Cold (8 page)

Farther south, in the American suburbs and frosty cornfields and icy parks, birds foolish enough to stick around through the
winter eat to stay warm. It would not be entirely wrong to say that they feed desperately. Golden-crowned kinglets, birds
not much larger than a grown man’s thumb, overwinter in places such as Vermont and Maine. Despite thick feathers, they lose
heat quickly. Winter ecologist Bernd Heinrich, curious about what they ate, killed a few one winter. “I shot the first kinglet
at dusk when the bird’s stomach would presumably be full,” he later wrote. He “took its body temperature as soon as it hit
the ground.” The little winged furnace was thermoregulating at 111 degrees. Its stomach was full of tiny caterpillars, previously
thought to overwinter as pupae. “To find out how quickly a fully feathered kinglet loses body heat,” Heinrich wrote, “I experimentally
heated a dead kinglet and then measured its cooling rate.” At thirty below, the tiny dead bird lost more than five degrees
every minute. Alive, at this temperature, the bird would have had to forage almost nonstop. Heinrich followed four of the
birds around on a January night. With windchill, the temperature was fourteen below. “The birds foraged tirelessly, without
pause,” he wrote. “I timed them at an average of 45 hop-flights per minute, without any apparent change of pace.”

Cold, really, is like malaria. If it does not kill you, it will help you lose weight.

It is August twenty-first and fifty degrees. I am wandering along the length of Point Brower, just east of the Prudhoe Bay
oil field, with two botanists, a father-son team. We step on diminutive willows and dryas and saxifrage. We splash through
puddles full of cotton grass. We peer into shallow freshwater pools full of tiny copepods. There are also crustaceans called
tadpole shrimp — not shrimp at all, but from a group called branchiopods, distant cousins of water fleas and closer cousins
of brine shrimp, including the ones marketed as sea monkeys. Soon all of these plants, all of these puddles, and all of these
little pools will freeze solid. Everything in them will turn to ice. All of this life will be suspended.

I ask my comrades to watch for caterpillars. Though skunked so far, I have not given up. A lemming scurries across the ground
in front of me like a tiny furry pig on espresso. It dashes along miniature pig trails between clumps of plants and through
tunnels under the leaves. Neither tunnels nor trails are more than two inches wide. Soon enough, the trails and tunnels will
be buried under snow. The lemmings will grow their winter digging claws. They will go about their business under the snow,
in their icy white grottoes, chewing on frozen willow stems. The snow will protect them from the bitter cold and wind of the
surface.

At the end of Point Brower, which juts out into the Beaufort Sea east of Prudhoe Bay, sit the remains of three human homes.
They were sod huts more than homes, little rectangular boxes ten feet on a side, before their roofs collapsed. The oldest
of them, possibly built more than two centuries ago, when Russia ran Alaska as a frontier province, is now nothing more than
a low mound of sod. The second oldest has been used as a trash heap and is full of rusted cans and broken glass. The youngest
— the remains of a roof still in place, its sod walls full of lemming tunnels and littered with piles of their droppings —
could be marketed as an Arctic fixer-upper, beachfront, ocean views, with kerosene tins and rusting cans that suggest it was
used as recently as fifty years ago.

This is treeless country. Structural members in sod homes like these might be bones from bowhead whales or stout driftwood
tree trunks. It is Canadian driftwood, carried down the Mackenzie River in Canada to float along the Beaufort Sea before washing
up on these gravel beaches, a drift of more than two hundred miles. There are, too, scattered boulders on these beaches, carried
here on Pleistocene ice sheets. The sod homes, in modern times, were heated by bottled natural gas or kerosene, and before
that by drift-wood and seal oil. In some areas, the locals once burned dried tundra sod soaked in natural oil seeps, where
crude oil finds its way to the surface from underlying deposits. The place, for all its wildness, has a feeling of history
unusual to find in Alaska, a feeling that the people who came before left a mark, that what might look at first like an untamed
coast has been home to people for generations, and that these people traded with other people, and built homes and fostered
dreams and ambitions of their own through long, cold winter nights and breezy sunny summer days on the shore of an icy sea
that to them did not seem at all untamed.

One of the botanists asks me about a bird. “It’s a long-billed dowitcher,” I tell him. Soon it will fly off to overwinter
in California or Mexico or as far east as Louisiana or Florida, like some of the Prudhoe Bay oil field workers. This time
of year, when the plants are still green, the Arctic seems unnaturally quiet. Over the past few weeks, most of the birds have
left. There are some stragglers, though, like the dowitcher. The geese and the larger ducks have not yet left. And tiny Lapland
longspurs still flit around happily. One, foraging on the ground near me, almost walks over my boot. Soon they will head south
to overwinter in suburban parking lots and subdivisions, happily taking handouts from bird feeders through the winter.

The same botanist who asked about the bird finds what has eluded me — a caterpillar, and then, almost immediately, another.
The caterpillars are mostly deep brown, the color of chocolate, but with black trim. Light gray hairs cover their bodies.
The hairs look like bristles, but they are surprisingly soft. The hairs slow down airflow, trapping warmth and moisture in
a boundary layer around the beast’s body. I let the caterpillars crawl around on my hand. They will make wonderful pets. I
will store them in the freezer while I travel. And, if this does not work out, I suppose I can eat them, as Greely’s men did.
I name one of them Fram, after the boat that Fridtjof Nansen intentionally froze into the ice. I name the other one Bedford,
after James Bedford, the retired psychology professor who, immediately after his death from kidney cancer, had his body immersed
in liquid nitrogen. Bedford — the person, not the caterpillar — remains frozen in a facility in sunny Arizona. Although I
cannot actually tell Fram the caterpillar from Bedford the caterpillar, neither can anyone else. I empty my lunch bag into
my knapsack, throw a few willow sprigs in the empty bag, and then bag the caterpillars themselves.

I
t is September fifth. On the North Slope, the temperature is thirty-nine degrees above zero. On the North Pole, it is just
below freezing and overcast. On the South Pole, it is sixty-five below. In Vostok, sitting at 11,484 feet of elevation in
Antarctica’s Russian sector, the thermometer reads ninety-seven below. I am in none of these places. Here, in Windsor, England,
it is seventy-three degrees and too hot to stand in the sun. I stand instead in the shadow of Windsor Castle. Rumor has it
that the queen is present. Security is openly active. My request for an interview has been flatly refused.

Windsor Castle has well over a hundred rooms. They have names such as the Green Drawing Room, the Crimson Drawing Room, and
the Octagon Dining Room. Ceilings tend to be high. The outer walls are stone. Some of the windows are narrow slits, just wide
enough to suit an archer, but others are much larger, well built to let in the cold of British winters. The doors could hardly
have been better designed to lose heat. The round towers were never meant to hold the weather at bay.

William the Conqueror chose the site nine hundred years ago. Over the centuries, it has been enlarged and renovated. Parts
of the castle originally built of wood are now stone.

It is a shame that my interview was refused, as I had but two questions for the queen. “How much is your heating bill?” I
hoped to ask her. And, for follow-up, a delicate question about the quality and use of royal long underwear in winter within
the stone walls of a drafty nine-hundred-year-old castle. Silk, I would guess, but verbal confirmation from the queen is needed.

What I really want to know is this: How did the castle’s occupants do during the Little Ice Age, starting perhaps as early
as the fourteenth century and running until around 1850? And how did they do when Mount Tambora blew its volcanic top and
ushered in the Year Without Summer? One can imagine the king’s voice echoing down a long stone hallway: “Break out the royal
long johns, Squire. It looks to be a cold one again.”

On April 11, 1815, Mount Tambora, on an island called Sumbawa in Indonesia, exploded. This was no ordinary eruption. Four
thousand feet of mountain summit disappeared during three months of tremors, rumblings, and lava and ash eviscerations. Twelve
thousand people on Sumbawa died. More than forty thousand on the neighboring island of Lombok starved when their ash-covered
crops failed. A British resident of Java, more than two hundred miles from the blast, wrote, “The atmosphere appeared to be
loaded with a thick vapour: the Sun was rarely visible, and only at short intervals appearing very obscurely behind a semitransparent
substance.” Sir Thomas Raffles, then the British lieutenant governor of Java, wrote of violent winds carrying away men, horses,
and cattle. The volcano discharged a hundred times more ash than was discharged by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in
Washington State. It dumped more dust than Krakatau in 1883. And, to make things worse, it was the third major eruption since
1812. Soufrière, on St. Vincent Island in the Caribbean, had blown in 1812, and Mount Mayon, in the Philippines, had gone
in 1814. Volcanic dust choked the stratosphere.

Dust in the stratosphere acts like a translucent shade on a window. It blocks the sun. This in itself is enough to cool the
earth, but it gets worse. Decreased warmth from the sun changes wind and current movements in the Northern Hemisphere. Cold
Arctic air moves south. Europeans and Americans called the year after the Mount Tambora eruption the Year Without Summer or
the Poverty Year. The laconic farmers of New England referred to it simply as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” There
were novelties such as flesh-colored snow in Hungary, red and yellow snow in Italy, and blue and red snow in the eastern United
States, all the result of ash captured in snow clouds. An English vicar wrote, “During the entire season the sun rose each
morning as though in a cloud of smoke, red and rayless, shedding little light or warmth and setting at night behind a thick
cloud of vapor, leaving hardly a trace of its having passed over the face of the earth.” Summer temperatures were as much
as eight degrees colder than normal. Violent thunderstorms with hail were unusually common. By the middle of summer, people
were worried about crops. On the twentieth of July, the
Times
of London reported, “Should the present wet weather continue, the corn will inevitably be laid and the effects of such a
calamity and at such a time cannot be otherwise than ruinous to the farmers, and even to the people at large.” During this
period, a typical family could spend two-thirds of its income on food. In the United States, rivers as far south as Pennsylvania
carried ice in July. It snowed in New England in June. And there were beautiful sunsets through the veil of stratospheric
dust.