Cold (17 page)
A tree that tolerates sand-blasting and survives snow loading still has to withstand freezing. A tree cools gradually, following
the air temperature downward. But like the blood of certain insects, the tree’s fluid supercools, dropping below the freezing
point without actually freezing. At some point, supercooling fails, and the liquid between the tree’s cells freezes, not gradually
but suddenly. It flash freezes. Molecules, one moment drifting about with the freedom of a liquid state, lock into place,
still. In doing so, they dump energy. The act of freezing, of changing from a liquid state to a solid state, releases heat.
This is not an abstract concept. Insert a thermometer in a tree, wait while the tree freezes, and record a temperature spike
as liquid turns to solid. A beech tree cools steadily to seventeen degrees, the spaces between its cells flash freeze, and
its temperature spikes back up to thirty. And then it cools some more, going back into a steady, slow decline.
Outside the cells, in the spaces between them, the tree is frozen. But inside the cells, the fluid is full of dissolved solids,
salts, and sugars. The complex molecules of the factory of life float about in each cell’s cytoplasm, suspended by water molecules,
and the water molecules in the cell are moving around, bouncing off one another, dancing like ten-year-old boys souped up
on marshmallows. Some dance right through the cell membrane and, once outside, freeze. This is a form of cryosuction, the
same cryosuction that sucks liquid water toward layers of segregation ice in soil. It is cryosuction pulling water molecules
across the cell’s membrane, drawing them out of the cell. At the same time, the cell membrane opens up, yielding to cryosuction.
In cold-hardened trees, cell membranes become increasingly permeable, letting the water go before it can freeze inside the
cell and create deadly sharp ice crystals within it. This is part of the reason trees can handle much colder temperatures
at the beginning of winter than at the beginning of autumn. As a consequence of cold hardening, the fluid inside cells — the
cytoplasm — becomes less wet. The dissolved salts, sugars, and proteins become more concentrated. As with all liquids, the
greater the concentration of dissolved solids, the lower the freezing point. This protection is not without limits. At some
point, the cells freeze, and ice crystals inside the cells spell death. Or the cells do not freeze, and the concentration
of dissolved solids inside the cells increases beyond tolerance, spelling death. Either way, cells die. Kill enough of them,
and the tree itself goes the way of Robert Falcon Scott or Lieutenant George De Long or the three frozen sons of Johann Kaufmann
in the School Children’s Blizzard of 1888.
It is November twenty-eighth and minus fifteen degrees at the Chena Hot Springs Resort, sixty miles west of Fairbanks. For
ten dollars, I walk on a concrete floor, through a locker room, into a heated indoor pool room, and then outside — in a bathing
suit and bare feet. Hitting the minus-fifteen-degree air is like walking into a brick wall. I can feel the cold inside my
nose, a feeling of dry boogers that I know are not boogers at all, but ice.
The rock pool, steaming with geothermal heat, is fifteen cold paces away. Steam rising from the pool freezes to the first
thing it finds. The rails around the rock pool are covered with ice. Beyond the rails, the pool is surrounded by boulders,
also covered with ice. Behind the boulders are trees, what seem to be small spruce trees, covered, too, with ice. The ice
covering the rails, the boulders, and the trees is white, not clear.
I wade into waist-deep water and immediately submerge, soaking up the heat. The rock pool is four feet deep and well over
a hundred degrees, the temperature of a hot bath. The smell of sulfur rises with the steam. I wade toward the far end of the
pool, where the hot spring spills into the pool, and the water is noticeably warmer. The cold air, over a distance of maybe
thirty feet, is sucking the heat right out of this water. Gravel covers the bottom of the pool. Green and red lights illuminate
the steam coming off the water. The sky beyond the steam is crystal clear, frozen into transparency. Low on the horizon, through
the steam, snow-covered hills reflect starlight. Overhead, the stars themselves burn — the Big Dipper and, almost directly
above, the North Star. I reach up to run my hand across my scalp. My hair is frozen. I submerge, and the ice, for a moment,
disappears.
A man speaks from the edge of the pool. “I’m celebrating my son’s house,” he tells me. This seems to me an odd statement,
out of the blue, to emerge from the steamy shadows at the edge of the pool. I move closer, expecting to see someone with him,
but he is talking to me. “We’ve been working on it for three years,” he says, “and today was the final inspection. We’re done,
and we’re celebrating. It has double-insulated walls.” The man has lived in Fairbanks his entire life. He is Bergmann’s Rule
personified, at least three hundred pounds, insulated from the cold of Fairbanks by thick flesh that gives him a rounded appearance,
something like that of a northern seal. He tells me that he is in his sixties. He seems eager to explain that he is retired,
maybe as an explanation for his need to converse, to feed a hunger for conversation that was once filled by coworkers. But
it is not so much conversation as monologue. It is not clear to me that my presence actually matters. Increasingly, I feel
like one of the monkeys at Jigokudani Park in Japan, which like to bathe in hot springs through the Japanese winter, jabbering
in meaningless primate patter, surrounded by steam and frost, falling into a stupor induced by heat and sulfurous fumes.
“We had snow in June this year,” the man says. “Snow and a hard frost. It killed all of the flowers in the yard. Of course,
we had more flowers. The garage was full of flowerpots. Only the ones in the yard were killed. It slowed down the construction
season, too. We got a late start on my son’s house. But it’s done now.”
I dunk to thaw my hair. Is it rude to dunk in mid-monologue, the only listener suddenly disappearing underwater? But when
I surface, he is still talking. “There’s not enough snow to ski,” he is saying. “Last year we had better snow. When I ski,
I ask for the slowest skis they have. I’m scared of skiing. I’m afraid of skiing too fast.” He is too obese for skis. It is
hard to imagine him on skis. My hair is frozen again, so I submerge and inch backward. When I resurface, he is hidden by steam,
but his voice goes on as if I have not moved. I continue to back away until his voice is muffled in steamy darkness.
Later, leaving the rock pool, I find my towel stiff as a board, coated with frozen steam. Before I get inside, the hairs on
my arms and chest freeze. They become brittle. When I move my arms, I can feel the hairs breaking under the strain. I am pleasantly
overheated from the pool. I feel slightly dizzy, the stupor of a Jigokudani Park monkey. Eight inches of ice hang from the
handle of the door going into the heated pool room. Just outside the locker room, a map with pushpins shows the homelands
of visitors. There are three pins in Japan, one in Afghanistan, many in China, one in Belarus, a few in Russia. The Lower
48 states are well pinned.
Dressed, I walk for a few minutes in the compound. My hair, still damp, freezes again. My ears grow cold, but I am otherwise
warm, parboiled, wearing only a sweater and a light jacket. On one side of the compound, the owners have erected an entire
building made from ice. They call it the Aurora Ice Museum, but it looks more like a church. Inside, there are ice sculptures.
There is an ice bar, with fifteen-dollar martinis served in glasses made from ice. It is possible to rent the church of ice
for corporate events, for birthday parties, for weddings. Wedding ceremonies are held at an ice altar. For just under two
thousand dollars, guests can participate in a three-day ice-sculpting class.
Elsewhere, for around six hundred dollars, it is possible to stay in an ice hotel. Ice hotels are a new phenomenon, the first
one appearing in 1989. Most winters, tourists have choices. There are at least six solid-ice hotels in the world, in places
such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, Romania, and Quebec.
By the time I get to my traditionally built hotel room, I have cooled off. The night has dropped another three degrees, to
minus eighteen. In my room, a sign taped to the air conditioner says, “Please do not use air conditioning September 15th to
May 15th.”
Charles Darwin, seasick, sailed into Tierra del Fuego, near the southern tip of South America, in 1832. It was December, the
middle of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. “The climate is certainly wretched,” Darwin wrote. “The summer solstice was now
passed, yet every day snow fell on the hills, and in the valleys there was rain, accompanied by sleet. The thermometer generally
stood about 45 degs., but in the night fell to 38 or 40 degs.”
He described the forests, noting in particular the treeline: “The mountain sides, except on the exposed western coast, are
covered from the water’s edge upwards by one great forest. The trees reach to an elevation of between 1000 and 1500 feet,
and are succeeded by a band of peat, with minute alpine plants; and this again is succeeded by the line of perpetual snow.”
The trees survive as best they can, but it was not so much the trees that interested him as the people.
While going one day on shore near Wollaston Island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject
and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld. On the east coast the natives, as we have seen, have guanaco cloaks, and on the
west they possess seal-skins. Amongst these central tribes the men generally have an otter-skin, or some small scrap about
as large as a pocket-handkerchief, which is barely sufficient to cover their backs as low down as their loins. It is laced
across the breast by strings, and according as the wind blows, it is shifted from side to side. But these Fuegians in the
canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together
with the spray, trickled down her body. In another harbour not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child,
came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there out of mere curiosity, whilst the sleet fell and thawed on her naked
bosom, and on the skin of her naked baby!
Since Darwin’s time, the Fuegians — the Yamana, Selk’nam, Manek’enk, and Alacalufe — have been admired for their ability to
withstand the cold. Take a man of European, African, or Asian heritage, lay him down next to an Alacalufe native of Tierra
del Fuego, and it is not the native who is abject and miserable, but the shivering European or African or Asian. The European
or African or Asian shivers to maintain a reasonable body temperature, while the Alacalufe stays warm without shivering, through
what is sometimes called “nonshivering thermogenesis.” They have physiologically adapted to cold, with a metabolic rate as
much as forty percent higher than that of other races allowing them to maintain a normal body temperature while sleet runs
off their skin.
In Darwin’s day, the Aborigines of Australia slept naked on the ground, even in the colder southern regions of the continent,
where temperatures might drop below freezing. Unlike the Alacalufe, the Aborigines did not stay warm. They had adapted to
cold through a different path than that taken by the Alacalufe. An Aborigine lying on the ground would become colder than
a European, an African, or an Asian. His body temperature would drop. When it hit the point that would trigger shivering in
the European or African or Asian, the Aborigine would not shiver. His body temperature would keep dropping. He would enter
a state of shallow hypothermia, unperturbed. During the night, his core temperature might drop four degrees, to ninety-five
degrees. He would then enter what has been called a state of “nightly torpor,” perhaps something like that of hungry tit-mice
or finches, which in turn is something like daily hibernation, which in turn has been compared to suspended animation. Today
Australian Aborigines sleep in heated homes, but presumably they could still enter into nightly torpor, maybe dreaming through
shallow hypothermia, while other Australians would shiver, likely not sleeping at all, and would appear, and in fact be, abject
and miserable.
