A Series of Miracles
The coldest place I’ve ever been, to my knowledge, was when climbing Denali, where the temperature reached -70 at one point. I thought I was prepared, but it was still cold beyond belief. It would have taken a lot to get any of us to go outside during the night, I can tell you that, especially since we had our pee bottles right in our sleeping bags with us and the wind came out with the onset of darkness as unfriendly and menacing as a feral and carnivorous animal.
When we get hard by winter in New England, I’m never prepared either, even with that Alaska background and how it happens the same way here every year. Walk outside and it sneaks up on you like a mugger with a baseball bat. You can’t really imagine it until you’re out in it. It seems academic and abstract, not yet in our guts. We wonder, wide-eyed, “How did this happen?” even though we can answer the question rationally.
The main character in Jack London’s short story To Build A Fire had a similar experience–
“But all this made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.”
I am getting out cold weather coats, vests, knit caps, gloves, boots and my go-to reading, like Jack London. This volume helps each year when winter moves in and many of us start to feel like the doomed protagonist of his tale and need winter words for their kindred experience. I always think “At least it’s not as bad as it turned out for that poor bastard or like being on Denali.”
I also annually reread Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World, about animal survival techniques. Of note for me this time through is that a hibernating bear never needs to get up to take a drink or go take a leak all winter. I did not know that. In fact, I never even considered that little biological problem.
Water is conserved because none is needed to flush out toxic waste, and the animals manage to stay in shape. They metabolize mostly fat and do not accumulate huge amounts of urea in their blood. What small amounts they do produce they convert into creatine, which is non-toxic. Additionally, instead of becoming a toxic waste, the nitrogen wastes in hibernating bears are biochemically recycled back into protein; hence no loss of muscle mass is experienced even if they don’t exercise. I’m envious, since I get up to pee (except on the rarest of occasions) at least once per night, usually twice. Imagine not needing to go all winter, needing no pee bottle?
Hans Christian Andersen once wrote “The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them that we call them everyday things.” Winter’s challenges are here, but so are its miracles.
