(I wrote this 20 years ago, before I had a blog. With -40s on us again, it’s a good reminder of the old days, when these temperatures were more frequent.)

It was cold here in Fairbanks for the past couple of weeks—down around -40º for days. That is the temperature where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales meet. And air that dense tends to hang around for a while when it’s in the neighborhood. With the proper clothes, this isn’t much to get worked up about. It’s too cold for skiing, but strolling around out in the crisp is actually fairly pleasant.

Machinery, on the other hand, ordinarily the Lapdog of Man, takes on a mind of its own. You don’t even know your own vehicle. Everything about driving becomes an extraordinary event. Unlocking the door must be done slowly to prevent breaking off the key. Your only hope of starting the engine depends on your having connected to the singlemost important feature of a parking space: an electrical outlet. Every vehicle whose owner expects to be driving away anytime soon is either left running or plugged in. Unless it is started within an hour, a vehicle parked and shut off without a lifegiving socket nearby is scrap metal until the weather changes substantially for the better. And you’d better hope your antifreeze is good to about -60º F, just in case.

Getting the door open can be an accomplishment—the hinges often become so stiff that it seems you’ll bend the frame getting the damned thing open far enough to squeeze in. The plugged-in engine starts with no trouble—it’s the only thing that works as it’s supposed to, and it warms just fine. But hearing the defroster and heater fan in the cab scream in protest at being started at such unholy temperatures is just the first sign that all is not well with other moving parts. Because, unfortunately, you can’t get all of the many moving parts outside of the engine to warm up.

Most of the rebelliousness of the formerly trustworthy machine comes from the fundamental changes that occur in lubricants at these temperatures. Plugging in a vehicle keeps the “coolant” and the oil heated, and on some vehicles a small electric blanket keeps the battery temperature up as well. But all the other moving parts are at ambient temperature—making “lubricant” a ridiculous term, because at these temperatures these compounds might be compared with solid, dried rubber cement, or almost-hardened concrete. And these materials are serious about remaining in this inordinately stiff state.

If you haven’t experienced it, the comparatively immobile state of familiar vehicular functions is very interesting—at least the first few times. Take my old truck, for example. It worked perfectly for years in the lower forty-eight, and, until now, it has continued to do so. But below -30º F its moving parts have no problem being parts, but every problem with movement. It takes both human and engine strength to successfully fight the resistance of the ultracold lubricants. And it’s a real fight. I haven’t bent the door yet. And I haven’t broken off the steering wheel. But every time I leave work on these intensely cold nights, these and other problems seem on the verge of occurring. Just getting home is a workout. Pushing in the clutch requires considerable strength, and after letting it go it takes so long to come back that I often wonder if it’s going to do so at all. But, after the engine has warmed up with the clutch out and the transmission spinning in neutral for five to ten minutes you’re as ready as you’re going to get. Ordinarily flexible plastic and foam seats turn into largely inflexible, hard, heat-sucking benches. This is the only thing that makes me feel cold—this and the steering wheel. A heavy wool blanket over the seat and heavy gloves solved this after day one. Still, I stand outside a little ways off enjoying the night while, after ignition, my personal mechanical lapdog becomes accustomed to the thought of moving.

When the temperature gauge shows upward movement, the engine is ready to join in the fight to get the vehicle home. It’s a show of brute force. The door, tough to open, is impossible to close. And, of course, one of the few things that seem to work pretty well is the whining, “door ajar” alarm. It will keep me company for the whole journey—that and the whistling wind. I slowly get the clutch in, get it into reverse, then, with an unavoidably slow return on the part of the clutch, the vehicle starts a painful lurch backwards. If I’m lucky, I can budge the steering wheel (this old model does not have power steering). Sometimes I have to seesaw back and forth a few times to get headed in the right direction—the steering has limited play (and none at all when the vehicle is stationary). Because it is so difficult to turn and to shift, the best parking spaces are those that leave the car pointed home after backing out from a plug head. Many drivers back into the space and use longer extension cords. But most of us usually have to take corners and shift gears, and each is an event. Steering is so tough that I feel great satisfaction at turning out of the parking lot, but the feeling leaves instantly as I try to horse the wheel back around so that I’m going straight again. Wide, poorly controlled turns are unavoidable. (A bad place to park would be near parking lot entrances.)

In first gear, the engine has little trouble getting the vehicle moving and keeping it going. But that’s too slow for public roads, and I have to at least get it into second. Here the cold-delayed clutch return becomes a serious problem, because as soon as it’s disengaged those exceedingly stiff lubricants in the wheel bearings work like a well-set parking brake. I’m lucky if the vehicle is still moving when I get it into second and the clutch finally comes back out. (Later, inertia makes the shift from second to third go a little better.) This is where some people regularly get hot, burning smells as the clutch fights with limited success to get and keep the vehicle moving. But for now, if I didn’t come to a complete stop and kill the engine in that first shift, I fly down the road in second gear. Maybe it’s only my speedometer, but something about this intense cold makes it go crazy—it tells me I’m going about 80 mph in second gear.

Even in the state of high concentration that this driving requires, I enjoy this first screaming straightaway. The tires have lost essentially all flexibility, and they’ve also lost air volume and have become squared up with the cold. On this perfectly smooth, flat, well-paved road, it feels like I’m driving on square wooden blocks. In second gear, the engine is seriously working, the cab’s fan keeps giving off intermittent protesting shrieks, the speedometer proudly states incredible speeds, my head is bouncing rhythmically off the roof in time to the square tires, the cold wind of an open door begins to make itself known, and the door ajar whiner is doing its thing in the background. I find that the radio breaks the tranquility of the moment, so lately I’ve just been leaving it off.

Out on the open road, ice fog is a new hazard that arrives with the intense cold, added to the ever-present icy winter roads. Ice fog is a consequence of burning fossil fuels under conditions of a thermal inversion; the exhaust of furnaces, vehicles, woodstoves, and power plants is trapped in the low-lying cold air mass, and the prevailing calm conditions keep the trap closed. In town, this causes a dense fog, and the air smells like big-city air. Outside of town this fog is almost absent, but in town it requires caution and headlights in midday. My jostling, windy ride home takes me clear of this fog. That and the heated garage (a truly wonderful feature of our house) make coming home an even greater pleasure than usual. I pity the poor souls who have to go through, in getting to work each morning, what I have to go through to get home. Fighting a vehicle like mine in both directions would be very discouraging. And, in fact, down around -50º F you find that vehicles begin dropping like flies. It just becomes too cold to get many of them to function at all.

On our first -40º night, I went out to do some celebratory grilling. Boy—and I thought the knobs on the gas grill were stiff at -20º and -30º F. But even after sloooowly twisting them open, I had tremendous difficulty getting the thing lit. When I finally succeeded, the pitiful result was a few tiny blue flames, which remained tiny even when the gas was turned all the way to high. Carefully, and without much hope, I laid two hamburgers on the grill and took the rest inside to fry. Ten minutes later I found that the two grilling burgers hadn’t even gotten warm. A rare grilling lesson: liquid propane (LP) remains in the L phase when it’s -40º.

The moose seem to get restless at these low temperatures, too. Sightings go up dramatically, at home and on campus. Nobody knows what brings them out of the denser woods to hang around people and buildings. The chickadees come in to the feeder as usual, tail feathers bent from roosting in small holes, but their movements are a little sludgy, and they tend to hop back and forth from one foot to the other when perched on metal. The red squirrel is conspicuously absent, choosing to estivate[1] for a while. A lot of people wish they could just sleep through it also. Down at the airport we can hear jets “idling,” because all too often those who shut their engines down can’t get them going again once they’ve cooled. Small aircraft mostly give up and wait it out. Creative solutions to heating things keeps the fire department busy. Some people have actually started small fires under their vehicles to warm them up—and watched them go up in flames when the lubricants really loosened up. We learned the hard way last week that it’s a boom time of year for furnace repairmen, too. An important water flow valve in our heating system chose a night of -40º to fail; we were lucky to get someone out before any pipes froze.

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[1] Estivation is a state of dormancy often used by species that do not hibernate so that they can sleep away periods of environmental extremes, when being active is simply too costly. It is a state of torpor in which metabolism is slowed to decrease energetic costs, the better to wait out—in this case—extreme cold.