Expeditions in the Cold

photo by davebrosha.

Arctic air slid down off the iron range and pooled around the Twin Cities. Each morning I woke up with my steaming pot of coffee and turned on the radio to hear the latest temps: -19 degrees, with a high of -5 planned for later in the day. It was warm inside, the furnace almost never turning off. I went down to check on it, touching one of its aluminum vents, and quickly drew back my singed fingertip. At least if I burned down the house, I would be warmed in its glow until the fire died out, and who cares what happens after that? The wind chill would carry me off to someplace else.

In the evenings, I drank brandy and escaped this place altogether. From my den, with snifter in hand and a few good books spread around my lazy-boy, I could dip in and out of various novels that had somehow escaped me in my youth; “Treasure Island,” “A Wrinkle in Time.” Sometimes Jung would interpret the symbols of my dreams. When I really stretched out these nights, I picked up my pen and that handmade little notebook my sister had given me years ago. I wrote down the string of words that came from who knows where, telling me things that I always had trouble understanding. If I was lucky, the ink would dry quickly enough to freeze the feeling to be deciphered later, but more often than not the dry air evaporated all essence from the ink so that I was left with a bunch of unintelligible scribbles.

Huh. Interesting. Something is forcing me to remain here writing. I keep trying to go on the internet but get failure messages, pages that can’t be found, proxies that can’t be bypassed. This is good; I’m excited about this news. Somebody is sabotaging me. At least something out there is listening, a paramour of the other side blitzing my motherboard, sending binary critters to rewire my router to guide me down a different route--to here: another empty page, but with words poised at the ready.

The cold even gets to me here, in a room puckered dry from a space heater. I make believe this cold comes from arctic winds howling around a science outpost, a circle of tents huddled on ice-flats at the tip of the world. We are beyond the rim of the sun’s route. There is hardly any sign of life on these stretches of ice, and I would never have realized, without having been here, that this also results in a lack of death. I have always mourned the lack of death; it leaves nothing for contrast. We have come in search of oil, at least that is the mission of the team that has allowed me to tag along to report on their progress. I come in search of something completely different, something captured in oracular visions, in hieroglyphs that modern words can’t translate, and by a side of myself I let few people see. It is only within the arctic circle that I feel safe enough to explore it further.

That is, until the brandy runs out, and the candle sputters down, and I fall asleep in the chair. I wake to the radio forecast: a warming trend is on the way. Finally. I wonder what a thaw will bring.