While Louise was walking home, Arnie was digging out a sleeping trench in the snow. Three of the most important rules of winter survival are stay dry, stay out of the wind, and stay well fed. Digging a sleeping trench satisfied the stay-out-of-the-wind rule. It had been dark for several hours and the temperature was still dropping. He felt like his body heat was being sucked away into a black vacuum.
All that day, he’d been making his way south, hitting good skiing on the lakes and rivers of the Näskänselkä-Isoselkä system. He had been playing the trade-off game between speed and safety. Speed required effort, which made a skier sweat. Sweat would soak clothes, from underwear out. The outer layers of clothes would freeze to ice, making the rest of the clothes beneath cold. The cold clothes would suck heat from the body and the skier would die of hypothermia.
Arnie, however, knew that the winning tactic was to keep pushing steadily, to keep his body heat up, but not push too hard. If he made a mistake by pushing himself too fast, he could fall, break a bone, and die from hypothermia for sure. If he slowed down to stop sweating, it would put him behind Mikhail. So, he sweated. There was no way to keep his underclothes dry. He relied on heat-generating fuel and physical effort to keep him from hypothermia during the day. That meant that his clothes had to be dried at night in his sleeping bag.
The whole situation filled him with satisfaction and purpose. He was once more living only in the present moment, with death over his shoulder. It felt right.
For three days, he’d caught glimpses of Mikhail. Clearly, they were evenly matched in terms of speed, skill, and endurance. This left an edge to the one who could get by on the least sleep. It was never fully dark if the sky was clear, because the moon was still growing toward full on February 5. However, around four in the afternoon, clouds had come in just as the sun was setting. This cut twilight nearly in half and it was dark by six o’clock. He’d packed a right-angle military flashlight with its standard issue red lens filter for maintaining one’s night vision, but he only used it occasionally to read the map, not wanting to waste the batteries. He’d slowed to a crawl in the darkness, feeling his way forward. He knew he could cover the distance he’d traveled for several hours in the dark within minutes when morning twilight arrived around five, depending on the cloud cover. The problem was that if Mikhail chose to crawl forward in the dark while Arnie slept, then that small distance might mean the loss of the race. On the other hand, he knew that neither of them could go without sleep for more than a couple of days because doing so would result in not only skiing slower but also the possibility of making a fatal, poor decision. He ended up assuming that Mikhail was making the same calculations, and if he was, then he’d stop when Arnie stopped. So, by the third night, Arnie had settled into a pattern of skiing until around 2200, then making a shelter and sleeping until 0200. He’d been vindicated in this decision by glimpsing Mikhail several times that day. He had gone through most of the war on four hours of sleep—mostly two hours at a time—so this wasn’t a major hardship. In the war, however, there had always been times and places where he could snatch fifteen or twenty minutes of sleep in safety. Someone was always around and on guard. Now, a twenty-minute nap could cost him the race. Of course, not getting enough sleep could also cost him the race. With his practical engineering mind—inherited from his father, a superb logger, which meant a superb back-of-the-envelope engineer—Arnie enjoyed playing with these tradeoffs. The enjoyment was further seasoned by two spices: not losing the race and not losing his life.
When he finished digging out the sleeping trench in the snow, he took out his small hatchet and made a small frame of limbs that he filled with pine boughs to slow the drain of heat from his body into the snow beneath him. Changing into dry clothes, he stuffed those he’d been wearing, damp with sweat, into the sleeping bag so they could dry. He fell asleep almost instantly.
Something woke him. It could have been an animal, or a change in the wind direction—or even a change in air pressure. In his heightened state, he was keenly attuned to his surroundings, unlike “normal” life, lived inside four walls or on four wheels, cut off from nature, which all people are part of, if only they could remember it.
He checked his watch. It was only 0030. Again, the trade-offs to calculate: get an early start but risk falling apart and needing sleep later or get in another hour and a half now but risk falling behind. It was a problem to which knowledge and experience could be applied but one that ultimately would come down to wilderness intuition. Those who had it survived.
Pulling into as close to a ball as he could get in the mummy sack, he wondered if Louise was asleep. He thought about the many times he’d awakened to find her propped up against a pillow reading. He would reach out, stroke her thigh, and she would smile. Then he’d wake up two hours later and she’d still be reading. When he got up for work, she was often in a sleep so deep he sometimes made it out the door without waking her. If she did wake, however, she’d always fix breakfast. He’d watch her sleepily scrambling eggs, a coffee cup in one hand, her body just outlined beneath her bathrobe. In the summer, she would sometimes make him breakfast wearing the robe and negligée set she’d worn on their honeymoon. In winter, it would be the silk robe he’d bought her for Christmas in 1940. A year later, the United States was at war and all the silk was going into parachutes.
He rolled to his other side, pulling his head inside the bag, leaving just a small hole for his nose. Shivering slightly—not enough to worry about, the bag would soon warm a bit—his mind drifted back to another time when he found himself lying in snow.
He’d asked her to come out to Fort Lewis over her Christmas break. She did. He’d gotten leave and they went skiing at Paradise on Mount Rainier, site of the 1936 Olympic tryouts, which he’d missed because he was still a cadet at West Point. They both had fallen into deep snow and wound up with their skis tangled together, laughing, then kissing. Then he’d blurted out, “I want to be tangled up with you the rest of my life.”
She’d stopped laughing.
He remembered awkwardly struggling to get upright, but his skis were still attached to him by their leather bindings, making it impossible. He remembered grabbing her hands, still lying on the snow next to her and saying, “I can’t get on my knee. Will you marry me?”
She’d clearly not expected it, at least right there and then. What she said after an agonizingly long pause was, “You Finns sure know how to be romantic.”
Then the joy came bursting through her like sunrise at the summit. “Yes!”
She lunged for him, and they’d both gone flailing back in the snow, rolling, skis, arms, and legs entangled, Louise shouting yes to the clear cold Cascade sky.
Arnie fell asleep, smiling.