Cold (5 page)

A Nebraska newspaper explained why some victims of the School Children’s Blizzard were missing clothes. “At this stage of
freezing strange symptoms often appear: as the blood retires from the surface it congests in the heart and brain; then delirium
comes on and with it a delusive sensation of smothering heat. The victim’s last exertions are to throw off his clothes and
remove all wrappings from his throat; often the corpse is found with neck completely bare and in an attitude indicating that
his last struggles were for fresh air!”

During the School Children’s Blizzard, a seventeen-year-old girl froze to death standing up, leaning against a tree.

Nebraska teacher Lois Royce wandered through the blizzard with two nine-year-old boys and a six-year-old girl. They could
not find shelter. The girl was calling for her mother, begging to be covered up. The boys died. The girl lasted until daybreak.
Lois eventually crawled to the safety of a farmhouse.

Johann Kaufmann, a farmer, found his frozen children after the storm. “Oh God,” he cried out, “is it my fault or yours that
I find my three boys frozen here like the beasts of the field?” The bodies were frozen together. They had to be carried back
to the cabin as one and thawed before they could be separated.

In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little House on the Prairie,
the horror of blizzards is discussed by children. Laura is asked what she would do if caught in a blizzard. “I wouldn’t get
caught,” she answers.

And Emily Dickinson, in “After Great Pain,” seems to have thought of hypothermia:

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —

First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

I
t is August second and sixty degrees. I watch a fisheries biologist wade into the Beaufort Sea. On and off, he has been wading
into the Beaufort Sea for more than twenty years, collecting fish as part of a long-term study. He wears chest waders, but
the cold soaks right through. Even when he stays dry, the plastic fabric presses against his skin, feeling wet. At their best,
waders in cold water give meaning to the word “clammy.” And at times the waders leak, or they are overtopped by a wave, or
he steps into a hole and they fill up with ice water.

I sit in the Zodiac as he boards from water that reaches close to the top of the waders. He rolls across the edge of the Zodiac,
leaning into the boat and straightening his legs, so that his feet are higher than his head. Water drains from the waders
into the boat.

I tell him about the book I am writing. I tell him of my five-minute bath in the Beaufort Sea. He has this to say: “You should
do a book called
Warmth.
You could do all the background research in Aruba.”

“What would be the fun in a book on warmth?” I ask. And then it occurs to me: fire walking.

Some polar explorers stayed warm. Part of their secret was clothing. Richard Byrd, famous for a failed attempt to fly over
the North Pole and for a successful flight over the South Pole, spent many months in Antarctica. It was during a Byrd expedition
to Antarctica that Paul Siple hung his water-filled cylinders in the breeze and worked out the principles of windchill. In
1933, strapped for funds, Byrd overwintered alone in Antarctica. “Cold was nothing new to me,” he wrote, “and experience had
taught me that the secret of protection is not so much the quantity or weight of the clothes as it is the size and quality
and, above all, the way they are worn and cared for.” At sixty-five below zero, he wore, among other things, a mask. “A simple
thing,” he wrote, “it consisted of a wire framework overlaid with windproof cloth. Two funnels led to the nose and mouth,
and oval slits allowed me to see. I’d breathe in through the nose funnel, and out through the mouth funnel; and when the latter
clogged with ice from the breath’s freezing, as it would in short order, I brushed it out with a mitten.” He wrote of walking
comfortably outside, suited up, and he compared himself to a diver. This was in 1933, during a time when divers wore heavy
canvas suits with brass and copper helmets bolted to the suits and weighted, metal-framed boots on their feet.

Another secret to warmth involved seeking help from the locals. This worked only in the Arctic, where there were local people
from whom to seek help. Isaac Hayes walked away from his ship when it froze into the Arctic ice in 1854. In general, he was
scornful of the natives he encountered on his way south, whom he called “Esquimaux.” He thought of them as savages, but he
was not above accepting their hospitality. After taking refuge in a village, he wrote, “The hut was warmer by 120° than the
atmosphere to which we had been so long exposed.”

Patience to wait out the cold played a role in survival, too. Fridtjof Nansen’s writings, though they were not intended to
do so, make a mockery of the suffering of the likes of Scott and Greely and Bering. Nansen, in 1888, was the first to cross
the Greenland ice sheet. He did it on skis. Later, he thought it reasonable to intentionally freeze his boat into the pack
ice and let the drifting polar ice carry him across the Arctic. In 1893, he sailed from Norway in the
Fram,
a vessel not much bigger than a large yacht. He traveled with thirteen Norwegians, because, he joked, only Norwegians could
tolerate one another for month after month on a boat drifting with the pack ice. A year and a half after freezing in, Nansen
and one of his men left the
Fram
. Apparently at least in part out of boredom, they headed north with three sleds, two kayaks, and twenty-eight dogs. After
three weeks, Nansen was within four degrees of the pole, a new record, but there he turned. Heading south, the two men over-wintered
on an island. They dug a hole three feet deep, which would have meant chiseling through permafrost with the consistency of
hardened concrete. They put stones three feet high around the hole and then roofed it with walrus hides and snow. They laid
in game, mostly bear.

Nansen and his companion gained weight that winter. Other expeditions at the time, if they went well, were at best exercises
in survival. Fourteen years earlier, Lieutenant George De Long had penned his last journal entry in Siberia, and nine years
earlier Greely had barely escaped alive. But Nansen wrote of shooting stars and “lovely weather.” To ease the boredom, he
and his partner took long walks in front of their hut. A playful arctic fox amused them and developed a habit of stealing
from the camp. Its thefts included, oddly enough, a thermometer. Nansen wrote, “There is furious weather outside, and snow,
and it is pleasant to lie here in our warm hut, eating steak, and listening to the wind raging over us.” They slept to a point
approaching hibernation, to a point at which sleeping became an art. “We carried this art,” Nansen wrote, “to a high pitch
of perfection, and could sometimes put in as much as 20 hours’ sleep in the 24.”

It is August eighth. I stand in a weed-choked lot just outside Fairbanks, Alaska, one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.
It is close to sixty degrees. A giant air conditioner drowns out the noise of traffic, wind, and birds. In front of me, built
into the side of a hill, is a shed, painted brownish red, a color marketed as redwood but looking entirely unnatural here
among the spruce trees. A door leads into the shed and from there into the hillside itself.

This is the permafrost tunnel, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s to test tunneling equipment. The idea
was to bore into frozen hillsides, perhaps turning them into missile silos and bunkers. Cold War thinking, so to speak. Now
the tunnel is used for research and education. A worn display panel shows visitors a picture of a very calm Dwight D. Eisenhower
next to Nikita Khrushchev, whose fist is raised. I am here with a Russian permafrost expert based at the University of Alaska.
Pointing out the photographs of Eisenhower and Khrushchev, he laughs at the way the world has changed.

The hill itself is of loess —finely ground particles originating when rocks were pulverized by massive rivers of ice in the
Brooks Range, north of here. This grinding goes on today under what is left of the glaciers, but most of it occurred when
the glaciers were more extensive, from seventy thousand years ago to a mere ten thousand years ago, and before that, on and
off for two and a half million years. The ice, sometimes miles thick, flowed down hills and across valleys, carrying with
it stones and boulders and rocks. The bottom of the glacier, with its load of rock, acted as a massive, slow-moving mill,
reducing granite mountainsides to dust as fine as flour — the same stuff that today paints the water of glacial lakes azure.
But when the glaciers pulled back, the flour was everywhere. Gales blew where warming ground met glacial ice. The gales picked
up the flour, scattering it through central Alaska, restacking it in drifts that became hills.

A walk into the permafrost tunnel is a walk through time. The lighting, the air-conditioning system, the signs, the very feel
of the place speak of the Cold War. The sweeping scars of the tunneling machine, now decades old, remain frozen in place.
And the walls themselves range to more than forty thousand years old. The walls of this tunnel — the earth of this hill —
have been frozen solid for forty thousand years.

Frozen soil is not a rarity. Something like one-fifth of the world’s land area lies within the permafrost zone. Poke a steel
rod into the ground in northern Alaska, and you will hit frozen ground. The same rod will hit frozen ground in northern Russia,
northern China, northern Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. It will hit frozen ground on certain mountaintops at the latitude
of California. It will hit frozen ground in parts of Patagonia. Late in the summer, the rod will penetrate eighteen inches,
thirty inches, three feet, and then hit what feels like bedrock. But it is a bedrock of frozen sand or gravel or fine glacial
flour, glued together by ice. In some places, three-quarters of the soil is in fact frozen water. Put a building on this stuff,
heat the building and warm up the ground, and the ice will start to melt.

What makes this tunnel unusual is that the government dug into the frozen ground, then kept it frozen. In summer, the massive
air conditioner keeps the tunnel chilled near its entrance, where warm drafts sneak past doors. The earth here is like a giant
cooler, its outer layers insulating its inside, keeping the tunnel walls in the low twenties. In these latitudes and farther
north, the surface expression of frozen ground is visible everywhere, in the form of polygons and frost boils and slumped
ground. Here you can walk right through that frozen ground. You get the worm’s-eye view.

The place stinks. It is a forty-thousand-year-old smell of mixed mold and musty dirt and cold, something like the smell of
a refrigerator that has gone too long unopened. The tunnel is twenty feet in diameter and roughly round in cross section.
One passage leads back into the hill more or less horizontally, while another slants downward. We head in horizontally, taking
advantage of a metal walk-way. Roots stick out from the walls and ceiling. It is easy to imagine that these roots are alive,
reaching down from the birch and alder trees growing on the hillside. But in fact we are well below the root zone. Ten feet
beneath the surface, the ground never thaws, and living tree roots do not penetrate into permanently frozen ground. The roots
in the tunnel walls are the frozen remains of Pleistocene plants. And what is this? The bones of a long-extinct steppe bison:
a jawbone, a femur, a vertebra. In the wall, a horn stands frozen in time. The steppe bison was common here thirty thousand
years ago but has been extinct for thousands of years.