You forget about winter, living in Southwestern BC. Maybe you remember details — snow crystalizing in your nostrils at -14 Celsius, feet going numb if you wait for a bus for more than five minutes — but you forget the way it completely transforms your life.
Here’s what drives winter in every other part of Canada, as well as here in Berlin: if you get caught outside at night, and can’t find somewhere to stay, you’ll die.
In Vancouver, winter is a depressing inconvenience. Here, it’s a primal paleo-enemy come back to life, like sabre-toothed tigers or that ill-tempered tribe of Neanderthals living on the other side of the valley. “Og stay outside last night. We find Og in block of ice during thaw next spring. Og no longer charming dinner company.”
So Alex and I have bundled up within an inch of our lives. Until the tips of my nerve endings freeze and break off (a process known as “getting acclimatized”), we have to treat every zero-degrees-Celsius walk to the U-Bahn the same way Scott treated an Antarctic expedition.
I’d like to be smug about it; I have a single set of thermal underwear, which is one more than Alex packed. But in a clear case of anticipatory karma, the zipper on my winter coat broke last night, leaving me at the mercy of the icy winds that whip down the alps, across the eastern German plains and along the Spree River, whispering to each other “Get Cottingham!”
Berliners, on the other hand, dress for the occasion with fur hats and bulky leather coats. Nobody thinks twice about looking like an earth-toned version of Youpi so long as they’re warm. And they train for it indoors by keeping the temperature of their apartments just high enough that their breath doesn’t actually condense.
Alex made me a scarf that turns out (in the absence of a functioning zipper on my coat) to be the one thing that keeps me from labeling my torso “CAUTION: Previously Frozen. Cook Immediately.” But her hat, which would be perfectly toasty in the Pacific Northwest, seems to serve mainly as radiators for Alex’s head. If you had an infrared video camera, you could watch an orangey-red plume bleeding off her noggin as she walks down the street, like the tail of a comet.
Today is our third day here (second full day) and the sun is, for the first time, breaking through the clouds.
