The Children's Blizzard (24 page)

In the first flush of panic Elias felt his stomach turn to water and the cold sweat drip down his ribs and pool at the small of his back.

He had worn no hat or gloves or heavy woolen coat when he left for school with Heinrich and Johann in the mildness of the morning.

None of them had. The wind found every gap in the homespun cloth, every pore in the woolen socks and underwear, every buttonhole and cuff. Elias hunched his bony little-boy shoulders. Pinpricks of snow lanced his clammy skin and made it tingle. The blood-rich capillaries began to tighten down at his feet and hands and his exposed neck: His body was trying to conserve warmth by removing blood from the lash of the wind and sending it deeper within.

Lost, alone with his terror, too scared to cry, Elias Kaufmann started to shiver.

In an awful way, the five Schweizer boys who had wandered off when the blizzard struck had become factors, very small and frail factors, in the immense equation of the weather. Physics dictated that their warm body tissues and fluids would eventually reach equilibrium with the cold fluid of the ambient air. It was biology that infinitely complicated the equation. The size and shape, weight, consistency, and age of their bodies; their gender; the actions, both voluntary and involuntary, that their brains initiated; the subtle physical and chemical changes tripped by their emotions—all of these would determine how long they survived. Every living thing fights the physics of freezing to death, whether it wants to or not. Whether the body wins or loses is so complicated, so mysterious a process, as to resemble fate or luck.

When they left the schoolhouse and walked out into the storm, the internal temperature of the boys was presumably 98.6 or close to it. They may have gained a couple of degrees in the first minutes outdoors from the force of their exertions to remain upright in the wind and from the adrenaline rush of striding off into the streaming snow ahead of their teacher. But inevitably, gradually at first and then more swiftly, their core temperatures began to drop as their bodies lost heat to the air. The same basic physical processes that move heat energy through the atmosphere—radiation, conduction, evaporation, and convection—worked against the boys.

Nearly half of their bodies’ total heat production radiated through their uncovered heads in the form of infrared energy—invisible wavelengths of electromagnetic energy that travel through the air until they are orbed by an object in their path.

Radiational cooling, as the process is called, is what created the frigid air mass of the cold wave in the first place: During the run of calm, clear nights up in Canada earlier in the month, temperatures dropped quickly at the surface of the earth as the long waves of infrared energy radiated into the atmosphere. With no clouds to reflect the long waves back, they just kept rising and radiating heat up and out into space. On a much smaller scale, the same thing was happening to the body heat rising off the boys’ heads.

Their wet clothing sapped away additional body warmth through evaporation and conduction. In order to evaporate—in other words, to change state from liquid to gas—water must orb heat. Sweat cools the body by whisking away warmth as it evaporates off the skin. The water in the boys’ wet clothing acted the same way as sweat does, and the wind greatly exacerbated the heat lost to evaporation.

What made it worse was that their clothing never dried because the wind kept plastering them with snow, which the warmth of their skin melted. The wet orbent material of their shirts and trousers and underwear soaked up even more heat.

Conduction, the process that moves heat directly from one object to another, wicked heat from the surface of the boys’ skin to the cold water that saturated their clothing. Since heat is conducted twenty-five times faster in water than in air, the most mortally efficient conduction occurs when a person falls into cold water. Even water at 60 degrees is cold enough to quickly induce a condition known as immersion hypothermia. The boys carried their own frigid streams of water around their bodies. Later, when they knelt to pray, more heat would be conducted from their legs into the snow.

Most insidious was convection, the process that carried off the small envelope of heated air next to their skin. Convection, the transfer of heat by the movement of the air itself, accounts for why hot soup cools faster if we blow on it: Our breath carries off the hot, steamy air rising off the surface of the soup and replaces it with cooler air; as the soup transfers its heat into the flow of our breath, it cools. In the blizzard, the incessant wind was the breath that stripped away the warmth of the boys’ bodies and mixed it into the colder air around them. For a time their bodies kept producing more heat, and the wind kept blowing it away and replacing it with cold air. But eventually they started losing heat faster than their bodies could make it. Again, there is an analogy with water: An icy current would have acted in the same way had the boys fallen into a river. In a sense they were being swept along in a river of air—and the swifter the current, the faster the thin shells of their body heat were peeled from them.

An American explorer and scientist named Paul Siple worked out a formula for how convection kills through a combination of cold and kinetics. He called it the windchill factor. Cold, of course, can kill without wind, but it takes longer. Wind and cold together accelerate the process. To be precise, the amount of body heat lost to wind increases as the square of the wind’s velocity. Air moving at 8 miles an hour saps the body of four times more heat than air moving at 4 miles an hour; at winds of 20 miles an hour, twenty-five times more body heat is lost than at 4 miles an hour. Paul Siple had a lot of experience with wind and cold because he spent years working as the biologist on the Antarctic expeditions of Admiral Richard E. Byrd during the 1930s and ’40s. It was in the Antarctic that he calibrated windchill through a series of experiments with water in plastic cylinders. Siple’s windchill index has since been re-vised, updated, and recalibrated, most recently by the National Weather Service in 2001, but the fundamentals remain.

Television weathercasters like to say that windchill is what the weather 
feels
 like. Using the 2001 windchill index, when the wind is blowing 30 miles an hour at a temperature of 25 degrees, it 
feels 
like 8 degrees. “Feels like” is a fuzzy term for an exact transaction.

What windchill means is that it’s irrelevant that the thermometer reads 25 degrees: If the wind is blowing at 30 miles an hour, the exposed parts of your body are losing heat at the rate that they would if the temperature were in fact 8 degrees.

When the Schweizer boys left school late in the morning, the windchill was about 5 degrees above zero. At 9 P.M., four hours after the sun set, the windchill had dropped to 40 below zero. In conditions like that, exposed human flesh freezes in ten minutes.

Ten minutes to turn warm skin and blood to ice. The five boys had been outdoors by that point for over nine hours.

For a while, shivering kept them warm. The twitching started in their faces and necks and moved down their torsos and out to their arms and legs, rhythmic waves that rippled through their muscles at a frequency of six to twelve cycles every second. As long as their flesh jumped and danced around their bones, their muscles were producing enough heat to keep their bodies warm. Inside, their vital organs went on working normally. But shivering cost them dearly. As they shivered, their consumption of oxygen doubled or tripled, a sign of accelerating metabolism. Heinrich and Elias quickly burned through the calories of their last meal—the coarse bread sweetened by syrup or jam they had carried with them to school that morning. When that was gone their bodies looked for more fuel with which to combat the cold. But there wasn’t any—at least nothing they could convert to heat quickly. The boys had expected to be home by now, with a fire and a smiling mother to cook their supper, so they had brought no food but their meager lunches.

Shivering on an empty stomach is like burning your clothes in the stove once the coal and furniture are ash. The energy it took to walk, just to remain upright in the wind, made their body heat dissipate even faster. Fear threw open still more vents. Even mild mental stress hastens heat loss. Terror and exhaustion are as efficient as wind in scouring heat out of the human body.

The Schweizer pioneers frowned on complaining. Their children were raised to be cooperative, to think of others before themselves, to work together for the good of the family and the group—above all, to be humble before God. So it came as a shock to the older boys when Heinrich and Elias started falling behind and whining.

They were hungry. They couldn’t feel their feet or hands. Their eyes stung from the blowing snow.

Johann heard his younger brothers wail over the shriek of the wind and could hardly believe his ears. Crying like babies, screaming for the others to wait for them. Johann saw Elias fall as he stomped through the drifts trying to catch up. Or perhaps Heinrich had pushed him. Then Heinrich stumbled. Both of them were angry and red-eyed. The bickering and crying were signs that the younger boys’ bodies were beginning to succumb to the cold.

Irritated as he was, Johann would never have dreamed of abandoning his brothers. The five of them must stay together no matter what. Johann motioned to Peter Graber and Johann Albrecht to stop. The three older boys put their faces together so they could hear each other and talked about what to do. Peter Graber and Johann Kaufmann, the two sixteen-year-olds, took charge. They knew it was essential to keep moving and continue looking for shelter. If the little ones couldn’t go on they would carry them. Johann and Peter bent over at the waist and had the small boys climb onto their backs. Now there were three sets of tracks instead of five.

For a time, the exertion did Johann and Peter some good. Or seemed to. The effort of carrying the extra weight sent a ripple of warmth through their bodies. And shivering contributed its own pittance of heat—for despite the exertion, it was so cold in the wind and their clothes were so thin that they still shivered. Shivering and labor combined to work and warm their muscles. But it was warmth they couldn’t afford for very long. The boys were paying for every step and every spasm—paying with precious currency.

Without food, without relief from the wind and cold, they were soon bankrupted.

Whenever they stopped moving even for a moment, to catch their breath or peer into the impenetrable air, the tide of warm blood ebbed from their skin and extremities and flowed inward to the centers of their bodies. But the tide was no longer warm enough to boost the temperature inside them. The heat of exertion rose off them and dissipated like steam. Gone. Their core temperatures, the temperature of the blood near their hearts, began to drop. At 95 degrees they exhibited the first signs of mild hypothermia.

Strangely, their minds were affected before their bodies. The boys became peevish. They wanted to argue, but when they opened their mouths to shout over the wind, they had trouble forming the words. Thoughts came slowly and only with exaggerated effort, like moving under water. For the first time, they blamed each other for wandering off from Mr. Cotton and the two younger Graber boys. The three who were still walking stumbled, and they saw each other stumble, and for some reason this filled the boys with annoyance and disgust. Shivering reached a climax as their bodies clung to an internal temperature of 95 degrees, but the uncontrollable twitching of their flesh disgusted them as well.

It is during this first mild stage of hypothermia that moun-taineering and exploring parties start to bicker and group solidarity breaks down. Ordinarily docile and cooperative individuals turn waspish and vindictive; leaders make bad choices. Everybody thinks someone else is to blame for the misery of being out in the cold. Mountaineers call it “cold stupid.” The dulled mind begins to throb around a single image—really more a sensation than an image: the craving for warmth.

Johann and Peter were now shivering so violently that it was difficult to hold Heinrich and Elias on their backs. What made it worse was that the younger boys had gone limp on them, like half-empty sacks of peas. Johann kept shouting for his younger brother to grab tightly to his shoulders, but the little boy made not the slightest effort. Again and again he slid to the ground. He just sat in the snow staring dazedly when his brother bent over to pick him up again.

Johann could hardly restrain himself from smacking the child.

What Johann did not realize was that Heinrich and Elias had become dangerously chilled while he and Peter were carrying them.

Lying inert against the older boys’ backs, they had fallen into the apathy of deeper hypothermia.

At outside temperatures of 35 below zero, the body loses a degree of heat every thirty to forty minutes—and far more rapidly than that if the clothing is wet. By evening the windchill temperature began to approach that level in Dakota. As their core temperatures dropped degree by degree, the boys’ minds betrayed them more severely and bizarrely. With their body temperatures at 93, amnesia began to cloud their thoughts and impair their judgment.

Thoughts oozed slowly out of their brains, and time itself seemed to drag on leaden feet. This is the temperature at which people make foolish, sometimes fatally foolish, decisions. They take the wrong path. They refuse to turn back from their attempt to reach the mountaintop. They lose gloves or hats or discard precious supplies. It’s like being insanely drunk with cold. From here on, the boys would remember nothing.

When their internal temperatures hit 91 degrees, they ceased to care what happened to them. Their speech became slurred. Johann Kaufmann and Peter Graber and Johann Albrecht were now as dull and apathetic as the limp younger boys cradled in their arms. Their bodies were so cold that nerve impulses moved sluggishly to muscles, and the muscles failed to respond normally once the impulses reached them. The boys stared down at the frozen blocks of their hands and wondered dimly why they couldn’t make them move or feel anything. They had trouble contracting the muscles in their thighs and calves that they needed in order to walk; but once the muscles contracted, they couldn’t relax them again. The boys stumbled and staggered. It was the wind that determined where they went, not their numbed brains.