The coldest temperature ever recorded on planet earth was -128.6°F on the 21st of July 1983, in Vostok, Antarctica. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Pennsylvania was -42° (without wind chill) on the 5th of January 1904, in Smethport, which is one county to the west of us. With those terrible statistics in mind, last week doesn’t seem quite so cold. It began on Monday morning. When I got up it was -6° with a wind chill of -11°. It’s been colder than that here in the time that we’ve lived here. I remember a wind chill of -39° a few years ago. When we lived in Naperville when I was a teenager, there were days when the wind chill was even colder than that. I remember in my freshman year of high school, when I used to walk to school, I would listen to the radio before starting out to get the wind chill report and the announcer would say something like “The wind chill this morning is minus [some awful number]. At that temperature exposed flesh will freeze in [so many] minutes.” But that was just the way things were and I didn’t think twice about bundling up and heading out the door. I was hardier then.
I wondered on Monday, as I sat looking out at our first subzero day of the year, how does a person actually freeze to death? There are a surprising number of sites online that cover this topic. Our body temperature is usually around 98.6°, but when our core temperature hits 95°, it begins to enter hypothermia and starts to shut down. That doesn’t seem like a very big drop, but I guess we are rather fragile creatures. When our core temperature gets to 82° a person usually becomes unconscious. Below 70° we die. I’ve heard at various times that to freeze to death is not such a bad way to go. I remember the Jack London short story, To Build a Fire, where he describes a man who freezes to death in the Yukon. I decided to check and see what really happens.
As the body’s core temperature drops, first the blood vessels constrict, especially in the extremities. Without the necessary blood circulation, cells become brittle, causing pain. This pain first hits the fingers, toes, nose, and ears. If the body temperature continues to drop, vital organs like the heart, lungs, and brain will start to shut down. In order to protect itself, the body tries to compensate for the low temperature by trembling. Speech becomes slow and slurred. After a while, the shivering stops. That means the brain and nerve endings have lost the ability to transmit signals, which causes numbness in the arms and legs. At that point, the pain goes away, but the body can barely move. We lose the ability to speak or think clearly. The final stage is marked by paleness, mental confusion, memory loss and, eventually, coma. People experiencing hypothermia in this final stage usually become peaceful. They feel like they just want to drift off to sleep. That’s pretty close to what Jack London described.
All of this might seem a bit morbid, but when there isn’t much else to keep me occupied, my thoughts go off in odd directions. An idea takes hold and I feel compelled to follow it to some conclusion. A glance at the thermometer on a Monday morning, and away I go.
There was no school on Monday. It was an in-service day. I had no plans for the day. After Hannah left for work, I brought in a big load of firewood and spent most of the day tending the wood stove. I only moved away from it to bring in more wood from the back porch and to go down and do the chores in the afternoon. Even with the wood stove going, the furnace kept coming on every half hour or so, that’s how cold it was. A nice fire, a good book, a cup of hot cocoa – it was a nice way to spend a cold Monday, even while thinking about freezing to death.
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| Monday. |
Stacey spent Monday flying back from Texas. She arrived back at the Thayn’s house that evening. Rachel, Tabor, and Russell weren’t able to get a flight back until Tuesday, so Miriam and Stacey stayed a day longer.
Tuesday morning it was 0° when I got up, but there wasn’t much wind, so the wind chill was at a measly -5°. I stoked the fire in the wood stove and got ready for another cold day of tending the fire. Then the phone rang and I was called in to school. It was snowing pretty hard, but it was very fluffy snow and the drive to school was only slightly scary. It snowed most of the day. I was in the high school library that day and I watched it fall through the big windows. Toward the end of the day, there were rumors of a two hour delay on Wednesday morning because of extreme cold. I came home and started up the wood stove again. Stacey and Miriam finally arrived home that evening. It is nice to have them home again. A feeling of relief and normalcy descended on the house immediately.
On Wednesday morning the rumors came true. School was delayed two hours because of the cold. It was -2° but the wind was blowing hard and the wind chill was -16°. The first thing I did was stoke the wood stove. When I looked at the national weather map, I saw that it was much colder in other parts of the country and I felt grateful that I didn’t live there. Minus 16° was cold enough. Southern Florida, I noticed, was in the 70s and I felt envious. I was in school again that day, in the library again. Doing the chores after school was a misery. The wind had blown all that fluffy snow into drifts across the front yard. In some places they were knee deep. I didn’t tuck my pant legs into the top of my boots sufficiently and half way to the barn, I got a boot-ful of snow. When I collected the eggs, I found that one hen had laid her egg on the floor of the coop instead of in a nesting box. The egg was frozen solid and the shell had split open.
Wednesday evening to celebrate the return of Stacey and Miriam, we invited the Shilligs for dinner. We all wanted to hear about Stacey and Miriam’s adventures during the week they were away. Dinner was good. We had tacos. After dinner we sat and talked and got caught up on all our recent adventures.
Thursday felt a little warmer. The temperature rose into the mid 20s. It’s funny how our response to things like cold and heat shifts. In January after several days below zero, the 20s seem warm while in November after several days in the 60s, the 20s seem unbearably cold.
Saturday morning I spent several hours tending to my houseplants. I removed them from their shelves and gave them a deep watering with a bit of plant food in it. I cleaned the shelves and the windows, and then put the plants back in their places. It felt good to work with living green things while it was bitter cold outside.
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| Some of my houseplants. |
Later that morning, I brought in the last wood from the back porch and stacked it by the wood stove. That afternoon we braved the cold and brought wood from the outside woodpile to replenish the back porch pile. That means that in about twelve weeks we’ve burned a full face cord (4' x 8' x16")of wood. If we continue at that rate, we will have enough wood to get us through the winter. Unfortunately, now, in the coldest, snowiest part of winter, we have to use wood from the outdoor woodpiles. Oh well.
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| Restocking the woodpile. |
That afternoon we pulled some maps that I have stored in tubes in the back of our bedroom closet. When we unrolled one of them, a pile of pretzels and dog kibble fell out, the larder of a mouse. It had to be at least ten years old since Pancho, our last dog, died then. I guess I haven’t looked at those maps in a long while.
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| Mouse stash. |
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Last week we marked the beginning of our twenty-fifth year living in this house. We arrived here in Gold in January 2000. It was cold then too – minus 20°, a real shock having come from Southern California where it was 70° when we left. But this was, and still is, the house of my dreams, the place I always wanted to live. And living here is a miraculous dream come true for me. It has been quite an adventure for us. Our children grew up here, for the most part. When we arrived here Geoffrey was 14, Rachel almost 13, Sarah was 11, Miriam 9, Daniel 6, Hannah 4, and Josiah was 18 months. The five older children can remember the California part of their childhood, but the youngest two do not. So the best part of all their growing up years were spent here, at least I think so.
When we arrived here, the house had been empty for a while. Aunt Esther had passed away in August of 1999 and Aunt Eleanor had moved to the Silver Maples Apartments in Ulysses. We moved our belongings into the house and arranged the rooms – bedrooms upstairs for the children, the big bedroom downstairs for me and Stacey, the living room, dining room, kitchen, and family room downstairs. Over the years the rooms have shifted as children have grown up and moved out. What was once the big bedroom upstairs is now our work/family room. The downstairs family room is now the library/music room. Miriam and Hannah have their own bedrooms, and there is even one left over as a guest room.
The house needed work when we got here. It still does. We made some big improvements soon after we arrived. We had a new roof, siding, and insulation put on. The house was not insulated before. We had the floor joists reinforced. Over the years we’ve made improvements in some of the rooms. We redid the walls and ceiling in the dining room. We’ve replaced the flooring in both bathrooms. We’ve painted some rooms. We put in a new furnace, installed a wood stove, replaced the well pump and the water heater. A few years ago we tore off the old front porch and built a bigger one. And last year we replaced the roof again. But some things are still mostly the way they were when we moved in. And in a house this old – [The house was built in 1869, so it is 155 years old. My grandfather bought it in 1920 and later gave it to his sisters, so it has been in our family for 104 years now] – there is always something that needs repairing or replacing. But it’s a good house, still solid. It is a happy house. It was full of love and happiness when my aunts lived here, and we have continued to fill it with love and happiness.
The property around the house has changed dramatically over the years. When we arrived, it was three acres of mostly lawn with the big old maples in front, a grove of spruce trees on one side, and a little weedy flowerbed in the back yard. There were three old apple trees. I dug new flowerbeds and gardens and planted an orchard. Over the years, the location and size of the gardens has changed as some of them have expanded, some have shrunk, some that once were, have disappeared. The grove of spruce trees is entirely gone, the victim of a blight, and new little hardwood trees are growing in their place. The ancient maples are still there. I stopped mowing parts of the lawn that have now become meadow. Two years ago we dug a little lily pond.
At first we kept chickens, turkeys, and rabbits in a coop up near the house, actually it was the old outhouse. Eventually, the old three-bay garage down by the road that was used as storage became our barn. Over the years it has housed chickens, turkeys, geese, rabbits, pigs, and for a short time, a cow and a goat. One winter the snow caused the roof to collapse and we replaced it with a new and improved second story. Now it houses only my flock below and feed and garden implements above. For years we kept bees until I started having bad reactions to their stings. I’d like to keep bees again, but someone else will have to tend them.
It makes me happy to think that I have now lived in this house longer than any other place. Having moved around a lot over the first forty years of my life, I determined when we arrived here that I would never move again. This is where I’ll live and die and my bones will rest with my kin in the cemetery just up the road from here. I belong here. But that doesn’t mean I won’t go away now and then – I will gladly, hopefully in the winters to warm places, as long as I’m back in time for the spring and the growing season.
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Church today was good. We had visitors from the stake, our High Councilor and our Stake President, to speak. Our Sunday School lesson was good. We’re home and the afternoon has warmed to 26°. The house is warm and cozy. Lunch is almost ready and it smells good. We’re having a nice, restful Sabbath. So here we are beginning our twenty-fifth year living here in Gold, coping with the cold, trying to remember that spring, as it always has, will come again. It might be below zero now, but under that hard crust of snow, there are snowdrops and crocuses waiting, and I must wait too.
