Cold

The most beautiful phrase I heard this week was uttered by someone I recently met who had lived in Alaska for 10 years. I was telling him how I'd traveled to most of the states but never to Alaska and it had always been a dream of mine to go there. He said most people obviously visit in the summer but the winter was an experience all its own--to see the northern lights, to witness that kind of cold. He said 50 below didn't feel as cold as the winters around here because in Alaska you don't have the wind chill. There's just one kind of cold. The only animals you come across in that season are moose and ravens. And the winter cold makes the air so quiet that you can step outside and hear the wing beats of ravens slicing through the air. Now there are a lot of sounds that I find endearing--the ping of flag posts as they clap for themselves in the night, the hollow scuttle of cans when kicked or blown across concrete, the hiss of damp wood being ravaged by a fire--but the sound of a ravens wing beats against the backdrop of nothing else I imagine would trump all of these. It's like saying you can hear a fly cough or the earth orbiting or a thought unfurl. And there it is--something else I need to know.