text: Most people haven't experienced real cold. -50F. -60F. -70F. You can hear sounds from miles away, clear as a bell. Engines won't start, and the internal components of electronic devices can freeze and crack. Glass can simply shatter. When it's that cold outside, you could walk into a deep freeze meat locker and feel 60 degrees warmer. &#x200B; The Cold seeps through layers of clothing, and with each passing moment, frostbite threatens to maim. It's easy to lose fingers and toes especially. If you don't wear a mask, you'll lose the tip of your nose, your ears. Your lips. Skin left exposed is skin lost. Sweating presents a mortal danger, and urination risks frostbite on your most intimate areas. The fluid on the surface of your eyeballs can freeze, hurting your eyes. Inhaling deeply through your mouth can hurt your lungs, and touching metal with your bare hands guarantees you'll be leaving a patch of skin behind. The risk of an asthma attack grows by the second. Wet hair freezes instantly, and it freezes so cold that you can snap it into pieces. When it's that cold, you could sit down and be dead within an hour. &#x200B; The Cold isn't beautiful. Snow is beautiful. The Cold is malevolent and terrible. It's surreal, as if it wants to kill you personally. Imagine how you would feel if you learned that someone had hired an assassin to murder you. Take a moment to close your eyes and really imagine how you would feel if you found out that there was an assassin coming to kill you. Did you feel that little jolt of fear? That's how every second feels in The Cold. Temperatures don't have feelings and desires of course. The Cold doesn't want to kill you, but it will do the job all the same. &#x200B; The three ingredients of fire are oxygen, fuel, and heat. Water is effective at combating fire because it is a coolant, thereby removing the heat component of fire. Extreme cold performs the same action, actively resisting efforts at creating and sustaining combustion. You could do everything right and The Cold might still kill you if your food and water freezes and you're unable to get a fire started. The Cold wants you dead, or rephrased in more scientific terms, life is not compatible with The Cold. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Ha! &#x200B; Throughout Earth's history, there have been five ice ages. You could say that the history of our planet is the evolution, growth, and proliferation of life, followed by The Cold utterly annihilating that life with contemptuous efficiency. The last ice age began 2.6 million years ago and killed 96% of all life on the planet. Most people think an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but that's only a partial truth. In reality, it wasn't a fiery apocalypse that nearly snuffed out all life. It was The Cold. The influx of dust into Earth's upper atmosphere blotted out the sun, which killed the plants, then the insects and plant-eaters, and finally, the meat-eaters. The Cold killed them all. 75,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, once again chilling the planet and reducing the human population to 10,000 - 30,000 individuals. Humanity barely survived. Ultimately, The Cold will claim everything as the stars die and darkness and entropy settle in to the ever-expanding space between matter. This is the ineffable destiny of our universe. We exist in the infinitesimally small moment in time wherein heat and life are possible, just before the vast yawning eternity that is The Cold. &#x200B; As I sit in this squat little cabin, contemplating The Cold and watching ice crystallize on the inside of the tiny door, I find it increasingly difficult to not take it personally and anthropomorphize. The ice seems to be reaching for me, blindly groping at me from the darkness beyond with cold fingers that won't take no for an answer. “Cabin” is perhaps too generous a word. It would have been impossible to heat a real cabin for long enough to survive The Cold. It's more of a deluxe-sized coffin, built short and sturdy. I built it with an oppressively low ceiling and an inward swinging door so small that I have to crawl out on my hands and knees. The cramped space is packed to the ceiling with chopped wood, neatly stacked as tightly as I could get it. The fireplace and chimney are stone, hewn together with clay mortar and sprinklings of ash. Most of my time is spent tending the meager fire and baking rocks for my primitive heated bed. The fire alone is not enough to keep me warm. I can feel The Cold leaching through the walls and floor, and I can hear the wind blowing down the chimney. Sometimes it's a whisper, sometimes a roar, and occasionally, a furious perpetual shriek of impotent rage. The only other sounds are my own breathing, the crackling fire, and the occasional gunshot-like detonation that can be heard when a tree freezes and explodes, or when a branch shatters and comes crashing down through the tree canopy, snapping all the branches below in a final act of arboreal suicide. &#x200B; I built my little coffin cabin on the top of a hill. The wind roars fiercer and colder up here, but at least I don't have to worry about being entombed in a 20 foot snow drift, fuck you very much. I have two 5 gallon buckets for company. One is filled with high density food. The other is filled with my waste. I'm sure there's something poetic about that, but the poetry seems to fade every time I shit in a bucket and the smell lashes out at me with fish oil infused violence. The stench never lingers for long though as the incessant wind howling down the chimney provides ample ventilation. &#x200B; Did you know that The Cold can kill in more direct ways as well? To quote and paraphrase Atlas Obscura: In 1942, a British forest guard in Roopkund, India, made an alarming discovery. More than three miles above sea level, he stumbled across a frozen lake surrounded by hundreds of human skeletons. That summer, the melting ice revealed even more remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake's edges. Analysis of the skulls showed that hundreds of men women and children had been killed from blows to the head suffered during a severe hailstorm. Fun right? Strong winter snowstorms and blizzards can even produce their own lightning strikes, a phenomenon known as thundersnow. Lighting formed in this manner can strike from miles away, sometimes even from beyond the horizon. As interesting as that is, I'm not here for hailstorms or lightning strikes, nor am I here to see exploding trees, or birds falling out of the sky, frozen mid-flight. I'm not here to see herds of cloven animals flash frozen to the ground, or ice crystals tearing life apart at the cellular level. No, I'm here because there's something in The Cold, and I'm going to find it.