Fifty Degrees Below

  Another fire started in Georgetown, which then lost power, and it also had frozen water mains. Frank drove down there, as his van kept starting for him, and he served as a taxi for a couple of hours, shuttling people from frigid houses and apartments onto the Georgetown University campus, where generators were keeping most of the buildings warm. George Washington University Hospital was also working on generators, and for a while it was clear that taxiing people was the best thing Frank could do to help; but then the streets began to jam up with traffic, amazingly—it was still twenty below and yet stop-and-go had returned to Foggy Bottom. So he parked in Georgetown again and joined a group of volunteers going door-to-door in the outage area, making sure everyone was out who wanted to be out.

  The residential streets of Georgetown were a surprise to Frank. He had never walked around, or even driven in, this part of town, and it was like being transported to some quaint and comfortable old quarter of a northern European town. Colorful, neat, handmade, human scale—the streets were like what Main Street in Disneyland had always hoped to suggest, much more real of course, but still, toylike. Like the village in a snow-filled paperweight. He would have to return and check it out under more normal circumstances.

  The sky overhead was unlike that in any paperweight, dark with smoke that streamed in fat bands all across the sky. A huge population lived hidden in the forest around the city, and nearly every single fireplace must have had a blaze in it; and a certain percentage had gone wrong and burned down their houses and added their greater smokes to the chimney fires, so that now the sky was streaked with black, and flakes of ash drifted down, lighter than snowflakes. Frank’s nose kept him from smelling the smoke, but he could taste it as grit on his tongue, a little acrid. He wondered if he would ever be able to smell again.

  A fire truck wailed down Wisconsin, and the firemen in it jumped out and ran a pump and hose line down to the Potomac. It took some awkward work with chainsaws to break through the ice covering the river, which was now a big white sheet from bank to bank. A crowd gathered to watch and cheer, their breath frosting over them in a small cloud. Sputter and roar of a big Honda generator powering up, downshift as the pump motor was engaged, a moment of suspense while nothing happened; then the flattened hose bulked like a snake swallowing a mouse, and water shot out of the big nozzle held by two firemen, who quickly secured it to a stand and aimed the white flow at the leading edge of their blaze. The crowd cheered again. Spray flying upward from the jet of water had time to freeze in the air, flocking the nearby rooftops with the kind of snow one saw at ski resorts. A tall black man grinned hugely at Frank: “They froze that fire.”

  Late in the day Frank went back down to the Potomac to walk out on the ice. Scores of people had had the same idea. It had happened the same way in London two weeks before, and all over the world people had seen images of the grand festival the Londoners had spontaneously thrown, celebrating the freeze in the Elizabethan style. Now on the Potomac people were mostly standing around or skiing, playing football or soccer ad hoc versions of curling. One or two wore ice skates and glided through the crowd, but most were slipping around in boots or their ordinary shoes. A hotdog-cart man was busy selling out his entire stock. The ice on the river was usually white but here and there was as clear as glass, the moving black water visible below. It was freaky at first to walk on these clear sections, but even big groups and giant leaps into the air did not cause a shudder in the ice, which looked from the occasional hole chopped in it to be about two foot thick, maybe more.

  When sunset slanted redly across the Potomac the light struck Frank like another vision out of Brueghel. One of his Flemish winter canal scenes, except most of the Washington, D.C., population was black. Out here on the river you could finally see that in a way that Northwest and Arlington never revealed. It was like Carnavale on ice, the celebrants improvising clothing that was warm enough to keep them out there, which then became costumes too. A giant steel drum band added to the Caribbean flavor. Snowfights and slip-and-slides, break dancing and curling that was more like bowling, touch football, tackle football, it all was happening out there between Virginia and the District, on this sudden new terrain. In the fading light the whole world took on a smoky red cast, the river ice both white and red, and the contrast between the snow and the dark faces finally diminished to the point where Frank could see people properly. It seemed to him to be an extraordinarily beautiful populace, every race and ethnicity on Earth represented—the many black faces vivid and handsome, cheerful to the point of euphoria, laughing as they took in the scene—the white folk flushed as red as the sunset snow, dressed like L.L. Bean or gypsies or Russians or anything they had at hand—all partying together on the frozen Potomac, until with the dark it got too cold to stay out any longer.

  The fires burned all night and into the next day, but on the other hand, the temperatures never dropped lower than ten below. Some in the coffee shops next morning thought all the smoke had created a smudge pot effect, the ultimate urban heat-island insulator; but even out in the country the temperatures had not dropped as low as they had gotten the night before. The low had been a freak thing, an all-time record for the city, and even the Post the next morning had a headline like a London tabloid: FIFTY DEGREES BELOW.

  Though it never got that cold again in the days that followed, it always remained well below zero, keeping the city somewhat in crisis mode. First the great flood, now the great freeze, with widespread fires as well—what next? “There’s an excellent chance of drought next summer,” Kenzo cackled when Frank talked to him on the phone. “We could hit for the cycle. And it’s going to get windy tomorrow.”

  NSF stayed closed, along with the rest of the federal government. Frank called Diane every morning, and once when he lamented the lost work time she said “Don’t you worry about that, I’m working Congress every day, I take them out until they look like they are frostbit, and every one of them will vote for what we ask next time. It couldn’t be better.”

  So Frank would wish her good luck, and spend that day cruising up and down Connecticut, hiking into the park, and helping out wherever he could, mostly with FOG work. Repair a hot box, keep them supplied with food, help lift out a tranquilized camel; always keeping an eye out for Chessman or the bros. Down to Dupont Circle, up to Adams Morgan, crossing the frozen creekbed to get to Georgia Avenue, marveling at the stream’s white arabesques, the frolic architecture of ice and snow.

  On the third night of the snap he ran into the bros, hunkered in a concrete embayment surrounding a Dupont Metro station grating. They had walled off the indentation from the sidewalk with refrigerator boxes, and cantilevered a roof of flattened boxes as well. The interior was even frosting up like an old refrigerator.

  “Come on you guys,” Frank said. “You should get to one of the shelters, the wind is supposed to hit soon. This is serious.”

  “It’s always been serious, Bleeder.”

  “Hey who’s winning! Where’s that barrel of brandy?”

  “The UDC gym is open as a shelter.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “This is warmer here.”

  “Yeah yeah. Whatever.”

  He went up into the UDC shelter himself, and spent an hour or two walking down the rows of cots, handing out paper cups of hot chocolate to the kids. The homeless or the heatless, it was hard to tell the difference in here. He ran across the knitting woman, sitting on her cot knitting away, and greeted her with pleasure. He sat and they talked for a while.

  “Why won’t the guys come in?”

  “They’re stubborn. What about you, have you come in?”

  “Well, no. But I don’t need to.”

  She smiled her gap-toothed smile. “You’re all the same.”

  “Hey what about Chessman? Do you know what happened to him?”

  “I don’t. He just stopped showing up. It don’t mean nothing. I think he probably moved.”

  “I hope.”

  She knitted on imp
erturbably. She had knitted herself pale yellow gloves that left her fingertips free, poking out of the fabric like tree roots. “He lived over in Northeast somewhere. His people may have moved.”

  “You don’t think something bad happened to him?”

  She shook her head, counting under her breath. “I don’t think so. I’ve been living out for twelve years. Hardly anything bad ever happens. It’s not so much dangerous as it is unhealthy.”

  “I suppose so. Don’t you want a place?”

  “Sure. But, you know. Wherever you are is a place.”

  “If you see Chessman will you tell me?”

  “Sure I will. I was gonna do that anyway. I’m curious myself.”

  Frank wandered on up Connecticut, looking into the coffee shops and student cafés. He was not reassured by the woman’s words. Thinking about it, he started making calls to people whose whereabouts he did know. The Quiblers were fine, Charlie and Anna working from home, school cancelled, fire in the fireplace. Anna noted that hoarding had begun at the grocery stores and that this was a breakdown in social trust that could be very debilitating to normal supply dynamics. It was starting to happen at gas stations already, lines to tank up, people freezing as they waited, all on their cell phones out stamping their feet. Frank promised to drop by and say hi. Same with the Khembalis, who again offered him a place to stay, despite the crowd. He promised to drop by.

  He gave Spencer a call, and the shaman picked up after the first ring. “Hello?”

  “Hey why no frisbee, what the hell?”

  Spencer laughed appreciatively. “We tried, believe me! But if the disks hit a tree they shatter! We broke a whole bunch of them Monday, although we did establish the low-temperature record, of course. Maybe we should try again.”

  “That would be fun. Where are you guys staying, are you keeping warm?”

  “Oh yeah, we’re squatting around like always, it’s fine. There’s a place on McKinley just off Nebraska that’s got good insulation and a big fireplace, you should join us, have a meal.”

  “Still doing the fregan thing?”

  “Sure, it works even better in this cold, the dumpsters are like big freezers.”

  “Well maybe I’ll just look for you in the park.”

  “Ha ha ha, you chicken. We’ll give you a call next time we go out, give me your cell phone number again.”

  Then it was back on the street.

  The cold snap had been going on for so long that it had somehow stabilized. Search and rescue had been turned over to the professionals, and Frank didn’t quite know what to do. He could go back in the park, he could drive into the office and do some work, he could go to Optimodal and take a hot shower . . . he stopped himself from thinking about plans. There was a lot to do still in Northwest, surely.

  And just as he thought that he saw Cutter, out in the street working on a tree that had split and fallen across three of the four lanes. Frank joined him and offered help that Cutter gladly accepted. As they worked Cutter said that a column of water had evidently filled a crack in the trunk, then frozen and split the tree apart. Frank picked up cut branches and carried them to the pile they had established on the sidewalk. Cutter thanked him without taking an eye off his work. “You seen the park guys?”

  “Yeah I ran into them, they appear to be okay.”

  Cutter shook his head. “They oughta get a place.”

  “No lie. You’ve got a lot of new work like this, I take it?”

  “Oh lordy! We should cut down every tree in this city. They all gonna fall on something they not s’pose to.”

  “I’m sure. When it’s this cold, will it kill them?”

  “Not necessarily. Not except they split open like this.”

  “So how do you choose which ones to work on?”

  “I drive till I see one in the street.”

  “Ha. Is it okay if I help you some more?”

  “Of course.”

  It was good work, absorbing and warm. Dodge around the work and the cars, never stop moving, get the wood off the street. The chainsaw was loud. It took four people lifting together to get the biggest section of trunk over into the gutter.

  Frank stayed with them through the rest of that afternoon. The days were getting a little longer. After a while he felt comfortable enough to say, “You guys shouldn’t wear cotton against the skin, it’s the worst possible stuff for cold.”

  “What, are you a vapor barrier man? I hate that shit.”

  They were all black. They lived over in Northeast but had worked mostly Northwest when they had worked for City Parks. One of them went on about being from Africa and not capable of handling this kind of cold.

  “We’re all from Africa,” Frank said.

  “Very true but your people obviously left there before mine did. Your people look to have gone directly to the North Pole.”

  “I do like the cold,” Frank admitted.

  “Like to die in it.”

  That night Frank slept in his van, and rejoined Cutter’s tree crew for the morning, after a dawn walk up and down the park. Deer nibbled unhappily among the snowdrifts; the rest of the animals stuck near the hot boxes. The gibbons looked more and more unhappy, but Nancy said an attempt to capture them had only caused them to swing away through the trees, hooting angrily. The zoo zoologists were thinking of trying to dart them with tranquilizers.

  The air temperature remained well below zero, but now there was an almost full load of traffic back on the streets, and a great number of trees and branches to be cleared. More people walked the sidewalks, some bundled up like the Michelin Man. The tree crew put out orange plastic stripping to keep crowds away from their work, especially when things were falling. Frank carried wood. No way did he want to go up in a tree and end up like poor Byron, hollering “My leg my leg. . . .” Chop wood, carry water; chop water, carry wood.

  When they took a break for lunch he left them and walked down to see how people were doing in the UDC shelter, and at the Dupont Metro vent. Then back up to the zoo, where many people from FOG and FONZ were still working to capture the ferals. In the zoo enclosures they were reduced to supplementing the regular heating system with weird combinations of battery-powered space heaters to try to keep the enclosures a bit warmer. The animals looked miserable anyway, and quite a few had died.

  It was such a busy week that Frank almost forgot when Friday rolled around, until that morning, when it became all he thought about. He ate Friday evening at the Rio Grande, then stood stamping his feet and blowing into his gloved hands at his pay phone in Bethesda.

  But no call; and when it was ten after nine, he called Caroline’s number, and let it ring and ring, with never an answer.

  What did that mean?

  He would find out next Friday, at best. So it seemed. Suddenly their system looked very inadequate. He wanted to talk to her!

  Nothing to be done. He tried one last time, listened to the ring. No answer. He had to do something else. He could go to work, or he could . . . no. Just leap. Deflated or not, indecisive or not.

  Walking back to his van, he called Diane on his cell phone, as he had every day of the cold snap. She always answered, and her cheery voice held no huge aura of meaning or possibility. She considered that it had been a very good week for the cause. “Everybody knows now that the problem is real. This isn’t like the flood; this could happen three or four times every winter. Abrupt climate change is real, no one can deny it, and it’s a big problem. Things are a mess! So, come on in as soon as they call off the shutdown. There are things we can do.”

  “Oh I will,” Frank promised.

  But the cold snap went on. The jet stream was running straight south from Hudson Bay. The wind strengthened, and added to every already-existing problem—fire, frostbite, trees down, power lines down. It began to seem like street work and polar emergency services were what he had always done. Get up in the frigid van and drive to get warm. Hike out to the tree house, climb the trunk to pull Miss Piggy up a ways
and tack her there on a piton; downclimb, most awkwardly. Scrounge, like a real homeless person, for cold-weather clothing he could give away at the UDC shelter. His own gear at fullest deployment was more than adequate: an old knit hat, a windbreaker shell with a hood, an old Nike ACG (All Conditions Gear, well maybe), a windstopped fleece jacket made of DuPont’s Drylete material, very warm stuff; capilene long underwear and long-sleeved shirt, Insport briefs that had a windstop panel in front, which would also hold a mitten to give his privates extra protection, until the rabbit fur arrived; then some bike shorts with the padding ripped out, some fleece knickerbockers, and then Koch pants, which covered the feet and went up to the waist, though they should have gone higher; Frank couldn’t imagine what Koch had been thinking. Then his low-topped Salomon walking boots and Thorlo synthetic socks, seamless and perfect; he even started putting one of them down the front of his pants instead of a mitten. Very rabbit-fur–like. And low-topped gaiters to keep the snow out of his boots, stylish, like black spats. Over all that, on windy days, a jacket that went down to the thighs, and covered the hands and stuck out far beyond the face; a baseball hat to keep snow off the face, help with sun in eyes. Ski gloves, snowshoes, and ski poles.

  Frank could not be more set; he was probably the best-dressed man in the city. He was the Alpine man, come back to life! And his goal, Johnny Appletentlike, was to get everybody else living out-of-doors into gear that was at least adequate. Into shelters at night if the cold was too much. It was no easy task, because it called not only for acquisition of gear that was disappearing fast from all the thrift shops (though people didn’t recognize wool, apparently), but the money to fund it. He used a grant from the zoo’s feral fund, among other things, considering that with that name it was not even a case of reprogrammed funds. But the distribution of the gear could be tricky. No one liked gratitude, but many people were cold enough to take what he gave them. Cotton and cardboard were no longer hacking it. The stubborn ones were likely to die. The newspapers reported that a few hundred already had. Frank could scarcely believe some of the stories in the Post about the dumb things people had done and were still doing. They could be six inches from safety and not recognize it. It was as John Muir had said of the Donner Party; a perfectly fine winter base camp, botched by ineptitude. But they didn’t know. It was a technique, and if you didn’t have it you died. It wasn’t rocket science but it was mandatory.