234. “Ah, bitter chill it was!”

Le Château Frontenac (fairmont.com-frontenac-quebec)

It is an incontrovertible fact that if you are cold you will be unable to think of anything besides the fact that you are utterly miserable. (There is only one exception to this truth, but it does not bode well for your survival: If you are intoxicated with alcohol you may feel warmer, but in fact your core body temperature is lowered, making you even more likely to succumb to hypothermia.) I speak of this cold-induced misery from bitter experience, one that I have not forgotten though it happened nearly forty years ago.

It was early February, 1975, I had just moved into the Co-op House at university when a contingent of Co-opers announced that they were about to embark on a road trip up to Québec in Canada for the City’s annual Winter Carnival, or Mardi Gras in the snow. Eager to make friends, I asked to be counted in, and after hastily throwing a nightgown, toothbrush, and change of clothes into a bag, I pulled on my warmest jacket and squeezed into one of the two cars in our caravan up North. I was full of anticipation, since we left in the middle of the night, my favorite time to set out on an adventure, and I had never been to Québec City before. But there was one thing I had not anticipated, and by the time I began to be aware of the scope of the problem, we were well on our way, somewhere in the wilds of Maine.

The problem was the cold. Not just your ordinary kind of cold, the kind you can keep at bay with a woolly scarf and mittens, but the “bitter chill” of Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes—deep, penetrating, bone-chilling cold—aided by Arctic winds sculpting a frigid snowscape. I first began to realize what I had got myself into when, for a hundred miles or more, it seemed, there had been nothing to be seen to the right or to the left of us but endless banks of ice and snow. I realized that I was colder than I had ever been before, although already wearing every article of warm clothing that I owned, and wedged in a crowded car to boot. Listening to the weather forecast on the radio, someone reported that the temperatures were well into the negative numbers, without even counting the wind chill factor, and that still colder weather was on its way. My feet were already numb, like blocks of ice; what would happen when I had to go outside? Panic started to rise in me, and I wanted to cry out that I had changed my mind and needed to turn back. But we were already halfway there, and I seemed to be the only one in my predicament. Everyone else was wearing hooded down parkas, thermal gloves and socks, and insulated snow boots; somehow I had managed to get through four New England winters without owning any of these items.

Arriving in Québec we pulled up at Le Château Frontenac, an ultra-grand hotel that looked like a glittering palace, sparkling frostily, not only with lights, but also with ice-crystals. I couldn’t wait to get inside, where I envisioned blazing fires, hot toddies, and curtained four-poster beds piled high with sumptuous eiderdown comforters. My one goal was to dive deep into one of those beds and to remain there, drinking tea, for the duration. Unfortunately, that was not to be. My friends had assured me that we would all pool our resources and wouldn’t need much money at all, and I had taken them at their word. The plan was to muck in 7 or 8 to a room so as to save money on the hotel; but what I hadn’t realized was that the hotel allowed only two to a room—at most, three—and that the two in whose name the room was booked were to go in first, while the rest of us had to lurk in the shadows and sneak in surreptitiously, one at a time, without being noticed. Of course it was those fortunate documented two who got the bed, while the rest of us had to camp out on the floor. Since we were personae non grata, we had to skulk and slink about all weekend, and it goes without saying that there were to be no cozy evenings by a roaring fire, since we had to make ourselves scarce. In any case, there were no evenings indoors, because, as I soon learned to my horror, the entire demonic purpose of the Winter Carnival weekend was to spend as much time as possible out of doors.

In quick succession, we took an excursion on the St. Laurence River on the deck of an ice-breaking ferry, tobogganed down an impossibly steep ice chute adjacent to the hotel, and visited an exhibition of ice sculptures in a nearby park where, it seemed, it was obligatory to go down yet another ice slide, this time on our uncushioned (in my case, anyway) bottoms. And all this time I was utterly miserable, cold, and hungry, since it turned out that I had brought nowhere near the amount of money necessary to keep me in food and drink for the three days.

I soon learned how the locals kept themselves happy—for they all seemed to having no end of a good time throughout the festivities. First, men, women, and children alike were all wearing head-to-toe quilted body suits, hi-test versions of the all-in-ones that babies wear to bed in the winter, and insulated snow mitts and boots. I had never seen such outfits before, but they clearly did the job. Of course everyone looked like a cross between the Michelin Man and the Apollo-11 astronauts, but they didn’t care, they were warm. Second, and probably more importantly as it turned out, all the Michelin-moon-men and women were wearing gun belts fitted out with long plastic swords looking like the ones we used to play with as children. At frequent intervals they would unsheathe them, twist off the handles, tip their heads back, and raise them to their upturned mouths in an attitude that made them look like sword-swallowers at the circus. At first I was mystified, until it was pointed out to me that, with a nod and a wink, the Québec chamber of commerce was enjoying brisk sales of these swords, and also selling and levying a healthy tax on hard liquor. It turned out that those in the know purchased the hollow plastic swords at the beginning of the carnival, and kept them well-filled with alcohol, with which they kept themselves well-fortified. No wonder they were oblivious to the cold!

(photo: Reuters)

But though those copious quantities of liquor successfully simulated warmth in the denizens of the city, it didn’t do much for the warmth of our welcome. Upon reaching the top of the first ice slide, I hesitated in sheer terror for a few moments—a few moments too long, it seemed. The people behind me were impatient for their turn, and so I cast off—or more probably, allowed myself to be cast off—well before I had screwed up the requisite courage. By the evening, at the ice-slide in the park, when the drink had gone to the merrymakers’ heads, they were beginning to turn nasty. Being unaware of the contentious struggle for cultural sovereignty for French speakers in Québec I must have made the mistake of speaking to someone in English (my French was fairly good, but it was rusty and I was shy about using it), and this time, when I was teetering at the top of the slide, someone shoved me from behind, and it was not a friendly shove.

I don’t know how I got through the long weekend without developing hypothermia or frostbite. Every time I was dragged out of the hotel for yet another open-air event, my feet turned to blocks of ice, and every time I sneaked back into the Frontenac and eased off my shoes and socks, my toes began burning painfully. I kept having nightmarish visions of the Everest expedition’s exhibit at Sherpa Tenzing’s Himalayan Mountaineering Institute’ mountaineering museum in Darjeeling, which gruesomely displayed the custom-designed boots of a mountaineer who had lost all his toes to frostbite. Somehow I survived, and got back home to tell the tale, but sadly, there was little to tell, because I had spent 99.99% of the time just being miserable. If I ever summon up the courage to return to the Winter Carnival (and to be honest, if I did it would most likely be the one in New Orleans or Trinidad and Tobago), I will make sure to take plenty of money, book a room in my own name, and above all, dress as the natives do.

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