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How Cold Is It? Ask Sam McGee How cold is it? Friends from Fargo, N.D., think our bone-shivering Georgia cold is like a balmy afternoon back home. We, however, are huddled by space heaters, trying to thaw out. We’ve become wearers of thermal undies, experienced in layering clothes to capture body heat. Our TV weather persons have their own technical nomenclature: “Snow event.” “Wintry mix.” “Flurry activity.” How cold is it? Yes, I know it sounds like a vaudevillian set-up, and the answers run the gamut from the Bible to Robert Service to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, just to pick a few. In the book of Genesis, we are warned, “There will always be cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” No comfort there for icy bones. John Keats wrote: “St. Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald.” But how cold is it, really? Hard to tell. I don’t believe we got above freezing the day I wrote this, and if today is balmy, there will be a certain loss of atmosphere in my words, So we’ll go for the chuckle. (Most of these are from a brief Google search.) How cold is it? It’s so cold, Levi Strauss started manufacturing electric jeans! It’s so cold, words are frozen in the air. If you wanted to hear what someone said, you had to grab a handful of sentences and take them in by the fire. It’s so cold our neighbors pulled everything out of the freezer and huddled inside it to warm up. Groan…. How cold is it? You know it’s cold when firefighters can’t persuade people to get out of their houses when they catch fire! Dave, who hates cold weather more than I do, identifies, a little, with Sam McGee, and likes Robert Service’s poem about a prospector who loathes the cold and fears he would die on the Dawson Trail, his body interred in an icy grave. Here’s most of the Ballad of Sam McGee: “Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. He begged his partner to take a solemn oath to cremate his body when he checked in, and his partner agreed, just to comfort the exhausted man. “Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan: No, of course, you can’t deny the plea of a dying man, so the promise was made and the two were on the trail once more. Almost delirious himself, the driver had to listen to the ravings of Sam McGee, his longing for his Tennessee home, until he fell silent and was dead. The horror of driving through the black Arctic night with a corpse aboard, its weight still borne by the huskies, nearly unhinged the prospector, but he stayed true to his vow. After several days driving, he came to Lac LeBarge, where a derelict ship had for ages been lodged in the ice, and it struck him: This could be Sam McGee’s crematorium. He pulled up planks from the cabin floor, picked up some coals, and soon he had a roaring fire – into which he shoved the stiff-frozen body of his comrade. It was a horrifying act, but he had fulfilled his promise. The wind and the dogs were howling, so he walked away a bit, unable to bear the sizzling sounds from the ruined ship. “I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear; “And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; 
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