Five Seconds

Count to five for me. Go slow. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. That's about what the mountain gave Jean Sullivan. It happened on this stretch of the wall, on the twenty-sixth of May, nineteen fifty-three. Mel Ruder, the newspaper editor down in the valley, wrote it this way. Tulips and fruit trees were in bloom in the Flathead Valley, but up on the Continental Divide, thousands of tons of snow moved off the Garden Wall. The push was on to open the road by June fifteenth, and the crews were working two shifts. A slide had already crossed the road, and more wet snow had come down on top of it. Sullivan, the road superintendent, was fifty-nine, and he'd been in Glacier since nineteen twenty-six. He and George Beaton, William Whitford and Frederick Klein were getting set to blast that slide with dynamite. There was no warning, Sullivan said. When they spotted the snow it wasn't more than eighty feet off. All I had time to do, he said, was jump into the cut made by the plow. He knew the snow would bury him. Better buried than carried down the mountain. About a mile off, a foreman named Ray Price turned around and saw snow across three hundred feet of highway. There sat Sullivan's pickup, and no plow. It looked fishy, he said. He ran for the phone at Road Camp. Four men and the sno-go missing. A dozen men came with shovels, in the rain. They found Klein alive, with a broken leg. They found William Whitford, and he was gone. And one man, Dimon Apgar, Sullivan's longtime friend, kept digging close against the bank. If Jean was alive, he figured, that's where the air would be. Jean was under five feet of snow, working his head back and forth to keep a place to breathe. In the last week of May, he thought of May, his wife. I wasn't cold or afraid for myself, he said. I knew they would dig me out. It was Whitford and Beaton he worried about. Then he blacked out. At seven that evening, Apgar's shovel broke through into a hole. Eight hours. Sullivan was unconscious, and he was alive. They had no hot water at camp, so they filled bottles with hot coffee to warm him. At dawn a bloodhound found George Beaton, nearly half a mile below the road. About forty men were on this mountain before that night was over. Dimon Apgar was the one close in against the bank with the rain coming down, and under his shovel, in the dark, a man with May on his mind.