Cold

January 18th, 2024

It happened during the summer of 1978, but I can’t remember exactly when it was. I was attending a three-week-long class at the Northern Warfare Training Center at Fort Greeley, Alaska. It had to be sometime around the summer solstice because it never got dark. It never got hot either. The NWTC was up near the Arctic Circle, close to Fairbanks. Even in summer, a long sleeve shirt or a jacket was necessary.

The military training was divided into three parts. The first week consisted of learning how navigate a small boat on the Tanana River. The second week was spent learning to do rock climbing and rappelling. The third week was spent on the glacier. We hiked on the glacier, crossed crevasses, and got sunburned from the glare off the ice. The Delta River flowed from the lower edge of the glacier. One day we did a river crossing. That was all we did that day.

The Delta River is narrow and shallow, at least where it is close to its source. The water in the river flows rapidly and is cloudy and white from all the fine silt in it. A heavy-duty cable had been strung across the stream, and each member of the class needed to hook on to the cable and ford the river. It didn’t take long to make the crossing, but the effects of the experience were long lasting.

Basically, the water flowing in the river had just recently been ice. It came right off the glacier. I remember that I took maybe a dozen steps before I went numb below the waist. After that, I shuffled along unable to feel my legs. On the far side of the river was a small campfire which was more for show than anything else. My clothes were soaked with freezing water, just like everyone else’s were. We all shivered until an Army bus picked us and took us back to our barracks. Everybody took a steamy hot shower and collapsed in their bunk. That was the end of the day’s training.

Now, forty-five years later, I wonder what the purpose of that episode was. Since it was Army training, there didn’t need to be a good reason for fording a frigid river. There didn’t need to be any reason at all. Perhaps, it was all about giving each student some firsthand experience with hypothermia. If that was the goal, the training was a complete success. We all learned that hypothermia sucks.

I have spent most of my life in Wisconsin, which implies that I have some understanding of how to function in the cold. When I was young, I went sledding and tobogganing. I made a feeble attempt to ski. I participated in outdoor activities, even ice fishing, which I have been told is one of the first signs of insanity. However, at this point in my life, I can barely tolerate the cold. I do not hate it enough to move south, but I no longer enjoy freezing my ass off.

I worked for decades as a supervisor on the loading dock of a trucking company in Wisconsin. The dock was not heated, so the environment of my workplace was exactly the same temperature as the outside of the building. In winter that meant it was cold. I used to dread the last part of January and the first few weeks of February. Almost without fail, there would be a week when the temperatures never got above zero. That’s brutal, just brutal.

Cold weather over an extended period of time is hard on machines and harder on people. If it gets cold enough, trucks and forklifts won’t run. During extremely frigid weather, we had one guy spend his entire shift just starting tractor for the drivers. Even if we plugged forklifts into the facility’s electrical outlets to keep the batteries charged, some of them still would not start. Often, before a truly cold night, we would park as many forklifts as possible into the heated maintenance shop. Then we knew that at least some of the jeeps would run.

The dockworkers, and I, wore as much clothing as we could to stay warm. That was a losing battle. After eight to ten hours out on the dock, even with frequent breaks for coffee or soup, a person starts to get hypothermia. You can feel it in your bones. There is a stiffness and fatigue that simply does not go away. There is a weariness that sucks the life out of a person.

I retired partly because I couldn’t handle the winter work anymore. So, when it gets crazy cold outside, like it is now, I stay inside. I will go out briefly to run an errand or get the mail, but I don’t go out on the tundra unless I have to do so. I am blessed to have a warm house. Some people don’t have that.

Today, in the Milwaukee area, there was a high temperature of two degrees. That’s the high temperature. It was eleven below last night. I read the news this morning. Three homeless men were found dead in the local area from hypothermia. One of them was my age and they found his body under a bridge. That’s unacceptable. Nobody in this country should freeze to death in winter. Nobody. That’s a horrible way to die.

I have some small idea of what that might be like.