There’s cold weather, and then there’s crazy.
I live in Florida for many reasons. One of the better rationales is that it doesn’t get insanely cold here in the winter time. In fact, as I write this, it’s nearly midnight and the temperature outside is plunging into the frigid mid-60s.
I like that a lot.
Thoughts of crazy cold weather began bouncing around inside my addled brain today when the newest game from Avalanche Press plopped onto my doorstep. Second World War at Sea: Arctic Convoy is a peek at the convoy battles that raged in the far north from 1941-43 as the western Allies sought to ship the material of war to the Soviet Union following the Nazi invasion in June, 1941.
More on the game itself in a day or two. Right now I’m just staring at the two rather frigid-looking operational maps from that game (which cover the entire run from Scapa Flow to Murmansk and Archangel’sk) and wondering what kind of crazy/brave men it took to sail and fight their way through those very hostile waters.
I’ve regarded the Arctic with a mixture of awe and suspicion since that day in my distant and misspent youth that I came across a collection of some of the photos my Dad took when he was in the Navy. He was a photographer and served aboard USS Staten Island (AGB-5), an icebreaker, during Arctic cruises in 1952 and 1953.
USS Staten Island operating in Arctic ice off the coast of Greenland, 1952
There were photos of a small ship surrounded by nothing but mountains of floe ice. There were photos of the ship’s superstructure crusted with ice. There were photos of deck and shore parties working in conditions so inhosbitable that they may as well have been exploring the moon. Every last damned one of them looked COLD.
After some brief experimentation with being stuck up to my armpits in snow drifts on a Colorado mountain trail (in the summer, at that) and then coming face to face with a few glistening blue glaciers in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, I easily decided that my Dad’s photos and stories – along with a few Robert Service poems – were about as close to the Arctic as I need to get. I think at some point during my little Alaska adventure I probably strayed north of the Arctic circle, but at the time I was more focused on dodging the magpie-sized mosquitos than engaging in precision land navigation. A mile or two this way or that didn’t much matter. I wanted to keep every quart of my blood to myself – and I wanted to keep it all thoroughly thawed out.
I am not a rugged individualist of the Far North. I am a swamp-dwelling grits-eater perfectly at ease in 95-degree heat and 95-percent humidity.
I like my mosquitos small and my days hot. Your mileage may vary, of course.
