Cold Read online

  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.”

  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 —

  AUGUST

  It 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 A
rctic. 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.