Cold (12 page)

It is September thirtieth. Last night, it dipped to thirty-six degrees in Anchorage, but by noon it is sunny and nearly fifty.
There are eleven hours, thirty-two minutes, and one second of daylight today, sunrise to sunset. That is five minutes and
forty-one seconds less than yesterday, and five minutes and forty-one seconds more than tomorrow. By December twenty-first,
the shortest day of the year, we will be down to about five hours of daylight. The sun, when up, will drift low in the eastern
sky, nowhere near overhead at high noon, but rather just above the mountains, angling in, its rays scattered and pasting long
shadows on what will by then be thick snow. My son and I drive out to Eagle River with the top down. He complains about the
cold. Soon the convertible will have to be parked for the winter.

It has been snowing in the mountains again. Above us, what had been termination dust is now a shroud of snow. On the trail,
well below the snow, we pass a hunter lugging out a Dall sheep. Under his load, the hunter is hunched over but moving fast.
He looks as though he has been sleeping on the ground for several days. Although he looks bad, his sheep, draped over a pack
frame and strapped in place, looks far worse.

Dall sheep, smaller relatives of the bighorn sheep that live in the Rocky Mountains, roam the mountain slopes winter and summer.
It would be fair to say that sheep seem uncomfortable on level ground. It would only be a slight exaggeration to claim that
a Dall sheep can stand upright on a vertical cliff. The rams, with their long curling horns, live in bachelor bands. The ewes,
with stubby billy-goat horns, give birth in May or June, and by the onset of winter the young have weaned. Both rams and ewes
butt heads now and again to maintain social order. They live in what is sometimes called “escape terrain,” steep rugged slopes
where they can elude predators. In summer, they eat the green fuzzy stuff growing between the rocks. In winter, they eat frozen
grasses and lichens and moss where the wind has whipped away the snow on exposed ridges. They lose weight.

Just north of here, students at Wasilla High School are raising funds to help pay the hospital bills of their basketball coach,
Jake Collins. In August, Jake and his fifty-three-year-old father had been sheep hunting in the Wrangell Mountains. They had
driven a four-wheeler eighteen miles down a mud trail and then hiked in another six miles. Doing the steep terrain work of
sheep hunting, they were at something like four thousand feet. The mountains were alive with ewes and lambs and, higher up,
rams with full-curl horns. Jake went after one of the rams. His father watched from below. “There was some really gnarly stuff
that had me nervous,” his father later told a reporter, “but he got through the gnarly stuff.” He watched his son shoot a
ram. The ram dropped. Jake moved toward it but was thwarted by the terrain. He tried a different route. He was above the ram
and tried to work down toward it but was stopped by a cliff. He went back up. “I think that third time was when he fell,”
his father said. When his father reached him, Jake was lying in a creek, bloody and unconscious, one eye swollen shut. Jake’s
father dragged him from the creek, took off his wet clothes, and redressed him in some of his own gear. Night fell. Freezing
conditions are not unusual in the Wrangells even in the middle of summer. The wind blew. By morning, Jake’s father decided
he had to go for help. There were the six miles to the four-wheeler, then the eighteen miles of muddy four-wheeler trail,
then twenty-five miles to help. It was night before a rescue helicopter was airborne. The pilot came in with night goggles.
Thirty-five-mile-an-hour winds made the helicopter shiver. When they reached Jake, he was still breathing. It took some time
to get him into the helicopter, and more time to get him to an Anchorage hospital. By then, his body temperature had dropped
to eighty-eight degrees, the temperature at which shivering slows or stops, muscles stiffen, and the mind becomes cold stupid.
Twenty days later, Jake came out of a coma.

My son and I stick to the valley floor. We watch salmon fanning the sand just above a beaver dam. We walk along a flat trail,
below the treeline and the snow, and well below sheep country. We bend over a small, weed-choked pool of water and scoop some
mud into a plastic bottle. The water feels close to freezing, like that of Prudhoe Bay in June. I put the bottle in my day
pack. Later, I will put it in the freezer with Fram and Bedford, next to the frozen vegetables and a slab of salmon, and in
spring, we will thaw it and see what comes out.

When I look up from here, certain slopes look almost skiable. It is late in the afternoon. Shadows have dusted the mountainsides,
and a breeze carries the cold air downward, into the valley, onto this trail. Despite the day’s sunshine, winter breathes
down our necks.

I
t is October third and forty-five degrees in Fairbanks. Patches of early-autumn snow lie scattered in the shadows of buildings
and trees. On the University of Alaska campus, students wear jackets. There is a correlation here: when it is cold, people
wear jackets. It seems momentarily plausible that the jackets cause the cold. People put on their jackets, and winter comes.
They encourage winter, welcoming it as others would welcome sunshine.

Fairbanks is a cold-affected town. It was settled in 1901, when the skipper of the steamboat
Lavelle Young
decided that he could not go any farther upriver, toward the goldfields. He offloaded a man named E. T. Barnette near what
would become the corner of Cushman Street and First Avenue. Barnette would become influential, but the place would have amounted
to nothing had it not been for Felix Pedro. It was Pedro who found gold nearby just a few months after Barnette landed. For
a short time, Fairbanks became the largest city in Alaska. And often it is the coldest. The average temperature in January
is minus ten. The temperature has been known to go close to a week without breaking minus forty. Thermometers in Fairbanks
know what it is to dip south of fifty below. And the people sometimes look weathered, too, pale and hardened. They are thicker
than most people, more insulated for winter. With minus forty just around the corner, this is no place for anorexia. Beards
are abundant and robust. Half of these people seem to live in cabins, which, by and large, does not mean a log cabin so much
as a plywood shack. Having said that, when an Alaskan claims to live in a cabin, what is meant is never entirely clear. A
cabin could have a dirt floor and log walls, or it could just as easily have five bedrooms, picture windows looking over a
lake, and an alarm system tied to a remote response service that notifies the owner if the central heat fails. In Fairbanks,
though, cabins tend to be on the shack side of things. Many do not have running water, in part because wells have to go deeper
than empty pockets can afford, and in part because arsenic occurs naturally in the rock around Fairbanks.

The cold weathers more than just faces. Road surfaces are wavy from frost heave. Houses are slumped from thawing ground ice.
Paint is dull and chipped, seemingly because of the cold but perhaps also because the summer is too short to be wasted on
the business end of a paintbrush. But if the town and people are weathered, they do not seem to mind. “There’s hardly any
wind,” they will tell you, looking on the bright side. For their health, they roll in the snow and jump into hot tubs. They
make ice sculptures, including a life-size phone booth with a working pay phone. When cold fronts pass through, they pose
in Bermuda shorts in front of thermometers. The frozen Chena River makes a perfectly good road.

Wandering around the university, I find a flyer advertising a bike for sale. The flyer is fringed with tear-off tabs offering
a phone number. The bike comes with studded tires and thick Gore-Tex gauntlets on the handlebars, a far cry from the Draisine
of Mary Shelley’s time. The gauntlets protect the hands and forearms almost to the elbows. “Perfect year-round commuter bike,”
the flyer says. Almost anywhere else, this would be a joke. Here, all of the phone number tabs have been torn off. At forty
below, it is easier to jump on a bike and go than to start and warm up an engine.

The university spreads out across a low hill overlooking Fairbanks. Stately buildings, most of them no older than the students
themselves, hold lecture halls and laboratories. The International Arctic Research Center uses an entire building. It has
a curved front and big dish antennas on its roof. Inside these walls, Russians and Japanese and Americans intermingle, talking
about things such as frost deformation and shoreline erosion in a warming Arctic and construction of pipelines in frozen ground.
The Japanese, though they have no Arctic of their own, helped pay for the center. The Russians are here because they know
more about development in the Arctic than anyone else. First under the tsars and later under the Communists, they built gulags
in the far north, and today they build pipelines and roads and operate a port above the Arctic Circle. In light of today’s
warming climate and melting sea ice, they see the Arctic Ocean as an increasingly accessible frontier, a resource basin, and
with their experience, they may be the first to cross the starting line in the inevitable race for fish and oil.

I am here at the invitation of a friend, a professor at the university. A graduate student shows me a time-lapse video clip
of soil freezing in a test chamber with transparent walls. Horizontal bands of segregation ice appear. The water in the soil
moves toward the bands, and the soil between the bands visibly dries. Vertical cracks form. The column of soil grows taller.
With the right music and juxtaposed against the right scenes of cars bogged down in snow, men with icy beards, and musk oxen
puffing hot breath against a frozen northern landscape, I feel certain that this could be a popular short film, something
for the Sundance Film Festival. The student sees no humor in this prospect. She plays the video twice, pointing out the features
of a freezing soil profile. A man interested in the engineering challenges of a gas pipeline explains how frost heave can
bend a buried pipe, and another man shows me how the pipe will be squeezed and deformed as the ground freezes and thaws around
it.

I have dinner with friends in a restaurant near Cushman and First, where E. T. Barnette was dumped with his goods in 1901.
No one mentions Barnette. We are, for the most part, busy eating. We are busy fattening up for winter. Although it is not
yet truly cold, we huddle together like miners around a woodstove or muskrats in a snow-covered lodge. If I lived in Fairbanks,
I would put on fifty pounds and sleep until June.

Humans, as it turns out, cannot hibernate. Hibernation would kill us. NASA scientists, wanting to understand the effects of
weightlessness, recently offered thousands of dollars to volunteers willing to lie in bed for up to several weeks at a stretch.
The ideal job, perhaps, except for this: bone and muscle mass decreases, digestion slows, tissues become resistant to the
effects of the body’s own insulin, and control of blood sugar levels deteriorates. And this: humans, despite what they may
want to do, cannot sleep for days on end. They need a drink of water. They must urinate. They require a snack. They want to
get up and walk around.

Hibernation, once thought simple, is complex. It is sometimes argued that bears do not hibernate at all. They merely sleep,
the argument goes, without entering a deep stupor and without a dramatic drop in body temperature. Some call this “winter
dormancy” instead of hibernation, to distinguish between a bear and, say, a ground squirrel. But the difference between hibernation
and winter dormancy is not clear. One blends into the other. And different bears fall into different levels of hibernation.
The heart rate for active bears hovers around a hundred beats per minute, but for hibernating bears it may drop to forty beats
per minute, or in some cases as low as eight beats per minute. An expert working on black bears in the Carolinas claims that
his bears always watch him as he approaches their winter dens. Another expert working on black bears in Minnesota talks of
falling into a den. His fall scared a cub. It was crying, immediately next to its mother, but the mother took more than eight
minutes to awaken.