Fifty Degrees Below (41 page)

The lunch runners already knew all about this problem. Penile frostbite was a serious concern, and extra precautions simply had to be taken; at the least, a sock or glove jammed into one’s shorts, but also windproof nylon shorts, longer jackets, all that kind of thing.

“What you need is a rabbit fur jock strap, the fur side in of course. You could make a fortune selling those.”

So, Frank never again forgot to pay attention to this matter, and not just for himself. A couple weeks later, when he clattered into Sleepy Hollow:

“Hey, Nosebleed.”

“Hello gentlemen. How are your penises?”

“Yarrrr!” Cackles, laughter: “Now the truth comes out! Now we know what he’s here for!”

“You wish. Are you managing to stay unfrostbitten?”

“NO.”

Various grumbles and moans.

“Look, there’s a shelter open over by UDC, it’s the closed high school’s gym and some classrooms too, it’s pretty nice.”

“We know. Fuck you.”

“Mr. Nose. Mr. Nosey Noser.”

“Mr. Nosey Nose That Knows It All.”

“Yeah well it beats freezing to death.”

“Yarrr, fuck off. We have our ways.”

“It is our fate to stay out here, but we will survive.”

“I hope so.”

Friday came and he went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant on Wisconsin near the Metro. He could tell already this would become his Friday night routine. It was an unpretentious little place where Frank could sit at the bar reading his laptop. Go to Emersonfortheday.com, search “fate”:

“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!”