Around me, the giant rock outcroppings on either side of the road were all that showed above the drifted snow, the rocks giving off an eerie glow, glistening light-blue with a thick coating of ice.
For the moment, there was total silence, no wind: one could hear the ice crackling and my footsteps crunched the freezing snow, like I was stepping on wafer-thin glass. Everything around me was iced up, including what little could be seen of the road, now demoted to a single track and barely visible under the frozen slush. A lonely place it was, with no one around to help, not even a seagull for company. In places, the snow had drifted every bit as high as the pickup, and my hands were so cold, that getting the chains on was difficult. Problem was, my hands wouldn’t work properly, they wouldn’t do what I asked of them, and the longer it took, the colder I got. Besides, with gloves on, I was useless, so I was forced to go barehanded and back into the warm truck every five minutes or so. The mental image I had of the long-absent native Fuegians going nearly naked and surviving this climate was surreal, no matter how many fires they kept going: here, winter was no theory or tall tale; it was a cruelly bitter cold time that lasted for a good long while.
“And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.”
Coleridge, at his best, and you would have thought that when he wrote that he was right there with me, helping with the chains.
The effort was worth it, because the chains, once on, worked their iron magic, so that an hour later for the first time, I was going through the entrance of what was now our estancia. Along the way, I decided that if ever extreme climate change became a reality and I had to write anything about ice, it would not be a eulogy, or anything nice, but hopefully an obituary—a short one: “Rock hard, all the time. Glassy-looking, sometimes. Extremely dangerous for being slippery, as a rule. Dreadfully cold, by definition.”
From In the Land of Fire