How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?
Alexander Solzhenitzyn,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
1975
In January, just below the Arctic Circle, the sun shows itself only briefly and the shadows are stark and spare. I awoke in the darkness inside a double-walled tent. Above me four pairs of my socks were hung on an improvised clothesline. Sitting up, but not leaving my double-layered sleeping bag, I filled a canteen cup with water and set it on the portable diesel-burning stove that burbled in the middle of the tent. I opened up the valve that let more fuel into the stove. I eased out of my sleeping bag and pulled a layer of clothing on over my long johns. I took three pairs of socks down from the lines, rolled them and put them in an easily-reached pocket of my rucksack. The last pair I put on over the socks I’d slept in and then pulled on my insulated, vapor-barrier boots. By that time the water had come to a rattling boil on the top of the stove. I ripped open a packet of instant coffee and poured it into the cup. I added a hooded parka and mittens to my layers of clothing and took the cup with me as I went out into the dark to piss and have a cigarette.
The hair inside my nose crackled in the cold. Looking around I could see a small ice fog hovering over our encampment. The snow crust creaked under my boots until I reached a spot near a tree and I created my own small cloud of steam. Above, beyond the fog, stars were crisp and faintly shimmering, giving enough light to throw a purple shadow. I shook a cigarette out of a pack. My lighter clinked and flared as I lit the cigarette. I quickly re-gloved my hand. The coffee cooled rapidly in the metal cup. I drank it in gulps. I swirled the cooling dregs in the bottom of the cup and then tossed them into the air. Nothing came down. The drops sublimated directly into tiny, almost invisible brown crystals that dispersed into the darkness. It was, I guessed, about 40° below zero, but no wind was blowing. It was a nice day.
An hour later we were packed. The gear for six men — tent, stove, fuel, ammunition, food, water, sleeping bags — was lashed to a plastic sled. We slowly made our way through the darkness on our snowshoes, pairs of us taking turns pulling the sled. My compass was almost useless this far north and I navigated by constantly checking landmarks that I could see, oriented to the stars, and trying to locate our place on the map. In good terrain we would traverse about a kilometer an hour. The key was setting a pace, shuffling one snowshoe in front of the other, getting the sled to smoothly glide across the icy crust of snow, never slowing, never changing the pull on the ropes until we reached a stopping point.
In that harsh coldness we were attuned to simply surviving the environment. Each man paired off with another to watch exposed skin for frostbite. We stayed ravenously hungry as the calories burned off in our bodies’ efforts to stay warm. At that latitude in late January the sun was low on the horizon even in the middle of the day. We shuffled across the low hills and through the sparse forests in dimness.
“Loose and in layers,” was the mantra for this place. Beginning with my two pairs of socks I wore a layer of long underwear, thick wool shirt and wool trousers, a pair of baggy overtrousers with a quilted liner buttoned inside them, and a parka that also had a quilted liner. Outside all those layers were a thin white over-parka and trousers that served as camouflage. My boots were rubber and insulated by a captured layer of air. This insulation was so effective that my major concern was the sweat that accumulated inside the boots, soaking my socks and threatening blisters. Part of the survival ritual was to change socks two or three times a day, tying the sweat-soaked ones to my gear and letting them first freeze, then dry in the extreme arid cold. On my head I wore a thin balaclava, a wool-lined cap, my helmet, and a fur-lined parka hood. There was a wire inside the hood that I could shape into a small circle, making a tunnel for my eyes and nose so that I could see to the front, but had to turn my body to see anything else. On my hands I wore wool gloves and huge thick mittens tied to me with strings.
I felt the bulk as I led my patrol across the snow. I was puffed out by all the clothes and insulated from the world. When I tripped and fell I didn’t feel anything. It was like falling on a pillow. It was hard to stay alert and sustain the necessary paranoia of an infantryman moving across the world. The radio hissed at me and forced me to stay in touch. I could sense the frustration of the command center. Time and again the questions came to me and I could visualize them in their warm tent, with their stoves blazing and their lights shining. It was impossible for me to tell them what our world was like. I didn’t try.
After an hour or so my vision narrowed from the exertion and from my parka hood restricting my view. All I saw was that small white circle of the world. I became so tired that I did not want to make the effort to swing my head and look around. I did not check the horizon. I was not being careful. If we had encountered an enemy, we would have been killed. But we were lucky.
We could not go into the earth in January north of Fairbanks. Instead we had to find something to hide behind, a rock or a clump of trees. To dig was simply to move the old snow around and provide something to hide behind or perhaps use as insulation. Snow will not stop a bullet. The secret was to see them first, to find them first, and take them out first.
We set things up, including our tent and stove; established the guard; and then the rest of us tried to huddle away from the cold for the night.
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