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14 | (continued) I did it. I claim the fastest bath (okay, rinse) in the Western World. Less than seven seconds. Check your Guinness (the book). I was wet. I was rinsed. I was very close to trembling with cold. I stood in the sunny air like a man who has just been rescued from an Antarctic crevasse. I was still alive. I was sure of it. I turned in the sun like a pig on a spit. Bring those limbs back to life while we’re still standing up! Dry that back! Thaw out those toes! I must have looked like a naked maniac from Times Square. I wanted to swallow the Sun. I wanted to bite little pieces off of it and suck on them. My scalp was burning. My skull was split right down to my gonads. If a wind had arisen at that moment, I think I would have screamed. I was colder than I had ever been before, colder than I had ever thought possible, far colder than I ever wanted to be again. Never, never again.
There’s a lesson for you. Nothing like learning at first hand. If anyone had told me that a shallow lake could be filled with ice-water on a warm spring day, I simply would not have believed them. I’d have thought they were just trying to scare me out of the forest so they could have it all to themselves. People do things like that. I simply had to find out for myself. I found out. The truth is that the water of a frozen lake requires months of solar heating before it becomes swimmable. The sun may seem hot at times, but at around 45 degrees above (or below) the Equator, its radiation, at the Equinox (March 21st and September 21st), is striking the earth at an angle inverse to the latitude, which at 45°, north or south, spreads its finite heat over twice the area it will cover on the Equator, where it appears directly overhead—hence the water takes that much longer to warm up. The farther from the Equator, the longer the warming will take. There are some Arctic lakes that are ice-free for only a few weeks every year. Even in the hottest summer, only the surface waters rise to comfortable temperatures, which explains why rivers in shield country are warmer than those among mountains —the mountain streams are draining from slowly melting winter snows, while the shield rivers are flowing from the warmest layer of their headwater lakes. The bottom layers of deep lakes seldom rise more than ten degrees above freezing. The most vivid example of this was described to me by a friend, from his time as a carpenter in the Yukon. One day in late summer, he went out for a swim in one of the countless kettle lakes of the Mackenzie River floodplain. He found the surface water perfect for sloshing about, but some 30 feet below him, he could see quite clearly the white surface of a never-to-be-thawed slab of solid ice. It takes a sight like that to bring home to you the true meaning of permafrost. |
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