“Mountains are great poets, and one glance at this cliff undoes a great deal of prose. All life, all society begins to get illuminated and transparent, and we generalize boldly and well. Space is felt as a great thing. There is some pinch and narrowness to us, and we laugh and leap to see forest, and sea, which yet are but lanes and crevices to the great Space in which the world swims like a cockboat in the sea.”
So true. But that turned out to be from the essay “Fate,” not about fate per se. Try again, word search in texts:
“The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.”
Oh my yes. So well put. What a perceptive and eloquent worshipper of nature old Waldo was. And why not. New England had heroic weather, which often cast its prosaic forest right up to the heights of the Himalayas or the shores of the Arctic.
But it was almost nine. He hopped up and paid his bill, using cash, which he did as often as he could now.
The pay phone he had chosen was in the Bethesda Metro complex itself, down by the bus stop. There were several phones in a row, and he went to the one on the end and pulled out a phone card, ran it through the slot, dialed her number.
No answer. He let it ring a long time, then hung up.
He stood by the phone, thinking things over. Was this bad? She had said it might not work every week. He had no idea what her daily routine was. How did that work, with a husband you hadn’t slept with for four years?
When the phone rang he jumped a foot and snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Hi Frank it’s Caroline. Did you call before?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, this was as early as I could make it. I was hoping you’d still be there.”
“Sure. We should have a kind of window anyway.”
“True.”
“So . . . how’s it going?”
“Oh, crazy. All over the place.”
“Everything’s okay?”
“Yes.”
Gingerly they re-established the intimacy they had inhabited the week before. It was hard over the phone, but that voice in his ear brought back a lot of it, and he took chances: How are things going at home? I thought of you. . . . Then she was telling him about her relationship, a bit, and the link between them was there again, that sense of closeness she could establish with a look or a touch, or, now, with her voice, clear and low. The distance between her and her husband had existed for years, she said; maybe since the beginning. They had met at work, he was older, he had been one of her bosses, now in a different agency, “blacker than black.” They had not had any huge fights, ever, but for some years now he had not been home much, or showed any interest in her sexually (“Incredible,” Frank said). But before they had met he had worked for a while in Afghanistan, so who knew where he was at.
That gave him a chill. “How did you two ever hook up?” he couldn’t help saying.
“I don’t know. My sister says I like to fix messed-up guys not that I mean you!” she added in a rush.
Frank only laughed. “That’s all right. Maybe your sister was right. I am certainly messed up, but you are fixing me.”
“And you me, believe me.”
But then, she went on, she had discovered by accident that he had chipped her, why she could not be sure; and a cold war, silent and strange, had gone on since then.
Frank shivered at the thought of this. They talked about other things, then. Their workouts, the weather: “I thought about you the other night when it got windy.”
“Me you too.”
Their windy night, oh my—
“I want to see you again,” she said.
“When can we?”
“I don’t know. I’ll look for a chance. There’s some stuff happening I may have to deal with. Maybe I’ll have something set up by next week.”
“Okay, next week then. Which one of us should call, by the way?”
“I’ll call you. I’ll start with this same number.”
“Okay good.”
He walked back to his van, passing first their elevator box on Wisconsin Avenue, then the little park where they had met the first two times. His Caroline places. This would be a new addition to his set of habits, he could tell, and all the rest would be transformed by it. He had gone feral, he had gone optimodal, he had become the Alpine man; and on Friday evenings he would get to talk to his Caroline on the phone, and those talks would lift and carry everything else, including the next time they met in person.
BUT FASTER THAN FRANK COULD FOLLOW, winter went from the sublime to the ridiculous, and then to the catastrophic. He was enjoying it right up to the moment it started killing people.
That night, for instance, it was cold but not terribly so; there wasn’t much wind, and its bite was invigorating. It made so much difference how you were experiencing it—not just what you wore, but how you felt about it. If you thought of it as an Emersonian transcendental expedition, ascending further in psychic altitude or latitude the colder it got, then it was just now getting really interesting—they were up to like the Canadian Arctic or the High Sierra, and that was beautiful. A destination devoutly to be wished.
But temperatures the following week plummeted from that already low point, an astonishing development no matter what they had been reading in the newspapers about other places. And that drop took them out to the equivalent of Antarctica or the Himalayas, both very dangerous places to be.
The first big drop was like a cold snap in a cold front, barreling in from Edmonton. It arrived at midnight, and by two A.M. he could not get warm even in his sleeping bag—a rare experience for him, and frightening as such. He fired up the space heater and cooked the air in the tent for a while, and that helped. But the heat sucked out of the tent the moment he killed the heater, and after a couple of burns he decided he had to go for a walk, maybe even a drive, to soak in some of the van’s warmth.
Climbing down Miss Piggy was a nasty surprise. He started to swing in the wind, and then his hands got too cold to hold on to the rungs properly, so that he had to hook his elbows over and hang on for dear life, waiting for the wind to calm; but it didn’t calm. He had to continue one rung at a time, setting his feet as securely as possible and then reaching down for another elbow hook. One rung at a time.
Finally he dropped onto the snow. He pushed the remote, but the ladder did not swing up into the night. Battery too cold.
Really very cold. You could only survive exposure in this kind of cold with the appropriate gear. Even ensconced in his spacesuit, Frank was struggling to stay warm. This was a temperature equivalent to being in the death zones of Everest or the Antarctic plateau.
And yet people were still out there in cotton. Out there in blue jeans and black leather jackets, for God’s sake. Newspaper insulation for the most hapless. And the animals, all but the polar ones—they would be dying if they weren’t in one of the shelters. The wind cut him in a way he had felt only a few times before, most of those in the Yukon’s Cirque of the Unclimbables, on multiday wall climbs. For it to happen in this semitropical city was bizarre, and an immediate emergency. And indeed it sounded like people were calling 911. He could hear sirens from every direction.
He could take care of himself, of course. Ceaseless motion was the key. So he hiked hard; but even so he got cold. He had forgotten what a furious assault cold made on you, he had to bury his face in the windward side of his hood, and had no idea how his nose was faring. For a while he even got lost, and worried that he had turned somehow and was headed south on the ridge trail. Narrow as it was, the park that night was too wide to cross.
He headed uphill, hoping it was west but knowing he would emerge eventually if he kept going up. He kicked right up the sides of snow drifts, noticing again what a huge difference his snowshoes made. It would have been horrible to post up a slope like that in deep snow. And yet
he was one of the few people using snowshoes in the city. Only the FOG people used them, as far as he had seen. Surely the ferals must be into it, if they weren’t skiing.
He came out on Broad Branch Road, almost exactly where he had hoped to be. God bless the unconscious mind.
He was very happy to hear his van start when he turned the key. After revving the engine for a while, he drove off with the heater on high. The van rocked on the gusts. The few other vehicles on the streets were weaving like drunks. SUVs finally looked at home, as if they had all moved to Fairbanks.
After driving around for a while he warmed up. The day arrived on a broad red sky. He snowshoed back out into the park, went first to 21 to check on the bros.
“Hey, Noseman! You should have a fucking barrel of brandy under your chin.”
“I’m amazed you guys are alive. How did you do it?”
“The fire.” Zeno gestured at it, pale in its giant mound of ashes. “We sat right next to it all night long.”
“We kept it real big, we had to keep running out for more branches, shit. It was so fucking cold. I stood like six inches from this mother bonfire and even so my backside was freezing. One side of me was frying and the other was freezing.”
“It was cold all right. Do you have enough firewood, or what are you burning?”
“We have all the flood wood.”
“Isn’t it green still?”
“Fuck yeah, but we’ve got a can of gas, and Cutter keeps siphoning cars to fill it up. Car gas burns like a motherfucker, it explodes in that fire, you’ve got to be really careful.”
“Okay, well don’t burn yourself up. There’s that shelter up at UDC—”
“Yeah yeah gowan! Gowan witcha! Go help some of them poor fools out there who probably need it.”
This was a valid point, and so Frank snowshoed off. Out of the park, into the paralyzed city.
In Starbucks they said it had been fifty below zero Fahrenheit at dawn. Almost a hundred degrees below the average daytime temperature for the day—now that was climate change. Sirens were still howling all over the city.
Frank called Diane. She was already at work, of course, but only because she had spent the night there. Forget about coming in, she told him. “No one should even try. I mean, can you believe this?”
“I believe it,” said Frank.
FEMA had already declared it a disaster area, Diane said. Federal employees were now being told to stay home, along with everyone else but emergency personnel. Lines were down, and power outages had been reported; all those areas were in crisis mode. Water mains had frozen and burst, there were fires going unfought, and no doubt thousands were in danger of freezing to death in their own homes. Six A.M. and already it was a huge emergency.
“Okay Diane, I’ll stay in touch today and I’ll keep my phone on.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see how I can help at the zoo, I think. There are still a lot of animals at large.”
“You be careful! It’s dangerous when it’s this cold.”
“Yeah I will. I’ve got polar gear, I’ll be okay.”
“Good. Okay, let’s talk.”
So Frank was free to do what he had wanted to anyway. “Ooooop!”
All the streets in Northwest were empty, or very close to it. No more blue jeans and windbreakers; the only people out and about were dressed as for polar exploration, or at the very least, a day of very cold skiing. These people greeted each other with the cheeriness of people who have survived a rapture and inherited the world. They were mostly men at first, out to see if they could help somehow, out for the hell of it really; and then there were quite a few women out too, more and more as the day wore on, often in bright ski colors. Esprit de corps was high. People waved to each other as they passed, stopped to talk on the street. Everyone agreed that anybody out in this without good gear would quickly go hypothermic, while on the other hand, good gear and constant exertion meant one could thrive. It was a stunning experience of the technological sublime, an evident natural religion. Space was indeed felt as a great thing. And some of the coffee shops were still open, so Frank ducked in them from time to time, like everyone else, for a break from the penetrating chill. Heated caves, there to take shelter in any time it got to be too much—as long as the area still had electricity, of course. The areas without power would be in trouble, perhaps in need of evacuation.
“I’m from Ohio,” one man said to Frank outside a Starbucks. “This is nothing!”
“Well, it’s pretty cold,” Frank said.
“True! But it’s not windy. Thank God for that. Because it’s not the cold, it’s the . . .”
Having toured Connecticut Avenue, Frank began a comprehensive hunt through Rock Creek Park, walking the Western Ridge Trail and venturing down every side trail. He was relieved to find that the park was basically empty. The deer were tucked into their brakes and hollows; he wondered whether these would be enough, this could be a major die-off. But you never knew. Snow was a tremendous insulator and windguard, and these deer had gone through winters before.
And the truth was, they could use some culling. It was the ferals he was really worried about.
Then he found three people, still huddled together in a wood-and-cardboard shelter, down by site 9. At first he thought they were dead; then they stirred. He called 911 and waited, getting colder and colder as he tried unsuccessfully to rouse them, until some firemen got there. He helped them get the three up to the road and the truck, two on stretchers; the one who had been in the middle had done a bit better.
He went back to look for more. Rock Creek itself was frozen to its bottom, of course. The whole park was quiet, the city beyond it unusually quiet too, except for the ongoing wail of sirens, criss-crossing like tortured coyotes or the gibbons with megaphones.
The firemen had said the power grid might go comprehensively when the demand for juice was so high. The power companies had instituted preemptive brownouts to keep from blowing the system. Fire trucks were some of the only vehicles that would still start reliably, because they were kept in heated garages. Battery heaters were crucial at temps like these, but of course no one had any.
“My van started this morning,” Frank had told them.
“You get one, usually, but don’t be sure it’ll happen again, they’re done for at these temps. It’s fifty below!”
“I know.”
Lucky no wind! they said.
Frank checked the hot boxes left out for the ferals. If there was a loss of power to these the result would be catastrophic. Every box was crowded with a menagerie of miserable animals, like little shipwrecked bits of Noah’s Ark, every single creature subdued and huddled into itself. The gibbons hung from the corners of the roof near the heating elements, their little faces frowning like Laurel and Hardy after a reversal.
Frank called in to Nancy and reported what he saw. Zoo staff were doing what they could to collect any creatures they could, but the holdouts were skittish and determined to stay out; if the zoo folks tried for them now they stood a very good chance of driving them away and killing them. Best to let them take to the shelters, and hope it would be enough.
“Is the power to the heaters on generator standby?”
“No way. Cross your fingers.”
He continued with his survey. The low sun turned everything blinding silver. By now the temperature had risen to about twenty below, which in combination with the midday sunlight made a huge difference in how it felt to walk around. It came back to his body’s memory how major distinctions could be made between cold and super-cold, so that eventually ten below became comfortable, because thirty below was so miserable; and ten above became shirtsleeve weather, while fifty below was always on the edge of sudden death.
The power went out west of Connecticut Avenue, and Frank went over there and helped for a while with a crew going door to door to make sure people were all right, occasionally carrying the hypothermic out to fire trucks an
d ambulances and off to shelters or hospitals. Eventually his hands got too cold to carry on. He had to retreat into a UDC coffee shop and drink a coffee with the other adventurers sardined into the place. Painful buzz of his fingers regaining their feeling, though it was nothing to the way his penis had felt. Then the coffee shop had to stop serving, as their pipes had frozen and their water supplies on hand were all used up. They stayed open just to provide shelter. The damage to pipes alone was sure to cost millions, someone said, and take weeks or months to fix. They might be in for a water crisis as bad as the one after the flood, when for several days potable water and functioning toilets had been very hard to find. People didn’t think about these kinds of things until they happened, and then it was like discovering yet another Achilles’ heel, because it had ruptured.
The sounds of sirens seemed to be converging on them. Frank went out and looked around, saw black smoke rising in a thick plume over the neighborhood between Connecticut and the park, just south of where his van was parked. He hustled over there, slapping his tingling hands together as he walked.
It looked as if squatters might have accidentally set an abandoned house on fire. Already the blaze was out of hand, several houses burning, a whole knot of trees, all roaring in pale flames. The radiant heat beat on Frank’s face. When the fire trucks arrived they found that the water had frozen in the fire hydrants. They had to work on that instead of the fire. A helicopter chattered in and dropped its load of chemicals, to no great effect as far as Frank could tell. It had to be dangerous to fly helicopters in this kind of cold; they did it in Antarctica, but those helos were specially prepped. No doubt the Antarctic guys at NSF were extremely busy right now, helping in any way they could. No lunch run today. Corps of Engineers likewise. It was essential they keep power flowing. If there was any kind of significant power outage throughout the city, many people would freeze.
Talking to some of the firemen around the hydrant, Frank learned that there were already as many as two dozen fires in the metro area. All emergency response people were out: firemen, police, paramedics, the power company repair crews; the National Guard had been called up, yes both of them. Everyone else was being urged to stay home. Nevertheless the number of people walking the streets increased as the day wore on, all of them bundled and ski-masked and walking out in the empty streets. It loooked as if bank robbers had pulled off a major revolution.
Fifty Degrees Below Page 34
