Winterlust. Bernd Brunner
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severe cold had set in, and it seemed to threaten to increase.”
And yet Akakievitch’s time with his coat was brief, as he was soon attacked in broad daylight and stripped of his fine garment. He was kicked and fell into the snow, losing consciousness for a moment. Then he staggered off into a snowstorm with his mouth wide open: “The wind, in St. Petersburg fashion, darted upon him from all quarters, and down every cross-street. In a twinkling it had blown a quinsy into his throat, and he reached home unable to utter a word.” Shortly thereafter, Akakievitch died, and yet the story was not yet finished: “A rumour suddenly spread through St. Petersburg that a dead man had taken to appearing on the Kalinkin Bridge and its vicinity at night in the form of a tchinovnik seeking a stolen cloak, and that, under the pretext of its being the stolen cloak, he dragged, without regard to rank or calling, every one’s cloak from his shoulders, be it cat-skin, beaver, fox, bear, sable; in a word, every sort of fur and skin which men adopted for their covering.”
Sheep’s wool, even though scratchy, has been spun into yarn and used for clothes for several thousand years. Traditional wool or sheepskin coats and their counterparts—fur coats—were important developments in the evolution of winter clothing. While our origins as humans are on the warm savannas of Africa, our intelligence has allowed us to devise ways to settle in some of the coldest places on Earth. The measure of perfection that Inuit peoples in particular have displayed in developing suitable garments from a variety of furs and hides and passing their knowledge from generation to generation is astonishing. Early on, they understood the concept of layering: the under layer, where fur faces inward, to trap body warmth. The outer layer, where fur faces outward, to repel wind and snow. Fur around the parka hood to protect the face (babies strapped to their mother’s backs peek out over their shoulders from within these ample hoods). There are mittens thick enough to protect against the cold but flexible enough to hold a harpoon or the back of a sled. For kayaking, waterproof suits made from seal, walrus, or whale gut are used. Waterproof boots have insulating insoles made from woven grass and treads for traction.
At some point, down was discovered as a suitable means of insulation. Today, most of the world’s true eiderdown comes from Iceland, where there is a unique relationship between these wild birds and the people on whose islands they nest. The people protect the birds from Arctic foxes; in return, they get to remove soft eiderdown from the ducks’ nests. The ducks replenish the supply and return year after year to the same nesting spots.
When people sweat and the liquid vaporizes, heat is taken away. A crucial aspect of winter clothing is the balance between keeping warm and avoiding sweating, and it’s important to know when it’s time to put on a layer or to take one off. The free movement of air is to be avoided; instead, it should remain trapped between the layers, because it is an excellent insulator. In the course of the twentieth century, natural down and wool clothing has been largely replaced with modern fibers that are lighter and have a higher insulating factor. A variety of synthetic fabrics are available, many of them breathable. Some fibers resemble down, but they have the advantage that they do not clump when wet. Should moisture be sealed in completely to avoid losing heat through evaporation? There have been patents for heated clothes, clothes where the porosity changes with temperature, or even clothes with built-in sensors that monitor temperature and humidity.
These issues are often discussed in a way that amounts to a philosophical debate. Although the final word on the best available synthetic fabric may not have been spoken (and this is not the place for advertisement anyway), many people still combine natural materials with synthetic ones, as in the case of a parka, which has a shell made of cotton (considered a no-no next to the body because it dries slowly) but is insulated with synthetic fiber.
Maybe the ideal winter gear for people (to about minus four degrees Fahrenheit, or −20°C) follows the example of the ptarmigan, a northern bird that puffs itself up in biting cold. The chambers of this style of clothing are filled with down feathers and also have air pumped into them, because air is the best conceivable insulator. Whether we emulate the bird or not, it’s good to remember that about a quarter of heat loss is from your head, so it should be protected particularly well.
People have tried other methods to keep the cold away. Pequot people, who lived in the area now known as Connecticut, are said to have smeared their bodies with bear fat. A modern equivalent is Vaseline, though it has to be said that it doesn’t always work very well. If you slather your face with Vaseline to protect it from frostbite, the protective layer also means you can’t warm your face up as efficiently with your hands. To say nothing of the fact that Vaseline makes clothing sticky, which reduces its ability to insulate.
Opinions differ on whether or not full beards are recommended for low temperatures: on the one hand, beards keep the wind off; on the other, the moisture from exhalations gradually freezes into a layer of ice, which in turn makes it more difficult to rub or warm the skin of the face underneath. Even eyelashes can become fringed with ice and obstruct vision.
The nose is a body part particularly vulnerable to frostbite. Hudson Stuck, a priest and adherent of Muscular Christianity (a form of religion organized around physical training), covered ten thousand miles (16,000 kilometers) in the Alaskan interior by dogsled in the early twentieth century. He advised placing a piece of damp rabbit fur over the nose, even though—as he allowed—this did little to enhance the attractiveness of the wearer: Stuck mentions a five-hour hike, after which his companion’s frozen breath hung down in two icicles from his nose fur, making him look like a walrus.
Without adequate shelter or clothing, our options for keeping warm are severely limited, but we do have a few paltry metabolic tricks. Three-quarters of the energy taken in as food is converted into warmth. However, the most important factor for a body to survive in a cold climate is movement. What exactly happens as temperatures drop? Blood vessels directly under the skin constrict, which lowers skin temperature and slows the rate at which warmth is lost. If that does not suffice to maintain a person’s core temperature, that person immediately begins to shiver. The brain automatically maintains a core body temperature between 96.8 and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (36 to 37°C), while the temperature measured in the rectum can deviate from that of the limbs by up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit (30°C) without the body suffering long-term damage.
The risk of hypothermia is greater in cold, wet conditions than in very cold, dry conditions. For example, it’s more dangerous if you’re exposed to cold rain during a thaw than if you’re exposed to dry snowfall in the depths of winter. If you’re exposed to extreme degrees of cold, there’s a chance you will recover. Occasionally there are reports of people from various places who have fallen asleep in the snow drunk and been revived after apparently freezing to death. In 1970, a three-year-old child lost his way in a forest near Karlskoga, Sweden, and was missing for twenty hours. By the time he was found, his body temperature had dropped to 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17°C), yet he recovered fully. Not all stories turn out this well, however, and death by freezing remains a problem in rural Russia and other cold areas to this day.
How much can cold slow human vital processes? Take the strange report of human hibernation mentioned in a 1900 issue of the British Medical Journal. Because food was so scarce in Pskov, Russia, farmers supposedly got into the habit of spending half the year sleeping, waking briefly each day to consume a morsel of dry bread washed down with water. Each of the family members woke at a different time so they could keep the fire going. “After six months of this reposeful existence, the family wakes up, shakes itself, goes out to see if the grass is growing, and by-and-by sets to work at summer tasks.” The reason there are no other reports of this curious behavior is that hibernation is not an option for humans. We would lose bone and muscle mass rapidly and cannot sleep entire days away—at least when we are healthy. And yes, we are active beings and we have to move our limbs. If nothing else, this “report” attests to the fascination with the idea that humans might hibernate despite all odds.
How cold is perceived depends substantially on the speed of the wind. In some parts of the world, weather forecasters report both the actual temperature and the apparent temperature taking into account the wind chill: the difference between what the air temperature is and how it will feel to you. Alexander Theodor von Middendorff, well known for his adventuresome travels in Siberia, experienced the difference the wind makes during