Yesterday our high for the day was four-below. This morning it's dropped back down to ten-below and is snowing lightly. At least we missed the blizzard that's rampaging along the coast. All we have is a wind chill warning of minus-twenty-five.

Outside for fifteen minutes--lugging a sled loaded with firewood, emptying compost pails, feeding chickadees, checking the mailbox--I feel the exposed flesh of my cheeks begin to stiffen. Weather like this is a lesson in dying.

Lately my son has been singing a song by Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers. Called "Northwest Passage," it tells the story of Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 Arctic voyage. I think Paul's passion for this song is coincidental to the weather, but listening to him has reminded me of how romantic frozen death can seem. I have never felt at all drawn to equatorial exploration--to any Heart of Darkness version of romance. But I find such strange tragedy and allure in the tales of Franklin and Peary and Shackleton and their ilk. You'd think it would be otherwise, given my long sojourn in the Scandinavia of America.

The photograph below shows the present-day state of the Northwest Passage. What could be more beautiful? That emptiness: it is like dying, or at least like ridding oneself of the clutter of living. It is terrible also, far too terrible to understand. I look at this portrait from the comfort of a warm house, and my body cannot conceive of the cold . . . despite the fact that it is banked against my own back door. Only when I step outside does the cold become real, does grappling with cold, existing with cold, giving in to cold become the only truth.

Ah, how easy it is to romanticize cold. Like all great lovers, it is austere and dangerous, as it seduces.