Cold (30 page)
As long ago as 1962, a professor in Japan froze the brain of a cat for 203 days, then revived it — if the brief presence of
brain waves can be used as a measure of revival. A year later, an American physics professor wrote
The Prospect of Immortality
, proposing that freezing humans might not be all that unreasonable. The idea was simple: suspend the animation of the sick
or dying, store them until the science of medicine develops techniques to treat their diseases, and then thaw them out and
revive something more than just a few brain waves. After Bedford, advocates who supported freezing humans organized conferences
and formed committees. In 1972, a manual was published. Commercial providers sprang up, offering what they called “cryonic
services.” Something like seventy patients — they are invariably called “patients” — are now stored in liquid nitrogen. Some
patients have been stored virtually intact, while others, to save money, stipulated that only their severed heads be stored.
One quickly grasps the short distance between a belief in the possibility of revival after immersion in liquid nitrogen and
the belief in the possibility of inserting a newly warmed brain into the presumably still warm but empty-skulled body of a
remarkably charitable donor. Advocates talk of “solid state hypothermia” and the use of surplus missile silos for storage.
Advertised prices hover around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, making immortality surprisingly affordable.
There is the Japanese cat, and various insects and frogs that freeze and thaw naturally with winter and spring, and the arctic
ground squirrel, which hibernates at temperatures close to freezing, and a manual, and businesses with business licenses and
investors and customers. All of this notwithstanding, one might not, a priori, hold out much hope for the likes of James Bedford.
Despite the care taken in freezing him, at the temperature of liquid nitrogen — 321 degrees below zero — he would have suffered
from the destruction of cellular membranes. Sharp ice crystals would have formed wherever glycerol failed to flush out the
water. It seems unlikely that he will be successfully thawed. A reporter recently put the question of ethics to a cryonics
professional. The reporter, writing in the first person, as if planning her own preservation, phrased the question somewhat
delicately, along the lines of “What if you can’t wake me up?” The response: “Well, you’re dead. I don’t see a problem with
that.”
Unable to sleep, I read Roald Amundsen’s
The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the
Fram, 1910–1912. Amundsen set sail in the
Fram,
a wooden schooner 128 feet long, with something like a hundred sled dogs on board. This was the very same
Fram
previously frozen into the northern ice by Fridtjof Nansen in 1893 and my second frozen caterpillar’s namesake. Nansen rode
the sea ice for three years before returning to Norway and eventually passing the ship on to Amundsen, ostensibly for a protracted
scientific expedition to the north. On the way to the Arctic, Amundsen announced that the little ship would head north via
a short detour to the South Pole — just a quick stop to beat Scott’s expedition and allow Amundsen and his colleagues to be
the first humans to stand on the earth’s southernmost point. He was successful, in both beating Scott to the pole and surviving
the journey. Nansen himself, a man whose stamina in the cold rivaled that of polar bears and arctic foxes, later referred
to Amundsen as “almost superhuman.”
At home, in my freezer, my pet caterpillars Bedford and Fram frozen but presumably still alive, or in some sense alive, or
at least potentially alive, at a temperature well below freezing but positively tropical compared to that of liquid nitrogen.
Spring is coming, and it is almost time to thaw them out.
In the cold of winter, pipes freeze, flooding houses. Ice dams form on roofs and back meltwater up under shingles. Bigger
ice dams form on rivers, often under bridges, holding back the flow of water and causing flooding before finally collapsing
to release torrents downstream. Boats are frozen into harbors. People slip and trip on the ice. The air, though it feels brisk
and clean, picks up the carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and other gaseous trash of cold-started cars, then holds it close
to the ground in envelopes sealed by overlying warm air. Bumps and potholes form in roads. Cars take a beating from the combination
of rough roads and thickened oil at a time when their metal and plastic parts are rendered brittle by low temperatures.
Well-built roads have cambers — rounded surfaces that shed water. When it is not wicked away by a good camber, water stands
on the road surface, finds its way into cracks, and then freezes. The expanding ice pushes the road surface upward, creating
unplanned speed bumps. When the ice melts, voids collapse, forming potholes, or the joints between two slabs of concrete separate,
leaving a space between.
“It really has to do with water getting into the structure of roadways, freezing and thawing and that happening repeatedly,”
explained a Washington State official to a reporter who had asked about pothole formation. “That’s why you see more potholes
in the winter and spring than in the summer. It’s that freeze-thaw process that breaks apart roadways.” Seattle repaired more
than 136,000 potholes in 2002, a bad year for roads. After a cold snap in Ohio, more than 200 claims were filed against the
state seeking reimbursement for repairs to cars damaged when they ran over potholes. When asked why the government was so
slow in paying these claims, a court spokeswoman said that people were not filling out their forms correctly. A Michigan drivers’
association usually sees something like 2,000 claims a year, averaging six hundred dollars each, for pothole-related damage
to cars. Near Detroit, more than 200,000 potholes are filled each year. “Potholes are kind of like geese,” a Michigan spokesman
told another reporter. “They don’t come by themselves; they come in flocks.”
Near Blacksburg, Virginia, the government maintains something it calls the Smart Road, used for pavement and transportation
technology research. Among other things, the Smart Road has seventy-five snowmaking towers used to create nasty test conditions.
In Alaska, the situation may be thought of more as one of trial and error tempered by budget shortfalls, with no need for
snowmaking towers.
There is the famous Alcan Highway, stretching from British Columbia to the Alaskan interior and from there via different routes
to Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Valdez. The Alcan is also known as the Alaska Highway, the Alaskan Highway, the Alaska-Canadian
Highway, and the Road to Tokyo. It was a war baby built by the U.S. Army as a supply road during World War II. Before the
road was finished, the Japanese occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, far out in the Bering Sea, but nevertheless
part of Alaska and therefore American territory. The Alcan route was designed to join airstrips used to deliver American airplanes
to the Soviets, via Alaska, in the lend-lease program that gave the Russians access to America’s manufacturing capabilities.
The route went from Dawson Creek in British Columbia through Whitehorse in the Yukon to Delta Junction, Alaska — just over
fifteen hundred miles from a town few people could place on a map, through a town few people could place on a map, to a town
few people could place on a map: a wavy line that ran northwest from somewhere north of Calgary to the middle of nowhere in
Alaska. When it was finished in 1943, long stretches of the highway were thin gravel over bulldozed permafrost. In spring,
the permafrost melted, turning the highway into a linear bog, a trap for vehicles of all descriptions. Logs were laid down
in the manner of railroad ties, providing structure. The logs were eventually covered with gravel, and the gravel was eventually
covered with asphalt. Over several decades, convoys of military vehicles were replaced by convoys of aluminum camping trailers
pulled by jeeps, and later by motor homes. The stretches of road built over logs — the so-called corduroy road — were dug
up and rebuilt with proper gravel foundations. Although the Alcan is open year-round, it is still a study in potholes, gravel
breaks, poor shoulders, and unplanned speed bumps.
More interesting, more audacious, and more ridiculous than the Alcan is the Hickel Highway. To understand the Hickel Highway,
one has to understand the mentality of resource development in Alaska. According to Walter Hickel, elected governor of Alaska
by a margin of eighty votes in 1966 and later appointed U.S. secretary of the Interior, “On May 2, 1967, a DC-3 with half
dozen of us on board flew through the mountains of the Brooks Range directly over Anaktuvuk Pass. As I looked over the long
gradual ramp of the North Slope, where the continental divide slowly merges with the Arctic Ocean, a vision hit me, or call
it intuition. I saw an ocean of oil. ‘There’s 40 billion barrels of oil down there,’ I said.”
To get to the oil, Hickel needed a road. In 1968, he had the state’s Department of Transportation bulldoze a road north to
Prudhoe Bay, starting near Fairbanks. The plan involved little more than pointing a team of bulldozers toward the Beaufort
Sea, putting them in gear, and hoping for the best as they blazed through spruce bogs, over mountain passes, and across tundra.
“I drove the first six or seven miles myself,” Hickel later said. “I got off and I told Jim, I said, don’t you shut this thing
off until you get to Prudhoe Bay.” A month into it, progress was suspended when temperatures dropped to sixty-three degrees
below zero. At fifty below, they started north again. The bulldozers scraped off the top layer of the tundra, cutting a smooth
trail into the permafrost itself. In winter this left a fine road, but in summer the exposed permafrost did what it does,
melting and then leaving behind a long, straight scar filled with water. Slowly, the ground immediately below the scar melted,
and the scar deepened. The road was permanently closed a month after it opened in 1969, but large stretches remain visible
today.
The cold is hard on machinery. At forty below, motor oil has a consistency close to that of warm tar. Pistons strain against
it. Copper wire grows stiff and breaks. Windshields crack from the tap of road gravel or even from a bump in the road or uneven
expansion. The stuff put on the roads to improve traction does not improve maintenance. Gravel put down for traction scratches
paint and cracks windshields and headlights. Sand works its way between moving parts. Salt, which keeps water flowing at temperatures
slightly below zero, eats into metal chassis and the bodies of cars.
It is not just automobiles that suffer. At Denver International Airport, sand spread on runways during a 2007 snowstorm became
airborne in the wind and then scratched the windshields of fourteen planes sufficiently to lead to cracking. And then there
is the space shuttle
Challenger
. Hot gas leaked around cold O-rings, causing an explosion of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and killing seven astronauts
seventy-three seconds after liftoff. The temperature on the launchpad that January morning in 1986 was thirty-six degrees,
fifteen degrees colder than any previous launch and colder than the conditions under which the rocket’s O-rings were tested.
There is, too, the issue of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is colorless, odorless, and poisonous. It locks up the blood’s
hemoglobin, preventing it from carrying oxygen. Even low levels can be dangerous to people suffering from cardiovascular disease.
Normally, the sun warms the ground, heating the air above it, and the warmed air rises. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides,
and other gaseous trash of civilization rise with it, to be scattered and lost in the wind. But during temperature inversions,
air near the ground settles in, trapped by a warmer layer above it. Inversions are common in cities that sit in geographical
bowls, surrounded by hills or mountains, such as Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Santiago. They are also common in cities that sit
between the ocean and the mountains, where cold air blows ashore under warmer air, such as Los Angeles, London, and Shanghai.
Cold engines working against thick oil pump out more carbon monoxide than they should, the result of incomplete combustion.
It is this combination of temperature inversions and cold starts that gives Anchorage and Fairbanks a history of what the
Environmental Protection Agency calls “non-attainment for carbon monoxide requirements.”
Worse still is indoor carbon monoxide. Leaking woodstoves and heaters fill rooms with the stuff. On a cold day, in a tight
cabin warmed by a leaky woodstove, carbon monoxide levels can quickly reach hundreds of parts per million. Expose yourself
to two hundred parts per million for a few hours, and you will experience a headache, nausea, and extreme fatigue. Expose
yourself to eight hundred parts per million, and watch for convulsions and unconsciousness. Death will come within three hours.
The cold floods houses. Water from cooking and bathing and even breathing condenses on cold glass, dripping through window-sills
and into walls to leave water stains and encourage mildew. Heat leaks up through ceilings, melting the bottommost layer of
snow on the roof. Beneath accumulated snow, water trickles down the roof and then refreezes when it hits overhanging eaves
and gutters, forming ice dams. The pressure of expanding ice pries gutters away from the house, or the weight of the ice drags
them downward. A gutter can take the fascia with it. Worse still, ice builds up along the bottom edge of the roof. Eventually,
a pool of standing water is held against the shingles. The water freezes and thaws with temperature changes, working its way
under the shingles and prying them up. Water leaking around roofing nails freezes, and the expanding ice pulls the nails from
the wood. Eventually, water leaks through the roof itself, into the attic. Insulation is ruined, exacerbating the problem.
Water pools on top of the drywall, leaking through, or finds its way into the walls, leading to mildew and rotten studs. Occasionally,
homeowners armed with blowtorches, intending to melt the ice dams that are causing all the trouble, inadvertently burn down
their houses.
