Unable to stop myself I Googled “Polar Vortex” Friday and saw some pretty wild stuff: people holding frozen bottles of anti-freeze upside down, normally comfortable apartments caked with frost, a soap bubble somewhere in Chicago freezing in the air, then cracking like puddle ice.
One guy, dressed like Roald Amundsen the arctic explorer, uncorked a thermos bottle of water out on the Manitoba tundra. When he threw the water into the sky, it burst into snow crystals, a mind-blowing sight.
My neck was starting to hurt, but I scrolled away on my phone anyway, because I understand that we in Atlantic Canada have got it mighty easy compared to the rest of the continent, now in the midst of an historic cold snap.
My response to this information is to make a face akin to the one that Ron Swanson used to make on Parks and Recreation when he heard something that he was skeptical about.
Age must have something to do with it. And, truthfully, I’ve never felt completely warm again since spending an inordinate amount of time walking around outside a few winters back.
I just know that the knowledge that it is downright balmy here compared to the frozen interior of the continent does little to cheer me as I trudge into a wind harsh enough to shear flesh from bone, on a night that even the dog wants no part of.
I come from what was once hardy stock: Highlanders fleeing the clearances and Lancastrians, the British collieries; German-speaking Swiss tough enough to endure a pestilent crossing of the Atlantic and then to hack an existence out of the primeval Nova Scotia forest.
But those days seem long ago to a man who has been known to just break into a trot towards the nearest building when the temperature plummets.
When conditions are as they’ve been lately, my mind turns to the old Jack London short story about a guy who wanders out into the Yukon with his dog and ends up dying of hypothermia because he can’t manage to build a fire.
This, I know, is heart-stoppingly moronic. But I am a simple man, and there’s something about extreme cold that strips life to its bare essentials, even though, to my knowledge, a DeMont has not frozen to death in some time, as so many people already have this winter.
Bone-snapping weather does tend to put things into perspective. You may, for example, think the world is going all to hell if your kid isn’t playing Tier 1 hockey, and your mutual funds are lagging on the TSX composite index.
You may be feeling low because you don’t have a cable package that carries Killing Eve, and didn’t get an invite for the Super Bowl party around the corner.
Then you step outside, because no other form of transport is available or because dogs must be walked and even though you are layered up and wearing a toque worthy of a K-2 ascent, all of your 21st century troubles go poof.
All that matters, at that particular moment in time, is that you are as cold as one of Cornwallis’ tubercular soldiers on sentry duty, as those barefoot Cape Bretoners wandering the island in search for food during the potato blight of the 1840s.
For the time being, you have forgotten about Trump, the Oland murder trial, and the doctor shortage, but not, perhaps, that the Toronto Raptors are in the hunt for New Orleans Pelicans star Anthony Davis, who may be reluctant to decamp from the Big Easy for a city where the temperature, including the wind chill, was south of -30 C this week.
Chances are that you have one eye on the sidewalk, because no one relishes six hours in the Emerg when you suffer a distal radius fracture, a broken wrist, after hitting black ice under a dusting of snow.
Your mind, as if to stop you from giving up right then and there, has turned to images that offer comfort: the clank and hiss of a cranked up furnace, a scalding bath, spicy grub, a fiery libation.
If there’s a book on the go — and I’m reading an amazing Man Booker Award finalist called The Long Take, which begins in Inverness County, Cape Breton — there’s nothing you want more in the world than to be sitting inside, wetting an index finger and turning its pages.
You will settle just for shelter. To be in a place where you can drowse in the heat, as your extremities slowly thaw.
Sometimes when I come in from the kind of cold that we experienced Thursday night, I feel like the victim of a mugging, or some other trauma, who just wants to lie down and go to sleep.
Which, come to think of it, would be mighty nice to do, at least until the vortex spins away.
