I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing,

the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained. Today we want to talk about ice, the freezing cold, breath that seems to crystallize in the air around you, wind that bites down to your bones. That creeping chill that

threatens to sneak in and swallow you whole, if you're not careful, if you don't wrap up tight.

And that unsettling thing about getting cold, that you don't realize you're in danger,

because right at the end, you feel unnaturally calm, and so they say, very warm.

There's a poem by the American romantic writer Emily Dickinson. She was known mostly for staying inside a lot

and writing things that make excellent goth yearbook quotes. Anyway, she once wrote some lovely lines,

comparing a calm moment and an emotional maelstrom to, well, the act of freezing to death. Not the most cheerful topic

or metaphor, but there's a reason why she was called the poet of dread. Anyway, the stanza goes like

this. This is the hour of lead, remembered, if outlived, as freezing persons recollect the snow.

First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

Emily, or Miss Dickinson, if you're strange, has evoked quite the experience there.

How would a freezing person, if they were to survive, recollect the snowstorm that consumed them? A writer named Peter Stark was so taken

with Dickinson's premise here that he named an essay after these famous lines. And in that essay, he described in what would be fair to call excruciating,

if extremely well-written detail, death by hypothermia.

In the essay, his character is stranded after a car crash

in an icy winter wonderland that soon turns, as you might guess, into a nightmare.

It's written in the second person, you know like your favorite choose-your-own-adventure books, but way more of a downer.

Now in Peter Stark's essay, the U character is pulled back from the brink of death at the

very last moment by medical intervention.

But the reader gets a thorough taste of what Dickinson must have been imagining in all

that snow.

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