At age 4 in Chicago, I woke
up from an afternoon nap, bitterly and inconsolably crying after a dream. I had
just re-lived, in the dream, a death I experienced in Switzerland in which my
St. Bernard dog and I, a little girl of age 6 or 7, had been crushed under a
giant avalanche. My mother rushed in to
console and reassure me that I had only experienced a dream, but I kept telling
her it was real, it was me, it was my dog.
At the time, I knew nothing about Switzerland, avalanches or St. Bernard
dogs. I later pointed out a St. Bernard
dog, which I had never seen before in this life, during one of our car trips. I
told my mother that that was the dog from my dream experience. Only then did I
learn what that dog was actually called.
In this three-month period,
an unprecedented number of avalanches took place in the Alps,
Austria-Switzerland border. The series of 649 avalanches killed over 265 people
and caused large amounts of damage to residential and other human-made
structures. These avalanches were thought to be caused by high precipitations making the
meeting of an Atlantic warm front with a polar cold front.
In the town of Andermatt Switzerland, avalanches were so common that they suffered six of them in only
one hour, killing 13 people. This particular incident took place in January
1951. I appeared on the scene in Chicago in January 1953. I am not sure if I
died in Andermatt, in Austria, or even among these “Winter of Terror”
avalanches specifically. But if anyone can find any documentation of a little
girl and her St. Bernard being found together in a European avalanche, please let me
know. Here is a video of the rescue efforts after the Andermatt avalance.
The following is a poem I
wrote about the avalanche dream experience:
The Girl Child
Papa
skied past,
on
snow so cold and damp
it
gasped for breath,
in
time with the crackling fire
of
our morning cabin.
Two
portraits,
a
dozen colors, my mittens
formed
snowballs before me,
each
one, a white heart,
a
daytime comet destined
to
startle my dog with light.
It
was like a miscalculated turn
of
a ski pole when wind hit our faces,
where
burst of white met
shaggy
St. Bernard mid-air,
he leapt
to play,
and
jumped like the
terrier
or whippet he wasn’t.
Wasn’t
he born that same winter as I,
the
twin I grew up with,
two
hearts that beat
together
like captive confidants,
he
forgetting, especially today,
who
he was?
His
left leg caught
in
his right,
sliding
us meters down
the
moguled slope,
rolling
as if wrapped in a hearth rug.
Didn’t
we land in a bowl of pearls,
where
our feet couldn’t find bottom?
And
above us, instead of clouds,
giant
mitts of bath powder clapping together,
each
handful,
another
cup of sugar
for
a sweeter cake
I
could not see the top of.
I
measured, packed and tossed,
and
when one hard morsel
landed
between his teeth
like
a jewel in a setting,
he
nudged for another
as
if begging a treat,
that
snowball in my other hand.
He
hurled himself through an invisible hoop
in
that relentless snow wall,
a
white hole, I too,
tumbled
into,
where
he became more the victim
that
dogs like him are
supposed
to save.
I
held to his fur as if
a
pony’s mane,
the
madly-colored mittens
blurred
into a rainbow,
snow
pushed against me closer than
the
wool drifts of my sweater,
or
was it just his thick-skinned warmth
next
to me, the way I like
when
we sleep?
We
climbed onto a ledge where I wasn’t afraid,
where
light beneath my eyelids
shone
whiter than ice skate blades
in
sunlight,
a
place where we could curl up
in
forgiveness,
until
something pulled me through
in
a fever, shook me loose,
Crying
inconsolably, four years old
on
my bed in mother’s arms in Chicago,
she
patting my eyes with
a
snowflake-edged hanky,
her
words light vanilla, soft lilies,
“It’s
only a dream,
wake
up, wake up,
it’s
snowing outside,
it’s
the first snow of the winter,
wake
up,
you
don’t want to miss it.”
~ Cynthia Gallaher
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