Falling Off the Heat Ladder, or … Daniel Boone Never Dug a Snow Cave
This is a nice piece of writing about winter and climate. Reminds me of my late Aunt Pat who said, ‘When I think back to summer, it’s like I was sleeping and dreaming. Only in winter am I wide awake.’
A modern snowmobile is more powerful than any machine that existed on the planet 200 years ago. Today’s snowmobiles go far and fast. In an hour you can be 20 miles from the nearest road, high-marking a snowy, corniced ridge.
But if the engine breaks or you run out of gas, how quickly the tables can turn. One minute you are omnipotent, devouring space, living like a god. In the next you are frightened, drowning in silence, shivering like a dog.
The Inuit understood cold, and how to survive it. For centuries, they lived on Arctic shores, heating their igloos with seal oil. If there was no seal oil, they ate their meat raw. If there was no meat, they conserved heat with the most ingenious clothing ever invented. In contrast, we modern people have become dangerously cavalier about this thing we call winter, perhaps because we live inside a civilization that is one big bonfire.
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Read the rest here: Falling Off the Heat Ladder — High Country News. It’s short and sweet.