In the lobby, what looks at first like an ornate fireplace made from beach cobbles turns out to be a masonry heater. The flue snakes around and turns back on itself, an extravagant twisted snorkel hood of stone. A single morning fire, fed with perhaps thirty pounds of very dry wood and all the air that it can suck in from the surrounding room, burns hot and fast. The heat snaking around in the flue heats the rock. Throughout the day, the cobbles cool, dumping their heat into the building.
There are five hundred sensors embedded in the walls and floors and ceilings of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, measuring temperature and humidity. There are sensors, too, in the ground beneath the foundation. To the extent that this place leaks heat, its operators will know. As an outermost garment, it is like smart clothes, with layers, or like a combination of layered smart clothes and the sort of rebreather mask worn by Richard Byrd, overwintering alone at sixty below in Antarctica. But not at all like Byrd, the people inside the building are hot. They shed their jackets like hikers removing a layer before they sweat. They sometimes open the windows of their offices, setting the heat free and letting in the cold and feeling suddenly alive in the middle of the business day.
APRIL
It is April second and well over sixty degrees in San Francisco. Outside my hotel, Californians mill about, some walking on the streets or hanging from streetcars that pass beneath my room or hidden in cars and buildings. There are more people in this city than in all of Alaska. How such crowding is tolerated baffles me. And yet their roads are not frost-heaved, the windshields of their cars are not cracked from the combination of flying gravel and bitter cold, and their pipes are not frozen.
Mark Twain worked here as a journalist. One of his editors is said to have claimed that Twain could not be trusted with anything but obituary notices and that he wrote them in advance, leaving a space for the name of the deceased and another space for the date of demise. A senator claimed that Twain offered to write favorable copy for him in exchange for an open bar tab. After a month, the senator stopped paying the bar tab, claiming that Twain had failed to produce and that the bar tab “twas very large.” One can imagine Twain rationalizing his drinking as a means of bracing himself against the city’s legendary cold. It is often claimed that Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. In fact, he never said that at all. The quote is one of many falsely attributed to Twain, including these: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics,” which Twain himself attributed to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli; “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” which Twain attributed to the humorist Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye; and “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away,” which in truth originated with the humorist J. P. McEvoy, author of the comic strip Dixie Dugan, who was only a teenager when Twain died.
But the quip about summer in San Francisco captures the cold reality of the city, which sits on a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. Cold water upwells from the depths, surfacing along the coast, chilling the air. Inland, sunshine warms the ground, and the ground warms the air. The warm air over the land moves upward, sucking in the cooler air over the sea. The wind blows through funnels created by hills and skyscrapers. Fog forms. Summer days in San Francisco can be as cold as winter days, but fog and wind conspire to turn certain summer days into blustery baths of chilled mist that permeates the marrow.
None of this is to say that winter temperatures themselves cannot drop in San Francisco. Three months ago, in January, a winter cold snap resulted in temperatures below freezing, and just inland thermometers flirted with the twenty-degree mark. San Francisco’s shelters filled with homeless people. Stephanie Schaaf, a spokes-woman for shelter operators, was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Yesterday we took in over 500 people, and usually our shelters are pretty full anyway, with maybe 275. We’re breaking out mats, spreading them across the floors, in the hallways, pretty much anywhere there’s open space.” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency and offered help for shelters and farmers. Twain, if he were still alive, might have had something to say.
Almost certainly, Twain also would have done a piece on the cryonics facility twenty-one miles from here, where humans, freshly dead, have been frozen and stored, awaiting a time when technological improvements will allow them to be thawed out, brought back to life, and cured of whatever killed them in the first place. “The coldest winter I ever spent,” Twain might have said, “was the last fifty summers submersed in liquid nitrogen in a warehouse just outside San Francisco.” It started when James Bedford arranged for his own preservation. In 1967, immediately after he was declared dead and in keeping with his wishes, artificial respiration and heart massage were administered. A three-man team pumped glycerol into his veins and cooled him with dry ice. Then they dropped him into liquid nitrogen.
As long ago as 1962, a professor in Japan froze the brain of a cat for 203 days, then revived it — if the brief presence of brain waves can be used as a measure of revival. A year later, an American physics professor wrote The Prospect of Immortality, proposing that freezing humans might not be all that unreasonable. The idea was simple: suspend the animation of the sick or dying, store them until the science of medicine develops techniques to treat their diseases, and then thaw them out and revive something more than just a few brain waves. After Bedford, advocates who supported freezing humans organized conferences and formed committees. In 1972, a manual was published. Commercial providers sprang up, offering what they called “cryonic services.” Something like seventy patients — they are invariably called “patients” — are now stored in liquid nitrogen. Some patients have been stored virtually intact, while others, to save money, stipulated that only their severed heads be stored. One quickly grasps the short distance between a belief in the possibility of revival after immersion in liquid nitrogen and the belief in the possibility of inserting a newly warmed brain into the presumably still warm but empty-skulled body of a remarkably charitable donor. Advocates talk of “solid state hypothermia” and the use of surplus missile silos for storage. Advertised prices hover around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, making immortality surprisingly affordable.
There is the Japanese cat, and various insects and frogs that freeze and thaw naturally with winter and spring, and the arctic ground squirrel, which hibernates at temperatures close to freezing, and a manual, and businesses with business licenses and investors and customers. All of this notwithstanding, one might not, a priori, hold out much hope for the likes of James Bedford. Despite the care taken in freezing him, at the temperature of liquid nitrogen — 321 degrees below zero — he would have suffered from the destruction of cellular membranes. Sharp ice crystals would have formed wherever glycerol failed to flush out the water. It seems unlikely that he will be successfully thawed. A reporter recently put the question of ethics to a cryonics professional. The reporter, writing in the first person, as if planning her own preservation, phrased the question somewhat delicately, along the lines of “What if you can’t wake me up?” The response: “Well, you’re dead. I don’t see a problem with that.”
Unable to sleep, I read Roald Amundsen’s The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram, 1910–1912. Amundsen set sail in the Fram, a wooden schooner 128 feet long, with something like a hundred sled dogs on board. This was the very same Fram previously frozen into the northern ice by Fridtjof Nansen in 1893 and my second frozen caterpillar’s namesake. Nansen rode the sea ice for three years before returning to Norway and eventually passing the ship on to Amundsen, ostensibly for a protracted scientific expedition to the north. On the way to the Arctic, Amundsen announced that the little ship would head north via a short detour to the South Pole — just a quick stop to beat Scott’s expedition and allow Amundsen and his colleagues to be the first humans to stand on the earth’s southernmost point. He was successful, in b
oth beating Scott to the pole and surviving the journey. Nansen himself, a man whose stamina in the cold rivaled that of polar bears and arctic foxes, later referred to Amundsen as “almost superhuman.”
At home, in my freezer, my pet caterpillars Bedford and Fram frozen but presumably still alive, or in some sense alive, or at least potentially alive, at a temperature well below freezing but positively tropical compared to that of liquid nitrogen. Spring is coming, and it is almost time to thaw them out.
In the cold of winter, pipes freeze, flooding houses. Ice dams form on roofs and back meltwater up under shingles. Bigger ice dams form on rivers, often under bridges, holding back the flow of water and causing flooding before finally collapsing to release torrents downstream. Boats are frozen into harbors. People slip and trip on the ice. The air, though it feels brisk and clean, picks up the carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and other gaseous trash of cold-started cars, then holds it close to the ground in envelopes sealed by overlying warm air. Bumps and potholes form in roads. Cars take a beating from the combination of rough roads and thickened oil at a time when their metal and plastic parts are rendered brittle by low temperatures.
Well-built roads have cambers — rounded surfaces that shed water. When it is not wicked away by a good camber, water stands on the road surface, finds its way into cracks, and then freezes. The expanding ice pushes the road surface upward, creating unplanned speed bumps. When the ice melts, voids collapse, forming potholes, or the joints between two slabs of concrete separate, leaving a space between.
“It really has to do with water getting into the structure of roadways, freezing and thawing and that happening repeatedly,” explained a Washington State official to a reporter who had asked about pothole formation. “That’s why you see more potholes in the winter and spring than in the summer. It’s that freeze-thaw process that breaks apart roadways.” Seattle repaired more than 136,000 potholes in 2002, a bad year for roads. After a cold snap in Ohio, more than 200 claims were filed against the state seeking reimbursement for repairs to cars damaged when they ran over potholes. When asked why the government was so slow in paying these claims, a court spokeswoman said that people were not filling out their forms correctly. A Michigan drivers’ association usually sees something like 2,000 claims a year, averaging six hundred dollars each, for pothole-related damage to cars. Near Detroit, more than 200,000 potholes are filled each year. “Potholes are kind of like geese,” a Michigan spokesman told another reporter. “They don’t come by themselves; they come in flocks.”
Near Blacksburg, Virginia, the government maintains something it calls the Smart Road, used for pavement and transportation technology research. Among other things, the Smart Road has seventy-five snowmaking towers used to create nasty test conditions. In Alaska, the situation may be thought of more as one of trial and error tempered by budget shortfalls, with no need for snowmaking towers.
There is the famous Alcan Highway, stretching from British Columbia to the Alaskan interior and from there via different routes to Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Valdez. The Alcan is also known as the Alaska Highway, the Alaskan Highway, the Alaska-Canadian Highway, and the Road to Tokyo. It was a war baby built by the U.S. Army as a supply road during World War II. Before the road was finished, the Japanese occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, far out in the Bering Sea, but nevertheless part of Alaska and therefore American territory. The Alcan route was designed to join airstrips used to deliver American airplanes to the Soviets, via Alaska, in the lend-lease program that gave the Russians access to America’s manufacturing capabilities. The route went from Dawson Creek in British Columbia through Whitehorse in the Yukon to Delta Junction, Alaska — just over fifteen hundred miles from a town few people could place on a map, through a town few people could place on a map, to a town few people could place on a map: a wavy line that ran northwest from somewhere north of Calgary to the middle of nowhere in Alaska. When it was finished in 1943, long stretches of the highway were thin gravel over bulldozed permafrost. In spring, the permafrost melted, turning the highway into a linear bog, a trap for vehicles of all descriptions. Logs were laid down in the manner of railroad ties, providing structure. The logs were eventually covered with gravel, and the gravel was eventually covered with asphalt. Over several decades, convoys of military vehicles were replaced by convoys of aluminum camping trailers pulled by jeeps, and later by motor homes. The stretches of road built over logs — the so-called corduroy road — were dug up and rebuilt with proper gravel foundations. Although the Alcan is open year-round, it is still a study in potholes, gravel breaks, poor shoulders, and unplanned speed bumps.
More interesting, more audacious, and more ridiculous than the Alcan is the Hickel Highway. To understand the Hickel Highway, one has to understand the mentality of resource development in Alaska. According to Walter Hickel, elected governor of Alaska by a margin of eighty votes in 1966 and later appointed U.S. secretary of the Interior, “On May 2, 1967, a DC-3 with half dozen of us on board flew through the mountains of the Brooks Range directly over Anaktuvuk Pass. As I looked over the long gradual ramp of the North Slope, where the continental divide slowly merges with the Arctic Ocean, a vision hit me, or call it intuition. I saw an ocean of oil. ‘There’s 40 billion barrels of oil down there,’ I said.”
To get to the oil, Hickel needed a road. In 1968, he had the state’s Department of Transportation bulldoze a road north to Prudhoe Bay, starting near Fairbanks. The plan involved little more than pointing a team of bulldozers toward the Beaufort Sea, putting them in gear, and hoping for the best as they blazed through spruce bogs, over mountain passes, and across tundra. “I drove the first six or seven miles myself,” Hickel later said. “I got off and I told Jim, I said, don’t you shut this thing off until you get to Prudhoe Bay.” A month into it, progress was suspended when temperatures dropped to sixty-three degrees below zero. At fifty below, they started north again. The bulldozers scraped off the top layer of the tundra, cutting a smooth trail into the permafrost itself. In winter this left a fine road, but in summer the exposed permafrost did what it does, melting and then leaving behind a long, straight scar filled with water. Slowly, the ground immediately below the scar melted, and the scar deepened. The road was permanently closed a month after it opened in 1969, but large stretches remain visible today.
The cold is hard on machinery. At forty below, motor oil has a consistency close to that of warm tar. Pistons strain against it. Copper wire grows stiff and breaks. Windshields crack from the tap of road gravel or even from a bump in the road or uneven expansion. The stuff put on the roads to improve traction does not improve maintenance. Gravel put down for traction scratches paint and cracks windshields and headlights. Sand works its way between moving parts. Salt, which keeps water flowing at temperatures slightly below zero, eats into metal chassis and the bodies of cars.
It is not just automobiles that suffer. At Denver International Airport, sand spread on runways during a 2007 snowstorm became airborne in the wind and then scratched the windshields of fourteen planes sufficiently to lead to cracking. And then there is the space shuttle Challenger. Hot gas leaked around cold O-rings, causing an explosion of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and killing seven astronauts seventy-three seconds after liftoff. The temperature on the launchpad that January morning in 1986 was thirty-six degrees, fifteen degrees colder than any previous launch and colder than the conditions under which the rocket’s O-rings were tested.
There is, too, the issue of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is colorless, odorless, and poisonous. It locks up the blood’s hemoglobin, preventing it from carrying oxygen. Even low levels can be dangerous to people suffering from cardiovascular disease. Normally, the sun warms the ground, heating the air above it, and the warmed air rises. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and other gaseous trash of civilization rise with it, to be scattered and lost in the wind. But during temperature inversions, air near the ground settles in, trapped by a warmer layer above it. Inve
rsions are common in cities that sit in geographical bowls, surrounded by hills or mountains, such as Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Santiago. They are also common in cities that sit between the ocean and the mountains, where cold air blows ashore under warmer air, such as Los Angeles, London, and Shanghai. Cold engines working against thick oil pump out more carbon monoxide than they should, the result of incomplete combustion. It is this combination of temperature inversions and cold starts that gives Anchorage and Fairbanks a history of what the Environmental Protection Agency calls “non-attainment for carbon monoxide requirements.”
Worse still is indoor carbon monoxide. Leaking woodstoves and heaters fill rooms with the stuff. On a cold day, in a tight cabin warmed by a leaky woodstove, carbon monoxide levels can quickly reach hundreds of parts per million. Expose yourself to two hundred parts per million for a few hours, and you will experience a headache, nausea, and extreme fatigue. Expose yourself to eight hundred parts per million, and watch for convulsions and unconsciousness. Death will come within three hours.
The cold floods houses. Water from cooking and bathing and even breathing condenses on cold glass, dripping through window-sills and into walls to leave water stains and encourage mildew. Heat leaks up through ceilings, melting the bottommost layer of snow on the roof. Beneath accumulated snow, water trickles down the roof and then refreezes when it hits overhanging eaves and gutters, forming ice dams. The pressure of expanding ice pries gutters away from the house, or the weight of the ice drags them downward. A gutter can take the fascia with it. Worse still, ice builds up along the bottom edge of the roof. Eventually, a pool of standing water is held against the shingles. The water freezes and thaws with temperature changes, working its way under the shingles and prying them up. Water leaking around roofing nails freezes, and the expanding ice pulls the nails from the wood. Eventually, water leaks through the roof itself, into the attic. Insulation is ruined, exacerbating the problem. Water pools on top of the drywall, leaking through, or finds its way into the walls, leading to mildew and rotten studs. Occasionally, homeowners armed with blowtorches, intending to melt the ice dams that are causing all the trouble, inadvertently burn down their houses.
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