For 15 years now, I have lived in Homer, Alaska, a small coastal town with a local economy fueled by summer tourists and commercial fishing. Although Homer is in Alaska’s “banana belt,” winters last for six months and summers are always cool and damp. We wear wool sweaters and down jackets year-round, and on summer’s sunniest days, a sharp wind whips off the 50-degree bay on which I live and finds me everywhere.
I wasn’t consciously seeking cold when I decided to move to Alaska a few years after graduating from college, instead I sought the things that cold so often brings: vast stretches of wilderness, undeveloped coastlines, rich ocean waters you can eat out of, and dark starry skies. I took my decision to move lightly, even as I mailed change of address postcards to friends and family, indicating I was relocating to nearly the farthest point I could while still within in the US, and began amassing the kinds of possessions I would need in Alaska: heavy down parka, rubber boots, field guides to western birds. I was too young to see the ways in which a single decision can lead to the next and to the next until the course of your life has been shifted without you really understanding how or why.
What is it to live in such a cold place? It means that the world around you is drowned for half a year under a sea of snow and ice. You won’t see your backyard for months. It means a winter so cold it’s devoid of smells and even of color. Nothing is blooming, the leaves have dropped, all of the colorful birds have flown south, and the spruce trees—blue-green during the summer months—seem to turn black against the snowy drop cloth. On the most frigid days, the fabric of your jacket becomes stiff and noisy. Skis squeak across snow so cold and dry it has no glide. In the middle of winter, the sun—if it appears at all—is barely higher than eye level above the horizon. Even at noon, the light is lean, casting long shadows across the frozen ground. And during our few midwinter thaws, each a brief respite from the regular deep freeze, we are not warm. Rain pelts the snow, partially melting the entire town until everything is lacquered in ice. Broken collarbones, fractured arms, cracked pelvises—these are some of the side effects of this warmth.
To live in a cold place like this, you forget what real warmth is. We often have to turn on the heat inside the house during the summer to take away the chill. We lose muscle memory of the wonderful full-body ease that true warm weather brings. Until we travel elsewhere, we forget the feeling of walking outside in a T-shirt and shorts and feeling absolutely, profoundly, just right.
Before I moved here, I didn’t realize that the cold—preparing for it, insulating from it, warding it off, and reacting to it—would be the focus of life. Fall is the season of gearing up for winter, and spring the season of cleaning up after it. Summer—those light-drenched months that pass in the blink of an eye—is the season when you can finally coax green things out of the garden that are winter crops for people in the rest of the country: cabbage, broccoli, kale.
Paradoxically, summer is what brought many Alaska residents here, but winter is why so many of us have stayed. People who don’t live here think winter must shut Alaskans inside for half the year. But it is the time of ice and snow when this—and other cold parts of the world—are their most accessible. A blanket of snow in the hills behind town smoothes out miles of tangled willow shrubs and untraversible hummocks, creating limitless skiing and snowmobiling terrain. In the northern part of Alaska, frozen rivers become marked highways connecting remote villages otherwise only reachable by slow-going boat or bush plane. Winter there means that cab service to a village of three hundred people is possible, as is pizza delivery. And since much of the state is sliced by rivers, bogged down in wetlands, and serrated by frilled coastline, the freeze turns the soggy expanse solid, making it navigable. Thank goodness, because we have to get out—to work, to eat, to play.
Unlike scurvy, cabin fever can’t be cured by a daily pill. A few winters ago, when I was pregnant with my second daughter, a cold front plunged us into a spell of frigid weather for weeks, and the temperature rarely broke five degrees. I bundled my toddler to go out anyway. First the inside clothing, then fleece overalls and a fleece jacket, a heavy-duty snowsuit over that, thick mittens, thick socks, a hat, hood, and boots. Even then, we could only stay out for half an hour—25 minutes to be safer. An extra five minutes and she’d be bawling, hands and feet cold and red beneath her layers and unable to get warm.
Cold kills far more people in Alaska each year than bears, wolves, and bush planes combined. Winter here plucks people from life, by avalanche, car accident, broken-down snowmobile far from help, or errant wave across the deck of a Bering Sea crab boat. Living here can sometimes feel like a list of “don’ts”: don’t tip your kayak into the bay; don’t drop your car keys in the snow; don’t go boating, hiking, or skiing without telling friends of your plan; don’t go snowmobiling alone.
Even in summer, a simple afternoon fishing trip gone awry can mean drowning in frigid water within the first five minutes of being immersed. In whatever form, too much cold can make you lose your mind. You stumble, mumble, and lose your connection to reality. This is why people suffering from hypothermia often take off their clothes, insisting that they’re hot. (...)
People assume that to choose to live in a cold place is to choose austerity and a life without comfort. Because, of course, to escape the cold—to winter in the tropics, retire under the sun, take off for the islands at Christmas—has always meant you had achieved a certain level of success. But a cold life is not without its own riches. There are clear winter days when the surface of the snow glitters like diamonds. We have access to silence, one of the rarest commodities. And cold ocean waters make for extravagant dinners: salmon hooked minutes before, clams and mussels gathered into buckets by cold hands, oysters slurped raw so that you can feel the ocean dribbling deliciously down your throat.
Living here means we have the opportunity to see how cold can shape a place. The terrain out my living room windows was under ice until about ten thousand years ago, and the landscape—a mash-up of rounded hills, sharp mountains, steep fjords, and a four-and-a-half-mile gravel spit that pokes out into the middle of the bay—are remnants the ice left behind. Relatively low tree line makes for not only endless hiking opportunities and vast expanses of low-growing blueberries, but a tundra landscape that blazes red in autumn. (...)
Even so, the benefits of the cold can be hard to remember in the face of ice cleats, May snowstorms and frozen pipes. Not to mention our cultural bias against the cold. There’s no comfort in cold comfort, no welcoming from a cold shoulder. A killer is made even worse by being cold-blooded, an enemy by being cold-hearted. There is nothing cathartic or healthful about breaking a cold sweat, and a cold fish is not attractive as entrée or lover.
In spite of it all, being cold makes me feel alive. I’m not sure who I would be if I moved back to the comfortable life—if I swapped rubber boots that are always getting mucky for sleek sandals that knew only pavement. How would I fill all of the hours I now spend with my children, dressing and undressing them? Whom would I relate to if I could no longer commiserate with those around me about the cold?
And yet, between our frequent laments about the cold, my friends and I breezily discuss our half-formed plans to leave: one considers moving back to her small, Iowan hometown near her parents, where you can bike everywhere year-round, and the kids can spend the summer in the local pool. Another friend applied for a school counselor job elsewhere—where summers promise tank top weather and extended family is only a two-hour drive away. I scan online want ads from towns within a day’s road trip of my parents. But beneath the seemingly flippant exchanges among my friends, there is something tender and vulnerable: Are our friends going to abandon us in this cold place? If we left, would we realize that we’ve been wrong about everything all along, wrong about the correlations between proximity and intimacy, isolation and connection, cold and contentment?
I am more than 3,000 miles from where I grew up and where my parents still live in suburban Maryland. We are four time zones, three airplanes, and more than a day of travel apart. My husband and I take our girls to visit my parents at least twice a year—I can’t imagine seeing them any less. But for my parents, coming to visit us is like traveling to Japan. They don’t need their passports or a foreign language pocket dictionary, but the hours of travel and the tricky airplane itineraries, the necessity to pack for a climate not their own—forcing them to drag winter clothes up from the basement even when they come in the middle of summer—and the brain-addling time change make the journey particularly arduous and the destination feel foreign to them. Without the ability to fly, call, email and video chat, I would never live here, so far away. (...)
“Do you like all of that snow and ice?” my mother asks me every time I visit her. It’s a funny question to try to answer. “No,” I often say, “I hate it.” Or, No, but I put up with it. No, I sometimes want to say, but it is attached to certain things I do like, things I even love, things I may now not just desire in my life, but need. It’s too long an answer to describe empty cross-country ski trails a ten-minute drive from my house. Or how we feel that the stars have magically aligned when the lakes freeze with solid, clear ice and we can skate across them, marveling at the silver, dinner-plate-sized bubbles trapped inches below our blades. Or the thrill of seeing the tracks of wild animals in the snow—moose, hare, lynx, wolves—and the way they are tangible proof of the beautiful, unruined landscape in which we live. “I could never live there. I could never stand all of that snow and ice,” she says.
by Miranda Weiss, LitHub |
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