Even though days in the Far North are longer now, with longer sunny afternoons, we’ve had a cold snap this week, and nighttime lows have dropped to the -40s. That’s not a wind chill value. It’s dead calm weather, bright and sunny, and bitter cold. Most places, that kind of cold would be newsworthy. Here, we plug in our cars and go on about our business. Late winter setbacks like this are not unexpected.

A friend of mine reminded me recently of something I once said about how winter in the subarctic is reality, and summer is an illusion. He’d seen a quote from Willa Cather’s, My Antonia:

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify–it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: `This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.’ It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.

I don’t see winter as a punishment. The subarctic would be cruel to anyone who believed in seasonal retribution.

Northern summer daylight has a joyous ethereal quality. Winter, on the other hand, is quiet wakefulness. It’s a stark reminder of the frigid reality parked nearby, on the other side of just a few miles of atmosphere. Cather’s view of winter was colored by the expectations of someone who depends on solar benevolence, inconstant though it is.

Extremes of cold and hot are impossible for the nervous system to grasp. I’ve had experience with this. Dumping a canoe on a river in midwinter flood was remarkably painless. So was accidentally running an acetylene torch across the back of my hand - initially. My reckless foolishness taught me that both cold water immersion and steel-cutting flame both feel like nothing. Lacking a physical signal, understanding the gravity of such events requires imagination.

This cold wave and my friend’s Cather connection reminded me of a story about a guy who didn’t really “get” what cold was all about. In To Build a Fire, the man was in a situation he didn’t understand. He missed all the signals. He didn’t know the value of experience. He was a fool.

…the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all–made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

The man’s story is a cascade of successive blunders. Little, seemingly insignificant mistakes multiply into a very large and ultimately fatal consequence. We don’t feel sorry for him. He had it coming. His story reminds me, again, that having information isn’t the same as knowing what to do.

“The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.”