In her introduction to this book, whose subtitle is “A Journey into Cold,” Ehrlich describes it as “a book about winter and climate change” and also as “a six-month chronicle of living with cold” (xi). It’s a mix of personal narrative/travelogue and facts about melting glaciers and Arctic pollution and disturbed ecosystems, a mix of lyricism and starkness. Ehrlich writes about blizzards in Wyoming and glaciers in the southern Andes and a trip to Spitsbergen on a 150-foot sailboat; she writes about seeing mink and coyotes and swans and geese, about seeing polar bears and whales and dolphins and walruses and sea birds, and about a visit to the Norwegian Polar Institute, where she talks to scientists who study climate change.
In the Andes she sees glaciers and thinks about how they’ve shaped the landscape through which she and her friend/lover are hiking; in Wyoming she goes canoeing with friends in an icy river. She write about winter as when “we go behind the scenes of our own lives” and says this: “Winter is a white vagrancy. There are no days or nights. Just breathing and snow pushing space between thought” (4-5). I like how she writes about how winter means “seclusion, intimacy, ceremony, cabin fever”, and how she writes about reading all through the winter in Wyoming, decades ago, just after having lost her fiancé to cancer. (69). I like how she writes about the aftermath of blizzards: “What’s left is a swept-out room of stark beauty and clear light” (105).
At one point Ehrlich takes a bus to see the Perito Moreno glacier and writes about how glaciers, built up over time, tell us about the past:
A glacier is an archivist and historian. It saves everything no matter how small or big, including pollen, dust, heavy metals, bugs, bones, and minerals. A glacier is time incarnate, a moving image of time. (53)
I like how this book looks at time and space, globally and personally, though I sometimes wanted there to be less abstraction/philosophizing and more straight-up description. Still, this was a satisfying read, even (especially?) in the middle of summer, though of course it made me depressed about global warming.
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