Cold

by Bill Streever

  And there are frozen pipes. In Anchorage, in a single winter, two fire hydrants were once pushed out of the ground by ice, frost-heaved to the point of breaking. Inside houses, expanding ice within pipes has nowhere to go but outward, through the wall of the pipe, first forming a bulge and then a crack. When the pipe cracks, the water flows. Frozen pipes flood something like a quarter of a million houses each year in the United States. Families return from vacations in Florida and Hawaii to find water streaming out through front doors and garages. Walk-out basements become aquariums with furniture floating in stairways. Specialized companies come to pump out the water, dry out what can be dried, rip out the rest, and renovate. If a frozen pipe is caught before it bursts, a thawing service can be called. For something like a hundred dollars, a thawing service uses electrical current to melt the ice. To avoid the charge, homeowners sometimes break out blowtorches to thaw pipes — the same blow-torches they might use on ice dams. The official advice from State Farm Insurance: “Never try to thaw a pipe with a torch or other open flame. Water damage is preferable to burning down your house.”

  It is April sixth and forty-five degrees in Anchorage. The road in front of my house is lumpy with melted ice, and my car bounces along as though I am on a rutted four-wheel-drive track in the Serengeti. In the low spots, thick pools of watery slush have accumulated. I head north, hoping to find cooler weather in the Talkeetna Mountains. The piles of snow stockpiled by plows through the winter have started to melt. As they melt, they metamorphose into piles of dark road grit, the whiteness of the snow running off as water and leaving behind the greasy detritus shed by an automobile culture and the grime from five months of plowing up gravel and sand. Other cars kick up a dirty mist that coats and recoats my windshield and headlights. It is not just the roads that are filthy. It is everything within ten feet on either side — cars, streetlights, sidewalks, fire hydrants, and mailboxes, all sprayed and resprayed by splashes of meltwater and, farther from the road, by meltwater mist.

  Creeks, in flood stage, flow furiously beneath bridges.

  Even at the long-abandoned Independence Mine, a gold mine sixty miles to the north and three thousand feet above Anchorage, the temperature hangs in the low forties, and the surface of the snow has turned to slush. On the steeper slopes, snow rendered unstable by the heat has collapsed, leaving avalanche scars of various sizes. In the summer, I have seen marmots here. Now they are under the snow, beginning to stir, hungry and suddenly eager for spring, with meltwater dripping into their rocky lairs and sunshine creating a blue twilight through the remaining snow.

  Outside, I clip on cross-country skis. I force the skis through the slush around the basin that surrounds the mine. Skis are meant to glide, but as the snow melts, their motion changes. The first ski has to be pushed forward and the lagging ski dragged along. The snowshoes and waterproof boots that I left in my garage would be superior footwear in these conditions. I meander up to an old mining shack, abandoned on a hillside. The shack is built of sheet metal fastened to a frame of unmilled tree trunks and branches. Sod bricks ensheathe the ramshackle shell. Inside, the remains of a platform bed are surrounded by fallen pieces of sheet metal and an old white sink sitting on an earthen floor. Someone has taken the stove, which likely would have run on coal hauled up from seams that surface lower down the mountain. The miners’ lives here would have been full of hardship and toil surrounded by scenic wonder. I sit on my pack in front of the shack, surveying the basin, feeling dreadfully tired, as depleted as the melting snow.

  Gold was discovered early near Anchorage. By 1890, prospectors had spread from the first finds in the creeks south of Anchorage to the Matanuska and Susitna valleys to the north. In the creeks, they found color — “color” being slang for flakes of gold. They turned up the occasional nugget. They followed the creeks upstream, looking for the source of these flakes. As they moved closer to the source, the color grew richer, nuggets more common. The gold was being washed out of the mountains, chiseled out by expanding ice and then carried downward by meltwater into the streams and rivers of the valleys. The lucky prospectors were the ones who tempered their luck with knowledge, patience, toughness, and the backbreaking fortitude required to stoop over an icy stream with a gold pan that did triple duty as a cooking pot and a plate for dried beans and moose meat. The truly lucky prospectors found the sources of the gold that colored the creeks. They found veins of quartz with embedded gold, the mother lode. And there they set up hard-rock mines — tunnels into the solid rock itself.

  Hard-rock mining was a different business than the placer mining of the creeks or the digging of tunnels through frozen soil to reach buried riverbeds. The word “placer” comes from the Spanish for sand bank, and placer mining was all about mining gold from sand and gravel — gold that had been washed away from veins in the mountains and mixed with common earth. In the area around Fairbanks and around the Yukon, placer miners used fires and steam to tunnel down through frozen silt and clay, reaching toward long-buried streambeds that had not seen flowing water since the Pleistocene. But here, in the Talkeetnas, the miners were boring into the rock itself, chasing the mother lode, pursuing the gold at its source. It was a matter not of melting permafrost but of dynamiting solid rock.

  This sort of mining required capital and teamwork. Expertise was needed in explosives, in engineering, in geology. Miners who once worked alone or in teams of two or three formed companies. The Alaska Pacific Consolidated Mining Company eventually owned eighty-three claims that covered thirteen hundred acres. More than eleven miles of tunnels extended below the surface. On the surface, they built a town. By 1941, more than two hundred men worked in the mine. Twenty-two families lived in what amounted to a company town in the frozen mountains, many very difficult miles from Anchorage, which in the mine’s early days was itself a muddy and isolated community. But the miners’ children had their own schoolhouse, and the mountains gave up more than a ton of gold, worth more than twenty million dollars on today’s market.

  From the wide-open but often frigid outside, the miners rode trams into the tunnels. Underground, conditions were cramped. In winter, many of the miners would enter the shafts well before daylight and come out well after dusk. A day in the shafts would leave them wet with the sweat of hard labor and the moisture of the earth. Outside, at forty below, their clothes would freeze within seconds. This was a time of cotton and wool, a time before breathable synthetic fabrics.

  When America entered the Second World War, gold mining was deemed unimportant to the war effort. The government considered it nonessential. For a short time, the Independence Mine stayed open, claiming to produce scheelite, a source of tungsten needed for the war effort. But scheelite was a ruse that allowed gold production to continue. The authorities caught on and eventually shut the place down. The miners were sent home or to the battlefields of Europe or the heat of the Pacific. Some of them may have later sat in jungle clearings listening to lectures on the dangers of frostbite and hypothermia and the importance of layering clothing.

  It starts to rain. In the flat light, the snow merges with the clouds, making it hard to know where the earth ends and the sky begins. Below, between me and the abandoned buildings of the Independence Mine, a diesel-powered snowcat — a tracked vehicle with a plow on the front and an enclosed cab for the driver — crawls up the trail, billowing smoke, working the snow. I ski down to it. The driver climbs down from the cab. The government pays him to groom the trails around the Independence Mine, attracting cross-country skiers. He tells me that he has had several flat tires this winter. The tires, which reside under the snowcat’s tracks, pick up water from the snow. Water can settle in the bead of a tire, between the rubber and the metal hub, and when the water freezes, it expands and separates the tire from the rim. He claims that temperatures here at the mine did not go above minus forty for a month this winter.

  I am strangely exhausted, as fatigued as if I had been huffing carbon monoxide. I am as tired as a miner just
back from the tunnels, emerging from the darkness of a shaft into the flat light of spring.

  The Anchorage Daily News reports on Port Heiden, an Alutiiq village four hundred miles southwest of Anchorage. The sea has frozen for the first time in seven years, driving sea otters out of the bay. Starving, the otters slide and waddle along the ice and the frozen tundra. Dogs attack them, or they are killed for their hides, or foxes get them. One man reported seeing thirty-five of them sharing a small hole in the ice, taking turns diving for food, slowly starving. They shared space on the ice with half a dozen otter carcasses. While the otters foraged through the hole, eagles fed on their dead brothers lying on the surface.

  Another story reported that the Canada geese had returned to Anchorage and then left. Twenty of them had been spotted flying over an urban neighborhood in late March. Another eight had touched down on a frozen lagoon two weeks later. Then, finding the city still more or less frozen in, they disappeared. “They may have gone back somewhere,” suggested the director of Audubon Alaska. “They’re not going to go all the way back to California, but they may turn around and go back just far enough to find what they need… in Seward or Homer or maybe the Copper River Delta.”

  There is, too, the question of wood frogs and ground squirrels. Although wood frogs freeze solid, they will not survive temperatures below twenty-one degrees. If snow cover is light and air temperatures bitterly cold, their hibernaculums become graves. For ground squirrels, it is not so much a matter of freezing as it is of repeatedly warming and rewarming. It is a matter of letting their body temperature drop to the freezing point, shivering to warm up, and then cooling down again to conserve calories. Forced to warm up one too many times, they run out of stored calories and freeze solid. They starve and then freeze, like Arctic explorers.

  Whenever low temperatures approach, gardeners talk of cold hardiness. The U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the country into zones based on minimum temperatures and illustrates these zones. Honolulu, an orangish red, stays above forty degrees. Miami, the color of faded bricks, does not drop below thirty-five. Fairbanks, the color of an unripened peach, can get colder than fifty below zero. In the orangish red zone, there are bougainvillea and royal palms and rubber plants. In the zone of unripened peach, there are cinquefoils and dwarf birches and scraggly black spruces that, even when perfectly healthy, look as though they have survived a fire.

  Gardeners and farmers have tricks. They cover small beds of flowers with sheets to get through a night or two of frost. They choose their fields, avoiding low areas that trap cold air. During temperature inversions, wind machines and helicopters have been used to blow the cold air off the ground, away from crops. They cut channels through hedgerows to let cold air from fields drain into ravines. And they use smudge pots. Developed after a 1913 freeze wiped out a fruit crop in southern California, smudge pots burn oil to generate heat and sooty smoke. The smoke settles above the crop, blanketing the trees, trapping heat from the ground and from the pots themselves. Burning tires have the same effect. Misting with irrigation water has the double effect of forming a cloud that traps heat and extracting heat from the water itself as it turns to ice. But if the weather stays cold, too much of the mist turns to ice. Ice covers the plants, and the weight of the ice snaps off branches.

  It is not just a matter of cold. Plants harden gradually to winter conditions, but when the weather breaks, they soften quickly. A sudden cold snap in autumn, before plants have hardened, is death. A temporary warm spell in late winter is death. A blanket of snow is a lifesaver. Leaves and stems are less sensitive than roots, so plants can tolerate cold air better than cold soil. In the end, a cold snap can wipe out a farmer as quickly as a drought. “There’s nothing alive,” a farmer in Illinois told an Associated Press reporter following an April 2007 freeze. “They’re all dead. They say you pay your bills with apples and make your money with peaches. This year, you’re not going to make anything on either side.”

  For humans, there is the issue of the cold itself, and winter damage to crops and roads and pipes, and fire hydrants frost-heaved out of the ground. But there is also the issue of slipping on ice. Sledders and skiers suffer various sprains and breaks and even death. States and cities have considered helmet laws for children on sleds. Walkers, too, are affected. An oil field worker in northern Alaska slipped, apparently falling backward. The back of his head connected with the ice. He died.

  And there are avalanches. A 2002 report from the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge describes the investigation of a herd of caribou caught in an avalanche the previous winter. The herd, wandering across a steep slope, triggered the slide. “The helicopter prop wash filled the sky with caribou hair,” the report says, “and caribou skulls and bones lay scattered over a large area.” At least 143 caribou died under thousands of tons of suddenly moving snow.

  It is April twenty-eighth here in Orlando, Florida, and pushing eighty degrees. On the North Slope, it is seven above. On the North Pole, the thermometer flirts with ten above. On the South Pole, temperatures are dropping below minus sixty.

  In 1905 on this date, Orlando thermometers dipped briefly to sixteen degrees. In 1940, Miami dropped to twenty-eight degrees. In 1985, Jacksonville found the seven-degree mark, and Pensacola encountered five degrees. In 1899, Tallahassee experienced subzero temperatures, falling to two below. People in Florida hate the cold. Many have moved here from places such as Detroit and Minneapolis and Montana. My cabdriver, originally from Chicago, brags that he no longer owns a warm coat. Near the hotel pool, a woman who grew up in Florida tells me that she cannot even imagine forty below.

  “Imagine thirty degrees,” I tell her. “Now imagine eighty degrees. They are fifty degrees apart. Now imagine that same difference, but downward from thirty degrees. That is twenty below. Subtract another twenty degrees, and you have forty below.” She stares blankly, as if at a madman. Imagination cannot extrapolate beyond the temperatures it has experienced. I stand in the sun, face upward, enjoying for the moment a latitudinal spring.

  MAY

  It is May fifth and hovering in the high forties on Prince William Sound, southeast of Anchorage, the site, seventeen years ago, of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Prince William Sound is Alaska at its best: a piece of the ocean protected by snow-covered mountains, kelp and barnacles visible through clear water, puffins and otters on the surface, the occasional bear foraging along the shore, orcas and sea lions in the waves. Weather and time have washed away obvious remnants of the spill, but oil still sits beneath the gravel on certain beaches, and biologists continue to argue over evidence of residual damage. The temperature swings noticeably as our boat moves across the water, here finding a warm spot in the sun, here feeling the wind blowing down the slopes of a snow-covered mountain, here chilled by a glacier. Young cow parsnip sprouts velvety green along the shore, and willows bud on south-facing slopes. Spruce boughs stand dark green, having shed their winter burden of snow, but beneath the spruce, the snow remains deep. Higher up, slabs of snow have collapsed, dropping two or three feet straight down and leaving obvious faults in the snow. In places, the slabs have slid down the sides of mountains in avalanches of various dimensions. Where the mountains catch the sun, entire ridgelines have slid. Below, the avalanche snow lies in piles taller than trees, burying God knows what. The snow and ice have fractured pieces of the mountain’s marrow, then pulverized them, leaving dirty streaks of mountain grindings exposed in fingers that reach downward across the snow-covered slopes.

  On the water: flocks of kittiwake gulls, murrelets in groups of three and four, pigeon guillemots with their black-and-white wings bobbing in the waves, groups of Dall’s porpoises as fast as torpedoes, scattered otters floating with their bellies and paws exposed to the sun, and three humpback whales. All but the humpbacks have overwintered here or nearby, tolerating the cold. The humpbacks are just back from Hawaii or Japan or Mexico, where they have fasted for months, focusing on singing their famous love songs under the waves
, frolicking and courting and mating. Now they move patiently, submerging to sieve food from the rich, cold depths of Prince William Sound, then surfacing to breathe, then submerging to eat again. Their grazing is like that of elephants, the movements of slow-motion ballet carried by tons of fleshy momentum.

  Our boat pushes in toward Beloit Glacier. Beloit is a tidewater glacier, reaching out past land into the bay itself, a grand remnant of a much bigger glacier that would have resided here in the late Pleistocene, shrinking and growing with warm spells and cold spells for untold years. Waves lap along the glacier’s front, and ice thunders down directly into the sea, creating violent waves that radiate outward. Occasionally, ice calves off underwater and rockets upward, emerging like a frozen submarine. As we move closer, the boat’s steel hull crashes through increasingly large blocks of floating ice. A mile from the glacier, we slow down and then drift with the ice, watching the glacier melt. Cold air sweeps down the glacier and out across a mile of water. The Windbreaker on a man standing next to me flaps like a flag, and his hood fills like a wind sock. The glacier’s breath mocks us, reminding us that spring is delayed, that summer is short, that winter will be back soon enough. We live at the end of a time of glaciation and ice, in the warmish dusk of an ice age. The massive glaciations of the late Pleistocene were only yesterday.