shaking like a detox patient. But cold exhausts the body and fear exhausts the brain and soon enough your wife taps you to complain: you’re snoring. An arm falls out, and the cold air coats it. Breathe through the nose and the air freezes your nasal passages; breathe through your mouth and you get a dry throat. I fall back to sleep. The ski hat I brought along comes off and some Arctic spirit massages my head and breathes on the rims of my ears. I twist in my mummy bag to re-position. The bag is rated for -28˚C. Eventually it gets to -26˚C. That’s the temperature outside, of course. Inside, I have no idea. I suspect it’s getting colder all night, but it’s possible I’m just weakening, waves of cold battering the ramparts of my being. I’ve slept outside, exposed to the elements, in deserts and jungles and I’ve been in a few really grim hotels, too, but now it comes as a revelation that I am, in reality, a soft man. I dream of the hours of the night. I dream that it’s morning. Even so, unlike a few guests each night, the one option I wouldn’t dream of is running for heated shelter. I’d rather be found mummified by frost, a stiff on my bed of ice, than to have quit. I have my pride. In the morning, light pours in through the ventilation hole in the ceiling that’s there to prevent humidity. Light is not just illumination. It brings news: I have survived. This is a modest achievement. I think of the great polar explorers – Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton. They had to thaw their sleeping bags before climbing into them. The biggest advantage a modern polar adventurer has today, a modern polar adventurer once told me, is not GPS or satellite phones but technical fabrics and advances in footwear. I lie there a while, enjoying the soft light and serenity and girding myself to the idea of unzipping the bag and climbing out. In the end, it isn’t courage that makes me move but a full bladder. I get up quickly, jiggling a foot into a shoe – careful not to land an unshod hoof on the snowy floor – and give my stiff spine a fillip. Then I stand, in a series of shivers and spasms, like a foal getting itself upright and, pulling a jersey over my swollen dome, I shuffle forward and lurch towards the finish line: a hot W breakfast, indoors. www.hoteldeglace-canada.com
158