Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [45]
If it was below zero, then you were in the arctic. You found yourself on the cold hill’s side, in a dreamscape as profound as any imaginable. One recalled in the body itself that the million-year ballooning of the brain, the final expansion with its burst into language and art and culture, had occurred in the depths of an ice age, when it had been like this all the time. No wonder the mind lit up like a fuse in such air!
And so Frank got out his snowshoes and gaiters and ski poles, and drove over to Rock Creek Park and went out for hikes, just as he had the winter before. And though this year there was not that sense of discovery in the activity, it was certainly just as cold, or almost. Wind barreling down the great ravine from the north—the icy new rip in the canyon, looking from its rim just as blasted by the great flood as the day the waters had receded.
The park was emptier this year, however. Or maybe it was just that there was no one at Site 21. But many of the other sites were empty as well. Maybe it was just that during weeks this cold, people simply found shelter. That had happened the previous winter as well. In theory one could sleep out in temperatures like this, if one had the right gear and the right expertise, but it took a great deal of time and energy to accomplish, and would still be somewhat dangerous; it would have to become one’s main activity. And no doubt some people were doing it; but most had found refuge in the coffee shops by day and the shelters and feral houses by night, waiting out the coldest part of the winter indoors. As Frank had done, when he had been taken in by the Khembalis.
Leaving, in these most frigid days, the animals. He saw the aurochs once; and a Canada lynx (I call it the Concord lynx, Thoreau said), as still as a statue of itself; and four or five foxes in their winter white. And a moose, a porcupine, coyote, and scads of white-tailed deer; also rabbits. These last two were the obvious food species for what predators there were. Most of the exotic ferals were gone, either recaptured or dead. Although once he spotted what he thought was a snow leopard; and people said the jaguar was still at large.
As were the frisbee guys. One Saturday Frank heard them before he saw them—hoots over a rise to the north—Spencer’s distinctive yowl, which meant a long putt had gone in. Cheered by the sound, Frank poled around the point in the ravine wall, snowshoes sinking deep in the drifts there, and suddenly there they were, running on little plastic showshoes, without poles, and throwing red, pink, and orange frisbees, which blazed through the air like beacons from another universe.
“Hi guys!” Frank called.
“Frank!” they cried. “Come on!”
“You bet,” Frank said. He left his poles and daypack under a tree at Site 18, and borrowed one of Robert’s disks.
Off they went. Quickly it became clear to Frank that when the snow was as hard as it was, running on snowshoes was about as efficient as walking on them. One tended to leap out of each step before the snowshoe had sunk all the way in, thus floating a bit higher than otherwise.
Then he threw a drive straight into a tree trunk, and broke the disk in half. Robert just laughed, and Spencer tossed him a spare. The guys did not over-value any individual disk. They were like golf balls, made to be lost.
Work as hard as they did, and you would sweat—just barely—after which, when you stopped, sweat would chill you. As soon as they were done, therefore, Frank found out when they thought they would play snow golf again, then bid farewell and hustled away, back to his daypack and poles. A steady hike then, to warm back up: plunging poles in to pull him uphill, to brace him downhill; little glissades, tricky traverses, yeoman ups; quickly he was warm again and feeling strong and somehow full, the joy of the frisbee buzzing through the rest of the afternoon. The joy of the hunt and the run and the cold.
He walked by his tree, looked up at it longingly. He wanted to move back out there. But