Cold Read Free

the plants. Just days ago, the creamy flowers of arctic dryas made patches of this dry ground look
     like miniature gardens of snowy roses. Now their dried scraggly puffball seed heads are all that remains. In the Arctic, blink,
     and summer is gone.
    Underneath, eighteen inches down, the ground is frozen. It remains frozen for a third of a mile before heat from the earth’s
     innards overcomes the cold from above. Poking the ground with a steel rod, one can feel the permafrost — the permanently frozen
     ground. It’s like hitting bedrock just eighteen inches down.
    Where are the caterpillars? I find a biologist who has been working here since May, counting birds. I ask her if she has seen
     any caterpillars. “I’ve only seen one,” she tells me.
    Later, I talk to an Inupiat elder. “I see them sometimes,” he says. “Maybe once each year.” Inupiat frequently pause when
     they talk, leaving what might seem like an uncomfortable silence. I have been told that the pauses give them time to think
     and therefore to avoid the mindless patter of whites. “They like high ground,” he says after a moment. “I see them near my
     camp at Teshekpuk Lake.”
    The little beasts eat willow buds. I squat on the tundra to check some of the willows growing on the high ground between water-filled
     cracks. These willows are related to the taller willows of warmer climates, but they never stand more than a few inches tall.
     Their trunks can be measured in fractions of an inch. I find neither caterpillars nor gnawed buds. I pluck a leaf and pop
     it into my mouth. It tastes like an aspirin salad. I move on.
    Hyperactive birds fly around the airstrip. A plover screeches at me and makes threatening dives, driving me away from its
     young. In tundra ponds and in water-filled cracks, phalaropes swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to
     their feet. A pair of snow buntings perch for a second on top of a pipeline next to the airstrip and then fly off. A long-billed
     dowitcher, its beak disproportionately long, flushes from the ground in front of me. Behind it, a hundred yards away, five
     caribou graze, their antlers imitating the beak of the dowager in their freakish length.
    Soon all of this activity will cease. The birds will fly away. The caribou will march south. The caterpillars will simply
     freeze. That is why I am interested. That is why I want one of these caterpillars. The little devils have figured out how
     to freeze solid without dying. They are slow growers. It might take a decade before they are ready to metamorphose into grayish
     moths. That means they survive through ten winters here in the Arctic. When spring comes, they thaw and go back to eating.
     For a pet lover who travels, they could be the perfect solution. Cute, furry, and quiet, and the freezer serves as a kennel.
     But where are they? If I were looking for oil, I would have just successfully drilled a dry hole, a duster. I have been skunked
     by a caterpillar.

    The polar explorers were great keepers of journals, and many of the survivors produced memoirs. Cold for the polar explorers
     came with a sense of pride, but also uncertainty, hunger, exhaustion, and death. The body’s boilers run on food, and as often
     as not, death from prolonged exposure to cold combines starvation, frostbite, and hypothermia. When one reads past the stoicism
     and heroics, the history of polar exploration becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary.
    There was, of course, discomfort. In 1909, Ernest Shackleton traveled to within ninety-seven miles of the South Pole. Realizing
     that his provisions would be stretched if he pushed farther, he turned around. He told his wife, “I thought you would rather
     have a live donkey than a dead lion.” In 1914, during a later exploration, his ship
Endurance
was iced in and eventually abandoned. He led his men slowly across the ice. In his travelogue, he wrote, “I have stopped
     issuing sugar