Living In Extreme Winter

By Tom Poland

The weather folks say we may get a wintry mix Saturday. Maybe so. I suppose we’re in for a typical winter but I hope we get a light snow or two. Being at home with lots of hot chocolate, soup, coffee, and comfort food makes a snowy day a beautifully peaceful day. No need to get out on the roads. Just watch the flakes fall.

But what if you lived in a place where winter tests your survival skills? What if you lived alone in a cabin in 12-foot snow and your nearest neighbor was 60 miles away? What if the power you rely on is bottled gas. No electricity. Just firewood for heat. And both can run out. I traded letters with a writer who faced that situation each winter. He lived in the remote reaches of Alaska, alone in the Land of the Midnight Sun, land of Polar Nights, place of frozen whiteness.

His letters painted a beautifully harsh landscape where solitude is yours whether you want it or not and life passes slowly in a land where each day is briefer and darker until, finally, darkness swallows you.

This man’s companion through the long Alaskan winter was a crackling fire. His forays into the snowy wilderness meant encounters with grizzly bears and one day he had no choice but to shoot one in the chest. The bear clambered up a hill. For a long time, he feared an attack from this wounded bear.

The Alaskan writer who encountered the bear was John Haines. His wintry wilderness story began in 1947 when he and a friend drove to Alaska. There he bought a 160-acre homestead, 80 miles southeast of Fairbanks. His goal was to pursue a career in art there. He salvaged wood from an unused bridge and built a 12-by-16-foot cabin. When his paint froze, he abandoned painting and turned to writing instead.

Haines long lived in the frozen reaches of that extreme land of cold rivers, salmon, volcanoes, and glaciers. He tracked animals for food with frostbite always a subtle threat and had many adventures. One night a man knocked on his cabin door. Frost covered his hair. He couldn’t lift his head or unclasp his arms. “His feet and lower legs were like dead things, nearly hard and white as marble,” wrote Haines. Warm coal oil, massaged into the man’s legs, saved them. When the feeling returned to his legs so did great pain. “He may have lost a couple of toes, but he walked on those feet and legs till the day he died.”

Ice ruled supreme, making everything beautiful, making everything deadly. Haines described how a nearby river would freeze as winter laid its hand upon the land. “Free of its summer load of silt, the river,” he wrote, “was incredibly blue and big rafts of ice crowd each other. “Where it gathers speed in the rapids above, the sound of all this ice and water is loud, rough, and vaguely menacing. As the cold gradually deepens and the sunlight departs in the days to come, the floating ice will become harder and thicker, and the sound of its movement in the water will change to a harsher, grinding and crushing … The ice sings, groans, howls and whistles like a living thing.”

The freezing river was not just powerful and majestic. It cut off an avenue for escape. No way out in a dark, cold land where you have no one to save you should something dire transpire.

It’s hard for me to relate to the Alaskan winter but a smidgen of the fear cold and isolation generate lives in me. I had driven up, alone except for my dog, Coffee, to see my girls in West Virginia. In those days I kept an old Army blanket in the car, a dark-mustard, scratchy thing. Seemed like a wise thing to do.

The last day of my visit, I awakened to a quiet, muffled world. I looked out the hotel window to see a heavy snow coming down. After saying goodbye to the girls, I left at once and began what was normally an eight-hour drive back home. This drive would take 18 hours. I bought a set of tire chains that broke up after fifty miles on the West Virginia Turnpike. I pulled over and tried to get them off, gashing my right hand in the process. An old blue-and-white Volkswagen van pulled up and a guy who looked like a Viking with wild red hair and a wild red beard cut the chains off. “Just go slow,” he advised, “and be careful where you pull off.” Many times I wonder what became of this anonymous Good Samaritan.

With more than a tad of fear and a heavy heart (I wouldn’t see the girls for another month), I drove down the turnpike at a snail’s pace. Intestate 77 was nowhere complete back then and I had no choice but to take a backroads highway in Virginia that would take me to Mount Airy, North Carolina. From there I could make it to Columbia down Highway 21.

Twice I tried to stop to get coffee and each time the car began to slide. I pulled back on the snowy highway and kept driving. Drove all night through falling snow. I’d look down and see yellow lights far below. If I end up sliding down a mountain, I thought, I can make it to that house. If not, the dog and I can keep warm with this old Army blanket.

Sometime around midnight I drove up behind a snowplow spraying showers of snow into the night. I stayed behind it for hours just crawling along. Finally, the snowplow pulled off the road. I began the seven-mile descent from Virginia on Highway 52 that ends up in Mount Airy.

As I came through a spot called Fancy Gap, a full moon came out, brightening everything. All the snow surrounding me brought the “Night Before Christmas” to mind … “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the luster of mid-day to objects below.”

I left the mountains and snow behind, got some coffee and gas, and let the dog get a much-needed break. That was as close as I’ve come to being stranded in snow.

This winter should we hear sleet tapping against the window or see flakes as big as quarters tumbling from the sky, let’s appreciate winter’s beauty and think of intrepid men and women in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Who knows what they face as you watch a winter day destined to give way to sunshine and temperatures in the 50s.

Enjoy the rare beauty of a Southern snow should we get one. Venture outside with no fears of grizzlies, frostbite, or getting lost in a blizzard. Go into snowy woods and study animal tracks, and be glad you don’t have to track them down to survive. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect they’ll be glad too.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
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Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”