Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet
Donald Anderson
University of New Mexico Press $24.95
Reviewed by Valerie Wieland
Years ago, before global warming and climate change shot to the forefront of concerns for civilization’s future, I began collecting books on snow, ice, and polar expeditions. So naturally I was eager to read Donald Anderson’s book, Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet. Anderson assembles his own writings into an anthology with texts and poetry culled from dozens of other writers, portraying a world that future generations might not experience.
In the book’s forward, Aritha van Herk pins down the gist of Below Freezing by stating that the book “invites readers to explore and encounter different versions, narrative and poetic, of ice and snow, cold and survival. The multiple quotes and allusions, set together with Donald Anderson’s own writing, effect a chiaroscuro of texture and history, warning and depiction” (x).
Much of Anderson’s writing stems from his days stationed in Alaska. Here he repeats a passage from his book of stories, Fire Road, in which he wrote that he was “worried for the earth’s simple, ungravelled glaciers and for the Arctic, for the scarred tundra above the DEW Line (where I’d spent that year scanning USAF radar for Russian bombers), for the sweet moss there, all the water, the unexpected birds . . .” (53).
In Below Freezing, he highlights dangers, miseries, and savage conditions that called for savage actions. Look at this bit from Lennard Bickel’s true story about a dog named Ginger who was part of Douglas Mawson’s early 1900s polar journey: “After simmering out the skimpy nutriment from Ginger’s depleted marrow, one source of food was left that he could not ignore—Ginger’s head.” The men bit away “the jaw muscles and lips, swallowing the eyelids and gulping down the eyeballs” (73). There’s more, but you get the picture.
Elsewhere, Jason C. Anthony provides a recipe, Escallops of Penguin Breasts, that I’m guessing won’t become a staple in too many kitchens.
It’s easy to get into all the gruesome incidents of cold weather survival, but there’s also beauty, as when Jon Krakauer writes about “a plume of ice crystals that trailed to the east like a long silk scarf” (74).
It’s also easy to lose track of the core of the book. The subtitle, Elegy for the Melting Planet, reminds me it is an elegy, an expression of sorrow and melancholy. For example, Neil Mathison in “Ice” mourns an envisioned loss: “No ice to chill our gin and tonics. […] No Yosemite Valley. […] No snowflakes or hail or frost-whitened mornings. No snowmobiles and no skis. […] No island of Manhattan” (141).
Anderson also includes moments of delight as Stephanie Vaughn writes in her story of a 29-year-old mom sneaking out at night to make a snow angel: “[…] now, alone on the hillside in the white universe, with the shadow of her own footsteps reaching back to the house like a lifeline, Marguerite feels the calm of a great and voluptuous sigh” (116).
I’d be remiss if I didn’t toss in some facts from Below Freezing:
Pauline Couture informs us that [glacier] ice is actually a rock, “one of the very few known rocks able to float” (25).
Also, from Couture, a polar bear’s fur “is not actually white; it is transparent, made of hollow individual hairs that reflect as white to the human eye” (55).
Anderson paraphrases this fact from 7summits.com: The interior of Antarctica gets “less than one inch of precipitation a year, making it the driest continent on Earth” (83).
And what would a book on our melting planet be without mention of our current president. Thus Anderson writes, “In fact, Donald J. Trump did say that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese . . .” (143). He further wonders, “What are the chances that the Trump family recycles?” (144).
As for myself, I do believe in climate change. I also recycle. And aside from falling on snow covered ice and breaking a hip two years ago, I remain fascinated with tales of icy environments. Below Freezing feeds right into that fascination. I found it to be a riveting catalog of Earth’s past, present and future climate extremes. I think you will, too.
Valerie Wieland is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Snow and Ice. Her book reviews have regularly appeared online and in print. Other works have been published in Front Range Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Buffalo Spree Magazine, Hawaii Review, SportLiterate, Cape Cod Life, Seems, Eureka Literary Magazine, Vietnam, Kaleidoscope, and elsewhere.