Deep Freeze

Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.
~Mark Twain

This week’s string of record-low temperatures is the longest in some 50 years. I’ve had to redefine my ideas about what actually constitutes cold, and how best to deal with it.

The city is enshrouded in an icy fog that makes it look and feel as though the air itself has frozen. While the standard expression to describe the resulting penetrating cold is “bone chilling”, I think that this week’s high temperatures in the –10 degree Fahrenheit range transform that saying in to “bone cracking”. Everything just seems so brittle when it’s covered in frost.

Passing through the front door is to be met with a blast of air that strikes like a sharp slap. It makes you stand straight upright and nearly stop moving with the first attack on your exposed skin and first painful gasp of air. Its shockingly cold.

Within a few feet of my doorstep, I noticed the sharp report of my boots on the pavement. What are normally quiet, soft rubber soles had stiffened in a matter of moments to boots as noisy as hobnails. But that was earlier in the week, because it’s been snowing for the past couple of days. Now, every step brings a noisy squeak from the ice and snow on the sidewalk.

It takes a while to get ready to go outside. Two pairs of thermal socks. Two pairs of thermal underwear.  A heavy, double fur-lined coat. A long scarf wrapped around my head from eyes to throat. And a fur hat (ushanka) with the ear flaps down and tucked into the raised fur collar of my coat. It’s as effective as armor, as heavy, and probably takes almost as long to put on.

Thusly girded, I dashed off to the kiosk on the corner for water. The routine is to pay at the kiosk, and then take the beverages from the adjacent refrigerator case when the clerk unlocks it remotely. Only now the cases had been so long exposed to the insane chill that all the bottles inside them were frozen solid.

I suppose the poor refrigerators weren’t able to deal with the role reversal expected of them. Their normal role is to provide cool refreshing drinks, in a word, to refrigerate. But when the outside world inverted and became a freezer, they didn’t know what to do. Were they now expected to keep things warmer than the ambient temperature? To un-refrigerate? It seems that they gave up in the face of the existential dilemma and let everything freeze and explode.

I bought two frozen-solid cylinders of water anyway. But I still wanted something to drink in the short term. I bought Fanta, which apparently only gets a little bit slushy even in weather that will cause a pepsi bottle to explode. I was happy with that purchase until halfway through the bottle when I wondered what naturally occurring ingredients in the context of a bright orange drink could possibly prevent freezing. I believe that the answer is “none”.

Oh well. As I got home and brushed the ice off my eyelashes, I decided that a little anti-freeze might just do me some good.