Fear of Cold

You are reduced to a crawling thing on the margin of a disintegrating world. Nothing will so quickly isolate a man.

Based on the poem by Robert W. Service

SOURCES:
Books:
To Build a Fire (Jack London, 1908)
Alone (Richard Byrd, 1938)
The Stranger in the Woods (Michael Finkel, 2017)
On the Banks of Plum Creek (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1937)
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 2014)
The Long Winter (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1940)
Mountains of the Mind (Robert Macfarlane, 2003)
The Shining (Stephen King, 1977)
Who Goes There? (John W. Campbell, 1938)

Longform Articles:

Movies and TV: To Build A Fire (David Cobham, 1969) The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1977), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho, 2013), The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), Little House on the Prairie (Episode 22, 1975)

Games: The Long Dark (2014), Frostpunk (2018), Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)

Music (chronologically): Theme for The Long Dark (The Long Dark), Un Dia En Granada (Vendla), Watery Grave (Carrion), Helix Bell (Christophe Gorman), One Must Go (Alec Slayne), Doubt (The Long Dark), Freezing Cold (Breath of the Wild), Silent Heaven (Silent Hill 2), Martian Law (Jon Bjork), Ennui (Cody High), Cold New Dawn & The Darkest of Days (Frostpunk), There’s Something I Have to Say (The Long Dark), Canonical Aside (Dead Space 2), A Cold Wind (Savvun), The Cremation of Sam McGee (Seth Boyer)

Additional footage from Getty Images
Additional music and sound effects from Epidemic Sound

Description from “Alone” by Richard Byrd

[Grauzinger]

The cold story that has most stuck with me is probably "The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Andersen. It is about a girl freezing to death while hallucinating from her matches' fumes which she lights to stay warm.
It's utterly terrifying.

[kgblagden]

I remember reading "To Build a Fire" in highschool english. I'm surprised you didn't mention that the dog was also characterized in the book as being more aware then the man was as to what was happening and how to survive, even being aware of the man's plan to kill it, sensing his violent intent. The dog survives in the end where as his arrogant owner, lacking any primal survival instinct, perishes.

[AaronLockman]

Jacob: “True frigophobia, or cryophobia, fear of the cold, is relatively rare.”
Also Jacob: LET’S FIX THAT

[shooterDisease]

I used to love the cold…until I actually had to work outside during winter. And all that talk of the cold sneaking up on you is right.

Hot weather is instantly uncomfortable the moment you open the door. But with the cold if you layer up enough you feel like you can take on Lady Winter herself.

Until some hours pass and you realize it hurts to move your fingers under your gloves and there’s an uncontrollable shiver in your chest that thumps like a second heartbeat.

I still like the cold but it’s kinda like getting hurt by a friend. You never forget it.

[wzbwtry]

I’m an astrophysicist that works with instruments cooled to around one kelvin, and it absolutely blew my mind when you mentioned that being unique in the context of the universe. You’re completely right, but those temperatures have become so mundane to me that I forget how wild they are. At work, heat is just an annoyance that interferes with measurements - we call it thermal noise.

[AchicoXion]

“He feels his nose begin to freeze, although this doesn’t bother him too much.”
A professor last year explained me that the brain doesn’t register the same pain/cold/hot from your skin after a while that you’ve been feeling it. The brain almost “filter” it because it isn’t something that you can apparently avoid and the body already told you that you’re in danger. She even told the class that she almost lost her nose once because she didn’t cover it in her scarf and hat and etc. while in a very cold place (maybe Siberia…?) and she didn’t even realise it until she got into an house and someone told her that the nose was getting black- she was laughing and we were horrified.

[silentsong]

when i was a kid, i was obsessed with the titanic (and i admittedly still am), and one of the most terrifying aspects of its sinking to me was the absolute hopelessness of the people in the water. it was so agonizingly cold, and every single person who froze to death that night knew that they would succumb to it. they listened as the screams around them grew fewer and far between. their last moments were spent surrounded by others but at the same time so isolated, with nothing that could save them from a slow, excruciating death.

[MattSRippeR]

"Cold itself, in terms of physics, is defined by absence".

This makes cold somehow...Poetic. Like something tragic, but also beautiful, in a very special way. It's like...The quiet, the loneliness, the silence...The stilness. Almost like the real concept of "Nothing", but yet still, there is something.

Just found this channel today and it's just incredible and beautiful.
Thanks.

[Hlast]

I've often thought of a line from Richard Adams' "Watership Down, " during the winter. Adams says, to paraphrase, that many people who claim to enjoy winter are wrong. What they enjoy is the feeling of being protected against it. I've often thought about that line when walking around on days where every inhaled breath freezes the hairs inside my nose. There is a great satisfaction in staring the cold in the face, feeling its fingertips reach out, and turning back to a well heated home. It's important to remember how easy it is for that final step to fail.

[ReelRai]

"The monster might kill them, but the cold will"

What a good line.

[TheRandalHandle]

I'm glad you mentioned how cold doesn't really have to be that cold in a place that's typically warm. My brother hiked the PCT and he said that the coldest he ever felt was in the Mojave desert. The temperature went from around 100 during the day down to about 40 something at night. I don't think the human body is well equipped to make adjustments to ambient temperatures like that.

[GigaChdad]

I can vividly remember the day in 03 when my 3rd grade teacher told us we were going to read the short story “to build a fire” and a few of us including me took turns reading some paragraphs and I vividly remember how after we finished the story, I was absolutely infatuated and obsessed with this story. It never scared me, I just absolutely loved it the second I’ve heard it. The story about a man trekking through the Yukon Territory with his dog through the day and night and as my little 3rd grade mine read it, I could just picture the beautiful Yukon/ Alaskan wilderness with snow covering the ground and trees and the lakes he comes across and the mountains. It was man vs wild and to this day, still my all time absolute favorite story. Jack London has made banger after banger.

[hailonyourparade]

Fun fact: in Alaska where I grew up, fire-building and outdoor survival is a required part of the school curriculum. We're taught "To Build A Fire" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" in schools when we're around 10-11, partly as literature but mostly as survival ed. I remember going through it in class, identifying with the teacher signs of hypothermia, considering where the speaker made mistakes, etc. Eventually it ends with a full semester-long unit on "not dying when you go outside" that caps off with a weekend-long spring trip to the mountains where we're tested on survival skills, with a second trip in 8th grade during the winter that includes ice fishing and starting our own winter fires for real. If the cold is a big part of your life, you treat it with respect...or you die.

If you haven't watched it, I recommed the first season of *The Terror* (AMC). It's based on a real doomed polar expedition in the 1840s--back when a trip to the Arctic felt like a trip to Mars. Stylistically/thematically it's close cousins with The Thing: there's a monster, but what really dooms the men is the cold and lack of resources.

[UncleDon]

I remember seeing a video a long time ago about a guy who falls to his death from the side of a cliff because he was goofing off. Someone in the comments said something that has stuck with me ever since then: "If you make a mistake, your friends will forgive you, the church will forgive you, your family will forgive you. But nature never forgives."

[asantaimeep]

Exposure, the war poem is the one that stuck with me.

I am autistic, and in my case this comes with a drastically decreased sensitivity to several sensations, particularly pain, hunger and cold, and as a result of this I have experienced hypothermia and frostbite more than most people have had to nowadays- simply due to the fact that I do not notice when things are bad enough that countermeasures must be taken.

As a child I did so much dumb shit because I didn't realise it was dangerous; I would go swimming in the Atlantic ocean fully clothed with no towel nor change of clothing nor even a jumper, and some of my fondest memories are from those times splashing around when it was too cold for anyone else to risk it, the solitude of swimming and exploring alone appealed greatly to me, likely also due in part to that same mental difference.

The number of times I was declared potentially lost at sea, searched out by the authorities in a desperate attempt to save me from my own stupidity is absurd, though through no fault of my poor parents who tried their absolute level best to keep me from running off (I was a leash child, unsurprisingly). The paramedics knew me by name, and had my parents contacts readily available, and the local police weren't fond of me to put it lightly.

The most prominent thing I associate with the cold is that dangerously blissful point in which the discomfort seeps away and it become so easy to slip into the soft, liquid heat you now believe is your reality. It feels like a warm bath after a chilly day, like a hot water bottle on a winter's night only all-encompassing, and it's even easier to succumb to once your hesd stops working. You feel dizzy, and warm, and the closest comparison for me is being pleasantly drunk surrounded by good company. It's deceptive, and you don't realise the danger until you're falling over, passing in and out of consciousness and incapable of basic problem solving. You can no longer accurately answer 2+2, you can't remember what a noun is. It's insidious, and until you realise how far you've slipped you don't even feel afraid. Once you do, it is _terrifying._

[beaksters]

A lot of people say they think a painful death is the worst, but honestly since a young age i’ve personally believed a long slow and gradual death is the worst, as with those you’re forced to not only stare your own mortality in the eye but it forces you to accept your fate regardless of if you want to go or not.

[samuelrey]

“The cold will find the weakness in infrastructure”

Very accurate.

[quincymc]

The song that plays while the credits roll is called The Cremation Of Sam McGee, a song/poem by a Canadian author. I read it in school years ago, but it sticks with me to this day.
A man and his friend are travelling through the Yukon, searching for gold. It becomes very quickly apparent that Sam isn’t going to make the journey, before he’s even begun to die. He’s a Southerner, and the cold bothers him more than anything, hence him saying he’d ‘rather live in Hell’. That part really stuck with me. He was doomed from the start, resigning himself to die before there was even a major threat to his life.
On his death bed he asks to be cremated, so the whole joke is he’s died in one of the coldest places on earth and just wants to be warm again.
And then. This part terrified me to my very core. To fulfill the promise, the main character *drags his frozen dead body for days* all the way to a shipwreck with a furnace so he can be cremated. He almost died on his own, just to fulfill a promise to his dead friend.

[timothyhume]

Excellent piece of work. Thank you. I lived in the Yukon wilderness for many years and once experienced 70 below. Have had frostbitten toes and have had to strike the match by holding it between my teeth as my hands would not work. Almost didn't survive after falling through the ice. But I did and I still love the winter and I still hike solo in the winter even though I am 75. Cold will kill you but love will keep you. Cheers.

[eko]

I don't necessarily have a fear of the cold, but when I was a child, my best friend sang me a song about two children who got lost in a frozen forest and died because their parents couldn't find them. It freaked me the hell out and every winter I would just stare outside at the snow and imagine what it would be like to be lost and unable to get help. Definitely made me respect the weather a little more deep down.