Cold (29 page)

For the denned polar bear, the outermost garment is not its fur but its den. For the human, the outermost garment is not the
caribou coat or parka or Windbreaker but the igloo or snow cave or quinzhee or house.

Much has been made of the Inuit igloo. Otherwise reasonable adults have the misguided subliminal impression that modern Inuit
live in igloos. The igloo today is at most a temporary shelter, sometimes used instead of a tent for a few nights while hunting
or traveling. A skilled builder with suitable snow — snow reworked by wind that can be cut into blocks with a long-bladed
snow knife — can build a small igloo in a few hours. The hole from which the snow blocks are cut forms the bottom half of
the igloo. Around the hole, the blocks of snow are stacked, each one angled slightly and with their size growing progressively
as the igloo walls grow. Envision a spiral of bricks growing larger with each step around the spiral. The warmth of occupants
warms the interior. Over time, with melting and refreezing, the interior becomes slick ice. The blocks freeze into a single
integrated structure. Fur can be hung on the walls for better insulation. The entrance is through a tunnel that dips down
and then up into the dome. Envision crawling through the snorkel opening into a warm hood. The temperature outside might be
forty below, while the temperature inside may be well above freezing.

In the past, igloos were larger and could be occupied for an entire winter. Igloo villages could be found scattered around
the far north, especially in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. In his 1932 publication
The Indians of Canada
, the Canadian anthropologist Diamond Jenness wrote about igloos:

Glance for a moment at the interior of an ordinary, single-room snow hut. You pass with bowed head along a narrow, roofed
passage of snow blocks until you arrive at the doorway, a hole at your feet, which you traverse on hands and knees. You rise
to your feet. On the right (or left) two feet above the floor is the lamp, a saucer-shaped vessel of stone, filled with burning
seal-oil, and with a stone cooking pot suspended above it. Behind the lamp are some bags containing meat and blubber; in front
of it, a wooden table bearing perhaps a knife and a ladle. A low platform covered with skins occupies fully half the floor
space. There, side by side with their heads facing the door, the inmates sleep in bags or robes of caribou fur. If you stand
at the edge of this platform, exactly in the centre of the hut, you can place both hands on the ceiling and almost touch the
wall on either side. A thermometer three feet from the lamp will register one or 2 degrees below the freezing point of water,
quite a comfortable temperature if you are enveloped like the Eskimo in soft, warm garments of caribou fur.

In Jenness’s day, several igloos could be joined by their entrance tunnels or walled together. The largest could have five
rooms, ice palaces in the northern wilderness, mansions of snow. Some communities built large snow domes for dancing and singing
and wrestling. Certain communities are said to have settled disputes through singing contests in which the point of the song
was to ridicule a rival. The songs could go on for hours, much like litigation today but more melodious and possibly as just.

In the summer, igloos melt. A point would come at which a tent was erected. The community was mobile, moving along the coast
to hunt whales and caribou and fish. When asked if this seemed inconvenient, an Inuit might have responded that summer is
the season for being outside. Why would one want a house in the summertime?

Away from the coast, in the taiga forests that cover hundreds of thousands of square miles, the snow is powdery and often
sparse. It cannot be cut into blocks. The Athabascan people of interior Alaska built
quinzhees,
piles of snow that they hollowed out. The beauty of the quinzhee is that, unlike the igloo, any fool with a shovel and a
bit of snow can build one. In fact, even the shovel is optional. The snow is scooped off the ground and mounded, then left
to sit for an hour or two. The pores in the snow are saturated with water vapor. There are differences in temperature within
the snow, and the water vapor moves from the warmest pore spaces, where vapor pressure is highest, to the coldest pore spaces,
where vapor pressure is lowest. As the vapor moves, it cools, turning to liquid and then ice. The snow metamorphoses. It hardens.
In two hours, it is hard enough to allow tunneling. The savvy tunneler pokes foot-long sticks into the mound, making it look
something like a pincushion on the outside and providing guidance on just how much snow to shave away from the inside. The
tunneler digs upward at a slight angle and then hollows out the dome. A bench might be left on one side. An airhole might
be a good idea. A quinzhee, while lacking the elegance of a well-made igloo, can last through the winter.

Today the villages of northern Alaska rely on imported houses designed for temperate climates. The houses, or at least the
materials from which they are made, travel north by barge. This is an expensive trip. After erection, decay begins almost
immediately. Neither the materials nor the designs were meant for the Arctic. From the outside, wind carrying snow blasts
the structure. The ground beneath, warmed by the structure itself, melts and subsides. From the inside, the humidity of human
life — exhaled air, steam from a coffeepot or a shower, water evaporated from washing countertops or from houseplants — finds
its way toward the walls and ultimately into the walls themselves. Just as water vapor moves through the pore space in snow,
going from warmer pockets to colder pockets — from higher vapor pressure to lower vapor pressure — it moves through walls.
It finds its way through any available opening. It moves through the insulation. Somewhere in the insulation, between the
studs or joists, it condenses into liquid water and then freezes. In spring, it thaws. Water stains form on walls and ceilings.
The water refreezes, and the force of expanding ice pops nails and tears screws from wood. Rot and mildew settle in. What
was delivered by barge to become a fine little house quickly becomes a very expensive hovel. The mobility of the ancestral
way of life looks increasingly attractive.

In Fairbanks, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center looks for ways to improve on the outermost garment. For something over
five million dollars, the center provides fifteen thousand square feet of space for labs and offices, but more important,
it is a living experiment in improved construction for use in cold climates. The foundation can be jacked up if the ground
beneath starts to melt. After jacking, structural foam or concrete can be injected into the open space. The building’s vapor
barrier is outside its wooden frame but encased in a blanket of polystyrene, three layers thick, which itself is encased in
stucco siding. What little vapor might escape through the barrier will not condense and freeze against the wooden frame of
the building. Also, the building’s ventilation is set up to remove moisture, to vent it to the outside, but for the most part
the warm air is reused. New air — cold air from outside — is sucked in only as needed. Just as in a snow cave or a quinzhee,
in a polar bear’s den or a lemming’s subnivean run, carbon dioxide can build up, so the building has carbon dioxide detectors
that feed information to the ventilation system.

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.

I
t 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.