I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search 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 consume 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. We're talking about a kind of chill that

Lolan Bones can't even fathom, a Minnesota winter. Now, some of you out there are probably

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