Oh yeah? How cold was it?

Driving to work today I got to thinking maybe it sounds like I am complaining about the weather too much. Actually I don’t think I am complaining at all, just curious about what things happen and why. And, I was thinking it hasn’t been that bad. I mean temperatures seldom below zero and then only a little. I should have stopped right there. Came home tonight and it was 20 below. Had to start a fire and plug in the car overnight.

One thing that happens to Alaskans is sooner or later you are going to have to explain to someone Outside how cold it is.

Which led to the next thought which was how do you explain cold. I learned about this from a Norman Mailer novel called “Tough Guys Don’t Dance.” His lesson was make adjectives specific and relative. His example was the word “strong” and he pointed out how the word means different things to different people.

Mine is cold. Years ago I wrote one of those “as-told-to” sports books with a woman sled dog racer. She was very good at recall and most of her descriptions were at least adequate if not literature. But her favorite adjective was “really,” as in it was really cold or that was really hard and my response always had to be “how cold was it.” In one part she went out into a really bad storm and of course it was really cold. I finally got this out of her. Wrapped tightly in her sleeping bag, her breath froze to the zipper and when she tried to get out of it she found she couldn’t move the zipper. You will have to read the book to find out how she did it. But that’s cold.

Still my favorite “that’s cold” statement came from a girl in the Delta Junction elementary school. Now, Delta is one of the colder spots in Alaska, deep in the Interior. During a writing class I was explaining to the kids that if they write in Delta only that it’s cold and someone in Miami reads it, that person is probably going to think something like 40 degrees. And then I asked the kids how cold is it when it is cold in Delta? Their response was 50 below zero. So I asked them if you are trying to explain that kind of cold to someone in Miami what do you tell them? They were quiet. And then I asked, OK what has ever happened to you when it was that cold. One girl raised her hand and I called on her. At just barely more than a whisper she said, “One time my boots froze to the floor of the school bus.”

That’s really cold.

Now, for outsiders who would like to understand, and for Alaskans who need something to show Outsiders what happens in the cold, I am going to give you a link. There is a fellow who works for the University of Alaska Fairbanks and it seems forever he has written a weekly column about science that is distributed to newspapers across the state. To give you an idea how good he is, most of them print it including the one I work for. His name is Ned Rozell and in this column, he went through a typical morning in a Fairbanks household as everyone heads off for their day with the temperature at minus 40 degrees. But, he adds easy to understand science that explains what is going on with the physics of it. Don’t be afraid, it is a pleasant read and not very long. It’s either that or put up with more posts on here explaining what "really, really cold" means.