Cold (24 page)

It is January twenty-fifth in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost community in the United States. The forecasters’ prediction
of a few days of warm weather has proved true. At fifteen below, it is a mild January afternoon. Two days ago, the sun rose
for the first time this year, but today is the first day with clear skies, and the first visible sunrise since mid-November.
The sun eases upward, then hovers, moving in a shallow, graceful arc from east to west, never more than one or two degrees
over the horizon. We are on snowmobiles, and we ride for some time into the sun. I leave a hundred feet between me and my
companion’s profile, his hunched form on the machine’s saddle. I see his parka hood framed against the Arctic sun, the silhouette
of a shotgun strapped to his back, and a light cloud of condensation and fumes from his exhaust pipe, all riding ahead of
his long, stretched-out shadow on the snow. Around him, the flat white snow and ice, devoid of contrast, confuses the eye.
I scan occasionally for arctic foxes, but see none. There are fewer foxes here, in Barrow, than in the oil fields southeast
of here. Although we travel armed, it is more from habit than from need. The time to see polar bears is spring, summer, and
autumn, not January. Now they are scattered on the sea ice or denned up to give birth and suckle their young, and in any case
their reality is less ferocious than their reputation.

The tundra in panoramic view appears flat, but on the machines we feel every bump. On occasion, we dip down a few feet or
ride over a shallow hill. With each dip we see the sun set, and with each hill we see the sun rise. It is an orange orb, angling
in through low haze on the horizon, the sky above it open and deep blue. We are riding into the wind. The cold nibbles and
then chews at exposed flesh around my cheeks and temples. At twenty-five miles per hour, the windchill equivalent is minus
forty-four. Any warmth from the rising sun is more psychological than real.

We intercept an ice road and ride along its smooth surface, picking up speed and occasionally fishtailing on the ice. Ice
roads, built by dumping water onto the snow covering the tundra, or right on the tundra itself, then scarifying the ice for
traction, are used throughout the far north for winter travel. This particular ice road heads far off into the tundra to an
exploration well. Someone hopes to find natural gas there. It will provide a backup supply for Barrow, a gas-rich community.
A water truck drives by, and we have to dodge momentarily into the tundra, then come back onto the road. The truck looks ludicrously
small against the ice road itself, and the ice road, disappearing toward the rising sun, looks ludicrously small against the
expanse of snow-covered tundra.

We cut off from the road, ride across a frozen lake, and intercept the coast. Although my face stings with cold, my body is
overheating, like that of a running moose or an agitated bowhead whale. I unzip the top few inches of my parka. The early
exhilaration of the ride has given way to irritation with the bumpiness and the cold wind and the restricted vision of goggles
and a parka hood. We stop at the coast and turn off our machines. Immediately, the exhilaration returns. My companion has
ice on his beard and collar. To our right, we can see Barrow, its five thousand residents scattered in village sprawl, picturesque
against the frozen sea. Closer, between here and Barrow, someone has stored a boat on the tundra. It is upside down, standing
on four steel fuel drums, frozen in place and masked with frost. It is a skin boat, an
umiaq,
built from the stitched hides of bearded seals and used to hunt bowhead whales in the open-water leads during spring, when
the whales are swimming east between ice floes and snorkeling from pool to pool. To our left, we see the coastline, empty
but for ice rubble, bulldozed into piles by the slow but powerful movements of a frozen ocean. The Inupiat call the piled
ice rubble
ivuniq
. This rubble, standing no more than fifteen feet tall, might be called an
ivunibauraq,
a little ice ridge.
Ivuniq
forms when sheets of sea ice, miles across, pushed by wind and current, slowly collide. The leading edge crumbles against
the shore or against another sheet of ice, piling up into a ridge, like drifting tec-tonic plates forming frozen models of
the Himalayas and the Andes and the Rockies in fast-forward. At times, the thunder of ice collisions can be heard for miles
through the still, cold air.

Barrow, like most communities in Alaska, looks temporary, like a pioneer settlement. It is not. Barrow is among the oldest
permanent settlements in the United States. Hundreds of years before the European Arctic explorers showed up, starving and
freezing and succumbing to hardship, Barrow was more or less where it is now, a natural hunting place at the base of a peninsula
that pokes out into the Beaufort Sea. It was called Ukpeagvik, literally “a place for hunting snowy owls.” Yankee whalers
sailed here, learning about the bowhead whale from Inupiat hunters, but also bringing new harpoons, steel, and guns. A weather
station of sorts was established in 1881. Later, the military came, setting up a radar station, and in 1947 a science center
was founded at Barrow. Men raised as subsistence hunters showed scientists how to function in the Arctic. They shared traditional
knowledge. They corrected the misconceptions of what has come to be known regionally as “Western science.” Today Barrow has
the coldest average yearly temperature of any community in the United States, at just under ten degrees.

We look out over the frozen ocean and see nothing but wind-sculpted waves of snow and ice. Though invisible, there are also
seals and bears and arctic foxes, and farther out, the North Pole. Soft light comes in low and angles across the ice. We stare
at the northern ice cap, a reflector the size of a continent that bounces what little sunlight it receives back into space,
an ice cube proportioned to cool the entire globe. There is nothing more to see than a rough white surface disappearing into
the horizon, yet we stand silently for some time, concerned that in turning away we might miss something very important, something
crucial to our well-being and somehow central to our lives.

I
t is February second, Candlemas Day, and a sweltering forty-eight degrees here in Anchorage. It is eleven degrees in Kansas
City, thirty-seven degrees in Washington, D.C., and twenty-six degrees in Denver. New Orleans hit only forty-nine, and the
low in Los Angeles was colder than the high in Anchorage. My beautiful snow is melting again, filling the streets with slush
and water. Across town, a creek thawed and flooded the basement of an office building, ruining computers. Roofers are busy
fixing leaks of suddenly liquid water. At the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage, Jake the brown bear woke up, groggy, and staggered
outside to lie in the sun.

As the snow melts, it grows gritty with a few months’ accrual of dirt and dust, previously scattered through three feet of
snowpack but now accumulating right on the surface. With a darker surface, the snow absorbs heat and melts that much faster.
I ski in a T-shirt, moving along a trail on the edge of Cook Inlet, watching thousands of blocks of dirty ice float past with
the tide. Hot air blows in from the south, stripping away the cold or, closer to the truth, pumping in heat. Right on the
edge of the inlet, slushy puddles that tug at my skis are interspersed with the sort of crusty snow that comes from freezing
and warming and freezing again. My dog, running along behind me, breaks through the crust and looks at me quizzically, head
tilted and ears up, seeming to wonder when we might turn around. But under trees, in the protection of windbreaks, the snow
remains firm.

I take heart. “It’s definitely a warm event,” Sam Albanese of the National Weather Service tells reporters, “but it’s certainly
not out of the realm of what happens most winters here.” In February, in Anchorage, one can be certain that the cold will
return. Mary Anderson, who has lived in the area since 1945, tells a reporter, “I’ve seen every kind of weather you can imagine.
This isn’t unusual.”

It is in fact somewhat unusual. It is a record high for this date, another record high in the annals of global warming. The
previous high was forty-six degrees in 1977. On this same date in 1947, the city enjoyed a record low. It was thirty-three
degrees below zero.

Candlemas Day marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox — the halfway point between the shortest
day of the year and the day with twelve hours between sunrise and sunset. It was once considered the last day of Christmas.
Although now thought of as a Catholic holiday, it may have its roots in the Gaelic festival of Imbolc, celebrated long before
Christ to mark the birth of spring lambs and the first stirrings of spring.
The Catholic Encyclopedia,
first published in 1907, denies this possibility so wholeheartedly that one is left convinced of its truth. The name Candlemas
Day refers to the blessing of the candles to be used at Mass, but the day is also marked by the burning of candles in windows.
The day has other names, including the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
And Groundhog Day.

In Anchorage, the sky is clear one minute and overcast the next. The groundhog, known in Alaska as the marmot, might or might
not see its shadow. One might or might not think of the day as clear and bright. Certainly, the shadows are not thick, and
there is no rain. If the proverbs hold true, winter will be around for a while longer. Marmots, if any have broken hibernation,
will waddle back into their holes, curl up, and drift back into their winter stupor. Their chubby little bodies will drop
to within nine or ten degrees of freezing.

Coming down a small hill, I round a corner and am suddenly exposed to the wind from Cook Inlet. Icy snow turns to slush under
my feet, ripping my skis out from under me. I go down on my hands and knees in the slush, my skis akimbo. Annoyed, I curse
El Niño and chinook winds and Hadley cells. I curse global warming. I long for the cold of 1947.

Young Frederic Tudor had a penchant for losing money. In February 1806, in his midtwenties, he filled a sailing vessel with
ice from a Massachusetts pond and sent it to the island of Martinique. The
Boston Gazette
covered the story: “Loading ice — No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique.
We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.” It did in fact prove slippery. Island people had no experience
with ice. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Tudor wrote of customers who left their ice in the sun or in a tub of water and
then complained when the ice melted. By 1812, Tudor was in debtors prison.

Three years later, out of jail and with more borrowed money, Tudor invested in an icehouse in Cuba. Pursued by sheriffs because
of his debts, he set sail from New England on November 1, 1815. He spent the next ten years building the trade and learning
how to preserve ice. He built icehouses throughout the Caribbean. He experimented with rice chaff, wood shavings, and sawdust
as insulation. He created a demand for cold drinks in the tropics, which in turn created a demand for more and cheaper ice,
which in turn inspired one of his suppliers to harness a horse to an ice saw, creating what would be called the ice plow and
tripling production. By 1833, he was shipping ice to India, sixteen thousand miles and four months away from Massachusetts.
This was at a time when many Indians had never seen ice. By 1855, Tudor would make more than two hundred thousand dollars
from the Calcutta ice trade. He became known as “the Ice King.”