The scariest story I’ve ever read was written
over a hundred years ago by Jack London. It’s called “To Build a Fire.” This story has very few hallmarks of your
typical horror writing. There’s only one human character and he is, generally, very
sane. There are no spirits of the dead, no nightmares or hauntings, no guilt that ticks
away like a time bomb. And yet, while reading “To Build a Fire,”
I feel paralyzed in a way I haven’t felt with any other written work. It is all of
16 pages long. It is about a man freezing to death. He doesn’t start freezing though. He starts
confident and decently prepared, hiking alone through the Yukon back to a logging camp.
The narration even describes him as “quick and ready in the things of life.” But, as
becomes immediately apparent, it only flatters him to highlight his naivete. Should he be
traveling with only a dog as a companion? No he should not. Could he have worn more
protective gear? Sure. But his real arrogance, the narration says, is that “he was not
able to imagine.” “Fifty degrees below zero meant 80 degrees
of frost. Such facts told him that it was cold and uncomfortable, and that was all.
It did not lead him to consider his weaknesses as a creature affected by temperature. Nor
did he think about man’s general weakness, able to live only within narrow limits of
heat and cold.” Most of us, in our day-to-day lives, live
within this narrow spectrum of heat and cold, and do so relatively thoughtlessly. Although
we may not enjoy being cold, although we may build our houses and societies to avoid it,
true frigophobia or cryophobia, fear of the cold, isn’t a common one. Maybe it’s because
the cold feels predictable, kept in check by a calendar. Maybe it’s because we can
always bundle up, just “keep putting on layers!”. Maybe it’s because, unlike spiders, or the
dark, or an unexpected noise at night, few of us have really experienced the cold. Few
of us have seen how ruthlessly it will break body and mind and spirit. The cold magnifies
our flaws, reveals our every imperfection. It does not forgive mistakes. In “To Build a Fire,” the air is colder
than 50 degrees below zero, colder than 60 below, colder than 70. The man’s mouth is
frozen closed, something he expected. The tobacco juice from the chew in his cheek forms
a long yellow icicle from his lips. He feels his nose begin to freeze, although this doesn’t
bother him too much. Many short stories, particularly horror ones,
are made by their twist endings. It’s not until the twist, the last paragraph or even
last sentence, that we truly understand what’s going on. That’s not the case in “To Build
a Fire.” We know, almost as soon as it starts, that this man is going to die. The paralyzing
magnetism of the story comes from finding out where, exactly, it becomes inevitable.
Probably, the answer is “before the day even started.” There was no way this man
was ever going to survive a hike across the Yukon in 100 degrees of frost. But the arc
of the story isn’t a simple, linear freeze, it’s a horrible series of dominos that fall,
one after the other. The first domino, probably, is the man plunging
his leg into an icy pool just below a frozen riverbed. He had been carefully walking along
this creek, he had looked for signs of hidden water, it didn’t matter. But a frozen leg
is only a death sentence if one can’t build a fire, and the man can. He sits down with
his frozen leg and patiently builds it, the way you need to build a fire, growing slowly
from scraps of bark and dry grass to full size sticks. Feeling begins to return to the
man’s fingers and toes. The way London describes the feeling leaving
your extremities in the cold is poetic, but not inaccurate. He says that the blood of
the man’s body shrank back from the cold, withdrew from his digits, because the blood
was alive. The blood was trying to get away from the freeze. In reality, your hands will
lose their warmth, lose their hot blood, within seconds. In these situations of extreme cold,
the temperature of your hands will drop more than 30 degrees, from your body’s typical
98.6 to closer to 60. It will continue to fall, your blood fleeing the cold, the longer
you leave yourself exposed. In “To Build a Fire,” the second domino
falls just as the man starts to warm his hands and feet. His fire, his savior, becomes his
downfall. The heat from the flames rises into the branches of the tree above him. The tree
warms just enough that snow slips off its branches, falling to the forest floor. It
falls directly on the fragile collection of kindling, smothering the flames instantly.
The fire, his lifeline, is out. This is the first time in the story where the man realizes
how dire a situation he’s in. London writes that the fire being snuffed was “like hearing
his own judgement of death.” But he continues to fight. He can build another
fire, this time not under a tree. He gathers more dry grass and sticks, although he has
trouble closing his fingers around them. He has more bark to use for kindling in his pocket,
although he can no longer feel it. The dominos are falling faster now. He tries to hold the
box of matches, but his deadened fingers drop it into the snow. He tries again and again
to pick it up, but he can’t. In a last ditch effort he spills everything left in the box,
and, against all odds, manages to strike them all at once. 70 matches blaze to life in his
hands. He refuses to let them go, even when he can faintly feel them burning the flesh
on his hands. In his desperation, he succeeds, he manages to light another fire- for almost
30 seconds, until he attempts to readjust the pile and his hands, shaking uncontrollably,
scatter the burning twigs across the snow. It’s all over by this point, and yet it
keeps going. The man thinks that if he could kill the dog, his only companion, he could
warm his hands in its body and build another fire, but he doesn’t have the strength.
He somehow finds the energy to run, and he does, blindly, what feels like miles but was
likely less than a hundred feet. He feels strangely warm, and pictures himself among
the men that may one day find his body. He falls asleep. Fear of the cold is almost always paired with
the danger of isolation. Some of our most famous horror fiction entombs its characters
in a near-impenetrable blanket of frost, the cold acting as a barrier between them and
safety. In “The Shining,” for instance, Jack Torrance and his family go to live at
the Overlook Hotel during the winter, intending to do some upkeep on the premises and enjoy
the weather-enforced family time. But as the cold closes in, the snow walling off the hotel
from the rest of the world, the winter season of the Overlook Hotel instead externalizes
the danger of the story. Threatened by the increasingly deranged Jack, Wendy and Danny
are unable to reach out, unable to escape. They are trapped by the cold just as they’re
trapped by Jack’s abuse. Within The Shining, there’s also the unspoken
notion that nothing, not the people nor even the hotel itself, is designed for this kind
of cold. Jack was hired as a caretaker because the Overlook cannot survive the season by
itself- faced with the unrelenting cold of the rocky mountains, the infrastructure would
simply crumble. The brutal winter environment adds to the feeling that everything here somehow
stands against nature. At the end of the book, the Overlook loses the battle, reduced to
rubble in its stand against the elements. In the film, however, the cold deals a more
personal end to Jack; he is frozen and thus preserved on the premises, rooted by the ice
in space and time. In John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” and
the short story it’s based on, the blasted frozen desert of the Antarctic similarly serves
as a wall between the characters and the rest of civilization. Living in a research base
deep in Antarctica, a group of men find the frozen body of an alien (or find another research
team who found it, depending on the adaptation). They recover its frozen body and examine it,
but it’s not long until the alien, awakened from its frozen slumber, starts to slaughter
and impersonate the crew. Although the titular “thing” is an abomination,
a horror, the men stay close to it because they simply have no other choice. The alien
may kill them. The cold will, no question. In the story, even before the creature is
revealed, the outside is simply referred to as “white death. Death of a needlefingered
cold driven before the wind, sucking heat from any warm thing.” The Antarctic is alien to the humans too,
more similar to the surface of a barren moon than any other landscape on Earth. Externalized
danger once again causing interior panic, every struggle exacerbated because of the
inhuman cold around them in the neverending night. But in both “The Shining” and “The
Thing,” the cold refuses to discriminate between pro and antagonist. Jack freezes within
the hedge maze, no amount of manic energy able to combat the ice. In “The Thing,”
the Antarctic is ultimately what preserves the rest of humanity; although every man at
the research station is destined to die by one method or another, the alien is trapped
there too. The cold is the great equalizer. Nothing, man or beast, survives that cold
forever. But that doesn’t stop them from trying. Perhaps the most famous story of real-life
survival in the Antarctic is Admiral Richard Byrd, an American explorer in the early 20th
century. Byrd and his expeditions were responsible for several Antarctic experiments and achievements,
meteorological readings, etc. Byrd was notably one the first two people to fly over the south
pole in a plane, his rounds of funding for exploration laid the groundwork for much of
the research still being done today. But that’s not the primary reason why Richard Byrd is
famous. He’s famous because, for 5 months of the Antarctic winter, he lived alone, in
a shack, in the continent’s interior, while everything for 100 miles tried to murder him. Byrd’s stated purpose for spending the winter
so far south was to gather scientific data, and the reason he claimed to go alone was
because there wouldn’t be room for three, and two might just end up annoying each other
(seriously). But in “Alone,” his memoir of the expedition, the streak of pride that
runs through the whole thing is undeniable. Byrd is a man who understands the value of
big capital letter Accomplishments. He’d probably be frustrated that I had to qualify
that he was one of two men to fly over the South Pole. And so, for reasons explicit and
unstated, purposes scientific and aspirational, Byrd and his team essentially buried a shack
in the ice, carved a couple channels for food and other supplies. And then his team left,
and Byrd remained. The first part of Byrd’s stay in the cold
goes shockingly well. He takes his weather measurements every day, he creates little
projects for himself, organizing his food and emergency supplies, he goes on walks,
he reads. It’s never easy, he is always living in a fundamentally inhospitable environment,
but things go about as well as he hoped they would. However, he knows this accord with
the elements is a tenuous one. In his memoir, he writes: “Relax once in the polar regions, and the
artificial wall of security which you have so painstakingly erected about yourself may
give way without warning.” I don’t think Byrd would ever say he relaxed,
and yet his artificial walls did indeed begin to crumble. Perhaps the single most dramatic
instance was during what was supposed to be a routine wind speed reading. He opens the
door to his shack and steps into a blizzard, a solid wall of snow, white death. He writes
that “millions of tiny pellets exploded in my eyes, stinging like BB shot.” He writes
that “in the senseless explosion of sound, you are reduced to a crawling thing on the
margin of a disintegrating world...nothing will so quickly isolate a man.” He steps
out into the blizzard and the gale scrambles his sense of surroundings and in an instant,
the door back into the shack freezes shut. There’s another man who lived alone in the
cold, slightly less famous than Richard Byrd, slightly more bizarre. Christopher Knight
lived as a hermit in the woods of Northern Maine, without permanent shelter and almost
completely isolated from other people, for 27 years. He stayed in a camp built in a near-invisible
clearing between rocks in the forest, he stole from nearby houses, he lived there for almost
3 decades and only spoke to another person once- a startled “hi” as he encountered
an unexpected hiker. Knight was so determined to be alone, and so paranoid of his camp being
found, that he never lit a fire. Not once. He survived 27 winters of Maine outside without
heat, with scavenged camp materials and a singleminded determination not to die. Winters in Maine, though not Antarctic-cold,
can drop to -40 degrees and below. And yet somehow, Knight’s strategy for survival
relied almost exclusively on determination. Far from hibernating, he feared that the winters
were so cold, the chill so brutal, that if he was asleep during the coldest hours, he
may never wake up. Instead, during the harshest freezes Knight forced himself awake at 2am
and paced around his camp for hours, pacing until daybreak. Sleep was the enemy, relaxation
was the enemy. If he let himself submit to the cold, he’d be lost. Richard Byrd didn’t die when the door to
his shack froze shut. He remembered a shovel that he left outside, managed to brace himself
against his ventilation pipes, wedged the handle under the grip of the door and strained
until it popped open. Collapsing inside, he reflected that there were actually harder
ways to die than freezing to death. A couple more minutes out in the cold and his senses
would have given way to a “lush numbness,” a desensitization that makes dying seem easy. The closest Byrd came to dying was not easy
though, and it was not as simple as freezing to death. Instead, it started slowly- he noted
in his diary one day that he felt strangely depressed, though nothing particular seemed
wrong. His feeling of listlessness continues, his ability to do simple tasks diminishes,
until one day he finds that his head is pounding so hard he is completely unable to move. His
stove, as it turns out, hasn’t been ventilating properly. Carbon monoxide from the burning
fuel has been filling the shack with a slow stream of poison, gradually robbing Byrd of
all his faculties. And so now, in the Antarctic winter, he faces an impossible choice: continue
suffering from the poison that leaves him more bedridden every day, or turn off the
stove, the thing that was poisoning him, the only source of heat in his world. When Christopher Knight, the hermit, was as
close to death as he ever came, months into a particularly brutal winter, he says he saw
a literal “lady death,” a cloaked woman who appeared in his camp. He was out of food,
out of propane. He was freezing to death in his bed. He recognizes now that lady death
was probably a hallucination, probably some fevered vision, but he isn’t entirely sure.
In his darker moments, he says that he still thinks about walking into the woods, sitting
down in the cold, and letting lady death take him. While Byrd lay, unable to move, in his shack
in the Antarctic, he measured the cold by how far the frost crept up the walls. The
temperature sank impossibly, 70 below outside his shack. His single room was engulfed by
ice. “I lived a thousand years,” he wrote. “And all of them were agonizing.” Byrd’s original plans were to stay 8 months
in the shack. Even in the depths of his poisoning, even facing near-certain death, he refused
to tell his base camp just how poorly he was doing. Like the entire expedition, this was
caused by a mix of practicality and pride. He feared that those who tried to reach him
would perish on the way. His vanity would not allow himself to admit just how dire things
had become. Fortunately for him however, the men he was corresponding with noticed the
steady decline of his morse code. After 4 months, it was nearly unintelligible. Dots
and dashes betrayed just how close Admiral Richard Byrd was to death. After 5 months,
he was rescued. Both men almost died in their self-imposed
deep freeze, both very nearly lost themselves to that white death. And yet, in that time,
both undeniably also experienced something close to euphoria. Richard Byrd writes rapturously
about the spectacle of the aurora, its undulating serpentine folds, what he feels is its implicit
storytelling. He pictures the lightshows in the dark Antarctic night as somehow a representation
of good vs evil. There are stretches of time when he feels the cosmos are telling him what
it means to be alive. He says that these shows left him “with the tingling feeling that
I had witnessed a scene denied to all other men.” For Christopher Knight, a man who
sought isolation to a more extreme extent than almost anyone else, the deep freeze of
winter offered the complete opposite- a sort of divine pause, the only time of the year
when everything stopped- no sounds of humans, animals, or even the rustling of the leaves.
After he was forcibly removed from his forest hideout, it seemed that the memory of winters
lost wore heaviest on him. "What I miss most in the woods," Knight said, "is somewhere
in between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness." Cold can be an individual antagonist, needlefingered,
intimate, but just as often it serves as a society-level threat. Rare are the people
who choose to go out into a freeze unsheltered- much more often, the cold comes to us. You don’t have to think back far for an
example of this. In 2021, a series of disastrous winter storms hit the US and many areas saw
huge numbers of people lose power. Texas, most infamously of all, had an almost complete
breakdown of its electrical grid during its coldest period in living memory. But it was
not, as a point of fact, unprecedented. 10 years earlier, a series of blizzards caused
a series of similar rolling blackouts across the state. Recommendations made by experts
on how to properly winterize and avoid further catastrophes were subsequently ignored by
the state’s leaders, and then a decade later, it happened again. Now, to someone who lives further north, the
temperatures during Texas’s freeze may not seem that cold. It almost never dipped below
0, the absolute chilliest days wouldn’t be anything unusual in Minnesota or Maine.
But, of course, the ability to withstand cold on a societal level has little to do with
individual toughness, and the numerical temperature matters much less than the resources a place
has put into withstanding it. Texas’s collapse is instead a reminder that the cold will find
the weakness at every point o f infrastructure, force open the cracks that can otherwise be
ignored. Many of the deaths in Texas weren’t from simple hypothermia but the carbon monoxide
poisoning that resulted from improvising home heaters, or even fires that spread from never-before-used
fireplaces. Water pipes burst, street lights blackened, people were forced close together
in shelters despite the ongoing presence of a global pandemic. Much like Covid, the cold
exposes the vulnerabilities in our systems that were always present- and exposes the
inhumanity of the people who profit by ignoring those vulnerabilities. And when I look at Texas, I don’t see a
freak accident but the beginning of a trend. Summers are going to keep getting hotter and
winters will keep getting colder and the building blocks that make up our society are fundamentally
not prepared for the climate hell that we’re staring down the barrel of. But you gotta admit- it makes a great story! This is the basis for Bong Joon Ho’s “Snowpiercer,”
a movie set in an apocalyptic ice age brought on by climate change. It’s also the background
quote-unquote “science” for The Day After Tomorrow, my personal favorite big disaster
movie. It’s also the context for the survival sim
“Frostpunk,” a game bold enough to ask “what if SimCity, but with frostbite-based
amputations?” Frostpunk takes place in an alternate history 19th century in which an
unexplained sudden ice age decimates most of Europe, leaving scant few wandering bands
of people and even fewer coal-powered generators that maybe, if you plan things exactly right,
can keep humanity alive through the plummeting temperature. But Frostpunk is not, at least initially,
a game that lauds players with easy victories in civil engineering. Although the game can
be minmaxed to perfection, my experiences with it were far more like Jack London’s
story, a series of ominous dominoes toppling, one after another. Except in this case, it’s
not one person, it’s a city. And in this case, I didn’t even realize they were falling
until far too late. Managing your city is a challenge of managing
many different resources and conditions, a juggling act of making sure you have enough
wood, steel, and coal, enough houses so people don’t have to sleep unsheltered, enough
medical clinics that the sick can recover and quickly get back to work. For me, it was
always about two things too many; I’d be really proud of the amount of wood I had stockpiled,
and then realize that our food reserves had been totally used up. At multiple points,
I had to turn almost the entirety of the city’s labor force into a coal-gathering machine,
ignoring every other problem because- I mean, if we ran out of coal to keep the heat on,
none of the other problems in the city would matter. My adherence to a “moral” city,
my refusal to enforce 14 hour shifts or put children to work, meant that we were constantly
on the precipice of disaster. Playing Frostpunk feels like living out the
tiny catastrophes of To Build a Fire, making a mistake as simple as dropping a match in
the snow, and watching those mistakes ripple out to hundreds. Early on, I had a team of
explorers find a defunct coal mine, and they offered me a choice: should we salvage a modest
amount of supplies from the mine now, with the potential of reactivating it later? Or
should we completely break down the operation, seize everything now and just hope for another
consistent source of fuel to present itself in the future? I generally pride myself on my delayed gratification,
my ability to hold off on immediate rewards for a larger prize in the future. But I looked
at this situation and was completely overwhelmed with the immediate gains- 200 pieces of coal,
wood, and steel! An absolute fortune! Later in the game, when I had my generator
cranked so high that it burned through 200 pieces of coal in a matter of seconds, I thought
back to that coal mine. As the temperature plummeted further and further below zero,
I realized that I had knocked the first domino over hours before without even thinking. As
I scrambled to keep my city at a livable temperature, forsaking all other resources and every other
standard of civilization in the face of that white death, I had a sudden flashback to a
story I heard as a kid, one that’s stuck with me for probably two decades now. It is,
hilariously enough, from the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” Ma and
Pa are going to town, but Pa says that he’s got to bring the wood inside before he does,
because a blizzard is going to roll through. He tells his daughters a story about some
kids who didn’t have enough wood inside, and it was too cold to go out in the blizzard.
He says that as their cabin got colder, the kids ran out of wood completely. They destroyed
the woodbox, then the chairs, then all the furniture in the house in a desperate attempt
to keep the fire alive. It wasn’t enough though- when their parents finally got home,
Pa said that the kids were “froze stark stiff.” This story causes a sort of mania
in Laura and her sister, who are so worried about freezing in their house that they bring
in all of the wood from their woodpile outside, much to the bemusement of Pa. The Little House series often spoke frankly
about the perils of 19th century life in the midwest, but I don’t remember anything else
as dark as this story- though only a couple lines, I could clearly picture the kids’
desperation turning to hypothermia as even their furniture didn’t provide enough fuel
for the fire to stay alight. It was only in researching this video that I learned Wilder’s
original version of this story, written in her non-fiction autobiography, is even more
detailed, and even more horrifying. The basic setup remains the same- kids at home, while
their parents are kept away by a blizzard. But the simple “froze stark stiff” is
replaced by detailed descriptions; the kids attempted to leave the house after their stovepipe
collapsed. All five were found in a snowbank nearby- three were dead, frozen completely.
The oldest, a 12 year old girl, had survived, and managed to keep the youngest, a baby,
alive by swaddling it in her coat. Though the baby was barely chilled, the 12 year old’s
limbs were frozen. Pa said that she screamed as they thawed her arms and eventually amputated
a leg. The version of the story I knew, the one that
stuck in my head for decades, was somehow the more child friendly telling. I can’t
believe how much worse it got. And it’s hardly the only time Wilder brought up the
cold- in fact, it seems like the biggest threat her family ever faced, its presence always
met with a dramatic darkening of the tone in what are, ostensibly, children’s books.
In The Long Winter, one in which her whole family are snowed in for months, she wrote: There were no more lessons. There was nothing
in the world but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and winds blowing. The
storm was always there, outside the walls, waiting sometimes, then pouncing, shaking
the house, roaring, snarling, and screaming in rage...she did not ever feel awake. She
felt beaten by the cold and the storms. She knew she was dull and stupid but she could
not wake up. Tales of the cold are almost always made of
long, harsh periods of shelter and depression mixed with tiny victories against the immovable
force. Laura’s family sings together while in the midst of the blizzard, generator upgrades
in Frostpunk bring brief periods of livability. In The Long Dark, a survival game set in an
apocalyptic winter, achievements are miniscule compared to other games in the genre. There’s
no fortress to construct in The Long Dark, farms to fully automate, or escape vehicles
to build. Instead, moments of victory are sewing together a slightly warmer coat, finding
a whetstone, lighting a fire. The Long Dark is a pure survival game. Although there are
wolves and bears in the game, it’s cold and hunger you’ll be fighting for the majority
of your time. The endgame doesn’t look so different from the beginning. Unlike most enemies in video games, or antagonists
in stories, there is no conquering the cold. You can merely survive it. The cold is a bizarre force though, because
although it can obviously be deadly, it also preserves- not just in food but in people.
Most of you probably have heard of cryonics, the pseudoscientific idea that if you freeze
a body now, we’ll be able to resuscitate it far in the future. Although cryonics are
basically impossible to prove effective with our current technology- which I guess is the
point- cases of survival in impossible cold are not. Far from our popular sayings related
to the temperature of death- cold, dead, hands and the like- medical wisdom actually goes
in the reverse direction. “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.” Cardiac arrest generally means death in less
than 30 minutes, but if you’re frozen that time can be multiplied, with successful resuscitations
after hours. A doctor colloquially known as Professor Popsicle has said “We’ve learned
that there really is no temperature so low you shouldn’t try to save someone.” The
cold’s ability to preserve lends it an almost mythic quality- the same force can maintain
life in a brain frozen for hours, keep a neon-jacketed body locked to the same point of Everest for
decades, and mummify a man so effectively that 5,000 years later, we can tell what he
ate hours before he died. On a purely theoretical level, you have to admire the cold; it is
so straightforward, so ruthlessly efficient at what it does. It is, of course, harder to appreciate when
you’re experiencing it. My favorite gross-out story of the cold, one so absurd I have to
include it, is from Howard Somervell, a mountaineer in the early 20th century. Somervell was on
one of the earlier attempts to summit Everest, but as the team climbed higher and higher
up the mountain, he found himself seized with coughing fits. Somervell eventually coughed
so hard that he felt something stick in his throat- he actually begins to choke, he can’t
call out for help, he sits down in the snow to die and then finally manages to hack the
thing in his throat out into the snow. It was a piece of his own larynx, frostbitten
and detached from his innards. He was fine by the way- made it back down the mountain,
lived another 50 years. Just left a little bit of himself behind. Almost 90 years after Somervell’s adventure,
a Friday in late November, 2009, I went on a trip to Grayson Highlands, Virginia with
some friends and their parents. Our plan was to hike in, camp a couple nights, explore
the trails while we were there. Grayson Highlands is gorgeous by the way- most of the mountains
are heavily forested but these are bare, with long sections where you can walk along clear
ridgelines. There are rocky outcroppings and beautiful overlooks, it’s one of my favorite
places in the state to hike. We arrived around noon and started to walk.
It was chilly but in the fun sort of way, the activity of the ascent keeping us warm.
It was exciting that the wind occasionally gusted hard enough to almost knock us over.
I can’t remember exactly when the temperature started to drop- I do know sundown would have
been about 5PM. I just remember that those gusts started to cut straight through the
light windbreaker I was wearing, my flexible gloves didn’t seem to retain any heat at
all. Looking back, I don’t think it was that
cold, taken in pure degrees- I doubt it sunk much below 15. But in real terms, I was simply
unprepared. I had the equipment needed for a sunny fall hike in a southern state, not
an overcast mountaintop with sudden temperature changes and a constantly howling wind. To
once again quote Jack London, the forecast for that day told me “that it was cold and
uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead [me] to consider [my] weaknesses as a
creature affected by temperature.” I remember getting to our campsite, reaching
into my tent bag, and being completely unable to determine if what my numb fingers were
touching was the canvas of the tent or the poles that would form the frame. I dumped
the whole thing out on the ground and tried to pick up the poles to snap them together,
but simply couldn’t make the connections. 12 years out, I couldn’t tell you if the
problem was exclusively physical or if my brain had also somehow been deadened. What
I know is I stood there and made no progress, increasingly frustrated and alarmed that I
couldn’t do the single action I needed to give myself shelter. Within minutes, my dad- who was also on the
hike- realized what was going on, gave me his gloves, snapped the poles together and
staked the tent to the ground. I more or less fell inside, got in my sleeping bag at what
couldn’t have been past 6, and immediately went to sleep. I half remember being woken
a little while later, again by my dad, who gave me some food warmed by a camp stove and
hot chocolate. I passed out again. Looking back, I think about Christopher Knight, who
forced himself awake at the coldest parts of the night, stubbornly paced to keep his
body functioning and warm. I failed just about every test the cold threw at me. I am possibly
overdramatizing the situation, but in my memory that is the closest I have ever felt to death.
It really felt like my dad saved my life. The next morning we all got up, a little shaken
by how unexpectedly extreme the previous night had been. We first hesitantly, then enthusiastically,
pitched the idea of leaving early. I wasn’t the only one who had a bad time. There are many places on Earth with “permafrost,”
a layer of frozen soil and sediment beneath the surface, one that is, theoretically, permanent.
Winter, summer, this stays cold, keeping all the dead plants and organisms on that layer
cold with it- preserving them, in a way. Keeping their bodies locked beneath the ground. But
as with so many things, our naming of permafrost assumed a level of stability we denied the
world. For many years now, permafrost has been thawing, and with it resurface startling
reminders of the past. In Spitsbergen, an island in Norway, human
bones appear to be rising out of the ground. A 1600s whaling graveyard, preserved in the
ice for 400 years, is now seeing the permafrost exhume the bodies it kept hidden. Humans,
whales, pieces of ships, all emerging from the earth. In previous years, this permafrost
acted as a sort of shield; not only would bodies remain permanently frozen, but so too
would any diseases or dangers they held with them. Now, with a steadily climbing global
temperature, that shield weakens. A small scale plague of viral anthrax broke
out in Russia, when a heatwave exposed the frozen corpses of 75-year old reindeer from
the permafrost. Back in Spitsbergen, corpses from a century ago still held the full sequence
of the 1918 flu. In Longyearbyen, Norway, the northernmost town in the world, there’s
a joke that residents “are not allowed to die.” In reality, this refers to burial.
The town will not allow corpses from today to freeze instead of decomposing, potentially
holding diseases in perpetuity and unleashing them on archaeologists centuries from now. And while that’s a noble effort, the deadliest
thing is already bound up with all the bodies in the permafrost: carbon. When functioning
normally, the frozen ground prevents plants, animals, even humans, from releasing their
carbon back into the atmosphere. The cold keeps the remains, and the carbon they carry.
But as the frost thaws, that carbon is released too, billions of tons of it, that in turn
increases the global warming causing the thaw in the first place, accelerating the heating
thawing process in a vicious cycle. Like in Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the cold, left
undisturbed, would have held the threat as long as necessary. Unlike The Thing, once
the dangers of the permafrost are released, they cannot be confined. No matter where we
are, we will feel the impermanence of the permafrost. It’s little surprise that the coldest naturally
occurring temperature on earth was recorded in Antarctica. It’s either -128 or -135,
depending on if you want ground level or satellite measurements. In any case, the continent fulfills
its promise as, “The end of nowhere. An inferno of ice. The Earth’s underworld.” The coldest naturally occurring place in space,
as far as we know, is the Boomerang Nebula. It’s part of the constellation “Centaurus,”
is about 5,000 light years away, and, thanks to the expelling of ultracold gas from a dying
star, maintains a temperature of about 1 degree kelvin, or 1 degree above absolute zero- that’s
about -459 degrees fahrenheit. This is less than half the temperature of the vacuum of
space in general, which holds a little higher than 2 degrees kelvin, thanks to background
radiation from the big bang. But the absolute coldest place in the universe-
as far as we know, the coldest temperature anywhere has ever been, ever- is back on Earth.
In labs across the world for the past century, scientists have pushed temperatures lower.
1 kelvin may be the lowest temperature in space, but we continue to go colder, far far
below 1, within thousandths and millionths of a degree of absolute zero. Like the speed
of light, it seems like something we may be able to get unbelievably close to, but never
reach. Cold itself, in terms of physics, is defined
by absence. The absence of energy, the stilling of particles. The lower the temperature, the
slower the particle movement within. In the theoretical, impossible, object at absolute
zero, there is no movement whatsoever; every particle within the object would be at rest.
In a poetic sense, the hermit Christopher Knight was correct from a physics standpoint
when describing the quiet of winter: “somewhere in between quiet and solitude. What I miss
most is stillness." It will take until the end of the universe
for natural temperatures to best those created in a lab on Earth. When every star has gone
out and every black hole has evaporated and the radiation from the big bang fizzles away,
all the nothing that exists will reach the same temperature, some impossibly small decimal.
Still not absolute zero. But about as close as anything will ever get. We, as humans, are inherently fallible. We
build houses with cracks in the walls, strike matches that singe and fall from our fingertips,
seek solitude without ensuring self sufficiency. And fortunately for our survival, we are generally
insulated from these mistakes. A cracked wall, a singed finger, is a setback, not a catastrophe. The cold will strip that insulation bare,
remove our layers of protection, show us how desperate a situation really is. The cold
punishes arrogance, forces isolation, remembers our mistakes. But to depict the cold as malicious,
antagonistic, is to limit its power. The cold is not an anthropocentric force. It doesn’t
care one way or another about its effect on us. It was present before anything existed. It will remain after everything is done.
