colonel P. M. Sykes’s A History of Persia; Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Order of the Assassins; Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins; Jane Fletcher Geniesse’s Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark; Calvin Trillin’s “At the Train Bridge”; the Marinette County Jail transcript of the interview with Scott J. Johnson; Kurt Diemberger’s Spirits of the Air and Summits and Secrets; Anatoli Boukreev’s Above the Clouds; Maria Coffey’s Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow and Fragile Edge; Greg Child’s Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas; Mark Jenkins’s “Ice Warriors”; Noel Busch’s Two Minutes to Noon; Charles Davison’s The Japanese Earthquake of 1923; Frank Stewart and Leza Lowitz’s Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War; August Ragone’s Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters; Thomas R. H. Havens’s Valley of Darkness; Masuo Kato’s The Lost War; William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind; Soetsu Yanagi’s The Unknown Craftsman; and the Fujiya Hotel’s We Japanese.
I’m also grateful for the support provided by Williams College and the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as for the inspiration and expertise provided by Elizabeth Kolbert, Rich Remsberg, Milton Harrigan Jr., David Tucker-Smith, Susan Coby, Kerry Sulkowicz, Margreet van de Griend, Karin van Rooijen, Monique Somers, Rebecca Ohm, Christine Ménard, Arnoud Molenaar, Jaap Kwadijk, Jos van Alphen, Pavel Kabat, and Djeevan Schiferli. I’m equally indebted to the saving editorial intelligence provided by Peter Matson, Jim Rutman, Frances Kiernan, Max Winter, Eli Horowitz, Michael Ray, Jordan Bass, Emily Milder, and especially Gary Fisketjon.
Other readers and friends like Lisa Wright, Steve Wright, Gary Zebrun, and Mike Tanaka have been even more constant in their support. But I need to single out for special praise the contributions of those readers who encounter my stuff at its earliest stages — Ron Hansen and Sandra Leong — as well as the person who’d be the first to say, with complete accuracy, that she improves me in just about every other way, as welclass="underline" Karen Shepard.
A Note about the Author
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and three previous collections of stories, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.