States of Mind

It is the light in the mountains that Dan finds particularly inspiring. There is something about the way the clear sky turns deep blue against the fiercely-reflective snow that lifts his spirits - a world away from the winter gloom of deepest Surrey. Home has its own attractions but Dan is energised by the Austrian Alps and the prospect of fresh adventures along the ski trails of Zell am See and beyond. He’s been coming here since he was four with his parents, always to the same apartment. His dad was the architect for the development and negotiated the use of a two-bed unit, for four weeks a year, as part of the fee deal.

Dan’s parents are keen skiers and always try to maximise their usage - with at least one week in summer when you can ski on the Kaprun glacier in the morning and swim in the lake in the afternoon. The view down the glacial valley from the top of Kaprun towards the lake and the mountains beyond - with its immense depth of field - is, as his mother likes to say, “a glimpse of heaven”. 

Dan Collins is sixteen but looks older, nudging six-feet tall with a wispy beard. This morning, exhilarated by the fine weather, he’s up early and out jogging by the frozen lake. The village centre has been cleared, but it doesn’t seem to matter how big a dump they have, the Esplanade paths are almost always snow-free and safely gritted - quite a contrast to England which invariably seems surprised by even the lightest snowfall. In summer, this lakeside park, swimming pool and diving area will be packed with sunbathers but this morning it is just him and a woman in the distance walking her dog. His eyes follow the dog, ambling along cheerfully on a long lead, taking time-out to sniff anything of interest. 

As the woman approaches, she lets the small terrier off the lead and reaches in her pocket. For a moment she looks away as a small creature scuffles by. Spring is coming so it’s probably a squirrel. The dog is on to it straight away to give chase. The animal speeds across the snow, straight out over the frozen lake without breaking stride. The dog follows in hot pursuit, struggling a little with the depth of the snow once it is off the path.

You can only tell the lake edge by its flatness – all other features of the shoreline are obscured by snow. There are warning signs everywhere but the dog is oblivious to the danger and blasts on. The woman is beside herself, shouting from the shoreline. “Katharina!”.

 Dan is about a hundred metres away and starts to take a passing interest. At this point, it’s still just an amusing incident. He only becomes concerned when the woman ventures out onto the snow-covered ice. In January he wouldn’t have worried but in late March you can’t be so sure. She walks towards the dog which refuses to give up the chase and is now well off-shore. Eventually it loses interest and turns back. The woman is delighted and calls to her more calmly, with a treat on offer. She is fiddling in her pockets but still walking. Dan’s internal alarm bell starts ringing. He is about to shout a warning ....

A crunching groan precedes a sharp snap as the ice gives way ...and down she goes.

Dan is alarmed by her sudden disappearance but knows he has to help – as he would with a skiing accident. He’s had some mountain-rescue training but not much that is relevant here. Part of his course involved: jumping into a freezing plunge pool fully-clothed; recovering from the ensuing hyper-ventilation brought on by the cold-shock; and then rescuing himself out of the pool. It was a basic course so they hadn’t practiced saving anyone else. The only guidance he has to go on is what he remembers from the lectures. Firstly he calls 112 for the fire brigade and gives them map co-ordinates from his phone. They estimate that they’re 10-15 minutes out. That should be OK...........

When he looks at the woman’s head re-appearing out of the water, it’s not OK. She’s flapping her arms and bobbing under. The audible gasps are a clear sign that she’s hyper-ventilating. The dog is close and barking loudly, but of no use at all. He looks around for assistance. The Esplanade is deserted. Forlornly, he shouts ‘Help!’ a couple of times but there’s no answer.

He needs to do something ...now!”

He’s relieved to see a lifebuoy attached to a rope on a lakeside support frame. He decides to put it around his waist and pay out the rope behind. Furled up it looks quite long - but unlikely to be long enough.

The woman is still thrashing wildly. He calls to her “Calm down and breathe. I’m coming to get you. .....What’s your name?” he asks, hoping to soothe her with a control in his voice he doesn’t feel.

“Alice.” comes back the distant answer.

“I’m coming to get you Alice, Hang on to the edge of the ice if you can ....facing the way you came. ”

She’s about forty metres from the shore but it doesn’t take long to realise that the line won’t reach. As he gets to the end, he has no choice but to cut it, using his trusty Swiss-Army knife, and rely solely on the lifebuoy.

 ‘It’ll be fine..’ he tells himself, now in a hyper-real state of mind.

Keeping both hands on the lifebuoy, he tentatively edges forward. The surface in front of him is a perfectly flat snow-field, apart from the footprints of the woman and the dog. Ominously, in the distance there are visible fractures and some dark patches where holes in the ice have appeared. The spring sunshine is beginning to have its effect. Dan tries to clear his mind of all doubt. 

When he’s a few metres from Alice, he carefully steps out of the lifebuoy and throws it towards the hole.

“Grab it, Alice” he calls. She immediately clutches her arms around the ring and leans her head on the top-side.

“Good. Now put it over your head and around your chest if you can”. This sounds simple enough but Alice can’t bear to let go.

‘That’ll have to do’ he tells himself and starts to pull.

'Hold on tight until I say to let go!"

His feet immediately start slipping so he widens to a Karate stance, trying to spread his weight on both axis of his body. For a moment it’s working ....her upper body is on the ice ....looking good.

Despite Dan’s warning, Alice lets go of the buoy when she’s able to reach out for the solid surface. Unfortunately, there is only water over ice - with zero traction. The recoil effect of letting go of the buoy under strain compounds the effect. She plunges back into the water with a startled scream. The dog is agitated and rushes towards Dan, growling and bearing its teeth.  

‘How long before the Fire Brigade get here?’ he wonders .... tick tock. The dog is fierce so he pushes it out of the way sharply. It backs off with a whimper.

“Let’s try again, Alice” he says as calmly as he can muster

He looks at her for the first time. She is a beautiful girl in her early-twenties - but her clear blue eyes are consumed with despair. “I sorry ...but I can’t hold on when you pull. I have no strength” she says. This is likely to be true by now, so he resolves to reduce the resistance in some way.

This time, Dan carefully throws the buoy to the edge of the hole and asks her to grab it without pulling it into the water. This is difficult to judge but, by tensioning the rope, just as she reaches for the buoy, he prevents it falling into the water. This time she has a good hold on it and her head is higher. She half-smiles as she looks at Dan with renewed hope. He quickly tells her his plan. On his signal she is to raise her legs and frog-kick behind her, whilst he will use the frictionless ice around the hole to pull the buoy, and her, out of the water in one go. ........She starts kicking and Dan starts pulling. It’s effective, even though he is sliding towards the hole almost as fast as she is coming out of it.

This time there’s no warning. The ice gives way and a long crack opens along the centre line of his body and the rope. Down they both go. The bad news is that as she lets go of the buoy it skids off, away from the hole. Dan also loses the rope as he falls. The cold-shock is as bad as he remembers from training but this time it's accompanied by intense fear.

The dog is yapping, Alice is crying desperately, and there’s broken ice all around. Worst of all, Alice has her hand in his jacket pocket for support and won’t (or can’t) let go. He asks her to paddle on her own. She nods weakly but can’t speak. She had only minutes left unless he gets her out.

 There’s no safe edge to hang onto and he’s the only one swimming for both of them. ‘Concentrate’ he tells himself, still trying to recover from hyper-ventilation. He tries to use whatever freedom of movement he has to find a new safe edge, pushing away the lumps of deep broken ice in the direction they’d come from. It has already borne his weight once so it should do again. After some effort, he finds an edge that might work. It’s not as straight as he’d like, and all the while he’s being dragged back by Alice’s pull ...surely they must come soon!

Decision time. He’s still confident of being able to pull himself out but it would mean shaking off Alice by force. This wouldn’t be easy because she’s clinging on for her life. If he got out, he would struggle to reach her across the expanse of broken ice. How would he lift her out from above? It isn’t possible .....He has another idea.

“Alice. Please listen...” She’s very weak but wants to hear. This is pure improvisation but he needs to sound as confident as possible.

“I’m going to put both my elbows on the edge of the ice. I want you to get behind me and try and climb on like I was piggy-backing you. When I say ‘go’ we’ll both stretch out our legs behind. I’ll gently breast-stroke kick. I want you to do the same stroke but with all your strength and use the forward momentum to crawl over my shoulders. I’ll stay low and keep my head as flat as I can. Try to be quick. Do you understand?”

Alice nods.

Dan manages to force his elbows over the edge ...which hold, but he can instantly see a problem. Part of the ice between his elbows is missing. There’s an indent just where you wouldn’t want one - meaning that there’s nowhere to properly support his head  ...But no going back on the plan now. Last chance.

“Go!”

Alice works her way into the piggy-back position. They both start kicking and she starts to clamber up over his shoulders. Keeping his elbows firmly on the edge he’s able to reach back to grab Alice’s ski jacket and haul her over his head. She slides forward rapidly but this bashes his forehead on the edge of the ice, which partly breaks away. His elbows are still in place but Alice is stuck, bridging across the gap with her lower half pressing down on his shoulders and her upper body on the ice. She’s struggling to gain any leverage at either end with nothing to push or pull against with her hands. Her knees dig into Dan’s upper back as she tries to scramble forward. Dan holds his head up as long as he can but the pressure eventually drives his head below the water. He takes a deep breath as he goes under but then can hardly move – the top of his head is jammed against the edge of the ice. With his last ounce of strength he kicks forward and attempts to launch Alice fully onto the ice using only the leverage of his lower arms...

Dan wakes up to find himself on a sunbed on the lawn of the Zell-am Zee Lido.

It’s the exact spot where, minutes earlier, he’d called the Fire Brigade – only now the wind is gently rippling on the lake and ... it’s the middle of summer. Both his parents are reading nonchalantly beside him. The Lido is quite crowded with lots of children ...and dogs. The dog alongside him in the next family group is sheltering under a parasol. Its owner, a beautiful bikini-clad girl in her early twenties, is sitting up facing Dan and taking a drink. She catches Dan looking at her and seems amused. She flicks her eyebrows at him over her sunglasses and flashes a half-smile. The dog is a terrier with a red collar. He notices the name on the collar.

‘Katharina’.

His father leans across and remarks to his wife.

“Ann dearest. It wakes!”

“Amazing. Such a deep sleep. I thought we’d lost him. Do you think that Coca Cola was all he drank with his Austrian friend last night?” 

“Hear that son? How’s the head? Anything to confess?”

Dan feels shell-shocked and splutters ... “It all seemed so ...real”. 

His father looks concerned. “Seriously son. Are you OK?”

Dan pauses for what seems like an age. When he speaks, he says,

“Dad. You know how you like to philosophize ...especially when you’ve had a bit of weed on the terrace with Mum ....don’t deny it.” he added as his father feigns indignation. “I can always smell it. Do you think I’m dumb?”

His Dad relaxes. This is just going to be one of Dan’s quasi-intellectual bickering sessions.

“I was thinking about your idea that conscious experience, memory and dreams are all processed in our minds in the same way ....into the same filing cabinets as you like to say. You also say that our remembered past and imagined future are written in the same script. I usually just humour you but I honestly think I get it...... as in, I’ve just experienced it.”

Peter snorts, as if Dan is taking the piss in his typical way. Dan glances across to see his father’s sceptical look.

 “I’m not joking Dad.  Let me see if I can get this right. You say that consciousness is dominant because of the consistency of its ‘triggers’ that carry on from day-to-day unchanged and are shared by other people. The other ‘states of mind’ don’t pass these tests. As I understand it, you think that whilst we’re reliving a memory, or dreaming a dream, or imagining a new building in your case, you’re using the same cerebral tools to recreate the world you perceive. Whilst we are immersed in each of these states they seem just as real as each other. You love to conclude that “ergo, there is no immutable objective reality.”

“Is that what I say? That does sound pretentious coming from you.”

“It has always sounded pretentious coming from you dear” chips in Dan’s mother, “...but I still love you.”

“So what brought this on Dan?” His mother sounds concerned at her son’s sudden acknowledgement of his father’s philosophical genius.

“I’ve just had the weirdest dream....”

At that, his father leaps up off his sun-bed and says “Race you to the pontoon!”

It is understood in the family that, when this challenge is dropped, all other considerations have to be suspended.

Both of Dan’s parents are athletic. Peter is strong and fast for his age but Ann’s technique is more refined. They’re usually neck and neck in swimming contests. Until last year they had always beaten Dan – no quarter was given or expected. But on the final day last summer he’d beaten his mother. His Dad hasn’t yet succumbed, clearly believing that he still had an edge over Dan.

Despite Dan’s current state of disassociation, he leaps into life and hares after his father, ending up only slightly behind at the water’s edge. The pontoon is about a hundred metres out so he needs to pace it. At first he falls back but feels himself gaining after halfway. As a bit of gamesmanship, he swims close to his father as he gets to three-feet behind. He wants his Dad to sense, and then accept, the inevitable as Dan’s superiority is confirmed - the passing of the generational baton. It’s close but Dan judges it well and wins by a hand-length.

They climb the ladder where his father gracefully accepts defeat with a handshake. Dan tries not to look smug ...but doesn’t succeed.

They both look back at the shore where his mother is waving. She mouths “Who won?” At first they both point at themselves until his father turns his finger around to Dan with a smile. His mother applauds

“Seriously, Dad, I had the strangest dream. Let me tell you about it.

Without looking at Dan, his father waves back to his wife.

“You don’t need to son. I already understand. I just want to know that you are ready.”

“Ready for what?” says Dan looking perplexed.

Dan barely finishes speaking before his father’s firm push launches him headlong back into the water.

Alice’s writhing body is forcefully dragged from Dan’s back - he can no longer feel the cold of the lake or the weight of his clothes. He smiles ...relaxed now ....unable to pull his gaze away from the shimmering light, dancing through the clear water.