Seven-Mile-Walk at Eleven Below

Yesterday, I felt satisfied that my new breathing techniques had solved the problem of ice on my glasses. I learned to direct exhaling air downward inside my face covering toward my chin and neck. As long as I remembered to do this, glasses stayed clear. But if I forgot for just a few breaths, then ice started to build up on the lenses, and did not go away. When it got so bad that I couldn’t see, I had to stop and remove one glove, remove glasses, blow on them to melt the ice, then wipe the lenses with a napkin—a difficult maneuver, leaving one hand cold.

But today is the coldest morning so far—eleven degrees below zero this morning, about thirty degrees below average for this date, with wind at about ten miles per hour. I didn’t know how I would fare in cold like this and seriously thought I might not be able to breathe. When my sister went to Fairbanks in the winter to visit her daughter, she said that when it got colder than ten below, including wind chill, that she could not breathe and went scrambling back inside. I figured this might surpass my limit, and would have to spend the day reading, writing, blogging, emailing.

Despite all this, I determined to try and to do everything right. I would begin the 3.5-mile walk to Ranier, and if I make it, to visit Grandma’s Pantry again. If the going became too hard, I would return to my warm room. I feel like a child just learning how to go outside.

I did the usual preparations—set my glasses outside to cool, put on my coverings, and left with the face mask pulled down to expose my mouth. I have learned that glasses ice immediately if I start with my mouth covered. On previous days, starting this way, my lips would begin to hurt after about five minutes, and I would pull the mask up. Today, being the coldest, I expected to pull it up sooner.

But twenty minutes pass, and my lips are still movable, the pain diminishing. Could it be that I have toughened against the cold? Wind kicks up loose snow around my feet and feels like it is blowing little knives into my face. After half an hour I touch my glove to the exposed skin on my lips and know that I still have feeling. This means that frostbite has not attacked my only exposed skin. It approaches without any pain or discomfort, taking away feeling from freezing skin. As cold penetrates muscles and tendons, the ability to move is lost. So here I am in minus eleven with a wind chill of perhaps minus thirty, and exposing my lips to the elements. An hour passes, trudging through drifted snow and packed snow. I find a snowmobile track, and it eases the pushing of my boots against loose snow. Ranier is only a mile away now, and I don’t feel cold, glasses not iced. I feel like a conqueror.

I approach Grandma’s Pantry just as a train moves slowly to the road crossing, where Grandma’s is just on the other side. I pick up my pace knowing that trains can take half an hour or more to cross this road on their way to or from Canada. Inside Grandma’s, the air is seventy and I peal back the layers. Wild rice pancakes and coffee feel perfect, and Grandma asks how far I walked.

This train is going to Canada, and we watch it from the window—dozens of empty lumber cars, empty gondolas that say “potash”, tank cars with “Canadian National” on their sides, grain cars with elaborate graffiti in huge mural-like displays of ornate letters spelling unfamiliar words or acronyms, painted by artists from a different world, but artists just the same. Now a tanker with a foot of snow on top as if it alone stood here for the past two weeks. The train stops on the road. “Have to go around,” says one of the diners to nobody in particular. But going around would be three miles out of my way, so I have another cup of coffee. “Oh, you miserable thing” says Grandma’s daughter to the train. Ranier is cut in half by the tracks, and these long delays have given Grandma’s customers something to complain about for the past twenty years. Finally the huge and lumbering snake of civility clanks its couplings and creaks away into Canada. Its empty cars will return from the country, giving lumber to American cities. Forests of Canada will hand their logs to the mill at International Falls. Out go huge rolls of paper, in come the books. Here come your groceries, country.

Can it be that a creature reared in the mild winters of Southern California can adapt to a winter like this, can live outside in severe cold? Am I really becoming able to stand it the way loggers do in these woods, working all day in this cold to feed the paper mill and their families? I wonder if my body has become more able to stand cold than most of the people who live here and never stay outside for more than a few minutes. After walking home I feel pretty good now with a glass of wine to celebrate. Seven miles walked at eleven below, or some thirty below counting the wind. 7-11 ~ It’s a gambler’s lucky call, but I feel better than lucky.

A note about the pictures:
(Dates, starting at the top: 11/19, 11/24, 11/27, 12/2, 12/10)
Whenever I go to Ranier, I stop at the bridge where the bike trail crosses an inlet of Rainy Lake. I have watched the lake change from water to ice to snow. In the sequence of pictures at the left, advancing ice, starting at the shore and now past the mouth of the inlet and far out onto the main lake.