How many degrees
do we have tonight? Eight? Six? How low is it supposed to go? Four, two, zero? These
aren't temperatures, they're hockey scores.
This weekly
descent into nether region, or northern regions, or arctic regions, has already
happened a few times this winter. Here it is again this week, and a repeat
performance of this descent into Negativity is predicted for next week as well.
Too much
really cold weather for us southern New England softies feels distressingly like
the end of the world. And that end of days will be a cold day in hell if this trend keeps
going.
It was a
sign when a phalanx of snowy owls from the Arctic found their way south in
early December, turning our barrier beaches, golf courses and school
playgrounds into tundra moments. The puffy white picturesque fowl apparently had
a hunch they were going to feel perfectly at home in New England in a couple of
weeks. If there's a small rodent shortage for the foxes, coyotes and native owls next spring, we'll know why.
When I hear
daily predictions for the kind of temperatures and strangers on a train (or, more likely, social media) pile on with the wind-chills, I think we must be
talking about distant, less peopled places. Single
digits are for other places: Single digit land. The world's famous cold places.
Russia, Siberia, Alaska, the Arctic Circles, and OK (let's be honest), states I've never been to, North
Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, almost all of Canada -- and, frankly -- some
scarily remote parts of New York and New England. But not eastern
Massachusetts; not the balmy South Shore.
Naturally (perfectly awful timing), even my escapist entertainment options, an essential
for getting through even ordinary winters, are going south this winter. Not
"south" as in sunny, but as in that frigid circle at the bottom of
the earth. TV, for instance, is nothing but cold comfort. My own private Antarctica.
Public
Broadcasting has chosen this moment to share a closely observed documentary
account of a bunch of hairy fellows, old enough to know better, who decided to
dress up in Edwardian cold weather clothing and replicate the premier cold climate
adventure of the early twentieth adventure: British explorer Ernest Shackleton's
miraculous rescue of his Antarctic voyage of exploration that set off in 1914.
Shackleton's
survival heroism is legendary stuff. The ship carrying his ambitiously named Trans-Antarctic
Expedition got caught by an earlier ice-over than expected (though what can you
expect in the Antarctic Ocean?). Trapped by an expanding ice islands, his ship The
Endurance was crushed by ice and plunged below the icy depths while the crew
stood on the ice and watched. Shackleton then made the decision to take a few of
his best sailors on a desperate small boat voyage across hundreds
of miles of freezing, storm-tossed water in the hope of reaching a tiny island --
easy to miss these tiny islands in a vast ocean -- where a whaling station
might provide help. He left the bulk of his 27-member crew behind with most of
the food and supplies to shelter under lifeboats and whatever else they could
rig up from the stuff they saved from the ship.
The voyage
was impossible enough; then when they land on the island they had to climb across a glacier with a vast,
steep crevice to reach the whaling station. There, the climate trapped them. In all, it took them 500 days to return with
a rescue ship for the rest of the crew.
The heroism
is in the leadership: Shackleton's entire crew survived.
PBS's 21st
century re-enactment explorers were not doing quite so well. They got blown off
course trying to reach the island. One guy was later injured on the climb and had to be
flown off by helicopter.
I'm not passing out medals to PBS for sharing these chilly scenes of Antarctic
experience with viewers in the midst of a serious cold spell. How about a skinny
dipping party at Downton Abbey instead?
The other
piece of my private Antarctica is my own choice to listen to Patrick O'Brian's
masterful adventure-literary novel "Desolation Island" on CD. It's one of the near
20-book British naval series based on the earlt
19th century exploits of a fictional capatin Jack Aubrey and his friend, surgeon,
scientist and master spy Stephen Maturin. When Aubrey and company, in the midst of the long voyage to Australia, suffer a murderous
pursuit from an enemy man of war, guess where they have to go? Straight into
the frigid waters at the bottom of the earth, to encounter harrowing
storms, deadly icebergs, a bare escape from the guns of the enemy, shipwreck from collision with submerged ice; after which they are forced to seek succor
from a place called Desolation Island.
This is the
kind of book where you encounter sentences such as "He was chilled through
and through" with distressing frequency.
I'm no hero
when it comes to cold. Next book I choose will definitely have to take a walk on the warm
side.
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