Winterlust. Bernd Brunner

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      GENERATIONS OF SCHOLARS studying The Overcoat and its protagonist, Akaky Akakievitch, a government official in St. Petersburg, have focused on the socio-critical dimensions of his story, but you could also see Nikolai Gogol’s tragicomic tale as a simple statement about the importance of a winter coat in the harsh Russian winter. Akakievitch’s old coat had long been worn out, and his new coat became his obsession. It was almost prohibitively expensive, and the cutting and time-consuming stitching of the coat took two weeks. It had a collar made of cat fur, which could be taken for marten at a distance. The finished coat was the most glorious garment Akakievitch had ever owned. Gogol wrote: “Never did a cloak arrive so exactly in the nick of time; for the severe cold had set in, and it seemed to threaten to increase.”

      And yet Akakievitch’s time with his coat was brief, as he was soon attacked in broad daylight and stripped of his fine garment. He was kicked and fell into the snow, losing consciousness for a moment. Then he staggered off into a snowstorm with his mouth wide open: “The wind, in St. Petersburg fashion, darted upon him from all quarters, and down every cross-street. In a twinkling it had blown a quinsy into his throat, and he reached home unable to utter a word.” Shortly thereafter, Akakievitch died, and yet the story was not yet finished: “A rumour suddenly spread through St. Petersburg that a dead man had taken to appearing on the Kalinkin Bridge and its vicinity at night in the form of a tchinovnik seeking a stolen cloak, and that, under the pretext of its being the stolen cloak, he dragged, without regard to rank or calling, every one’s cloak from his shoulders, be it cat-skin, beaver, fox, bear, sable; in a word, every sort of fur and skin which men adopted for their covering.”

      Sheep’s wool, even though scratchy, has been spun into yarn and used for clothes for several thousand years. Traditional wool or sheepskin coats and their counterparts—fur coats—were important developments in the evolution of winter clothing. While our origins as humans are on the warm savannas of Africa, our intelligence has allowed us to devise ways to settle in some of the coldest places on Earth. The measure of perfection that Inuit peoples in particular have displayed in developing suitable garments from a variety of furs and hides and passing their knowledge from generation to generation is astonishing. Early on, they understood the concept of layering: the under layer, where fur faces inward, to trap body warmth. The outer layer, where fur faces outward, to repel wind and snow. Fur around the parka hood to protect the face (babies strapped to their mother’s backs peek out over their shoulders from within these ample hoods). There are mittens thick enough to protect against the cold but flexible enough to hold a harpoon or the back of a sled. For kayaking, waterproof suits made from seal, walrus, or whale gut are used. Waterproof boots have insulating insoles made from woven grass and treads for traction.

      At some point, down was discovered as a suitable means of insulation. Today, most of the world’s true eiderdown comes from Iceland, where there is a unique relationship between these wild birds and the people on whose islands they nest. The people protect the birds from Arctic foxes; in return, they get to remove soft eiderdown from the ducks’ nests. The ducks replenish the supply and return year after year to the same nesting spots.

      When people sweat and the liquid vaporizes, heat is taken away. A crucial aspect of winter clothing is the balance between keeping warm and avoiding sweating, and it’s important to know when it’s time to put on a layer or to take one off. The free movement of air is to be avoided; instead, it should remain trapped between the layers, because it is an excellent insulator. In the course of the twentieth century, natural down and wool clothing has been largely replaced with modern fibers that are lighter and have a higher insulating factor. A variety of synthetic fabrics are available, many of them breathable. Some fibers resemble down, but they have the advantage that they do not clump when wet. Should moisture be sealed in completely to avoid losing heat through evaporation? There have been patents for heated clothes, clothes where the porosity changes with temperature, or even clothes with built-in sensors that monitor temperature and humidity.

      These issues are often discussed in a way that amounts to a philosophical debate. Although the final word on the best available synthetic fabric may not have been spoken (and this is not the place for advertisement anyway), many people still combine natural materials with synthetic ones, as in the case of a parka, which has a shell made of cotton (considered a no-no next to the body because it dries slowly) but is insulated with synthetic fiber.

      Maybe the ideal winter gear for people (to about minus four degrees Fahrenheit, or −20°C) follows the example of the ptarmigan, a northern bird that puffs itself up in biting cold. The chambers of this style of clothing are filled with down feathers and also have air pumped into them, because air is the best conceivable insulator. Whether we emulate the bird or not, it’s good to remember that about a quarter of heat loss is from your head, so it should be protected particularly well.

      People have tried other methods to keep the cold away. Pequot people, who lived in the area now known as Connecticut, are said to have smeared their bodies with bear fat. A modern equivalent is Vaseline, though it has to be said that it doesn’t always work very well. If you slather your face with Vaseline to protect it from frostbite, the protective layer also means you can’t warm your face up as efficiently with your hands. To say nothing of the fact that Vaseline makes clothing sticky, which reduces its ability to insulate.

      Opinions differ on whether or not full beards are recommended for low temperatures: on the one hand, beards keep the wind off; on the other, the moisture from exhalations gradually freezes into a layer of ice, which in turn makes it more difficult to rub or warm the skin of the face underneath. Even eyelashes can become fringed with ice and obstruct vision.

      The nose is a body part particularly vulnerable to frostbite. Hudson Stuck, a priest and adherent of Muscular Christianity (a form of religion organized around physical training), covered ten thousand miles (16,000 kilometers) in the Alaskan interior by dogsled in the early twentieth century. He advised placing a piece of damp rabbit fur over the nose, even though—as he allowed—this did little to enhance the attractiveness of the wearer: Stuck mentions a five-hour hike, after which his companion’s frozen breath hung down in two icicles from his nose fur, making him look like a walrus.

      Without adequate shelter or clothing, our options for keeping warm are severely limited, but we do have a few paltry metabolic tricks. Three-quarters СКАЧАТЬ