The Children's Blizzard (25 page)

As darkness fell, Maria and Johann Albrecht took some small comfort in the fact that the teacher, Mr. Cotton, hadn’t come back either. They had gone over it again and again through the long day of waiting and wondering. Mr. Cotton, who was boarding with them, must have stayed at the schoolhouse with their son Johann and the other children. That would explain why neither he nor the boy had come home. Albrecht reassured his wife that this was the only possibility. He had been outside himself when the storm hit and he knew how bad it was. Albrecht had never seen anything like this in all their years in Dakota. It would have been madness for the teacher to dismiss school and send the children out into this storm.

Maria Albrecht tried to believe her husband. She agreed that they must not even think of traveling to the school to get Johann until the wind had died down. Now in the darkness the storm was more dangerous than ever. Together they would pray and wait for the morning. But still, whenever she saw Johann’s younger brother Peter, Maria could not stop herself from sighing and shaking her head. “O where is my child?” she wailed. “My heart is going to break."

Shivering is a very demanding way of warming the body. But the body shivers as long as it’s able to because the alternative is much worse. Shivering is the body’s last defense against the abyss of deep, potentially fatal hypothermia. Once shivering stops, the chilled body falls quiet and then shuts down rapidly. On a graph of temperature loss plotted against time, the drop from 98.6 to 90 looks like an intermediate ski slope; below 90 is a cliff.

Heinrich and Elias stopped shivering first; then Johann Albrecht; finally Johann Kaufmann and Peter Graber. Their core temperatures were now around 88 degrees. Severe hypothermia had set in.

The functions of their vital organs slowed. The chilled blood thickened. Their hearts turned stiff and frail as the cold penetrated deeper. Like the muscles of their legs and arms, their heart muscles failed to respond efficiently to nerve impulses. Contractions became weaker and weaker; the pumping action was barely forceful enough to push the viscous blood through their veins. A vicious cycle set up as their weakened hearts failed to supply the tissues with the oxygen they were craving: The lack of oxygen made their bodies unable to complete the metabolic cycle, causing lactic and pyruvic acids to accumulate in their tissues; the buildup of these acids made their hearts beat even more feebly and erratically, which in turn spiked levels of the acids.

The deepening cold radically redistributed their bodily fluids.

During the first hours, the blood had retreated from their skin and extremities into the core of their bodies to keep the central organs warm. The temporary rise in the volume of blood flowing through vessels deep inside increased the production of urine. Soon the boys were desperate to urinate, but their hands were so paralyzed by cold that they couldn’t open their flies. Eventually, as their bladders emptied repeatedly and their core temperatures kept falling, their blood volume began to decrease. The blood itself became increasingly viscous as more and more water was retained in their tissues.

Their kidneys were no longer able to conserve water. The boys urinated again and again, probably wetting themselves and adding to their misery. Dehydration became acute, and this in turn made their blood volume sink even lower.

There was a measure of protection in this shutting down of their internal processes, at least for a time. As their metabolism slowed, their brains required less oxygen, which was fortunate since their bodies were incapable of supplying much. Doctors today routinely induce extreme hypothermia during certain open-heart operations by pumping very cold blood into the body with a heart-lung machine. For an hour or so, the doctors keep the body at the threshold of death while they operate on the cold, motionless heart. The stilled pulse and the barely functioning brain reduce the patients’ risk of heart attack or brain damage. Had the boys been rescued at this point and warmed properly, they might have recovered fully from an internal temperature of 88. It’s dangerous to be this cold but not necessarily fatal.

But the odds of being rescued diminished steadily as the day wore on. The Kaufmanns and the Albrechts still believed that their sons had stayed in school, as they had been told to do again and again. And the Graber parents, who knew the truth, were too frightened to go out searching in the storm.

At 87 degrees, the boys probably would not have recognized their parents anyway.

Below 87 degrees, they began to lose their grip on reality. They ceased to know or care that they were cold. They gave up looking for shelter.

Hallucinations and delusions set in. Starved of oxygen, unhinged by stress and fatigue, the brain fabricates its own reality—often the fulfillment of desperate prayers. Two hikers stranded on Everest at 28,600 feet in temperatures of –35C hallucinated together that their supply officer had joined them in their bivouac—the only person in the team who might have brought them dry sleeping bags, food, and oxygen. Sailors who survived the sinking of the USS 
Indianapolis
 in the eastern Pacific in July 1945 hallucinated that an island was within reach. Some of the men stripped off their life jackets and drowned. The Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Little Match Girl” is a classic case of wish fulfillment hallucinations induced by severe hypothermia: a small girl, shivering barefoot in her snow-dampened rags, watches in amazement as a series of fantastic images appears out of thin air every time she strikes a match—a warm stove, a table laden with food, a Christmas tree glittering with candles, the return from the grave of her recently deceased grandmother. The next morning, passersby find the girl dead, with a smile on her face.

Johann, Heinrich, and Elias Kaufmann, Peter Graber, and Johann Albrecht, brought up together in the tight-knit, deeply religious world of the Ukrainian Mennonites, may have hallucinated that Jesus came down in his flowing robes to take them to heaven.

Or that their mothers walked out of the storm bearing plates of hot poppy seed cake or the savory dish they called 
Käseknöpfle
—literally, cheese buttons—made of delicious dough and cheese and onions.

People freezing to death sometimes find they are unaccountably happy and relaxed. They feel flushed with a sudden glow of well-being. They love the world and everything in it. They want to sing.

They hear heavenly music. As the mind and the body amicably part company, the freezing person looks down on himself as if he’s hovering overhead or already in heaven or a returning ghost. There is his body, lying miserable in the snow, but somehow he is no longer trapped in it. He’s gazing at his corpse and walking on. He’s telling the story of his miraculous escape. In his account of the 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, Jon Krakauer wrote that in the depths of exhaustion and hypothermia he experienced a "queer detachment” from his body, “as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a windchill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm.”

This disturbing warmth is another common sensation in advanced hypothermia. Right before the end, the skin may feel like it’s on fire. The bliss of merging with the cold is interrupted by a sensation of burning and suffocating. Doctors are not sure why this happens. It may be a delusion manufactured by the oxygen-starved brain or it may be that for some reason in the last minutes of consciousness the body sends a surge of blood back to the constricted capillaries at the surface of the skin. Whatever the cause, the result is that victims of hypothermia suddenly feel so hot and stifled that they strip off their clothes.

A few days after the blizzard, the 
New York Tribune
 reported in perplexity that a number of the dead were found with torn or missing clothing—collars ripped away from their throats, hats tossed off. The paper’s reporter speculated that storm victims had suffocated on the fine powdery snow and wind-borne ice pellets: “In a genuine blizzard the air is filled with fine ice dust, driven with terrible force, which chokes the unfortunate victim in a short time if he attempts to stand against it.” But the 
Blue Valley Blade
 in Nebraska correctly attributed this phenomenon to delusion and hallucination: “At this stage of freezing strange symptoms often appear: as the blood retires from the surface it congests in the heart and brain; then delirium comes on and with it a delusive sensation of smothering heat. The victim’s last exertions are to throw off his clothes and remove all wrappings from his throat; often the corpse is found with neck completely bare and in an attitude indicating that his last struggles were for fresh air!" It sounds bizarre—to wantonly sacrifice warmth and cover just when you need it most—but it’s common enough that doctors have given the impulse a name: paradoxical undressing. Before paradoxical undressing was identified, police routinely mistook hypothermic women with torn or missing clothing for victims of sexual assault.

The reaction explains a disturbing incident in military history. After a brutal three-day storm in January 1719, hundreds of Swedish soldiers were found stripped and dead in the field in the wake of a disastrous campaign against Norway. At the time it was assumed they had been plundered by their comrades, but now doctors believe that they tore off their own clothes as their minds and bodies went mad with cold—a mass outbreak of paradoxical undressing.

For the five Schweizer boys, the end was probably peaceful. "First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—” as Emily Dickinson imagined freezing to death in her poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” As their internal temperature dipped below 85 degrees, the hallucinations lost their grip, the imagined music stopped, the sensation of freezing or burning faded. They just wanted to go to sleep. “I was getting so terribly tired,” wrote another boy who had gotten lost in this storm at the age of thirteen. “I felt sleepy. I thought if I could only lie down just for a few minutes I would be all right. But I had heard the farmers telling stories about lying down and never getting up again in snow storms. So I kept on, but I finally got to the point where I could hardly lift my feet any more. I knew that I couldn’t stand it but a minute or two longer.” The farmers were right. When the body sleeps, its core temperature drops, metabolism slows, heat escapes more quickly from the surface, shivering ceases—all of which hastens the loss of the dwindling supply of bodily warmth.

Johann Kaufmann and Peter Graber undoubtedly knew that sleep meant death, and very likely the younger boys did, too. They would have kept moving as long as they could—anything to avoid lying down in the snow. By late afternoon they had been wandering for three to four hours. They had come to the end of their endurance. Their cheeks and eyelids were raw from scraping the ice off their eyes. Their limbs were stiff. Their hands and feet and ears were beyond warming. Johann and Peter were no longer able to carry the younger boys, and Heinrich and Elias were barely dragging themselves through the snow. Every few steps they fell to their knees, struggled to stand, fell again. The older boys waited, turned back to help, shouted, fell down themselves. When they tried to think, words and images drowned inside their skulls before they could break the surface of consciousness. When they spoke they made no sense, to themselves or to each other. With body temperatures at 80 degrees, delirium entirely eclipsed reason. In the profound darkness of night in a storm, hope was impossible.

The younger boys gave out first. At some point Heinrich or Elias fell and couldn’t get up again. Nothing Peter or Johann said or did could stir them from their apathy. It’s possible the younger boys fell to their knees and the older boys, thinking they were praying, knelt beside them. That’s how their families preferred to imagine it. In truth, whether they knelt together or not, it was a tribute to the strength of the bonds between them—and to the heroic efforts of Peter and Johann—that they had remained together at all.

Other groups of children caught out in the storm straggled, separated, and dropped alone, one by one. But the five Schweizer boys hung together until the end. And perhaps they did pray with some small, glowing ember of the mind.

By all accounts they were good boys, obedient, cherished by their families. They had been prayed over and instructed in prayer from the moment they were born. Johann Kaufmann, the only one of Anna Kaufmann’s first four sons to survive childhood. His younger brothers Heinrich and Elias, born after so much desperate suffering in the New World when their mother hardly dared to hope anymore. Johann Albrecht, the baby born on board the immigrant ship just three days out of New York Harbor—a child bless-edly impervious to the noise and danger and heat of the long journey, and to the deprivations of the hard seasons ahead. Peter Graber, not yet four when his mother died of exhaustion and illness that first bitter spring in Dakota and raised to the age of sixteen by his stepmother in a house packed with brothers and sisters.

In the small, closed world these boys had grown up in, the only world they ever knew, the impulse to pray was so powerful and deeply ingrained that it was almost an instinct. And kneeling, if one or more of them had indeed summoned the will to kneel, would have been a blessing in its own right. Folding the body in the middle and bringing the knees close to the chest would have provided some protection.

It was better than lying in the snow.

But in the end that’s what they did. One by one, they collapsed onto the frozen ground. With his last surge of will, Johann raised himself and wrapped Elias in his arms. As the snow conducted heat away from their bodies, their heartbeats slowed to an occasional twitch. The boys lost consciousness. Beyond both hope and fear, they felt nothing at all.

Doctors have a brutal phrase they use in treating people found unconscious in the cold: “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.” In profound hypothermia, the internal functions become so slow and feeble that the body enters a kind of suspended anima-tion. The pulse is all but gone, the brain barely flickers with activity, the blood moves glacially through the veins and arteries—but there is a window during which an unconscious hypothermia victim can be resuscitated with surprisingly little damage. A fairly wide window, in fact.