40 below is no laughing matter

Above the door inside my dad's cabin at Lake Minchumina is a small printed sign, sky blue on white in a font large enough to read from the far wall. It says, "Laugh at the cold."

Who printed the card is lost in the fog of yesteryear. Was there really a market for such mockery before climate change put an end to the crushing 40 below zero temperatures of December and January common in my youth? I can't believe Fabian had a commercial printer produce the sign only for a single customer.

Thoreau said, "A trout in the milk is evidence." The sage of Walden Pond's maxim applies here: "Laugh at the cold" above the door was evidence somebody wanted it there. Fabian had to have put the sign up after bringing it in from Fairbanks.

[Yukon's climate, notoriously cold in Gold Rush days, expected to transform in coming decades]

My mother, Mary, would have disapproved. She would have accused Fabian of "silliness." Not that she was without humor. She admired the subtle, the understated; he admired the bold, the blunt. When he cranked up our powerful Magnavox stereo to hear comedian Mickey Katz and his band perform a Borscht Belt parody of the pop hit "Purple People Eater," she yelled from the kitchen "Turn that off." (I listened to Katz's raucous celebration of the "vun-eyed vun-horned poiple people eatah" when nobody was home).

In retrospect, I am surprised that an LP featuring Mickey Katz's absurd oeuvre was on sale in Fairbanks in 1960.

It occurs to me now that when Fabian tacked up "Laugh at the cold" he understood the joke was on him. He's the one who, by choice, left Minneapolis for Fairbanks in 1937, and spent the rest of his life wrestling with winter days and nights below zero.

A trapper once told me "a grizzly bear is nothing to monkey with." Neither is 40 below zero. In the woods, every outdoor task is harder. The cold creates what social scientists call friction because a woodsman's first task is to stay warm — or at least warm enough to function safely — and it is difficult to stay warm mushing trails, setting traps, making camp, breaking camps. My dad spent parts of several winters in a tent. At 40 below, life in a tent is reduced to feeding the Yukon stove and ensuring the fire doesn't die. Tending a stove in a tent surrounded by the great white silence, interrupted only by the occasional sound of a raven or the brief appearance of a camp robber, is enough to have a trapper asking himself, "Was I out of my mind to come here?"

A trapping cabin at -40 or lower is a different story. If the cabin is well built and adequately provisioned, the trapper can take the day off and attend to household chores. My dad had a radio with a homemade antenna, and one Sunday we spent the afternoon listening to a 49ers game live from San Francisco and the evening tuned into Radio Moscow, which provided us with Prokofiev and propaganda. Reception was exceptional in Bush Alaska.

[Recalling the Alaska winter of 1989]

Fabian trapped by himself when I was a boy, although as a young man he had partners. In the late '30s, he and a partner trapped within easy dog-sled distance of Manley Hot Springs. One morning, his partner hitched up Fabian's dogs to run into Manley for a few cans of milk. My dad dryly noted years later that when his partner returned at sunset "I learned his Carnation was 90 proof."

The northern lights were common enough on clear nights on the trapline. I've often wonder what the early trappers and miners made of them. Few had seen them before they came to Alaska. Trapper Carl Hult, Fabian's partner before my dad bought many miles of his line, couldn't suppress his irreverence when asked about the lights. "The old timers told me they could hear the northern lights crackling. I think that was just the sound of their brains freezing."

In town, the cold slowed everything down, and the ice fog reduced visibility to the length of a football field or less. Walking to Lathrop High school presented a challenge not found in stateside suburbia. How to keep my ears warm without wearing a hat that ruined my greasy Presleyesque pompadour? Fashion triumphed, and I had frost-nipped ears more than once.

At night, in bed before going to sleep, I smiled when our loud oil-fed furnace began to rumble. Soon I would hear hot air rushing toward my room.

Not every cold morning, but frequently, I would awaken to Fabian, home from the woods with a "town" job at the city power plant, banging breakfast pans and listening to the news on the radio as he prepared to head for work. Before long, the banging ceased, and he turned off the radio before quietly leaving the house. I then heard him open the door of his panel truck, which had been plugged in overnight to keep the battery warm, and climb in. Momentarily, he put in the key and attempted to turn over the engine. A hearty "RRR, RRR, RRR followed as the engine struggled — and failed to engage. He tried again with "RRR" returning at lower decibels. This continued until "RRR" became a meek "rrr" of surrender, and the engine quit.

I knew what to expect next. Fabian opened the door, dropped to the hard-packed snow, slammed the door, and exploded in a brief tirade of profanity. Then I heard the echo of his footsteps as he disappeared into the distance, walking to his job across the frozen Chena River near downtown Fairbanks.

He never told me what he thought while hustling through the dark. But it is safe to say he was not laughing at the cold.

Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@alaskadispatch.com.