COLD ALASKA. WARM CABINS.
There is nothing quite like the experience of dealing with Alaska's extreme cold.
This isn't the "cold" that they recommend you stay at, on the little green digital monitor on your Sears Roebuck chest freezer -- zero degrees. In the Copper Valley -- with it's average temperature of 27.1 degrees, year round, zero degrees isn't considered particularly "cold."
In other places, "cold" often means that it's windy. In other places, wind alerts you that you'd better get a coat on. But in Alaska, At 40 and 50 below zero, the air is completely still.
In other places, "cold" also means "wet." But in true cold, you never get wet. There's no water, anywhere at these temperatures. True cold is very far away from 32 degrees and above.
Cold in other parts of America -- like Buffalo, New York -- tells you when it's doing its damage. It makes you feel bad; it makes you wet; it blows icy water from the Niagara Falls onto you when you go there in midwinter.
But absolute cold, with no wind and no wetness has a calm, seductive, even reassuring quality.
When you're walking on a trail at around 20 below, and you're annoyed with an overhanging spruce branch, or a willow twig, you can just reach out -- and snap it off. Truly frozen things break easily.
In the summer, those same twigs and branches flex and bend, and and are hard to remove. But, in the winter, there isn't a lot of water inside of them, and the flexibility is gone.
Everything organic is affected by the cold. Firewood chunks that are difficult to chop up in the fall or summer crisply snap apart with a single blow at 20 below.
Rubber also snaps in the cold. And, so does metal.
During the coldest part of the middle of the winter, in Alaska, your home is a fortress against the outdoors. The huge, dark, dry and very cold reality of "Alaska" envelopes it; smothers it with cold, looking for entry, so it can flow in.
Alaskans have always had substandard housing, made of whatever is at hand. And there is no time when the pitfalls of homegrown, rapid construction are more obvious than in the middle of winter.
One tool Scandinavians brought with them was knowledge. One reason that Alaska was settled originally by Scandinavians and Scandinavian descendants is that they knew how to fit logs together when building. The Scandinavian notch uses a relatively large log, and undercuts it in a long wedge on the bottom of the log, which is filled with some kind of chinking -- and which forms a solid barrier to the outdoors.
But the typical Alaskan -- in the old Gold Rush days, and then later on -- wasn't a Scandinavian log expert.
Waves of Alaskans have headed north. Many have never seen cold, or built a log home. These people far outnumber the "experts".
Cabins in Alaska were built on the fly -- of scrubby black spruce only 4 inches in diameter, or irregular, gnarled logs in the immediate vicinity. These cabins required hundreds of feet of chinking to keep out the cold.
For a hundred years, settlers have used whatever was at hand to keep out the cold. When a cabin is being built, it's frequently been chinked with oakum (an oily rope used to chink boats at the turn of the century) or with sphagnum moss, which is in plentiful supply.
But, when you look at an old cabin today, and the hundreds of feet of cracks between each log that requires chinking, you can piece together the stories of desperation -- as the inhabitants struggled with the cold.
Burlap sacks, crumpled newspaper and magazines, old clothes and socks have all been crammed into cracks in log cabins, from the inside, as residents rummaged around in the middle of winter, trying to find something to keep out the inexorable cold.
On the outside of these old cabins, sticks have been hammered over the moss to keep it in place, or tin cans have been flattened over the cracks and tacked on.
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| Chinking on a Copper Center cabin, made from flattened Blazo fuel cans. |
When you go outside at these temperatures, there's an eeriness in the air. A sense that everything is far away, no matter how close it is. It's not necessarily a feeling that you're "cold" -- because those triggering indicators of wind and wetness are missing. It's a feeling that you are very, very alone.
One analogy of how it feels to be in Alaska when its very, very cold can be drawn from the film, Fiddler on the Roof. In three scenes in the film, Tevya, the father, realizes that his three daughters are taking their separate routes and leaving him behind. In the film, there's a sense tht the daughters are suddenly physically distant from Tevya, that instead of 5 feet away, they're 50 feet away -- and he's alone and isolated
In the Copper Valley, in the middle of winter, that's very much how it is. Outdoors, the surrounding cold is like cotton, like an intangible barrier. It seems as if there were dozens of feet of muffled space between you and your car. It seems as if there's a buffer, all around your body. Even if you're with someone, you are alone -- as your body silently cools, and tries to seek equilibrium with the outdoor world.
Perhaps its how the astronauts felt while moonwalking.
One of the more interesting things about the Alaska extreme cold is that it isn't uncomfortable -- as high winds and freezing water are uncomfortable. The dry, calm, coldness of the extreme north actually has a soothing quality when you're out wandering in it.