Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [145]
He started visiting thrift stores and sporting goods stores too, buying overlooked or sale items, particularly synthetic clothes, and cheap but effective down bags. Once he bought a whole rack of capilene long underwear and matching long-sleeved shirts. These were really nice, similar to one of the inner layers he wore himself, and the next time he was out in the park and saw some of the bros were back in Sleepy Hollow, their shelters more knockabout than ever, he threw a top-bottom pair knotted together in to each one of them. “Here, wear this against your skin. Nothing but this stuff against your skin. No cotton! Throw all that cotton crap away. You’re going to freeze in that cotton shit.”
“It’s fucking cold.”
“Yeah it’s cold. Get this gear on and stay out of the wind when it blows.”
“No shit.”
Andy said, “It’s not the cold, it’s the wind.” The wee-und.
“Yeah yeah yeah. That’s right.”
“That’s what everybody says.”
Frank snorted. “That’s for sure.”
It was the new truism, and already Frank was sick of it. Just as in summer people said, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” until you wanted to scream, in the winter they said, “It’s not the cold, it’s the wind.” So tedious to hear over and over! But Andy’s default mode was repetition of the obvious, so this new mantra was unavoidable.
And certainly it was true. On windless nights Frank snowshoed through the forest completely removed from the cold; his exertion warmed him, and his heat was trapped in his layers of clothing, under jacket and windpants. The only problem was not to break a sweat. He might as well have been in a spacesuit.
But in a wind everything changed. How big the world became, yes, but how cold too! His outer layer was as windproofed as you could get, but the wind still rattled through it and sucked at every move he made. On the very worst nights, if he wanted to walk into the wind he had to turn his back to it and crab backwards to keep his face from frostbite. During the days he had taken to wearing sunglasses with a nosepiece, because with his nose numb all the time he couldn’t be sure if it was getting frostbitten or not. More than once it had been white in the mirror when he got back in his van. The nosepiece helped with that, as well as giving him a medieval look, like a burgher out of Brueghel. Icicles of snot would hang from the tip of it at the end of a walk, but his nose would stay warm.
Fine for his poor nose, but then he discovered there were other protrusions that also needed extra protection; he finished one long tramp on a windy Saturday afternoon, stopped in the forest to pee, and discovered to his dismay that his penis was as numb as his nose! Numb with cold, meaning, oh my . . . yes; it was thawing out in his hand, as painful a needling effect as he had ever felt, a burning agony lasting some ten minutes. He cried and his nose ran and it all froze on his face. An unusual demonstration of the density of nerve endings in that area, as in that old illustration of the human body in which the parts were sized in proportion to how many nerves they had, making a nightmare figure with giant mouth, hands, and genitalia.
The lunch runners already knew all about this problem. Penile frostbite was a serious concern, and extra precautions simply had to be taken; at the least, a sock or glove jammed into one’s shorts, but also windproof nylon shorts, longer