It was a Sunday 33 years ago almost to the day, and we spent all of it at the Harbor Bar, a dozen bachelors, cheechakoes, alcoholics and the like, sipping drinks, telling stories and shooting pool. No one got drunk but that wasn’t the point. We were there sponging up heat from Jack Martin’s furnace.
The thermometer on the bank read something below zero, as it had for more than a week, dropping as low as -11 F. at night. The members of our sad group were running out of heat or firewood or favors from friends or girlfriends.
It was Alaska’s coldest cold snap in decades and as nothing has matched it since so let’s call it the coldest cold snap in the past 50 years.
Barrow was 50 below and would set 8 days of new low-temperature records. Fairbanks, 51 below. Anchorage was 30 below. The 400 poor souls living on the Kuskokwim River at McGrath were leading the state in misery. In 10 days, the bush village never warmed above 57 below and it chilled to minus 75, just 5 degrees shy of Alaska’s all-time record cold. A radio news story said only one truck was still running in McGrath – and they weren’t turning it off.
Deep cold arrives like an intruder and bully, forcing its way into your coat, your house, your bed, stealing comfort. I started wearing gloves beneath my mittens. To keep my 1975 International Scout running, I brought its battery in next to the woodstove at night. Like others, I cut my losses by sealing off the loft of my tiny cabin, limiting my living space to a single room. My wet firewood could add 50 degrees to the place, typically enough, but not when the addition starts at 10 below.
Town wasn’t much better. Flights were cancelled. The Lutak sawmill shut down because its logs became like glass, shattering under the blade. Besides, a frozen bilge pump sunk the mill’s tugboat. Haisler’s Hardware sold out of space heaters and stores were running low on food because the big chill blocked two barge sailings.
The state ferry – a heroic outfit at the time – stepped in to deliver our groceries.
Officially, two high-pressure systems had collided and one was lying atop the other, creating a Goliath. On Jan. 31, the barometer in Northway hit 31.85 inches, the highest its ever reached in North America, a record topped only twice in the world, in Siberia.
To help warm us up, Mike Sica, the brilliant Skagway reporter for KHNS, phoned Mike Lane, the public radio reporter in McGrath. Sica told Lane that Lynn Canal was suffering, that people here couldn’t cope with temperatures of 10 below. To which Lane chuckled and said something about breaking out lawn chairs and barbecues next time he felt anything so tropical.
Eventually, the cold front pushed south, making February of 1989 the coldest ever in the Lower 48. In Valentine, Nebraska, the temperature dropped 70 degrees in 12 hours, including a whopping 33 degrees in a single hour.
What I remember most is that long day at the Harbor Bar killing time, just trying to outlast the weather. Jack Martin was a poker player rumored to have won the joint in a card game. He knew the score, including why we were there and that our slow business wouldn’t cover his heating bill.
He closed up around 10 p.m., hollering, “Get out of here. Go home and burn your furniture.”
Which it turns out, is an old, last-ditch trick for staying warm in the North. Furniture wood is bone dry and burns hot.
Some years later, driving to Whitehorse on another frigid February night, I slammed on the brakes near Champagne to avoid chunks of something scattered all over the road. It seemed that a truck or trailer had overturned, spilling a load of dry, Canadian firewood.
To my girlfriend’s amazement, I started loading it into the back of my pickup. It was late and pitch black and she asked if the effort was really necessary. “Yes,” I told her. “It is.”