Photo: Colony Glacier, northeast of Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Death is a dish best served as an abstraction. And so as summer arrives, there’s no better time to think about freezing to death.
Jack London, of course, wrote the most vivid piece of fiction on the subject, “To Build a Fire,” about a man and his dog lost in the Yukon.
While London probed his character’s mind, Peter Stark delved far deeper into a freezing man’s body in his classic 1999 article for Outside magazine, “Frozen Alive.”
Stark’s piece features a (we hope) fictional man driving along a mountain road on a frigid night (27 below zero). When his Jeep gets spins out and gets stuck in a snowbank, he decides to ski to his friend’s house.
Big mistake.
It’s dark and cold and he can’t find his way. Time passes. Stark writes:
An hour passes. At one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You’ve slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every one-degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5 percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. … You’ll remember little of what happens next.
Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.
You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.
By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods.
At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.
When you lift [your head] again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First it’s warm; then it’s hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.
At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.
All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.
But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up.
Stark’s hero is found and the second half of the story details the painstaking process through which frozen bodies are rewarmed back to life. Major urban hospitals use cardiopulmonary bypass machines, which “pump out the victim’s blood, rewarm and oxygenate it.” In more rural areas, caregivers use the “intravenous administration of warm saline, the bag first heated in the microwave to 110 degrees.” But even this can be tricky:
In fact, many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being rescued. In “rewarming shock,” the constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest movement can send a victim’s heart muscle into wild spasms of ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea. They then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them.
