Cold (4 page)

“Everybody was wretched,” Greely wrote later, “not only from the lack of food, but from the cold, to which we are very sensitive.”
Like other Arctic explorers, his narrative is one of death: “Lieutenant Kislingbury, who was exceedingly weak in the morning
at breakfast, became unconscious at 9 a.m. and died at 3 p.m. The last thing he did was to sing the Doxology and ask for water.”
The men shared sleeping bags to conserve warmth: “Ralston died about 1 a.m. Israel left the bag before his death, but I remained
until driven out about 5 a.m., chilled through by contact with the dead.” Greely had one man shot for stealing food.

Sergeant David Brainard kept a journal. Like Greely, he focused on the lack of food and described the deaths of comrades.
The cold did not go unnoticed. He wrote of sunbathing at forty degrees in May. He wrote of June temperatures well below freezing.
After a storm and a very hard night outside, he wrote of suicide: “Of all the days of suffering, none can compare with this.
If I knew I had another month of this existence, I would stop the engine this moment.”

Others had similar thoughts. “Schneider,” Brainard wrote, “was begging hard this evening for opium pills that he might die
easily and quickly.”

It may go without saying that some of the men suffered from frostbite.

The absence of food was in a very real sense the result of the climate where they resided. The Arctic, despite seasonal and
regional abundances of seals and whales and even caribou, is often desolate. And the cold forces one to eat more, to burn
more fuel, further compounding the scarcity of food. In a scientific paper written in 2002, it was estimated that the Greely
expedition was two million calories short of minimum survival rations. A diet of six thousand calories per day is not unusual
for explorers in the polar regions. The calories are needed for both warmth and activity. This is as true for animals as for
humans. Bird feathers, when oiled, can no longer keep a bird’s skin dry. For a while, an oiled bird will shiver to maintain
its body temperature, but shivering requires food. Hypothermic birds die of starvation compounded by hypothermia, or hypothermia
compounded by starvation. The same thing killed most of Greely’s men.

Winfield Schley, who commanded the boat that picked up seven Greely expedition survivors in 1884, saw Greely through an opening
in what was left of a tent. “It was a sight of horror,” Schley wrote. “On one side, close to the opening, with his head toward
the outside, lay what was apparently a dead man. His jaw had dropped, his eyes were open, but fixed and glassy, his limbs
were motionless. On the opposite side was a poor fellow, alive to be sure, but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied
to the stump of his right arm.”

It is July thirty-first. Here, a mile from the Beaufort Sea, the thermometer struggles to break forty degrees. My companion,
a botanist specializing in Arctic plants, wears rubber boots, wool socks, trousers made of synthetic wicking material, blue
Gore-Tex overpants, a sweatshirt and a light jacket under a green plastic raincoat, gloves, and a fleece-lined hat. The wind
blows at something like twenty miles per hour. A blanket of fog, thick and damp, covers everything.

Paul Siple is credited with conceptualizing windchill factors in a report written in 1940 but held as a military secret until
1945. He hung water-filled plastic cylinders from a long pole at the newly established Bay of Whales Antarctica base and developed
what became known as the Siple-Passel equation for calculating windchill. The windchill factor quantifies the amount of heat
lost to wind combined with cold. It expresses what the temperature feels like when the wind blows. Heat lost to wind increases
as the square of the wind’s velocity. A day with forty-degree temperatures and twenty-mile-per-hour winds feels the same as
a still day at thirty degrees. It gets worse as it gets colder. At twenty-five degrees below zero with a thirty-mile-per-hour
wind, it feels like sixty below. A common footnote on windchill charts warns that frostbite will occur within five minutes
under these conditions.

Fog makes things worse still. The moisture in the air sucks heat away faster than dry air ever could. Fog chills to the bone.
Meteorologists sometimes calculate the apparent temperature by combining the measured temperature, the wind speed, and the
humidity. This is sometimes called “relative outdoor temperature.” Most days, knowing this is no comfort whatsoever.

I wear rubber boots, cotton socks, jeans, and a light jacket. No overpants. No gloves. No fleece-lined hat. I suffer in the
midsummer cold. Clothes make the man, or, at least, clothes make the man warm.

Adolphus Greely lived to see his ninetieth birthday. He became the first American soldier to enlist as a private and retire
as a general. He commanded the erection of thousands of miles of telegraph wires, many of them in Alaska. He oversaw the relief
effort following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he was a founding member of the National Geographic Society. For a
time, he ran the Weather Bureau, then part of the Army Signal Corps. He was in charge when the Blizzard of January 1888 swept
through middle America.

Greely’s bureau issued this prediction: “A cold wave is indicated for Dakota and Nebraska tonight and tomorrow; the snow will
drift heavily today and tomorrow in Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin.”

In places, temperatures dropped eighteen degrees in less than five minutes. In Helena, Montana, the temperature dropped from
just over forty degrees to nine below in less than five hours. In Keokuk, Iowa, it dropped fifty-five degrees in eight hours.
These temperatures do not include the windchill. They are straight temperatures, read from thermometers. Windchill temperatures
were colder than forty below.

When the blizzard was over, people found cattle frozen in place, standing as if grazing, their once hot breath now formed
into balls of ice around their heads. A government official estimated that something like 20,000 people were “overtaken and
bewildered by the storm.” Of these, about 250 died from hypothermia and complications of frostbite. The temperature dropped
too far too fast. The snow, blowing sideways, reduced visibility to what is called “zero-zero” — one can see zero feet upward
and zero feet sideways. People staggered around blindly outside. Cattle, horses, and people, unable to see but knowing they
had to seek shelter, wandered downwind. No amount of food would have helped the victims. They died from the cold alone. Because
so many of the storm’s victims were children, the blizzard became known as the School Children’s Blizzard.

Sergeant Samuel Glenn, based in Huron, South Dakota, working for Greely’s Weather Bureau, described the suddenness and severity
of the storm:

The air, for about one minute, was perfectly calm, and voices and noises on the street below appeared as though emanating
from great depths. A peculiar hush prevailed over everything. In the next minute the sky was completely overcast by a heavy
black cloud, which had in a few minutes previously hung suspended along the western and northwestern horizon, and the wind
veered to the west (by the southwest quadrant) with such violence as to render the observer’s position very unsafe. The air
was immediately filled with snow as fine as sifted flour. The wind veered to the northeast, then backed to the northwest,
in a gale which in three minutes attained a velocity of forty miles per hour. In five minutes after the wind changed the outlines
of objects fifteen feet away were not discernible.

After the blizzard, a farmer named Daniel Murphy went out to his haystack. From inside the haystack, he heard a voice. “Is
that you, Mr. Murphy?” The voice belonged to nineteen-year-old Etta Shattuck. She had staggered through the windblown snow
and, as a last and only resort, had crawled into the haystack. She stayed there just over three days without food or water.
Frostbite came on, as it always does, painlessly. There is a sense of cold and stiffness and numbness, but no pain. By the
time flesh reaches a temperature of forty-five degrees, nerve synapses no longer fire. All feeling is gone. And then the tissue
freezes. Ice crystals form first between the cells. Because ice excludes salts, the remaining liquid between the cells becomes
increasingly salty. Osmosis draws water from within the cells toward the saltier fluid outside the cell walls. The cells become
dehydrated. Proteins begin to break down. Ice crystals eventually form inside the cells themselves. The sharp edges of the
ice crystals tear cell membranes. The flesh dies, starting with the skin. Usually the first skin to die is that of the fingers
or toes or ears or nose. Death moves into the muscles, the veins, the bones. Whole limbs, once lively, freeze solid and are
dead.

Etta seems to have crawled into the haystack headfirst. She prayed. She sang hymns. She listened to the wind blow. She shared
the haystack with mice. At one point, Etta felt the mice rustling through the stack and even nibbling at her wrists. She later
explained that this was comforting rather than terrifying. It told her that she was not alone in the world. Because she had
crawled in headfirst, her feet and legs were more exposed than her torso. They froze.

Saved from the haystack, Etta went through two rounds of amputations. The newspapers got wind of her, and for a short time
she became something of a hero. The
Omaha Bee
set up “The Shattuck Special Fund.”

“Miss Etta Shattuck,” a reporter wrote, “the young school teacher who lost both limbs from the exposure in the recent storm,
will be incapacitated for any service by which she may derive a living. It is desired that $6,000 be raised.” But infection
set in. She was nineteen years old when she was caught in the blizzard, and she died without seeing her twentieth birthday.

Never mistake frostbite for hypothermia. Frostbite freezes extremities, while hypothermia cools the body’s interior. Humans
function best at a core temperature of just under ninety-nine degrees. At windchills of minus forty degrees, with serviceable
clothing, it is reasonable to expect the core temperature to drop at something like one degree every thirty minutes. When
the core drops to ninety-five, significant symptoms appear. People shiver uncontrollably. They become argumentative. They
feel detached from their surroundings. As their minds slow, they become what winter travelers sometimes refer to as “cold
stupid.” They become sleepy.

A thirteen-year-old boy who survived the School Children’s Blizzard later recounted his experience. “I felt sleepy,” he said.
“I thought if I could only lie down just for a few minutes I would be all right. But I had heard the farmers telling stories
about lying down and never getting up again in snow storms. So I kept on, but I finally got to the point where I could hardly
lift my feet any more. I knew that I couldn’t stand it but a minute or two longer.”

At a core temperature of about ninety-three degrees, amnesia complicates things. Do we turn right or left? Did I put that
glove in my pocket? Have I been here before?

At ninety-one degrees, apathy settles in. Muscles by now are stiff and nonresponsive. If one continues moving at all, one
begins to stagger.

When the core temperature reaches ninety degrees, the body’s ability to fight the cold diminishes, and the core temperature
tumbles downward. The heart itself becomes sluggish. Blood thickens. Lactic and pyruvic acids build up in tissues, further
slowing the heartbeat.

It is possible to survive core temperatures as low as eighty-seven degrees, but only with rescue and rewarming. At this temperature,
self-rescue is almost impossible. Hallucinations are common. The mind imagines warm food and dry sleeping bags. The ears might
hear music. A survivor might report looking down from above on his own struggling body, or he might remember strolling away
from his own prone carcass in the snow. Victims at this point have crossed the line between cold stupid and what is sometimes
called “cold crazy.”

Just shy of death, victims may experience a burning sensation in the skin. This may be a delusion, or it may be caused by
a sudden surge of blood from the core reaching the colder extremities. The last act of many victims is the removal of their
clothes — the ripping away of collars, the disposal of hats. Doctors sometimes call this “paradoxical undressing.”