Monday, October 4, 2010
Life In A Cold Climate.
The article " life in a Cold climate" by Bill Bryson appears in the book (am a stranger here my self). This article talks about how Mr. Bill Bryson pushes his body to the exteremes to see if his body can withstand such a punishment. As he puts it, he does it for scientific research and not out of stupidity. One of the places he mentions is New Hampshire as its one of the coldest places on the face of the earth but not the coldest. One morning he goes out to get his morning paper from outside not wearing the proper attire with below zero temperature and it took him thirty nine seconds for him to run back in the house. He was unable to stand in that weather one second longer. The coldest weather measured for New Hampshire was the year 1925 and it was -46 degrees yet 20 other states had lower lows than that. Of those other states (Creek, Alaska) had the lowest of temperatures. In 1971 (Creek, Alaska) had a recorded temperature of -79.8 degrees below zero. The most wretched inhabited place goes to (Landon, North Dakota), which in the winter of 1935-1936 had 176 consecutive days of below freezing temperatures including 41 consecutive days with temperatures below zero. In such temperatures there are many fun things people do to pass time. Like skiing and ice skating and sledding on a local golf course. Others flood their back yards and turn them into skating ponds for the kids. Best of all you can count on winter, as it is one of the endless cycles of reliable, well defined seasons.
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"Life in Cold Climate" was slightly different that the other chapters of the book that I have read because rather than giving his personal opinion on a matter, Bryson tells more of a story about what he likes to do in the winter. I really enjoyed this chapter for that reason. It is not that I do not like the chapters where Bryson gives a personal opinion, because I typically agree with it and even if I don't it usually makes me laugh; I just really enjoyed not having to look at something according to how he felt about it. He does express how he feels about winter, but he doesn't really make any debatable comments. The only thing slightly debatable would be him describing a trip outside on a -19 degree day, but I have to assume that anyone who has to be outside in that weather would agree with the feelings he is describing such as, "Your face feels as it would after a sharp slap" or "every breath you take hurts" (160). It was nice to read this article without disagreeing with or second guessing what Bryson has to say.
ReplyDeletei did not agree with the second paragraph where he gives us ideas on how to hurt our selves. For instance he describes how he allows one of his legs to fast asleep in a movie theater and then seeing what happens if he suddenly got up. Only one thing can happen in such a situation and that is falling down face first and loosing teeth. I think he put that paragraph in the chapter to prove to us that he is doing this crazy stuff for pure research and for nothing else. He then goes a bit further in the same chapter and experiments with wrapping a rubber band around his index finger to see if he can make it explode. At the end of the paragraph he claims to have made some important breakthroughs doing things in that nature. LoL.
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