Writing Cold
What was it like to write Cold? There are three answers.
The first is easy. While I wrote Cold, my day job kept me in motion, both literally and figuratively, and as I moved from place to place for four months out of twelve writing gave purpose to my wanderings, something beyond a sterile hotel room and a business meeting. And as I moved from problem to problem on my employer’s behalf, stomping on brush fires that could never be fully extinguished, writing gave me a sense of progress, a sense that something worthwhile was underway.
The second answer is related to the first. The sense of purpose translated into an opening of my eyes and mind to all things cold. I traveled extensively within Alaska, where signs of cold are ubiquitous: there is river ice and sea ice, caterpillars and frogs that spend the winter frozen, a tunnel into permafrost, temperatures of forty below zero. But to open eyes and an open mind signs of cold appear around the globe: Cornelis Drebbel tried to air condition London’s Westminster Abbey in 1620, Frederic Tudor shipped ice to the Caribbean in 1806, mounds of earth and boulders carried by Pleistocene glaciers litter Scotland, and certain birds in the Philippines summer in the Arctic. With an open mind, even a flight to New Orleans ushers in thoughts of cold—thoughts, for example, of a balloon flight in 1865, when James Glaisher drifted somewhere above 25,000 feet to measure reduced temperatures at altitude, only to lose consciousness. His assistant’s hands were too cold to pull the balloon’s descent valve, so the man pulled it with his teeth, the balloon descended, and both men survived.
A third answer is that a book like Cold requires a tremendous amount of waiting. After the book was written I waited for a literary agent. I waited again while my agent found a publisher. There were waits for a contract, for editorial comments, for proof reading, for indexing, for reviewers, for galleys. I waited while the economy tumbled, wondering if my publisher would survive. I waited while spring turned to summer, summer to autumn, autumn to the cold and darkness of winter. While I waited I thought about the book and where it was, who was looking at it, what they thought about it. And finally in July the book arrived, brand new, something solid and final that I can hold and show to others.
Friends ask what it was like to write Cold, and so I tell them variously that it gave me purpose, that it helped me see things that I might otherwise have missed, and that it required a large measure of waiting. And, as often as not, they tell me about their own plans to write, to say something, to leave a lasting statement. Each time I hear this, I think of a passage attributed to Plutarch’s Moralia, a quotation well suited to Cold but maybe of interest to anyone who writes or thinks about writing: “In a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.” And that nicely captures what it was to write Cold and wait for the summer of 2009 to see it, at last, in print.
Copyright 2009 Bill Streever