Issue 02

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト

Issue 02

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト

Cover by Nayalan Moodley.Issue 02 - May 2015

I photograph things to see what they look like photographed.

 ~ Garry Winogrand

Table of Contents

Issue 02

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト

Click on the # or content to jump to page

Technical Details

Contributors

Alex McLaren

Jason Weller

Nayalan Moodley

Theo Kogod

Mind & Spacein Modern Japan

Theo Kogod

The Climb

Will Fitch

Contributors3ft Left is publish bi-monthly and we don’t want you to miss anything.To receive new issues as soon as they are released, sign up here.

He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

 ~ Douglas Adams (from The Salmon of Doubt)

Title Fonts:

Cover & Contributors - Packt by Simon StratfordFiction - Vtks good luck for you by Douglas Vitkauskas

3FeetLeft

on social

The views and opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. To the best of our knowledge all details in this magazine were correct at the time of publication. The publisher does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions.

3ft Left magazine contains photographic and artistic content that may include nudity, adult concepts, coarse language, and bears.

This 3ft Left issue is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You are free to share this work in its original form for private consumption. No commercial use is permitted. No editing, adaptations, derivatives or changes are permitted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

All individual content within 3ft Left is copyrighted by the respective creator(s) or copyright owner(s) and may not be reproduced in any form without prior express permission except as noted above under the CC-by-nc-nd license of the issue in it’s entirety.

Thanks for checking out Issue 02 of 3ft Left. Not too many changes for this issue but we have added some navigation icons to help you move through the mag-azine. If you want to jump around, look for the home and info icons in the bottom right corner. You’ll be able to jump straight to the table of contents as well as the technical information chart at the end.

We’ve got the same team as Issue 01 but we’ll be looking to grow from the next issue. If you are a photographer in Japan and interested in getting involved, reach out on facebook, twitter or shoot us an email. Everyone involved is currently in Nagoya and Tokyo/Yokohama, so we’ll be especially pleased to hear from someone in a different area. But either way, feel free to get in touch.

-Will Fitch (editor)

Resident Writer

Theo is a writer, teacher, wanderer, and occasionally dabbles in the black arts of editing. Being dyslexic, Theo didn’t learn to read until he was ten years old. The next year, he began writing his first attempted novel. After getting his Bachelor of Arts from Guilford College, he moved to Japan to teach English. When he’s not writing or researching geeky historical facts, he enjoys reading comics, eating exotic foods, spoiling his two cats, and rebelling against the laws of physics. A lover of history, he has climbed the heights to Dracula’s Castle, crawled through Minoan sewer ducts, and explored the outskirts of Edirne in pursuit of stories. You can follow him on his blog The Modern Skald.

Theo Kogod

Resident PhotographersWhy I take photos? Top reasons.

1. Special occasion.2. Everyone else is taking photos.3. I need something for Facebook4. I’ve got a camera and I’m going to use it.5. I got a camera in my smartphone and I want to use it.6. It’s helps me see the world better?7. There is no No.78. I like to find out about my camera and all the kinds of photos it can take.9. I like to find out about myself and all the photos I could take.10. All of the above.

I also take photos for my internet shopping site otaku.com.

Alex McLarenI was born in Middle America, but I currently find myself in Nagoya, Japan. It

was here in the spring of 2013 that I found my love of making photographs.

I began prowling Nagoya daily on the hunt for anything photogenic. As time went by, I found myself getting deeper and deeper into the city. I started outdoors and on the street, but eventually I ended up exploring stranger and darker venues.

Recently, my fascination has shifted to people. We are in a transformative period unprecedented in human history. Our species is making incredible headway in all facets of life, moving us rapidly towards an efficient singularity. While this progress is undeniable, the concept remains bittersweet in my eyes.

In order to enter this palace of modernity, it seems we are leaving our individ-uality at the gates. Even in my short lifetime, I have witnessed a substantial amount of the change. Across the world, what to eat, wear, watch, read, and idolize are merging into similar, if not identical, entities. Our paths are narrowing. As a consequence, it is becoming rare to catch a glimpse of a true individual.

It also makes it that much more fun to try.

Jason Weller jcweller.com

I’m an expat South African freelance multimedia content creator working out of Tokyo.

I am passionate about underground, reactionary subcultures. The stubborn nails that refuse to be hammered flat. Because the best human beings I’ve ever met are the ones most looked down upon by the herds of sheeple that make/partake in the mass, blind consumerism that is “proper” society.

Nayalan Moodley darc.jp

I learned to shoot on my parents’ old soviet Zenit when I was in high school.Shortly after university, I traded in both my film and digital cameras for a compact point & shoot. I’d been taking your standard vacation snapshots for a while at that point, no longer creating shots but instead capturing memories. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but my artistic interest was peaked anew after watching Jason fall down the photographers’ rabbit hole. I decided I, too, wanted (back) in.

This issue features two of my digital shots and one expired film shot. It was my first time trying expired film and I’m rather pleased with the effect it created. You may see me shooting with it more and more.

Will Fitch

Ley lines of steel stripe the land, carrying people over the electric roadways of Japan’s railroad grid, while the blacktop brands its hot scars into the Tokyo streets flanked by cobbled walkways. At the famous Shibuya Crossing, pinnacles of glass and neon lights tower over the intersection where people swell from train to sidewalk to street and back, moving with the industrial vigor of modern purpose. But when the Yamanote Line opened its first railway terminal in 1885, Shibuya was still a village run by a family of the same name. It was the rails and roads which imbued this village with the pulse of urban life, carried along the veins of track that shaped not just the land, but the way Japanese people used and understood their surroundings.

I can’t find such changes surprising. Japan’s con-sciousness has always been shaped by its geography. In the Heian Period, emperors and empresses composed waka poetry to celebrate the land’s beauty. To the people, Fuji’s snow-capped dome and the surrounding sea are no less important than the cities of Tokyo and Kyoto. The country’s oldest surviving book, the Kojiki, tells how the gods Izanami and Izanagi made the Japanese Isles, but it was people who shaped those isles into the place we know today.

There is a sense inherent in Japanese urban plan-ning, guiding people instinctively along main routes. At the Cherry Blossom Festival in Yoyogi Park this past spring, drunkards stumbled under the eaves of a pink-blossomed canopy, and though they were unable to walk straight they still managed to follow the paved blacktop paths as they ambled to wherever it is drunk-ards feel compelled to go when they are half-blind with booze at 11am on a Sunday. The beauty of the park is in its trees and spacious landscape, but also in that its paths have been designed so that even the most inebri-ated can follow them.

People converge along the cobbles that flank busy streets, using their phones to navigate, and the experi-ence of moving through the city is dictated as much by the wireless summons of maps beamed onto their phones’ screens and the software of hyperreality as by the concrete squares underfoot or the glass-faced monoliths that tower like kaiju overhead.

People follow the prompts of storefront logos emblazoned onto their consciousness by marketing groups and the unseen signals feeding their phones, and one wonders if the blue LED lights of our era blaze even brighter than the dawn across the light-pol-luted skies of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Sometimes the only way to steer the unknown maze of unfamiliar streets is with the map on one’s phone. Other times, telecartography fails and direc-tions beamed across the airwaves get lost before they ever reach the people on the ground. A trip to Shin-juku’s cat café leads past a street of hostess bars and love hotels as the meaning of cat apparently gets misinterpreted. A couple stands on the corner together and enter the same address into their smart phones, only to be instructed to go in opposite directions.

For many a flâneur, an amble down unfamiliar streets is experienced with eyes fixed on a phone’s screen as much as the surrounding land.

Yet the land is shaped to make a niche for almost anything. Buildings and streets are designed to draw attention. Respectable businesses attract the eye as they occupy the largest space with the shiniest advertise-ments, and thus paradoxically have created a space for those places that cater to the culturally taboo.

Hostess bars are accessed by stairs just above or below the main ground-level restaurants, keeping them quite literally off the street. Graffiti decorates the back alleys where restaurants serve getemono.* The entrances to gay bars blend into their surroundings, often only distinguished by a small rainbow flag outside the door. Thus is subculture built into the architecture of main-stream culture.

Anime and videogames depict Japan as a country either whirring on electric currents into a futurist utopia or else still defined by its past of feudal bushi in struggle with ancient ghosts and spirits. The present is a world far more strange for its mundane pastiche of these divergent places in time.

But an hour south of Tokyo is the Sugiyama Shrine in Nakayama, Yokohama, a sacred site built into a forest now mostly cut down to make room for housing and convenience stores, my own apartment among them. Outside the shrine, metal bus stops rise in bent two-pillared arcs like New Aged torii on Route 140, creating an almost surreal faerie tale blend as tradition straddles the modern roadways. And following the logic of faerie tales, I have found the truly great and unexpected adventures occur only after leaving the main road far behind.

Mind & Space in Modern Japanby Theo Kogod

瀬をはやみ岩にせかるる滝川の

われても末に逢はむとぞ思ふ

Tanka No. 77 of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Written by Emperor Sutoku; Translated by Clay MacCauley

Though a swift stream isDivided by a boulderIn its headlong flow

Though divided, on it rushesAnd at last unites again

* “exotic food” or “strange food”

But his mind had been going for a while. He wasn’t seeing things so clearly, or perhaps it was that he saw a few things clearly that weren’t altogether there. That woman he’d groped—he’d thought it’d been Cassie, not that Cassie believed him when he told her.

Now Cassie was gone, and what did he have without her? This crappy studio apartment filled with boxes of over-loved books and dirty laundry. His old climbing equipment. Bills. An old laptop. A credit card with a limit so high he couldn’t see it from beneath the weight of his debt.

At least that was something he could use.

He’d once read how in feudal Japan, villages would send their elderly up into the mountains to die of exposure rather than burden the community by eating food and wasting resources better given to those who’d live. The thought weighed heavy on him mind.

Maybe they had the right idea.

He opened Google and began searching for a place he could go to die. He looked at some Japanese cities, then began scanning through tropical islands, Asiatic temple complexes, and Amazonian jungle resorts. None of them felt right. But then again, he could dig his own grave amidst a third world sewage heap and it’d be an improvement to ending his life here in Wyoming’s rural foothills. But he wanted the choice to be meaningful.

He sighed, stood up, and immediately tripped over a box. The floor tried to uppercut him, but thankfully, another box intercepted the blow. He crashed into it, spilling climbing rope and carabiners across the floor. And suddenly, he knew where he could be happy dying.

Three days later, Reid was more than four thousand miles from home and five thousand dollars deeper in credit card debt he had neither the ability nor inten-

The woman dropped the charges against him, but Cassie still kicked him out.

Reid told himself it wasn’t his fault. He made excuses. He drank. But he couldn’t forget what he’d done, or what people were saying about him, and he couldn’t remember how things got this way.

He picked up the phone, and called her again. She picked up this time. It was only his third time calling.

“What is it, Reid? What could you possibly have to say now?” Cassie snapped.

“I—“ Reid stammered. “Just, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah? You’ve told me. Listen, Reid, stop calling me, okay? We’re done, and you need some serious help.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but then the line clicked. Maybe it really was over. Her words echoed in his head.

Help? Maybe he did need help. And so he made a call he’d been putting off for far too long.

“Cancer.”

The word struck him like a guillotine. Reid barely heard the doctor as she kept talking, only vaguely aware of the technical words she kept repeating and then dumbing down for him. She said some things about spatial awareness, vision and memory being affected, told him speaking would become more difficult if they didn’t “act fast” and “handle it immediately.”

He couldn’t “handle it”—now, or ever.

“When do you think you want to schedule to come back in for more tests?” the doctor asked.

“I can’t. My insurance won’t cover it,” Reid told her, and bit back of desperation he tasted in those words.

“This really isn’t something you want to wait on. You’ve already delayed coming in too long as is,” she insisted.

“Yeah? Well, tell that to my provider. I’ve already got more bills than I can pay,” Reid said, and turned toward the door. However, he didn’t leave, nor did he really stay. She convinced him to listen to what she said, and he did, or tried to, but he was already gone and they both knew it.

That night, he sat up in bed staring at the worn page of an old trade paperback and reading the same inscrutable lines again and again, trying to take his mind off all the things he wasn’t going to miss. He’d lost his wife and his job within a month of each other. Not that the job was much. Reid had never enjoyed working in sales. The numbers on his paychecks never seemed to equal the number of indignities he suffered earning them. When he’d been made a manager, it just meant the company expected him to spend more time doing things he hated but kept paying him far less than he deemed fair. When his headaches started up, they didn’t want him taking off, but the headaches worsened, and he had trouble thinking straight. After he messed up the count on two separate occasions they let Reid go. Apparently they didn’t like getting less money than was fair either.

The Climbby Theo Kogod

“Troll women. Or maybe elf women is a better way to say it. It’s what I call these girls with their gothed-out hair. Some of the old stories use the word, saying how men got lured up into the mountains by beautiful and mysterious women. Of course, the men never returned. I think we’ve got some stuff on them in one of the brochures,” Magnus offered.

“That’s all right,” Reid said, trying to remember if he’d read about this before or not.

“First time in Norway?” Magnus asked.

“Yeah. I’ve always wanted to climb in the Jotun-heimen, but—“

“Let me guess. You found love, right? Or knocked someone up?”

“No. I got a job. Well, more like a life sentence, really. The marriage came later, but no... No kids,” Reid trailed off, and Magnus sensed some doom in his somber tone.

“You have much experience climbing?” he asked instead, changing the topic.

“Yeah, but it’s been some years. I’ve done the Alps, the Alaska Range, the Rockies, a couple others. But I’ve always wanted to climb in Norway, like I said.”

They talked climbing and technique and compared differences in snow and rock faces for a bit, sharing stories until Magnus finally asked about Reid’s climb-ing partner. When Reid said he didn’t have one, Magnus informed him that anyone with half a brain knew not to climb alone. Reid didn’t bother telling him how much of an improvement half a brain would’ve been.

They talked back and forth, and it came out that Magnus led tours up the mountain every other week. Magnus invited Reid to climb with him, but of course Reid declined. Except then Magnus bought him a drink, and even though it was early, he accepted,

because it’s not like he’d have too many more opportu-nities. They talked a bit more, and eventually Magnus convinced Reid to agree to go climbing with him, even saying Reid could pay back the difference by working at the hostel for a week or so. The tour was going to be in four days, and Magnus recommended other touristy things to occupy him until then.

Of course, Reid had no intention of going with Magnus, so he woke early the next day, gathered his climbing gear, and set out on his own to scale the looming peaks.

The first few hundred meters’ climbing were straightforward enough. It was basically just hiking with solid rock underfoot that got harder as he left the vegetation behind. The higher he climbed, the steeper the slope became, shedding its coat of grass and then donning a white cover of hoarfrost.

Ice slicked under his heavy boots and his lungs wheezed, unused to the frigid air after years without climbing, but one stride at a time, he ascended until he stopped to rest on a magnificent ledge overlooking the valley.

The view was as beautiful as he’d hoped after years of staring at travel brochures, but still, there was a sense of sorrow knowing this would be the last climb of his life.

In the past, he’d always had a partner with him. He used to climb with his friends Mike and Darrell, and they’d talk and joke on the early parts of the climb and help one another out as things got harder near the top. But now Mike was gone—taken by cirrhosis after one (or a thousand) Guinnesses too many—and Darrell hadn’t returned his calls in years.

He’d climbed with Cassie too, backpacking every other summer for their first ten years together. But his job had ruined that for him, giving him that big promotion which meant more responsibility, less

tion to repay. He’d only packed clothes, his climbing equipment, and a beaten paperback copy of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. It had taken him most of the flight just to read one story, “The Frost-Gi-ant’s Daughter,” in which the barbarian hero Conan chased a beautiful giant maid across the mountain peaks of Nordheim.

Now he had arrived in the real land of giants—the Jotunheimen Mountains. Named for the same Norse giants that had inspired the Conan story, the peaks were the highest in Northern Europe. Reid had reserved a room in a hostel at the foot of the moun-tains, choosing one that catered to mountaineers. He arrived early, and sat in the first-floor lobby waiting for his room to be ready. Nearby, a couple of girls giggled. He stared. Curvy, young, and fit, they possessed an elfin beauty with rich tattoos and hair dyed in auroras of green gossamer. They saw him, laughed, waved, and he looked away, ashamed as much at being caught as because he did not trust his eyes to speak honestly through the tumor clotting his thoughts.

“Great slopes on those girls, am I right?” said a man stepping up to Reid, and he scarcely managed to hide the relief at this man’s confirmation of his senses.

“I’m Magnus,” the man said, extending a hand.

Reid gave his own name, traded grips, and exchanged pleasantries as Magnus sat beside him.

“Huldras like that, I tell you, they can make a man lose his senses,” Magnus said.

Reid gave a noncommittal nod, but despite his initial unease, found himself dragged into a conversa-tion with Magnus, a cook and a guide at the hostel who had a deep appreciation for women with artificial hair coloring and an excess of tattoos—whom he kept referring to “huldras” for some reason.

“What?” Reid finally asked, after Magnus used the term for the half-dozenth time.

from the tumor pressing against his optic nerve, well, then he wouldn’t even be able to see his final moment as he blundered into it.

He ate another MRE, downed half his canteen, and reminisced about his last climb in the Rockies with Cassie. They told stories to each other around a small campfire alongside the trail, and when they reached the summit, made love on the mountaintops under the open sky. But that had been in the height of summer and at lower elevations. Not like these heights where scathing white winds blasted across the moun-tainside. He’d always wanted to climb in Norway, but it wasn’t even winter, and still the cold clawed under his coat and gloves to burrow inside the hollows of his bones. He picked icicles of frozen snot from his nose, and stared up at the white ridges bending ever higher. This really was the perfect place to die.

He climbed another couple hours that day before stopping on a snowy ledge to set up camp for the night. Nightmares plagued him, or perhaps they were memories, as delusion and recollection bled together inside him.

He awoke the next morning not from the wind, but the cold.

The sun still stalked the nightlands beyond the horizon, its orange glow not yet come to drive back the dark, and an altogether different light filled the sky above. He stared in open-mouthed wonder as the auroras bled across the vault of heaven with the arcane streams of burnt copper. Reid stared up at them as he melted more snow to drink with his tiny stove, and its blue flame seemed a dim reflection of the greater lights above.

By the time the dawn’s gold rays drove the green troll-fires from sight, Reid had already packed up camp and begun his final ascent.

To his surprise, the snow didn’t have the crisp icy

day. Then he began his ascent up the wall of ice. Driving his ice axes and crampons into the rime, he fumbled to twist ice screws into the cliff face. He advanced slowly, the wind tearing at him as he hung exposed on the heights. But after the first sixty or eighty feet, the wind eased up and his muscles began to remember how to work after years of neglect.

It took him several hours to get to the top of the wall, and when he reached the summit he pinioned himself in place and just lay there, panting. His whole body ached. He sucked deep breaths of the thin air. Finally, Reid got up the strength to peer over the edge.

There was no bottom. There was just pale haze in the void, a chasm that stretched into infinity.

In times of old, Norse warriors who died in battle might expect to be greeted by beautiful and furious Valkyries who’d whisk them off to Valhalla, but the shameful dead went to Helheim’s misty halls below the roots of the world. It seemed even at this height, those mists climbed up to claim him.

So he climbed even higher, not giving himself as much rest as perhaps was wise, but not willing to quit either. He was determined to reach the top, and if it killed him, then all the better.

A much gentler slope awaited him atop the ice wall, and he figured if he took it along the bend to the east he could reach the eastern peaks ahead of him by early the next morning. However, less than an hour into the trek, his headaches returned, and gravity began to pull sideways as vertigo took hold. He sat down, opened his sack, and began to fumble with his medicine.

It wasn’t the good stuff. He couldn’t afford the good stuff. The little blue pills numbed his pain and helped suppress his vertigo, but when things got really bad and he had difficulty with memory or spatial relations or—God help him—visual hallucinations

vacation, and an extra seventy-five cents every hour he worked once his unpaid overtime was accounted for. That job had been slavery, strangling the life from him one pay period at a time.

But this! This was freedom!

Reid let out a smoking sigh of wonder as he looked down across the fey greens and troll greys of the valley below, where the town was little more than a few twists of bulging color in the mountains’ roots. Then he turned his head up to admire the coronation of sharp white peaks that sliced the heavens in crystalline arcs above. The flutings and cornices seemed almost to support the vault of the sky. He felt so small here, surrounded by nature, and caught in this middling place, he took a moment to gaze upon the beauty of all that waited both above and below.

High up like this, he could really feel the bite of winter temperatures and the thinness of the air, cutting daggers in his throat with every inhalation and freezing a kiss upon his lips as he exhaled. Already, the sun was descending. He couldn’t climb much more that day.

He made camp in the shadow of a sheer ice-slicked wall while the light scintillated on the rockface above. He’d packed enough food, but hydration was always a greater priority and he boiled ice into drinking water with his small gas stove before retiring into his tent for the night.

The next morning he woke to the ululating wind, keening an eerie dirge as it shrieked down the frozen slopes. He opened his tent flap onto a blinding white abyss of snow. He couldn’t see the valley anymore, and he certainly couldn’t see the peaks above through the jotunn’s breath that blasted down the mountain at him. This windy haze had devoured yesterday’s autumn hues.

He breakfasted on MRE’s and snowmelt, boiling enough extra drinking water to fill his canteen for the

However, amidst the pain and his thick gloves, he couldn’t unscrew the top of the pill bottle. Fumbling, he removed his glove—and dropped the bottle, its top popping off at last. It skidded down the steep bank, blue pellets raining like tears across the white snow as they spilled over the cliffside into oblivion.

Reid stared after them. He could follow their lead.

All it would take to end the pain would be to let go of his ice axe and fall into the void below. There’d be no pain. No memory. No body for them to find.

He thought of all that’d die with him. All the memories he’d carried with him. When he’d bought his first car—an old beat-up Sedan—and driven it to the Grand Canyon with Mike. Hanging out after school at the corner pizza shop with his favorite steak-tip subs. The way his mother used to read to him at night.

And then there were all the memories of Cassie. Waking up in the mornings and listening to her breathe. Dancing with her at their wedding. Proposing to her at the foot of a glacier on their trip to Alaska. Meeting her at the 4th of July barbecue.

The pain of memory metastasized, cutting down his spine as his ruined leg bled out in the snow.

He was going to die, along with his memories, his hopes, and his dreams, but if he let go now, the pain would also die and this agony would vanish in the snows below.

But down there, the mists of Helheim waited. After climbing so high, he didn’t want to fall into the pit.

Gritting his teeth, he sank the crampon of his good foot into the snow. Then, he did the same with his bad foot. His lips split in a scream and tears burned in his eyes, his reward for trying to keep a foothold on life.

He reached to his side and produced an ice drill, driving it into the steep hoarfrost ahead of him. Then he looped a rope through it and connected it to his

snow clawing at his face as he plummeted into the void.

Instinct kicked in. He hacked at the whiteness surrounding him, flailing desperately with his ice axes. Powder gave way before him, spraying up cold and rocks, until suddenly he caught hold of something solid—with his foot.

The crampons stuck into ice and rock as he fell. He screamed in agony and dropped one of his axes as his shank ripped through the skin beneath his knee. There was a thud and the crampon broke loose. He was falling again. Winter blades gashed him. Reid smashed against a sheet of ice, rolled, and slid against its hard slope. He slammed his ice axe down, skidding along the hoarfrost as his axe blades clawed the ground, grinding down to catch a firm hold. Friction cut grooves into the slope, spitting up ice, slowing him.

Finally, he stopped.

And he lay there, panting through his pain.

To his amazement, he’d stopped just a few feet from the edge of a sheer drop. Looking up, he saw that he had fallen more than fifty feet through the snow. White flutings and mushrooms swelled on the heights above, where he’d been walking before. If his foot hadn’t struck the mountainside and slowed his fall, he’d be dead.

Amidst the pain, he wished he was.

And yet now he wanted to live more than ever. The paradox of it would be troubling, except he could barely focus on anything besides the torment in his broken leg.

Whatever he decided, he didn’t want to suffer. With his free hand, he fumbled at his bag, freeing the bottle of blue pills. They wouldn’t kill his pain, but might numb it enough to make killing himself more bearable.

bite of the day before. Instead it was a soft delicate powder, like other climbers talked about encountering in the Andes. But he’d never heard of that kind of snow up here in the Jotunheimen Mountains. His boots sunk in the loose snow ‘til it piled to his knees. He had no need for crampons in this powder, but he didn’t know how much ice lay beneath the snow so he’d strapped them onto his boots before leaving, and held an ice axe in each hand.

The going was slow, but the sun blazed silver against the crystal peaks less than a thousand feet above. It didn’t take him long to make the climb.

When he reached the top, he sighed with relief, staring into the abyss below. The beauty of the slopes stole his smoking breath. Breathing the chill air made his head light, and he realized he couldn’t see the bottom. A pale haze blanketed the roots of the moun-tains, and Reid didn’t trust his eyes to know if it was real.

Still, this was victory. He’d made it.

He stayed up there maybe an hour or so, and thought about just giving in then and there. It would be as good a place as any to die.

But there was another peak just looming to the south. He decided to see if he could make it there before dark.

Sighing, he began his descent along the mountain’s southern slope.

Reid knew between 40 and 70% of all mountain-eering accidents happened on the descent. But he wasn’t really descending. He was just going from peak to peak until an accident found him.

It didn’t take long.

He was walking across a patch of powdered snow along the southern slope when suddenly the ground gave out beneath him. He shot straight down, ice and

Ahead, the stream forked about a jut of rock, one rivulet bending left and burrowing into the rock while the other lazed to the right and away from the moun-tainside into some icy protuberance of the cave walls.

Atop the rock a pair of young women sat and sang.

They were naked as the dawn, the curves of their skin glacially pale and their hair like cobalt flame. Their lips cut blood-red lines into their pearl features, and their eyes blazed with a feral light. Enchantment rolled off their lips in a maddening hymn that reinvig-orated Reid, rousing the blood in him with renewed vitality.

These were not women, but phantoms from the old tales, giant-maids or huldras, more myth than flesh, and surely to see them meant that Reid had died beneath the mound of the hills and was now in the presence of those fey whose deaths had come when modern disbelief reduced their essence to shapeless memory.

One of the women stood, looking right at him. She closed her lips and beckoned him with an outstretched hand.

Reid obeyed.

His feet staggered through the stream’s slush, his boots and snowpants barely sufficing to keep out the frost-flecked waters. Limping, he ignored his pain, desperate to get to the rock.

But as Reid ambled forward, the second sylph rose, and still chanting her sibylline song, crooked a finger at him, and stepped into the stream’s left fork. For a long moment she held his gaze, her deep eyes boring into him. Then she looked away, and his eyes followed after her as she strode through the icy rivulets. Her companion went with her, stalking through the stream to the place where it disappeared into the rock.

far down as he could dig.

Reid burrowed until he couldn’t even see the beginnings of his makeshift tunnel, when suddenly his axe broke through the ice in front of him and out into open air. A warm breath blew through the gap. With it came the wind’s siren song, whispering to him. He wondered if he was just tunneling through a massive cornice and might fall out into empty sky the moment he broke through. The hole was too small to tell much, and all he could see through it was a pale cloud of frostbitten air and a faint glow of blue light.

He swung the axe again. The ice broke before him, and he fell forward, tumbling through the gap—not into the sky’s maw but a mere twelve feet down into a cave in the ice. He landed on his chest and grunted from the pain. Reid lay there, exhausted, as the wind’s song continued, only now he could hear words in it sung in an unintelligible sibilant soprano.

He forced himself to rise, looking about him. The cavern was enormous, an icy womb at least twenty feet tall and impossibly long as it winnowed around the mountainside. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling and dribbled down onto the cave floor, forming a silver stream that snaked along the passage. Reid bent and drank from the cold stream, sipping the tears of icicles. They burned their cold sorrow into him.

He followed the stream as it twisted its burbling descent along the passage floor. The rime-walled corridors were so huge they could hide sleeping giants, and he wondered if he had crossed the threshold into myth. He limped uneasily, biting back the pain, but as he progressed the ache in his leg numbed. All the while, the eerie eldritch song grew louder.

It was like church music, and the sounds of mourn-ing for all he knew he’d leave behind, ringing through the scintillant cave of his mind until he felt himself a part of this chthonic world.

harness. The second ice screw he set even higher into the slope. The third higher still. And so, bit by bit, he slowly pulled himself up to the high flutings of pow-dered snow rising in a great wall before him.

Reid dug himself a cave in the snow, and collapsed.

His eyes opened and the world was empty. All was white. All was lightless. Cool mist hung in shrouded mystery in all directions. The entrance to the cave had evaporated in the haze. Space and time had dissolved.

Beyond and through the fog, a shrill song keened on the stillborn wind. The wending whine of sound slithered inside him, and he felt it press against the inside of his swollen skull.

Disoriented, Reid picked up a clump of snow, then let it go. It fell up, some of it getting in his face.

How had he turned himself upside down in the cave? Maybe that was the cause of this headache—too much blood to the head.

He got to work, reaching inside his pack for some rope and a spare pick, then began to splint his broken leg. He didn’t remove his pants to do it properly. He was in too much pain already to risk more cold.

With that done, he began to dig with his one good ice axe, tunneling up—or was it down?—in the direc-tion gravity had pulled the snow. The white powder he’d encountered before was gone, hardened into the hoary crystals that chinked against the axe and sprayed in solid clumps as he climbed across them on elbows and stomach, burrowing a tunnel for himself. He put some of the chunks of ice in his mouth and sucked them to stave off dehydration, the chill shards gnawing at him from within.

He wondered if the snow would collapse under him again—give him a quick death. It’s not like there was any real rock as far as he could tell—just snow as

until they told him later.

At the hostel, Magnus got him his own private room and phoned for a doctor to come by, not wanting to move him anymore.

Magnus paid him a visit before the doctor arrived, finding him sitting up in bed staring at an old well-loved photograph.

“So, were you trying to get yourself killed?” the Norwegian asked.

Reid didn’t bother denying it, and shrugged by way of confession.

“Ok, well then, what now?” Magnus asked.

Reid sat up in the bed, and gave the man a long look before answering.

“I’ve got another mountain to get over,” Reid said.

“I think you’re climbing days are over.”

Again, Reid didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he stared at the crumpled piece of paper in his hand. Cassie stared back up at him. Behind her rose the huge Alaskan glacier where he’d proposed.

Reid looked from the picture of his wife to the window where the rising slopes filled his site, and then to the man in front of him who had only a few days before indicated the worst thing possible was to have just half a brain.

He didn’t answer for a long moment, but just as Magnus was about to go, Reid spoke, and despite all he’d been through, a feeling of hope swelled in his chest.

“You know,” Reid said,

“There’s more than one kind of mountain.”

When he finally broke out into the light of day, the ice sluiced down about him as needles of sunlight stabbed his eyes. The fresh air stung his lips and lungs. Snow sloughed off the mountainside in white puffs.

He watched it roll into the valley below him.

The town below was less than a mile away, the buildings reduced to black bricks in the autumn’s rocky hues. He was so close.

Yet he could never reach the bottom. Not with his leg.

And then he heard another sound. Human voices. Not singing.

Shouting.

He looked about before spotting the source of the noise. Below him on the slope, small black silhouettes moved like ants crawling up the mountainside. They were still a ways away, maybe half a mile below him, but they’d spotted the snow sliding down the moun-tain and by the sound of it they were hailing him to see if he was okay.

“Hey! Hello!” one of them shouted, speaking English with only a slight Norwegian accent.

“Hello!” he shouted back, and then “Help! Help me!”

“Are you okay?” they shouted.

“No! I need help!” he called back.

The party shifted their course, turning away from the marked trail to climb toward him. As they neared, he recognized the man in the lead. It was Magnus, apparently just setting out on his guided tour—the one Reid had lied and said he’d join.

Magnus and the others helped carry him the rest of the way down the mountain. With a broken leg, there weren’t really any other options. They also gave him some food and water, since he was so dehydrated that he babbled incoherently, something he wasn’t aware of

Reid hastened his steps. Then his foot struck something, and the pain shot up his broken leg, causing him to topple forward, kicking up a wave of ice water as he fell. He splashed face-first at the foot of the rock, drenching himself in glacial melt.

The women were retreating from view now, vanish-ing deeper into the cave with their keening song.

He wanted to join them, but the pain in his leg was so great he couldn’t rise.

Pain?

The dead could feel no pain, could they? Had he died, the synapses in his brain would’ve stopped processing physical sensation.

So this was not some sort of mythical apparition, but his own flawed brain taunting him. It had to be.

Which meant that if he still wanted to live, he needed to follow the right fork of the stream away from the cave’s depths and into the open air so he could see how to get down the mountain.

Reid stared to his left. He could just barely see the women’s silhouettes vanishing down a passage in the ice and rock, the wight-words of their siren song fading with them into the cold and dark.

His breath smoked as he sighed.

He pushed himself to his feet, and his cry of pain was not enough to drown out the song swimming through his thoughts. He took his first step—with the bad foot. Agony jolted up him from ankle to crown, and he staggered onto his good foot for support, splashing into the stream on his right.

Reid followed the stream until it pushed out through a hole in the ice wall to drip down the moun-tain. The hole was too small for him to crawl through, but he still had his ice axe and put it to use.

Technical Details Table of Contents

At 3ft Left we like to distinguish shots that have minimal editing. In addition to highlighting film photography with the film icon, we’ll add tags above to denote limited editing. Minimal crop to correct for parallax or viewfinder coverage will be ignored and considered straight-out-of-the-camera.

sotc - straight-out-of-the-camerawbo - global white balance only / co - crop only / lo - basic level tweaks only / bwo - B&W conversion only

wb + c + l + bw - combinations

Film Icon

Pg Body Lens Additional info Ltd Edit

C Sony α7S Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA sotc

4 Canon 5D (Mark I) Canon 20-35mm f/3.5 f/3.5 1/6s ISO500 + 430EXii flash clbw

5 Canon 5D (Mark I) Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM f/4.5 1/6s ISO1600 + 430EXii flash clbw

6 Olympus Tough 80007 Olympus Tough 80008 Zenit EM Helios 44m 58mm f2 Kodak Gold 200 (expired) cl

10 Canon PowerShot G7 X11 Canon PowerShot G7 X18 Sony α7S Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA cl

19 Sony α7S Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA cl

BC Canon PowerShot G7 X

Table of Contents

Issue 02

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト

Back cover by Alex McLaren.

quote 2 ~ quoted (from)

Issue 02

3FeetLeft

スリーフィートレフト