How I got through, am getting through, this heat wave

I started with the Siberian Arctic and Valerian Albanov’s 1914 trek across the frozen seas. Then I went back a couple of centuries and read David Roberts’ Four Against the Arctic, about four hardy Russian walrus-hunters whose ship is wrecked in 1743 and they end up stranded for six years on Svalbard, way north of the Arctic Circle. Their story presents a model of how to survive in grim conditions: shooting reindeer and foxes, keeping out of the way of polar bears, and gathering scurvy grass. During the long dark & boring winter days and nights, they took turns reciting the Old Testament forward and then backward, and renamed the stars.
But since I am not going to the Siberian Arctic any time soon, I thought I should start reading about where I am heading, the Canadian north. And once you start reading about that region, it seems to be All Franklin, All the Time. To say that there is a whole industry of Franklin-driven searching and Franklin-obsessed books is not to exaggerate. Au contraire.
In that remarkable British way (think Robert Falcon Scott) of deeming him the greatest hero he-who-fails-nobly, Sir John Franklin is revered. On his first voyage to the Arctic (1819) he got lost, over half his crew died miserably, and Franklin ended up eating his boots (and maybe a few of those dead sailors). On his 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, Franklin perished along with all 134 sailors and officers.
In the century and a half since the Terror and the Erebus were last sighted, dozens of expeditions have gone in search of Franklin, of the remains of Franklin and his crew, of anything at all to verify what went so terribly wrong. In the course of those searches, many more lives were lost and much of the Canadian arctic coast was mapped.
So enough of explorers.
Today I am keeping cool with Peter’s Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos, and there is nothing cooler than proper Eskimo attire. If I were an Eskimo female, this is what I would be putting on to leave my snug igloo: for undergarments, a bird skin shirt with the feathers next to the skin, hare skin stockings; then sealskin boots called kamiks that reach the crotch and are trimmed with the mane hairs of a male bear (the longest and most elegant) and short panties of fox skin. Over everything a loose fitting coat of fox fur with a sealskin hood edged with foxtails. And finally, caribou skin mittens.

Another reason all this information is useful: if this weather persists, and climate continues with its apparently inexorable slide into cauldron-hot summers, deluges at all the wrong times and tornadoes in all the wrong places, then many of us will be moving to the Arctic and it is always good to know the local culture and history.

A few survival tips

Because I am heading to the Arctic in a couple of months, a brother of mine thought it would be useful if I learned a few polar survival skills. To that end he suggested I read the excellent, In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov. This is a tale told in clear and poetic language of a journey across the frozen Arctic Sea north of Siberia in 1914, which I would recommend to you even if you are not planning to visit the Arctic any time soon.
And here are a few of the very useful things I learned from Albanov’s narrative:

Polar bear liver eaten raw – even though delicious – can kill you.

Seal blood, however, can be used to make a nourishing and tasty broth.

Seal blubber, when lit, illuminates much better than bear fat.

Providing you have a seaworthy vessel, you are generally happy to encounter a polynya. This an area of consistently open water amid the ice pack, prevented from freezing over by prevailing winds and currents. It could also be a great word for Scrabble if you ever have 2 Y’s.

Eider eggs are almost as big as goose eggs and when cooked with duck fat, they make an excellent omelette.

Malitsi are heavy, sacklike, Samoyed garments sewn from reindeer hide, with the fur on the inside. Slipped over the head, they have crude openings to accommodate the arms and the face. In you don’t mind being cold and wet and uncomfortable – which, if you are traveling to the Arctic is a given – they can substitute for a sleeping bag.

Walruses are challenging. Just when you think you have them in your sights, they slither off the ice and into the dark and chilly water. Albanov found their bloodshot eyes to be especially repulsive.

When Albanov and Konrad, the only other survivor of the Brusilov expedition, were finally rescued on Franz Joseph Land by the Saint Foka, they regaled the crew with all the usual questions: What has happened in the world? Has war broken out? And then were shocked to hear the answer that yes, war had very much broken out following an assassination in Serbia.
Five years later in 1919, after surviving those six months of hardships, near starvation and rampaging walruses on the pack ice, Albanov died in a manner so mundane that it is not even sure whether it was typhoid or a railway explosion.

A theater review for prehistoric creatures

If you are an above-average young man in his late 20’s, what would be the most inappropriate subject matter for a play to which you will take your visiting mother?
Think about it.
Sex and violence presumably come to mind rather quickly – though it is true that a certain vitriolic ex-wife refers to your mother as a pornographic writer, one can only assume that is because she has set the bar quite low. Perhaps Thomas Kincaid paintings, bestiality and necrophilia also occur as taboo subjects.

You are a thoughtful and highly intelligent young man (and your mother is not the only person who thinks so) so you go ahead and buy tickets for a play at a small experimental theater.
The play is called Adore, and the program notes, which admittedly you do not read until you have already bought the tickets, begin “Armin is a cannibal. It’s a secret...” Naturally, you assume this is meant metaphorically. There is a literary tradition of such things, just as there are mythological tales of cannibalistic revenge.
Soon the night in question arrives. You and your mother have a pleasant meal at a local pub with an overly solicitous waitress. In the theater lobby you notice that the play only lasts for 60 minutes. This will prove to be a very good thing. Because, not too many minutes into the opening scene, it becomes clear that the cannibalism in the play – there are only two actors and a screen for video images – is not a metaphor. On the contrary, it is about two men who find each other – over the Internet, where else? – and proceed to live out their ultimate sexual fantasies: in Armin’s case, to eat his lover, in Bernd’s case, to be eaten. For about an hour these two actors alternately make the case that true love is eating/being eaten by one's beloved.
The thoughtful son in question keeps glancing over at his mother and asking her if she is all right.
Have I mentioned that they are sitting in the front row in a very small theater, so that rushing out in order to vomit would be a very public act?

Luckily, your mother is flying home the next day, so the topic of cannibalistic fetishism and all the ways in which it is not about love - and that in fact eating one's beloved does not mean that the beloved becomes incorporated into one's being, but rather that one excretes one's beloved, hardly a romantic notion - can only be flogged for another 12 hours. And it is true that the play’s revolting subject matter did manage to veer the conversation from Lyuba and the contents of her stomach.

Lyuba, since you ask, is a month old woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) whose very intact body was discovered in the Siberian permafrost by a reindeer herders, and named after his wife. Unlike his wife, Lyuba lived over 40,000 years ago and was the size of a large dog at the time of her death by inhalation of mud, presumably while crossing a bog with her fellow woolly mammoths. Inside her stomach, researchers at a Japanese medical school found mother’s milk, pollen from grasses, algae and mammoth dung.

Additionally, the river in your city has become bright green. This has nothing to do with your theatrical fiasco of the previous night. It is viewed with pleasure and amazement by mother and son, just before the mother heads to the airport for her flight home.

Or so you thought. Nature intervened and brought air travel throughout the east coast to a halt, which meant that your mother was back with you for another 48 hours while trees were uprooted and trunks fell on roofs and smashed in cars and power was extinguished and rain fell in record-breaking inches.
This gave you both more time to come up with bad jokes about cannibalism as love, or not.