I just got off the phone with Matt Donahue. He's currently living on the North Slope of Alaska, working as an engineer for a construction company. He told me that walking home tonight the temp was 38 degrees BELOW ZERO, and that it will hit 50 below by the end of the night. Crazy. I don't think humans were meant to live in conditions like that. The very thought of it makes my bones hurt. Hell, I bitched today that it was too cold when the wind picked up and dropped the thermometer to 45.
The thing is, humans have been living in the arctic for a long time. As a matter of fact some of the oldest, continuous societies in the world are in the arctic. The Inuit have been living there successfully for over 10 thousand years - five times longer than Christianity. They do it mostly by consuming large quantities of marine mammal and exposing as little skin as possible to the elements - not many inuit nudists.
They developed a society based on the basic elements they had at their disposal: whale, caribou, seal and snow. Anyone who can live in a house make of ice is a star in my book. They don't rely on foreign oil to drive cars to Wal-Mart to buy huge TVs that run on electricity produced from strip-mined coal. Nope, fun is all about dolls made from walrus skin and brushing your hair with bowhead balene, or telling stories about that one huge blizzard that was so bad, the day after seabirds were literally frozen to the ice and the whole tribe feasted for weeks. Ah, the life.
All I can say is that I like my comfortable house and its trappings, and I don't know how I feel about eating whale blubber. Maybe that doesn't make me one of the tough ones, but the way I figure it, if I ever find myself having to live with the Inuit, I'll reminisce back to this very moment. The house is warm, I ate a delicious meal, watched funny sitcoms on my second had TV and fell asleep in my warm bed, with visions of walruses and sugar plums dancing in my head.
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Ahhh.... the life. They are some tough bastards. Starvation seems to be the most common form of death-at least historically. I was just reading this morning about a hunter in the northwest territories (Canada). He was trying to get a seal for bait, he's a guide for a rich hunter from Las Vegas (my how things have changed) and got stranded when the wind blew the ice he was on free. While his wife and the hunter watched helplessly, he thought he was going to die on the ice. Like his brother, like his father. Shear dumb luck, determination and skill that he survived, Canadian search an rescue found him, etc.
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