Lost: An Inventory
Beth Peterson
Lost Jewels
In the spring of 2013, approximately $300,000 worth of jewels were found in a small metal box marked “Made in India” that was halfway buried, halfway sticking out of the thick, icy cover of a glacial peak on France’s Mt. Blanc. The tin box was about the size of a shoebox; the jewels inside of it included emeralds, rubies, and sapphires—roughly 100 stones in total—each tucked in a small sachet.
The box of jewels was discovered by a 20-year old French student and mountaineer. When he found that box, he immediately carried it down the mountain to the nearest police station. The jewels could have been worth millions for all he knew, but he said he would give them to a museum if no one claimed them and he was entitled to the find. Though it was one of the most valuable mountain discoveries in recorded history, the student never released his name to the public.
It turns out, though, the jewels weren’t random or lacking an owner. They had been carried across Europe—from Bombay to Delhi to Geneva, on their way to London—by Air India Flight 101, a flight that, on January 4, 1966, crashed into the Bossons Glacier on Mt. Blanc at 15,584 feet, killing the flight’s crew and all its passengers. The jewels had been there ever since.
Lost in Ice
On September 19, 1991, Erika and Helmut Simon, German climbers visiting the Alps, were hiking Mt. Finailspitze near the Austrian-Italian border when they noticed a shoulder and then a skull protruding from the ice, half in the open, half-buried, facedown. Assuming it was a recent death, Austrian officials came back four days later, chipping the body out of the ice with jack hammers and pick axes.
There was some clothing made of animal skin near the body and strange tattoos on its right knee, left calf, and spine. Its forehead was partially decomposed, but it still had hair and a dagger and a copper axe. When the body was taken back to a morgue, it was dated to be 5,300 years old—Europe’s oldest mummy. They named him Otzi after the Otz valley where the Simons discovered him.
In 2002, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson, hiking near the edge of a receding glacier in Peru, found a plant that was 5,200 years old, the same age as the famous iceman, Otzi. This suggests, he writes, “that the present warming and associated glacier retreat are unprecedented in some areas for at least 5,200 years.”
In August of 2004, a local mountain guide, Maurizio Vicenzi, found the mummified bodies of three soldiers, hanging upside down from an ice wall, near San Matteo, Italy: soldiers—it was soon decided—who had fought in the First World War. A love letter was found in those same mountains and a soldier’s diary.
Only a year later, Vicenzi again made a find, this time an entire wooden cabin emerged from underneath the ice. The cabin was used as a supply station in the war, and it was set between a 100-foot tunnel drilled into the ice and a several-thousand-foot cableway that soldiers used to bypass the glacier to get to the front lines.
In the summer of 2006, in a melting Norwegian glacier, a leather shoe was found that dated back to the Bronze Age.
In 2007, a 10,000-year old hunting weapon was found in what had once been a frozen ice sheet in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
In 2013, not long after the Mt. Blanc jewel find, a message is found in a bottle in a cairn near a Canadian glacier. The message was left in 1959 by an American geologist named Paul Walker. The message told its recipients that he had placed his note and bottle exactly 168 feet from the edge of the glacier, and if they wanted to see the movement of the glacier, they could measure from the bottle to the glacier’s endpoint.
The biologist who found the bottle measured; the bottle and the message were now 401 feet from the furthest edge of the glacier. In just 50 years, the glacier had receded over 200 feet.
Lost Coin, Lost Sheep, and Lost Son
In Luke 15, the Bible narrates three parables about lostness: the lost sheep, the coin, and the lost son. In the first parable, a man has 100 sheep and loses one. In the story, he leaves the 99 to go look for that one lost sheep and searches until he finds it. In the second parable, a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. In this story, she lights a lamp, moves the furniture, and sweeps until—like the man with the lost sheep—she finds her lost coin. In the third parable, a man has a lost son. That son sets out and squanders his inheritance, partying and living recklessly. When that lost son finally comes home though, the father runs out to greet him, bringing him a ring, and robe, and sandals; he throws a feast in the lost son’s honor.
The parables seem to grow in value, at least according to the time, but they also have a common moral: the nature of a lost thing is that it should be sought out, it should be found.
Lost: Biology and Psychology
For many years, it was believed that certain people and even certain people groups had a better innate ability to find their way than others. Recently, though, scientists have begun to tie people’s ability to find their way—or conversely, to get lost—to cognitive maps, or the brain’s representation of physical spaces.
Drawing on research done on rats, Paul Dudchenko, author of “Why People Get Lost: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Spatial Cognition,” suggests different types of neurons fire in the brain when people find themselves in different physical locations. He writes, “The combination of these different cells being active in different places of the brain began to look like a kind of neural map, a representation in the brain of different places in the environment.”
In his book, “Lost Person Behavior,” K.A. Hill argues that spatial orientation and cognitive maps are largely taught and learned rather than the instinctual genetically or biologically-based sense of direction. “No controlled study to date,” he explains, “has found reliable evidence of a human ability to sense the direction of magnetic north—or any other direction, for that matter.” Hill goes on to write that people who seem to usually know where they are tend to “mentally update” their geographic position as they move in their environment. People who tend to get disoriented—lost—do not.
There’s also a physiological side. When we’re lost, Hill adds, there’s a level of fear and a level of emotional arousal. The arousal causes the limbic system to be stimulated. In small doses, this can lead to sharper mental functioning. But when the response is too heightened, it can scatter our thoughts and make us unable to concentrate or even remember things that should be familiar.
Lost Words
When I turn 30, my parents give me a necklace that reads “Not all those who wander are lost.” The saying, a quote from one of my favorite writers, is carved into a silver pendant. The pendant is small and shaped like a compass, with marks for North, South, East, and West imprinted below the words.
The quote is fitting. By the time my parents give it to me, I’ve lived in ten cities and many more houses, apartments, and flats, enough that I can’t even remember all my past addresses.
It is fitting, but I cannot decide as I look at that necklace, whether it is true. “All that is gold does not glitter,” the rest of the poem that quotation comes from begins, “Not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither. Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
/lôst, läst/
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the words “lost” and “loss” can be traced back to the Old English “losian” which means to perish or to destroy. The similar root word “los” spread to Norway and meant there “the breaking up of an army.” There was also “leus” which influenced the German word for lost and meant “to loosen, divide, cut apart.”
Lost in Switzerland
I try to see Mt. Blanc one summer. I’m going to Switzerland for a couple of weeks and plan to fly through France, take a train across the country and visit the French Alps before I make my way to Switzerland. The week before I go to buy my tickets, though, terror attacks take place in Paris and so I end up buying a direct ticket to Zurich instead.
A couple of days before I leave for the trip, I explain to a friend that I’m sad to miss Mt. Blanc. “Just a second,” he says. I’m sitting in his living room, talking with him about the trip. He comes back a minute later with a map. The map is colorful—bright blues and greens—with mountains and towns illustrated in their approximate locations. There’s also a series of passes, roads, cable cars, and even an image of a train on the map. “There. That’s the spot,” my friend says, pointing to the Swiss mountain Schilthorn, just past the town of Lauterbrunnen and above the village of Mürren. “You can see Mt. Blanc from that pass in Switzerland.”
I look at the spot where he’s pointing. Mt. Blanc is labeled in tiny letters on the map, surrounded by an indigo blue sky.
Five or six days into my time in Switzerland, my friends and I make it to Schilthorn. They decide to hike near Mürren, but I want to see Mt. Blanc—if only from a distance—and so I take a series of cable cars up the mountain. The first cars are packed—standing room only—but more and more people get off at each stop, until it’s only me and a small group of Australian students in the last car. As I exit the final cable car, the air is noticeably cooler and thinner, a dramatic change from the early summer heat below. I put on my jacket and walk around. At the top, there’s a James Bond museum and a restaurant and then an outdoor viewing area with 360 degree views. There are a handful of people in that viewing area, but beyond us, almost all I can see is mountains, a swell of overlapping crags, some shadowed by valleys and highways of snow, sharp angles of barren rock on others, becoming—hundreds of feet below—evergreen-forested slopes.
I walk along the edge of the platform. There are signs detailing which mountains can be seen in each direction. I see Eiger, Monch, Jungfrau. The sky is clear in all directions except for one. A low-hanging cloud obscures from view a single mountain in the distance: Mt. Blanc.
The nearest I come that summer to Mt. Blanc is taking a photo in the airport at a store named after the mountain. I assume when I walk down the terminal gate towards the store that it will be an outdoors shop. It turns out it sells diamonds.
Lost on Mt Blanc
Mt. Blanc, I read in a tourism guide long before I visit Switzerland, is not only the highest mountain in Europe; it’s one of the most visited mountains in the world, with nearly 20,000 people summiting it each year, math that works out to about 55 people per day.
Nearly 100 climbers die every year in the Blanc Massif. At busy times, local officials perform an average of 12 rescues per weekend, often of climbers who are disoriented, unprepared, or find themselves injured or in bad weather.
In 2007, two outhouses were helicoptered in and placed at 13,975 feet—and began to be emptied, also by helicopter, every few months and sometimes weeks. This was an effort to keep Mt. Blanc—once known as the white lady, as well as the symbol for modern mountaineering—from becoming, as someone puts it in an article I once read, “Mt. Noir.”
Lost in Mt. Blanc
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind and rolls its rapid waves
Now dark—now glittering—now, reflecting gloom
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
—“Mt Blanc” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, July 23, 1816
Lost Promise
The summer I visit Switzerland—the summer of 2017—the president of the United States declares that he will be withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord. “As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do,” he says in his official statement, “I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States, which is what it does.”
In that same statement, the president explains the U.S. will instead increase coal jobs. “We’re having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of.”
Lost Place
Within six weeks after that, an iceberg the size of Delaware breaks off the Larsen C Antarctic Ice Shelf.
Lost Country
Within four months after that, the U.S. suffers Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and the most significant California wildfires in its history.
Lost Science
Within five months after that, the Environmental Protection Agency pulls three of its scientists—set to talk on climate change—from the lineup of a Rhode Island Conference.
/lôst, läst/
In 1300, the word “lost” came to mean “wasted,” “ruined,” or “spent in vain.” By 1500, it also took up the meaning “gone astray.”
Lost Worlds
As a child, I’m fascinated by the stories of lost worlds: “Treasure Island,” Narnia, even the story of Pompeii, buried and then found after so many years.
When I go to graduate school, I get caught up in maps, which takes me back to the lost world, the mapped and unmapped: “Erewhon,” “King Solomon’s Mines,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Coral Island,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
It’s the idea that you could walk through the back of a wardrobe or sail just past what you know or dig into a mountain and find yourself somewhere else that appealed to me. Of course, as a child I never considered that sometimes the new world we find isn’t always better than the one we left behind.
Lost Father
For some time after he was found, there was a custody battle over the mummy found in the Alps, Otzi. As Otzi was discovered right on the border of Austria and Italy, both countries wanted ownership of his body. Eventually it was decided that Otzi had been found 15 feet into Italian territory. After that, more court battles raged about who should be compensated for Otzi’s find and for how much. Two women separately declared that they had seen the body before the Simons did. One said she had “spit on the body to claim it.” Neither woman could verify their claim, though. In the end, Otzi’s body was placed in a museum in Italy, in a freezer that mimics glacial ice conditions.
On October 15, 2004—two years before the Simons were awarded nearly $100,000 for their find of Otzi—Helmut Simon returned to the same place where he’d found Otzi. It should have been an easy climb—four hours of hiking—but it began to snow once Simon was already on the mountain; temperatures dropped; unable to find his way, Simon slipped into a 300-foot ravine; his body was found eight days later.
Helmut Simon was not the only one connected to Otzi to have died. Since 1991, seven people who have had close contact with Otzi have died: Rainer Henn, a forensic pathologist died in a car crash; Kurt Fritz, a mountain guide, was killed in an avalanche; Rainer Hoelzl, a journalist, died of a brain tumor; Dieter Warnick, a rescuer, died of a heart attack hours after Simon’s death; Konrad Spindler, an archaeologist, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease and in 2005; Tom Loy, also an archeologist, died of a blood disease. The German Press has called it “the curse of Otzi.”
Simon was once quoted as saying, “Otzi was like our son.”
Lost Mantra
When you search for what is lost, you need to be careful, it seems, not to become lost yourself.
/lôst, läst/
In the 1630s, the phrase to “lose one’s heart” emerged to mean falling in love. In 1744, the phrase “lose heart” began to refer to discouragement.
Lost Student
One of the friends I travel to Switzerland with tells me that a student of hers once got lost in the Mt. Hood wilderness area in Oregon. That student had decided to go hiking on her own one Sunday night in late March. She was supposed to be backpacking with a small group of friends, but in the end, they couldn’t come. Rather than postpone the trip, the student sent an email to a friend mentioning she’d be on Mt. Hood and then set off. She’d packed a sleeping bag, but left it in her car and set out on foot with only a backpack that carried some clothing, climbing supplies, and a day’s worth of food.
When the student didn’t come home after some time, the friend alerted the authorities. Her credit card was traced; video footage showed her at a store on the way to Mt. Hood, buying shoes and an axe.
Search and rescue teams were sent out to comb the mountain and surrounding woods.
Six days after she went missing, a National Guard helicopter spotted her. She had run into a whiteout while trying to summit the mountain, then fell 40 feet and injured her leg. She’d dragged herself up to an area where she thought someone might see her. Miraculously, they did.
“Were you afraid?” my friend had asked her student. “No,” the student replied, “I knew I’d be found.”
Lost Valley
If Air India Flight 101 would have flown 15 meters higher, it would have missed the edge of Mt. Blanc. After the crash, it was determined that it was a communication error that led to the plane hitting, rather than missing the mountain. The air traffic controller told the pilot to descend after Mt. Blanc. The pilot seemed to think he had already passed the mountain.
Conspiracy theorists, though, wondered if the plane was made to crash intentionally. Former CIA operative Robert Crowley claimed a bomb had been placed in the cargo area of the plane. Homi J. Bhabha—the father of India’s Nuclear Industry and the Chairman of Indian Atomic Energy—was on board that plane on his way to attend a conference in Vienna. The crash, Crowley and others suggested, was meant to slow India’s development of a nuclear bomb.
The plane flying Air India 101 was a Boeing 707-437. It was named Kachenjunga, after the third highest mountain in the world, an Indian peak that is said to be the home to the valley of immortality.
Lost in Ice
Since the Air India 101 crash, the Bossons Glacier has been the site of many significant finds, both fragments of the plane and items it had been carrying.
In 2008, a mountain climber found a set of India newspapers there, dated January 1966.
In 2010, a British university student on a class field trip found a blue mail bag that contained 75 letters and cards.
In 2012, two climbers discovered another bag of mail, this time a 20-pound bag of diplomatic mail marked “On Indian Government Service, Diplomatic Mail, Ministry of External Affairs.” That bag contained a copy of “The Hindu and The Statesman” and Air India calendars, among the mail.
In 2014, a 1966 camera was found by another French climber near the site of the crash. That same year, a treasure hunter, Daniel Roche, found 50 more pieces of jewelry on the glacier. He said the jewelry wasn’t as valuable as the unnamed student’s find of the 100 jewels the year before. In any case, he planned to keep what he had found.
One year later, Roche found an upper thigh and a hand sticking out of the ice.
The same month Roche found those body parts on the Bossons Glacier, three other bodies were found in the Swiss Alps. Two, found on the Diablerets massif, were a shoemaker and a teacher who had disappeared 75 years before. The other body, found on the Lagginhorn, was a German hiker who had died 30 years prior.
Lost Artifacts
“Without close attention,” the Archeological Institute of America writes, “many of the artifacts that emerge from melting ice will be lost—decomposed or washed away—before they can be studied.”
Lost Friends
My friend’s student was not the first to be lost in Oregon’s Mt. Hood Wilderness Area, or even the first person I’d heard of, myself. In August of 2010, the bodies of a friend-of-a-friend, Katie Nolan, and her climbing partner, Anthony Vietti, were recovered from the Reid Glacier on Mt. Hood, eight months after they went missing, once the warmer weather had melted the snow enough to see them, there, suspended in time.
Lost Chances
A few months after Katie Nolan’s body is found, I attend a wedding in Oregon on the edge of the Mt. Hood National Forest. I plan to hike Mount Hood while I’m out there and even pack, in a carry-on, all my glacial gear: harness, daypack, wool underclothes, headlamp, food, waterproof everything: gloves, jacket, pants, and boots, leaving room only for a bridesmaid’s dress and a couple regular changes of clothes.
While we’re there, the rest of the wedding party and I stay in a small Scandinavian-themed cabin called the Heritage, poised high in the evergreen forest. It’s lined in dark wood with blue shutters. On the wall is a framed copy of the Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian next to some museum photos from Oslo.
As it turns out, I never make it to Mt. Hood. It rains and snows the entire five days I’m there except for a twenty-minute break in the middle of the ceremony when a slice of light appears through the branches, through the widows of the wooden rotunda where the wedding is held, and onto the bride’s bare back.
The light doesn’t last. As soon as the wedding is finished, it begins to hail—like rice—one of the other bridesmaids says—only harder.
Lost on Mt. Hood
Two years after the wedding in Oregon, I do make it to Mt. Hood. My friend Kim is visiting the U.S. from England and offers to meet up in the Northwest. I suggest Mt. Hood. On the day of our hike, Kim drives our tiny rental car up a narrow gravel road that looks, at first, like a driveway or logging road, at best. But it goes up curving higher into the woods, and so we follow it.
Finally, we find ourselves at a small parking area. We park next to the one other car there, put on our hiking gear and start upwards, into the woods. We’re supposed to be making a loop toward Mt. Hood. The shady uphill path moves us that way at first. After 30 or 40 minutes, we can see the mountain itself, ahead of us, its snowy outline looming above the trees. I take a photograph of Kim and myself and the mountain. We’re wind-whipped and my face is red from the hike, but the sky is clear behind me.
We turn just after that, onto a high ridge that veers back into the denser woods. Perhaps that’s where we go wrong. After only a few minutes, instead of continuing to walk up, towards the mountain, we seem to be going down. We walk and walk some more, and I feel certain this must just be a dip before a rise, but there is no rise. When we finally turn around and walk back, we can’t find the path up from our map.
Somewhere near the lowest part of our descent, I hear three sharp blasts of a whistle, as if someone is calling for help, but in the dense trees, I do not know from where the whistle is coming. I cannot make my way to it.
Lost Planes
Fifteen years before Air India 101 took off—November 3, 1950—another plane crashed into the mountain in almost the exact spot on Mt. Blanc. That plane, a Lockheed L-749A, Air India 245, named The Malahar Princess, was carrying 40 Indian soldiers from Bombay to Istanbul to Geneva to London. There was stormy weather that November day. Rather than coasting over the top of Mt. Blanc, Air India 245 crashed straight into the Bossons Glacier at 15,344 feet. It took three days before search parties could reach the plane, but there were no survivors.
/lôst, läst/
The phrase “losing it” began to be commonly used in the 1990s. When researching the phrase, I come across an English-language-learners website where a new English speaker titles their post, “Am I losing it?” and asks, “Could you please tell me the best meaning for this sentence? By the way, should I just use it when I’m talking with my friends and family?” Two people reply to say the phrase means getting angry or losing composure. One woman from England adds that it also means “losing one’s marbles,” or sometimes, “losing the plot.”
Lost Ice
In the last forty years, glaciers in the French Alps have retreated by 100 square meters, or about 25% of their surface. In the last hundred years, the glaciers on Mount Hood—eleven in total—have shrunk by over 30 percent, with one of these glaciers losing 61% of its volume.
The melting glaciers not only reveal artifacts; they also create crevasses, fissures, rockfalls, and floods.
Lost Saint
One summer, I visit my friend Laura, who has recently moved to Europe. The day I arrive, she and her husband, Andrew, pick me up from a small train station in a medium-sized city, the city where Andrew grew up. We wander by shops and restaurants, through a garden, past a river, and then he points out the city’s cathedral.
“We should go inside,” Laura grabs my arm. We walk right past the paying entrance. “Andrew doesn’t believe in paying to visit churches,” Laura says as we push open a side door and walk through.
We wander around the Cathedral, past its long wooden pews and cement plaques and tombs. After a few minutes of walking around, and while Laura and Andrew are looking at a tomb and discussing its history, I walk to the very front of the church, to a narrow hallway behind the lectern and communion table.
There’s a wooden door there and it’s open. Though I’m not sure what this place is or even if I’m supposed to be there, I step inside.
There, inside that room is a small chapel, filled with paintings in woodcut frames, each painting of a different Christian saint. My eye is drawn to a single painting. There’s greenery around the saint; he has wispy brown hair, wears a cloak, and is carrying a long wooden staff, still bearing the marks from where it was sawn off when once a tree branch. A small nameplate below the painting reads “Saint Christopher.” A woman standing just behind me looks at the same painting and says to her husband, “He’s the saint of lost things, isn’t he?”
“No,” her husband replies, reading off a small yellow cardstock brochure that he has in his hand, something he likely picked up from the information table in the corner. “He’s the saint of travelers and also of mountaineers; he once carried the Christ child across a river.”
Though I’m not of a tradition that venerates saints, in that chapel, my friends waiting just outside, I kiss my palm and touch the saint’s head.
Saint of the Lost
The real saint of lost things is Saint Anthony. Tradition says he got this title—the saint of lost things—after praying for a lost book to be found, and it was. Anthony also had a gift for preaching. One day—years before he’d preach to crowds of thousands—there was no one there to listen, and so he went out by himself and preached his message to the fish.
Lost and Found
When I’m in college, a friend invites me to a Pentecostal tent meeting. It’s the South, but even so, it’s an unseasonably warm winter.
Partway through the meeting, the preacher tells the crowd that sometimes God gives signs to lost-people-who-have-been-found by God: sometimes healings, sometimes “physical manifestations.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, not until the woman next to me leans over and shows me her palm. “Look,” she says, pointing at her hand, “That glinting you see; that’s diamonds.”
I try to look closer, but all I see is water.
A wilderness guide before she began writing, Beth Peterson has an MFA from the University of Wyoming and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Passages North, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., where she is an assistant professor in Grand Valley State University’s creative writing program.