At the moment your Jeep lazily slides off the mountain road and hits a snowdrift in reverse, the cold is the last thing on your mind. First, you worry about your dented bumper. Then you remember you didn't bring a shovel. And then there is the worry that you’ll be late for dinner. Your friends will be waiting at their ski lodge around eight in the evening to set off on a moonlight ski tour, followed by a late dinner and a sauna. How could it be otherwise?

Driving out of town with the window heating roaring at full blast, you only noticed out of the corner of your eye that at 18.36, the thermometer in the square by the bank building showed minus 27 degrees. The radio weather forecast reported that large masses of arctic air were moving into the region. The cashier you paid at the Conoco petrol station shook his head and said that, in your shoes, he wouldn't be going anywhere on a night like this. You smiled. As long as you are dressed warmly and have a decent SUV, the crispness of a winter frost can't do any harm.

But now you are in a fix. In the lowest gear, you try to claw your way out of the drift. The tyres howl on the icy snow, and the wall of snow-covered spruces on the other side of the road sways in the glare of the car's headlights. Having shifted the gear lever into park, you push the door open with your shoulder and clamber out of your heated cocoon. The frost lashes your unprotected face, and tears spring to your eyes.

You look at your watch – it is 19.18. You check the map – a thin, winding line twists up the mountain to a pencil-drawn cross where the cabin is supposed to be.

The puffs of your ragged breath immediately turn to rime. The Jeep, tilted at an angle, lies in the drift like an empty tortoise shell. Your thoughts drift to the log fire, the sauna, hot food, and wine. You check the map again. The marked square might be another 10 kilometres away. That is the distance you usually run every morning before breakfast. Now you just need to strap on your skis. There is no reason for alarm.

There is no specific temperature at which a person must die from the cold. At the Dachau death camp, by immersing people in cold water, Nazi doctors discovered that death occurs when the body reaches a temperature of approximately 25 degrees. The lowest recorded body temperature at which an adult has managed to survive is 16 degrees Celsius. For children, this threshold can be lower. In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered away from her home in minus 40-degree weather. She was found right by her front door the next morning, and her body temperature was 13.9 degrees. She survived.

Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions. One of the most severe weather-related disasters in Europe occurred in 1964 during a walking competition across the rainy and windy English moors. Although the air temperature never dropped below zero and at times even exceeded +7 degrees, three competitors died from hypothermia.

No matter how much scientists and statisticians now know about freezing and its psychological aspects, no one can predict how quickly and which one of us will be struck by rapid hypothermia, and then, once it has happened, whether that cooling will actually lead to death. The cold remains shrouded in mystery – preferring men over women, being more lethal to the thin and muscular rather than those with extra weight, and being most hostile towards the careless and inattentive.

Its effect begins even before you get out of the car – when you take off your gloves to push the loose ski binding rivet back into place. The freezing cold metal stings your flesh. Your body temperature drops.

Within a few seconds, the temperature of your hands has already dropped to a numbing 15.5 degrees. The capillaries in the surface of your skin instinctively contract, forcing the blood to leave the skin and take refuge deeper in your body. Your body is prepared to sacrifice your fingers to preserve heat for vital organs.

You pull your gloves back on, noticing only that your fingers have become less sensitive. Once your boots are locked into the bindings, you set off.

If you were a Norwegian fisherman or an Inuit hunter, who often have to work in the cold with bare hands, your cold hands would nevertheless occasionally open their surface skin capillaries, periodically supplying your fingers with warm blood and thereby allowing you to retain mobility. This trait, known as the 'hunting response', is capable of raising skin temperature by as much as eight degrees in seven or eight minutes. Other mechanisms for adapting to cold are far more mysterious. Tibetan Buddhist monks are able to raise the temperature of their hands and feet by almost 10 degrees during meditation. Australian Aboriginal people, who once used to sleep on the bare ground without any clothing in temperatures as low as 0 degrees, were able to induce a hypothermic state, suppressing the shivering reflex and thus waiting for the first rays of the sun.

But for you, who spend your days at a computer in a climate-controlled office, such defensive mechanisms are not available. After just ten minutes of cross-country skiing, your body temperature rises, blood begins to return to your fingers, and sweat breaks out on your back and chest.

You leave the road, having decided to cut straight across the forest-covered slope and skip one bend in the road. Moving through the soft, deep snow, where the silvery light of the full moon alternates with the gnarled shadows of the trees, you reason that your friends were right – it is a wonderful evening for skiing, although, of course, the sting of minus 35 degrees on your face is noticeable, as it is a severe frost after all.

However, the path is nowhere to be seen even after an hour, and you start to worry. You stop to check the map. At this moment, your body temperature reaches its peak – over 38 degrees. Climbing uphill through the deep snow, you are generating almost ten times more body heat than when at rest.

Fidgeting and trying to match what you see on the map with the surrounding forest, you hear a metallic click. A glance downwards. The loose rivet has disappeared from the ski binding. When you lift your foot, the ski no longer stays attached to the boot.

You switch on your pocket torch, but the batteries, exhausted by the cold, can only manage to mark a yellowish circle in the snow. It must be right here somewhere, you reason, and dig through the snow with your gloved fingers. Finding the rivet occupies you so much that you barely notice the cold air surrounding your exhausted body and sweat-soaked clothes from all sides.

The exertion that kept you warm while climbing the hill suddenly turns against you – the capillaries dilated by physical exercise transport excess body heat to the surface of the skin, and your damp clothing helps it dissipate quickly into the cold night. The lack of a muscle-insulating layer of fat allows the cold to get even closer to your warm blood.

Your temperature begins to fall. In 17 minutes, it reaches a normal 37 degrees, but it continues to drop.

When 36 degrees is reached, the neck and shoulder muscles involved in the slow searching are tensed by the so-called pre-shivering tone. The receptors have signalled the temperature control centre in the brain's hypothalamus, which in turn has ordered the entire network of surface skin capillaries to constrict. Your hands and feet begin to ache from the cold. Ignoring the pain, you continue to rummage carefully through the snow. Another 10 minutes pass. There is no longer the slightest doubt that you are in serious trouble.

Finally, after about 45 minutes, you find the rivet. You even manage to get it back into place and attach the boot to the ski. But the cold, which initially only prowled around you, has now penetrated deep into your body.

Upon reaching 35 degrees, your body has already entered a state of mild hypothermia. You shiver all over, as the body tries to make maximum use of the shivering reflex – an involuntary body reaction that attempts to generate additional heat through rapid muscle contractions.

Now you realise that the idea of going anywhere on such a cold night was misguided after all. You must turn back. You fish the map out of your jacket pocket. If it helped you get this far, it should be able to get you back to the warmth of the car. The thought of simply skiing back along your own tracks does not enter your mind, which is gripped by ever-increasing panic and becoming increasingly blurred.

After such a long pause, even the actual skiing has become significantly harder. The moment you start heading downhill, your muscles have already cooled and tensed up so much that they contract with difficulty, but once contracted, they refuse to relax. All you have left is a clumsy drilling through the snow with arms held straight and wobbly knees.

And yet, you manage to weave between the spruce stands, swishing down through the silvery light that alternates with shadows. But you are too cold to appreciate the beauty of the night or think about the friends who wanted you to see it. All you can think about is the warm Jeep waiting for you somewhere down at the foot of the hill.

In your mind's eye, you can already see its gleaming body, but then you reach the ridge of a small hill. As your speed increases rapidly, you hear the wind whistling in your ears. And then, before you have even grasped what it means, a kind of bump emerges from the snow before you.

Realising the approaching danger too late, you try to align your skis to stop. But in this state, your sense of balance and reaction are no longer working very well, and the next moment your ski hits a snow-covered fallen tree, and you fly head over heels through the air and tumble face-first into the snow.

You lie motionless. The forest is as if stilled, and the only sound is the echo of your own blood. Your ankle throbs with pain, and you have also hit your head against something. On top of that, your hat and one glove have gone.

Prickly, sharp snow has got under your shirt. Melting snow trickles down your neck and back, soon joined by blood from a small wound on your head.

The situation, as you conclude, though not yet panicking, is indeed serious. Trying to pull yourself up to your feet, you collapse immediately, because your aching ankle cannot support your weight.

Stunned by your inability to stand, you sink back into the snow, but heat continues to leave you at a terrifying rate – your bare head alone is responsible for 50% of the heat loss. The frost bites into your ears so painfully that you start rummaging through the snow until you find your hat and pull it back onto your head.

But even the slightest activity requires enormous effort. It is clear that you should also find the glove, but by now you are so lethargic that you see no reason to hurry. You decide that it is better to rest a little first. An hour passes, and at one point it flashes through your mind that you should start to be afraid, but fear seems like something too distant and intangible, similar to your bare and already numb hand resting in the snow. You have slipped into that temperature range where the cold begins to reduce the efficiency of your brain enzymes. With every degree the body loses after reaching 35 degrees, the level of brain metabolism decreases by 3–5 per cent. Upon reaching 34 degrees, your consciousness begins to be clouded by amnesia. You look at your watch – 00.58. Surely someone should find you soon. A moment later, you look again. The numbers no longer stay in your memory. Of what happens after that, very little will have remained in your memory.

Your head falls back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. At minus 37 degrees, your body temperature drops by one degree every 50–60 minutes; your body heat slowly seeps into the soft snow. Reaching 33 degrees, apathy takes over. Losing less than another degree, stiffness sets in.

At this point, you have crossed the boundary beyond which severe hypothermia sets in. When your body temperature drops to 31 degrees, the body loses the drive to warm itself even with shivering. The blood begins to thicken like oil in a cold engine. Oxygen consumption, which allows one to judge the level of your metabolism, has decreased by more than a quarter. At the same time, your kidneys are working at full capacity to deal with the overproduction of fluid caused by the constriction of blood vessels in your extremities, trying to push as much fluid as possible deeper into the body. The only thing you can still feel at all is a strong urge to urinate.

Upon reaching 30.5 degrees, you would no longer be able to recognise a familiar face, should one suddenly emerge from the forest.

Losing another half a degree, cardiac arrhythmia begins under the influence of disorders caused by cooled nerve cells. Now it can pump less than two-thirds of the normal volume of blood. At the same time, oxygen deprivation and slowed metabolism in the brain begin to cause visual and auditory hallucinations.

You hear bells. Lifting your head from the snow pillow, you joyfully realise that these are not bells on a sleigh, but inviting bells at your friend's ski lodge front door. You already knew it had to be close by. The ringing sounds every time someone opens the lodge door, and the lodge is right there – just behind the spruces.

You try to stand up, but collapse, tangled in your skis and poles. That doesn't matter. You will crawl. It is very close.

After several hours, or perhaps it has only been minutes, you realise that the lodge is still behind the trees. You have covered only a few feet. On your illuminated wristwatch, it says: 5.20. Exhausted, you decide to lie down for a bit.

When you lift your head again, you are already in the lodge and lying on the floor by the fire. The glow of the fire turns everything red. First, it is warm, then it becomes hot, but after another moment, your whole body is burning. Your clothes are in flames.

When the body reaches 30 degrees, those dying of the cold often get a strange urge in the very last moment to tear off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is so common that in populated areas, victims of freezing are often initially mistaken for victims of sexual assault. Scientists are not in agreement about the causes of this phenomenon, but one of the most logical explanations is that, a moment before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels in the surface of the tissue suddenly expand, causing an intense burning sensation in the skin.

You only realise that flames have engulfed you. You tear yourself out of your shell of clothing, pull off your wool jumper and fling it all away. But then, in one last flash of consciousness, you see that there is no fire, no lodge, and no friends nearby. You are lying alone in the freezing cold, and you are half-naked. Suddenly you realise what a mistake this was, a whole series of mistakes – like a dream that becomes more and more nightmarish. You have dropped your clothes, abandoned your car, your warmly heated home in the city. Without all these fine contraptions, you are simply a tropical-latitude organism whose suitable living space is merely a narrow, sun-drenched strip around the equator.

But now you have wandered quite far from it.

There is a saying about hypothermia: “You are not dead until you are warm and dead.”

Around six the next morning, friends first found his stuck Jeep, then him too – collapsed not far from the snowed-in fallen tree, one hand, without a glove, tucked into his armpit. His skin looks as if it is covered in wax, his limbs are stiff, no pulse is detectable, his pupils do not react to light. Dead.

But those who understand the nature of the cold might know that, even though it can kill, it also harbours a seemingly impossible chance to survive. Heat is a presence, namely – the movement of molecules. Cold is an absence, or the cessation of movement. At absolute zero, the movement of molecules stops completely. Cooling is a slowing down that can liquefy gases, turn liquids into a solid state of matter, and make solids even harder. It slows down the reproduction of bacteria and chemical reactions. In the human body, the cold stops metabolic processes. The lungs take in less oxygen, the heart pumps less blood. At normal temperature, this would cause brain damage. But a cooled brain, with metabolism slowing down, needs significantly less oxygen, and under the right conditions, it may suffer no damage at all.

One of his rescuers, crouched down, presses her ear to his chest and listens carefully. Seconds tick by. And then she hears a distant and barely audible sound – a single heartbeat, so intangible that it could just as well be the echo of her own blood. She presses her ear tighter against the cold flesh and hears another beat, then another.

The slowing down that accompanies cooling can, in a strange way, also be useful and is sometimes even deliberately induced. Doctors often use cooling to a low temperature to slow down a patient's metabolism before heart or brain surgery. In such a state, the patient's blood circulation slows down, the heart rate becomes rarer, or in cases where life support equipment is used, it does not beat at all, and it seems – death is right there alongside. But, carefully monitored, a patient in this cooled state can safely pass several hours.

The rescuers quickly wrap their half-naked friend in a spare jacket, put mittens on his hands, and finally push him into a sleeping bag. They wipe the snow from his stiff, frozen face. Then one of them zigs back down the wooded slope to the nearest lodge. The others remain standing around the sleeper in the bluish dawn twilight, and silence descends upon them. At one point, the woman feels that she can hear all those creatures that spend the cold months under the thick snow cover stirring, breathing, and snuffling.

Having counted “One, two, three”, the doctor and nurses slide the man's stiff and arched form onto a table covered with a mattress filled with warm water kept at a set temperature. They had already been warned that a severe hypothermia case would be brought in. Usually, it is possible to straighten such victims out of their foetal-like position. They did not manage to straighten this one.

The nurses use stainless steel scissors to cut through the ski trousers, which are soaked in urine and frozen together with his long johns into something resembling corrugated cardboard. Heart monitor electrodes are attached to his chest, and an electronic low-temperature thermometer is inserted into his rectum. The digital readings show 24 beats per minute and a body temperature of 26.2 degrees.

The doctor shakes his head. He cannot recall seeing such low figures. He is not entirely sure how to revive this person without killing him at the same time.

Indeed, many hypothermia victims die every year precisely during the rescue. At the moment known as the “rewarming shock”, the constricted blood vessels tend to expand almost all at once, causing a sharp drop in blood pressure. Even the slightest movement can trigger ventricular fibrillation of the injured heart, completely stopping blood circulation and causing death. In 1980, after spending an hour and a half in the freezing waters of the North Sea, 16 Danish fishermen who had survived a shipwreck were rescued. They walked across the deck of the rescue ship under their own steam, went down into the cabin, where they were served a hot drink, and then fell down lifeless – all 16 of them.

– 26 degrees, – the nurse reports. – Two-tenths of a degree lower.

The patient has entered a “post-cooling” period, during which the cold accumulated in the body’s external tissues continues to cool the deeper tissues even when he has already been brought into the warmth.

The doctor quickly issues orders to his subordinates: administer a physiological solution intravenously, having first heated it in a microwave oven to 43 degrees. To raise the average body temperature of an average-sized man by just one degree, approximately 100 kilocalories of heat must be supplied. One kilocalorie is the amount of heat needed to warm one litre of water by one degree Celsius. Since about a litre of 60-degree hot soup provides about 30 kilocalories, the patient lying on the table would have to guzzle 40 litres of chicken broth to reach a normal body temperature. Therefore, even the warm physiological solution injected directly into the circulatory system can provide only 30 kilocalories.

Ideally, the doctor would have access to a blood transfusion machine, with which it would be possible to pump out the victim's blood, warm it, enrich it with oxygen, and pump it back, thus safely raising the body temperature by one degree in five minutes. But such equipment is rarely available in hospitals outside large cities, so the doctor has to rely on other options.

– Preparing for surgery, – he announces.

A moment later, he inserts a large catheter through a small incision in the man's abdominal cavity. Warm solution from a bag hanging on a stand begins to flow into his abdominal cavity and is drained using another catheter placed in a second incision. To put it prosaically, this lavage works exactly like a car radiator, only in reverse – the solution warms the internal organs, and the heart then pumps the warmed blood throughout the body.

The patient's stiff limbs begin to loosen. His pulse accelerates. And yet, the robotic line of his heartbeat on the electrocardiograph screen makes a strange excursion from time to time, which is often observed in cases of hypothermia and is known as the “J wave”.

– Be ready for defibrillation, – the doctor warns the emergency medical staff.

For about an hour, the nurses and everyone else continue to bustle around the table, in the centre of which the patient lies in a circle of warm light like a sacrifice prepared for the sun god. They monitor his heart rhythm. Watch the temperature of the mattress. Whisper to each other about how reckless it is to head out alone in weather like that.

Gradually, the patient begins to react. A new litre of solution is connected to the system. Blood pressure is still far too low because it is lowered by the blood flowing into the limb capillaries that have started working rapidly. The loss of fluid caused by sweating and urination has reduced the total volume of blood. But every 25–30 minutes, his temperature has risen by another degree. The possibility of fibrillation decreases because both the heart and the thickened blood gradually warm up. He might lose fingers or an earlobe due to frostbite, but it seems he has overcome the worst the frost can do.

In the following half-hour, the nurse quietly calls out the thermometer readings, and it sounds like a mantra accompanying the evolution of his cold-blooded proto-organism into a warmer, conscious being.

– 32,4…

– 33,4…

From a great distance in the infinite cold darkness, you hear a muffled, persistent humming. It rapidly turns into a cloud of sound, like a planet rushing towards you, and suddenly transforms into a stream of words.

Someone is calling your name.

You have not the slightest desire to open your eyes. You feel light and warmth playing on your eyelids, but from the depths of the ocean not reached by the sun and the furthest corners of the universe, a chilling cold continues to rise within you. You lack the strength even to shiver. You only want to sleep.

– Can you hear me?

You force yourself to open your eyes. Above your head is a blinding light. All around the light – human faces and identical coats. You try to think: “It must have been a very long time since I have been gone, but where was I?”

– You are in a hospital. You were found in the cold.

An attempt to nod. The neck muscles feel completely stiff, unused for years. They can obey your command only with a barely perceptible contraction.

– Most likely you remember nothing, – says a voice.

You remember the moon rising above the jagged spruce tops and that you are skiing towards it to some warm place that lies directly beneath the cold moon. But after that – absolutely nothing, only the cold that has engulfed your whole body.

– We are trying to get a little warmth back into you, – says the voice.

You would have nodded if only you were able to. But it is impossible to move. And something is throbbing unpleasantly all over. Looking down, where it hurts the most, at your fingers in those places where they had come into contact with the snow while bare, you notice blisters filled with transparent fluid. In the hours spent in the cold, the tissues had frozen and ice crystals had formed between the cells, which drew in the water contained in the cells and blocked blood circulation. You look at the blisters with a vacant stare.

– I think it will be all right there, – the voice above your head says. – The damage seems superficial. It is expected that the blisters will burst in about a week, and the tissues will recover after that.

If that does not happen, you know that your fingers will turn black like dead flesh left without blood. And then they will be amputated.

But the worry fades as a new wave of fatigue washes over you. Slowly you slip into a doze and dream of warmth, of tropical ocean waves lapping over your chest, and a shore of warm sand.

Still stiff and numb, you emerge as if from deep water only after several hours. It feels like a warm tide is lapping around your waist. With difficulty looking down, you see tubes inserted into you, the heat from which flows like a rapid river around the deep-seated frost still reigning in the depths of your abdomen. Your gaze follows the tubes and comes to rest on the solution bag hanging in the air.

If it were in your power, you would have sobbed, because you are beginning to realise: in that bag is everything you had almost lost. These people bustling around have brought you sunlight and warmth – everything you had recently taken for granted as constant, easily accessible, belonging to you, and obtainable by simply turning a knob or putting on an extra blanket.

But now you have peered into a place where there is no sun. You have experienced that in the endless expanses of the Universe, heat is something as astonishing and fleeting as the light of distant stars. Heat has a place only where matter is, where particles have the opportunity to dash about and move. In the endless winter of the Universe, heat is infinitesimally small; cold reigns there.

Someone speaks. Your eyes look away from the bright lights and notice vague outlines at the periphery of the room. She is one of those friends you set off to visit what now seems like so long ago. She leans over you and tries to smile.

– It was cold there, wasn't it? – she asks.

Published in Outside Magazine, January 1997 issue, with the title “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow—First Chill—Then Stupor—Then the Letting Go”.
Article in Latvian first published in the February 2016 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks