BY HANNES THUM
Our human perspective of temperature and of metabolism is extremely narrow.
This, as opposed to the countless other creatures that manage just fine through vast temperature ranges, letting their metabolisms slow down or speed up as possibilities allow, patient in their acceptance of what the world allows them to accomplish, and when.
Not us. We are warm, need to be warm, and only exist when we’re warm. It’s no wonder that we associate warmth with life, heat with energy, and cold with death.
And now, we return again to the season that is trying to kill us.
We’re not all that evolved for this, really. Our home, our crucible, our safe place as a species, has always been in the more central latitudes, closer to the equator. That, for humans, is where life is easy. We’ve managed to expand to all sorts of different kinds of geographic areas in our history through certain tricks like technology in shelter and clothing, food trade routes, and the use of fossil fuels on various scales. But, take all that away, and we’re pretty much left out in the cold.
Yesterday, I spent the entire day on some high, long ridges east of town. Everywhere I walked, from ridge to ridge, I kept walking alongside a fox’s tracks. I never found their beginning or their end, but for miles I followed them.
Throughout, I could not shake the notion that I am profoundly ill-qualified to be walking around in the face of oncoming winter.
I wore on my body a great deal of clothing made from exotic chemicals from all exotic corners of the world and shipped to my town on fossil-fuel-fueled craft at great expense. I carried on my back a whole additional quiver of different items of clothing in case the weather shifted or I changed my mind about how I wanted to maintain my exceedingly restricted acceptable temperature range. I carried a few thousand calories worth of food, none of which was grown anywhere near me.
I fancied myself a pretty good walker for a while, getting farther and farther away from my car and into a wild-feeling range, but I was more like an astronaut doing a space walk but still tethered to the space station—out alone in a profoundly inhospitable environment, sure, but not truly out in that environment in the sense that a great deal of preparation had gone into making sure that my body would be safe and sound and comfortable and quite removed from that environment.
How “out there” can we really be? How long would I really last if I tried to cast myself out from my tethers?
I tried to put myself in the head of the fox. This fox carried no synthetic clothing and no imported food. This fox had no gasoline-warmed car or natural-gas-heated shelter to return to. This fox was out there, and without the tethers that I traveled with.