Let’s call it research…

I started looking for books on survival in extreme cold and/or the art of sled dogging. I am calling it research because I wrote a novel last year that was set in a very cold climate and I am sure, despite having grown up in the frigid upper peninsula of Michigan, I have made a few mistakes that will cause experts to rupture their frostbitten anatomical bits in outrage at my ignorance. So after some searching, I found “Ten thousand Miles with a Dog Sled” written by Hudson Stock in 1914 about both survival and sled dogs. It has proven interesting so far, but a bit hard to follow with all the side notes.

Already I have learned that the extreme temperatures I had proposed for my novel would make the journey impossible because 1) coal oil freezes at 40 below, 2) acetylene requires water, which also freezes and 3) Batteries, which have not been invented yet in my story world, also freeze. The only thing that seems to work in extreme cold is actual fire and wood. Of course my character is traveling across a barren, treeless windswept snowy wasteland, where there is nothing to burn. I guess there will be some rewriting involved here.

            The author is very good about describing the various methods of traveling over treacherous terrain, which has been interesting and informative, but he glossed over the terrain that was most like the one in my story. I guess this means I wrote it correctly in that there isn’t much to tell about the difficulties. I may go back and add some more obstacles just for fun though, like rivers bursting through the ice like a geyser from the pressure building up below the frozen surface. Sounds fun doesn’t it!

Also a few quotes struck me as amusing so I thought I would share them here since we can assume that he was writing these quotes in about 1912 and so they were written 100yrs ago.

“The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished” (His description of the treatment of Alaskan natives reminds me of modern day treatment of the indigenous people of the Rainforest. Over a century later and we still haven't learned any better.)

“The phonograph is becoming a powerful agency for disseminating a knowledge of English among the natives throughout Alaska, and one wishes that it were put to better use than the reproduction of silly and often vulgar monologue and dialogue and trashy ragtime music.” (I wonder how he would feel about reality TV and Jersey Shore.)