Excerpted: Counting Bones by Ellen Anderson Penno

August 3, 1986: car-sized blocks of ice fell from the Roman Wall on Mount Baker, Washington, crushing two climbers. One of those climbers was my first love Ian Kraabel. The article “Unburied: The Secrets of a Deadly Mount Baker Avalanche,” published in Seattle Met Magazine’s April 2015 issue, detailed the contents of a backpack belonging to Ian’s fellow deceased climber that had just emerged from the toe of the Coleman Glacier. A few months earlier a reporter had called me out of the blue, asked about the avalanche, and instantly transported me back to high camp where I kissed Ian goodbye for that last time in the predawn dark outside the tent before they left for the climb.

The Seattle Met article listed the contents in much the same way an anatomist records a dissection:

• 1 royal blue backpack lid
• 2 REI tags
• 2 sections of blue and yellow cord
• 1 toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss kit
• 1 tube sunscreen
• 1 vial cologne
• 1 crampon cover
• 1 headlamp and battery pack
• 4 A A batteries
• 1 snow fluke
• 1 blue mitten
• 2 lengths of 9mm spiral-twisted rope, ends frayed 1 Gideon New Testament Bible
• 1 Pentax camera, 1 roll exposed Kodak 35mm film 1 roll exposed Kits 35mm film

I was, at first, deeply angered by this list — even though it was not Ian’s pack. How does this collection of objects begin to capture the loss of a life? If a bus runs me down, are the contents of my pockets — a crumpled receipt, half a granola bar, my wallet, and a safety pin — my lasting legacy? Are we nothing more than the things we carry?

On the other hand, these last objects do harbour clues to the owner’s habits or frame of mind. Pondering this list reminded me of the text Gray’s Anatomy, a whole book of lists. Henry Gray published the first edition of Gray’s Anatomy as a young man in 1858. This seminal text is a methodical framework for medical students to use when learning human anatomy, and is still used more than a century later. I purchased Gray’s Anatomy at age twenty-four, in first-term medical school, just weeks after the 1986 avalanche. Decades later, while leafing through the yellowed pages of a 1917 edition of Gray’s Anatomy from the rare book collection at a medical school library, I understood that my memories could be dissected in exactly the same way. This list of last objects unburied after three decades is just like a catalogue of cadaver parts. In both cases lists are only one part of the truth, but I realize now it’s a place to start.