Cold (28 page)

Cashmere wool comes from the Indian cashmere goat, and mohair wool is from a North African goat. There is alpaca wool, vicuña
wool, and llama wool. In Alaska and parts of Canada, there is musk ox wool. When warmth and cost are considered together,
sheep’s wool is the best of the natural fibers. When warmth alone is considered, musk ox wool wins, reputedly the warmest
fabric known. It is as much as eight times warmer than sheep’s wool, and it is softer.

An adult male musk ox weighs something like eight hundred pounds. It stands a bit over four feet tall at the shoulders. Its
expression, at best, is somber. The bulk of its shoulders and the curl of its horns, which sweep downward from in front of
its ears and then upward and outward, resembling a deep scoop, make the animal appear hunched and somehow grossly unintelligent.
In the wild, a threatened herd of fifteen or twenty musk oxen will form a circle, allowing a man with a rifle to shoot one
after another. Admiral Peary’s expedition to the North Pole killed something like six hundred of them for food. But the oxen
are not killed to make wool. Instead, they are raised in captivity, and their
quviut
, or underfur — the soft warm stuff that hides under their bristly guard hairs, the mammalian equivalent of the down found
under the coarser outer feathers of birds — is combed out each spring.

A full-grown musk ox naturally sheds something like five pounds of quviut each year. The stuff is remarkably light. Five pounds,
stuffed and packed, will fill a kitchen-size garbage bag. Oomingmak, the Musk Ox Producers’ Co-operative, buys all the fiber
they can find. If they can pull together six hundred pounds — enough to fill 120 kitchen-size garbage bags — they ship it
to a company on the East Coast, where it is treated in much the same way as sheep’s wool and spun into yarn. Months later,
sometimes more than a year later, the yarn is distributed to knitters, typically Native American women working in villages
scattered around Alaska. At their own pace, they knit scarves and hats and tubular pullovers called smoke rings, which can
be used to warm the neck, be pulled over the head and face like a balaclava, or be worn on top of the head like a chimney
hat. Marketers claim that quviut yarn is as soft as a cloud. They claim that a woman with her eyes closed could touch this
stuff and never feel it. A quviut cap of the kind one might wear skiing costs more than four hundred dollars. Quviut scarves
go for about the same price as hats. Quviut smoke rings are a bargain at under three hundred dollars.

For warmth, animal fibers outdo plant fibers, but plant fibers cost less. Picking cotton may be backbreaking work, but it
is easier than combing quviut from under the belly of a musk ox or raising puffball Angora rabbits or even shearing sheep.
And it was plant fibers that led to synthetics. Rayon was inspired by silk — which then and now comes from a caterpillar’s
backside — and was commercialized in the late 1800s. Count Hilaire de Chardonnet collected wood chips and treated them chemically
to get a substance called viscose. The viscose was pushed through a spinneret, which looks and functions something like a
showerhead, but instead of sprinkling threads of water, it sprinkles threads of fiber. The sizes of the holes in the spinneret
determine the thickness of the fibers. The count took his product to the 1889 Paris Exhibition and two years later started
manufacturing and distributing large quantities of viscose at a factory in France.

Rayon was the first manufactured fiber, but it is not a true synthetic. Rayon comes from wood fibers, while true synthetics
come from materials that do not even resemble fibers, things such as amine and hexamethylenediamine and natural gas and oil.
Nylon was invented by Wallace Carothers of Du Pont, who had once taught organic chemistry and who specialized in the study
of long chains of repeating units of atoms called polymers. By 1935, his team had more or less perfected a method of combining
amine, hexamethylenediamine, and adipic acid in a way that would yield molecules with more than one hundred repeating units
of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. A filament of nylon might have a million of these molecules. Nylon was first used commercially
for toothbrush bristles. By 1939, nylon was also used in stockings, fishing line, parachutes, and lingerie. By 1945, people
were fighting over the stuff. On more than one occasion, police were summoned. In the worst of what have been called the Nylon
Riots, forty thousand women fought over thirteen thousand pairs of nylon stockings in Pittsburgh.

By the 1990s, a confusing array of fabrics and advice were available. Nylon was still around, good for blocking wind. And
there was polyester, good for insulation even when moist, but heavy and clammy when wet. There was polypropylene, which moves
water away from the skin. There was Polarguard, a single strand of a polyester-like material widely used as sleeping bag insulation
— warm when wet but relatively heavy. There was Hollofil, with hollow fibers, and Quallofil, like Hollofil but with four holes
through the fibers. There were the breathable fabrics — Gore-Tex and Stormshed and Klimate — with pores a few hundred times
bigger than a water molecule. Water vapor can escape through the pores, but anything as big as a raindrop cannot squeeze through.
There was PrimaLoft and Micro-loft, superthin fibers that are nearly as light as down but that do not form clumps when wet,
as down does, making them warmer than down when wet.

There are ideas, too, that have not yet been and may never be widely used in clothing. There was the idea that sealing moisture
in might be beneficial under the right circumstances. A vapor barrier against the skin would signal the body to stop producing
its base level of perspiration. Because trapped moisture cannot steal heat by evaporating, a camper sealed within a vapor
barrier might be warmer than one whose clothes breathe. On the downside, the system fails if the camper overheats from hiking
or cutting wood or running from a bear, producing pools of sweat that have nowhere to go. Also, few campers are comfortable
lying in their own steam, and at the end of a three-day trip, they tend to stink.

There was the invention and patenting of heated clothes. There are socks with built-in pockets for chemical heat packs, such
as the “Thermal sock having a toe heating pocket,” described in patent number 5230333, issued in 1993 to James and Ronnie
Yates. There is the “Electrically heated boot sock and battery supporting pouch therefore,” patent number 3663796, issued
in 1972, the “Inflatable boot liner with electrical generator and heater,” patent number 4845338, issued in 1989, and the
“Electrically heated garment,” patent number 5032705, issued in 1991.

And there are the so-called smart fabrics and smart clothes. Some have porosity characteristics that change with temperature,
the pores growing to release heat and moisture near hot patches of skin or shrinking to preserve heat when skin temperature
drops. “It’s very simple,” one of the inventors reported. “You cut flaps in the clothing, and as the fabric absorbs water,
one surface swells up and the flaps bend backwards.”

Some even smarter fabrics have built-in microprocessors. In addition to keeping the wearer warm, the smarter fabrics have
the potential to become wearable computers, providing navigation and communication aids and monitoring the wearer’s pulse
and breathing rate.

For his well-being when exploring the Arctic in the early 1900s, Vilhjalmur Stefansson consistently shunned the European ways
and turned instead to traditional local ways. “For nine winters I have never frozen a finger or a toe nor has any member of
my immediate party,” he reported.

The Inuit, then and now, wear fur. On very cold days, one approach is to wear an inner layer with the fur turned toward the
skin and an outer layer with the fur turned outward. Native American Niomi Panikpakuttuk said in a 1996 interview, “Of course
caribou skin was the only source of clothing that we could get when I was young. The textiles that were available to us were
not good for winter wear. As a matter of fact, I do not consider them to be the type of material that you could use in winter.
I am still like that; whenever I am wearing textiles, I have to put on layers and layers of clothing on my body and legs,
and even at that it will not warm me up. This is because I am a real Inuit. I do not consider textiles warm clothing.”

In Anchorage today, two or three hundred dollars will buy oversize mittens of beaver, coyote, fox, or lynx. A fur hat can
cost more than five hundred dollars. Mukluks, perhaps the ugliest boots ever made, cost four hundred dollars in either beaver
or coyote. Bikinis made from lynx or fox or wolf, though of questionable value in the cold, might be considered a bargain
at under three hundred dollars.

It is March eighth and twenty-three degrees below zero here at the edge of the Beaufort Sea, reasonably warm for this time
of year. On the East Coast, cold weather is in the news. York, Pennsylvania, is experiencing a record low for March, at minus
nine degrees. Atlantic City, New Jersey, is also experiencing a record low, at four above. March is an unpredictable month.
On this day in 1941, Philadelphia got eight inches of snow and at fourteen degrees experienced the second of three consecutive
record-low-temperature days.

We have turned off our snowmobiles, silencing them, darkening their headlights. The wind blows. Above us, eighty miles up,
the northern lights stretch in a pale green arc over the pack ice. A hundred feet in front of us, there is a low rise. Near
the center of the rise, a polar bear den had been spotted in December. This is the den that we hope to find. The wind picks
up snow between us and the rise, carrying it just over the ground, dusting our boots and forming tiny drifts against the brown
musk ox droppings that lay scattered around our feet.

On my torso, I wear two polyester and spandex shirts, covered by a light nylon jacket stuffed with polyester PrimaLoft fill,
all buried under a thick down parka intended for use at the South Pole. My hands nest inside loose-fitting gauntlet-style
mittens. On my face, I wear a full mask, polyester and spandex, with cutouts for eyes and nostrils and a small one where my
mouth should be. I also have my parka hood, which for the most part I leave in the down position. If I pull the hood up, it
forms a snorkel in front of my face, muting the wind, and I have a tunnel-vision view through the coyote-fur ruff that muffles
moving air six inches out. On my lower body, my feet rest inside lined boots. I wear polyester and spandex tights, a pair
of looser pure polyester trousers, another pair of thicker but even looser polyester trousers, and down-filled bib overalls.
The down has been treated to fight bacteria. The outside of the overalls has a Teflon fabric protector that repels water but
is breathable. Underneath it all, I wear a pair of thick flannel boxer shorts printed with polar bears.

I feel as if I am wearing a space suit. I look like Charlie Brown dressed for winter. I am warm. Farther south, I would be
grossly overdressed, but here I am stylish, in vogue.

In December, the polar bear had been spotted from the air with an infrared scanner. At that time, she was digging the den
that we hope lies out in front of us. A video clip from the scanner shows the bear turning to look at the airplane, seeming
to stare right into the scanner. Her teddy-bear ears glow with warmth. She moves about in her den, which is perhaps three
times the size of her body. Her movements within the freshly dug den and her stares toward the airplane somehow speak of her
solitude. But by now she should have cubs, little bears that are cuddly but no doubt annoying within the confines of the den.
With a handheld infrared scope of the kind used on search-and-rescue missions, we search for her. We see nothing but the varied
shades of gray and white that make up the snow-covered hill. We move closer but still find nothing. The bear, if here, is
not giving away her position. Perhaps the den has become drifted in, the snow blocking the heat signature, or perhaps she
left, cubless, or even with cubs in tow, earlier than expected.

I turn the infrared scope toward our snowmobiles. All three glow hot white against a background of gray snow. I turn the scope
toward my companions. Their bodies are ghostly gray outlines with white blotches where they leak heat. They leak heat through
their boots and under their arms and through their gloves. Their faces glow hot white, seventy-five percent of their heat
loss purged out through their snorkel hoods.

One of the snowmobiles is dead. Its key start results in nothing but the useless whir of the starter, and its pull cord is
jammed. We pop the hood. Inside, the bendix — the end of the starter motor that engages with the flywheel to start the engine
— has broken off and wedged itself against the flywheel. One of my companions pulls it free, and I drop it into my pocket.
“Nothing lasts at these temperatures,” my companion says. Today he has broken the faceplate of his helmet, the copper wire
that powers his helmet heater, and now the bendix. But with the bendix removed, we can start the machine with its pull cord.
We head south, the noise of our machines silencing the wind, our headlights darkening the northern lights, our presence temporary,
ephemeral leakers of heat fleeing south toward the warmth of a permanent camp powered by the almost bottomless pit of natural
gas that resides far beneath the permafrost.