The thing about working search and rescue above the Arctic Circle is that you get comfortable with the silence.

What the absence of sound? I mean, there's always wind. There's always the groan of the ice settling.

It's always your own breath fogging into the heat lamp beam.

I'm in the silence of empty space, you know, minals of it.

Kind of makes you understand why the...

Anupiat, 47 words, different types of darkness.

My fourth year at the SAR stationed.

Tonight's a paperwork shift, which means I'm alone in the operations room with three

thermos of coffee and a stack of incident reports that need signatures.

Heater clicks on every 12 minutes.

Radio hisses their white noise lullaby outside it.

It's a nice, balmy, negative

34 degrees Fahrenheit,

the tundra stretches flat and featureless

to the horizon like a

frozen ocean.

Most people who go missing out here

fall into three categories.

Tourists, who underestimate the cold.

Locals who overestimate their sobriety.

And elders who simply walk into the white and they don't come back.

And that last category we don't talk about much.

...