THAT 52 DEGREES BELOW ZERO STATE OF MIND

At fifty-two degrees below zero, you understand, strange things happened. The mercury in the thermometer had congealed into a ball at the very bottom of the instrument and would not budge. I didn’t know if I should trust the reading, but the quicksilver stuck hard: minus 52.

Only a young fool goes outside in cold this deep. So I went outside. Took a bubble pipe with me, I did.

Arctic cold is made of tempered steel. It has unimaginable strength. On a February night in 1969, in a back-of-yonder dubbed Coos (pronounced ‘co-ahss’) County, New Hampshire, I walked into a steely wall. There was no moon, but the night was as bright as Broadway. So many stars shown that night that the sky looked as if it was infested with dust caught in the footlights on the Great White Way. The Jovian planet Jupiter, usually a little wobbly candle flame in the sky, was automobile high-beam bright.

On such nights the air ceases to move at all, except that it sinks into abyssal pockets and gets colder and colder as the evening wears on. It was still as death and quiet as deafness, except for an occasional rifle shot from the woods: a sap pocket expanding suddenly and bursting the overlying wood fibers of a tree apart.

I took the bubble pipe out, loaded the little wand with soapy water, and blew. Out came a stream of bubbles, clear and round for an instant, and then, magic, they turned the color of lake ice. They floated in front of me because there was not a breath of wind to move them about. Finally one of the little soap spheres landed on the porch. It shattered like glass. Another landed and rolled -- yes, rolled -- down a porch plank.

In New Hampshire’s Great North Woods, well north of the White Mountains, one could get away with things like this. No one was about to see me suffer bubble-pipe relapses.

In Coos County -- the huge forested realm in New Hampshire’s far north -- you enter a lost world. On the highway maps of the state, most of the territory up there is left blank. Cartographers simply don’t know what to ink into their maps. It’s the same thing that explorers like Henry Hudson, John Cabot, Ponce d’Leon and Verrazano did when they sketched their first maps of the New World.

Maybe it’s the utter cold that keeps people away. As I write this, Mount Washington summit is the second coldest place on Earth and was, until recently, home to the highest recorded wind speed ever.

The remote county is home to only about 33,000 souls. Maybe it’s the distance from our urban utopias that’s the deciding factor. Everyone swarms about the White Mountains in summer, but only a few hearty sapiens leak through Pinkham, Franconia or Crawford Notches to make it into the lost world.

Or maybe it’s tongue-in-cheek craziness that holds the flatlanders at bay. My Coos County madness didn’t end with the bubble-pipe incident. I went looking for that well altered state of mind -- brought on by being isolated in a full one million acres of woodland for too long -- wherever I could find it.

How else do you explain a set of bagpipes on the summit of East Royce Mountain, and no hikers about and no car at the trailhead parking spot? Or how about the big creosote post with the ski mask pulled over it and a cigar (placed in a drilled hole) sticking out of the mouth? And this in the middle of no, no, nowhere.

Then there were the five college students who had lugged up to the summit of 5,000-foot Mount Jefferson a five course meal, a table, chairs, wine cask, and a big oaken hand-crank Victrola that had to have weighed fifty pounds. They disrobed, dressed in tuxes and flowing gowns, and sat down for a formal dinner, complete with crystal wine glasses and candelabra.

One day I got a call from a fellow in Columbia Township who said he had shot the biggest eastern coyote ever recorded in the state of New Hampshire. I went to photograph the poor creature for the little newspaper I worked for and found the guy had shot a German Shepherd stone cold dead.

Say, I almost forgot about the cracker who picked me up hitch hiking back to my car after canoeing the length of the Magalloway River. The passenger side of the old pickup truck he was driving was filled full with empty beer cans. He had cracked a fresh one and was nursing it along while we chatted. When he had finished the beer, he tossed the can out the window with a well-practiced flick. The can landed in the bed of the truck, where it settled down comfortably with at least 200 other cans.

Twenty years ago, I went bushwhacking and marking out the route for a new foot trail in an unknown pocket of woodlands between 3,000-foot mountains Muise and Baldhead, fully expecting to be alone all day. There were no pathways and no prominent features to attract someone into this forgotten realm, and it took some hours of tramping in the backcountry to get there. I climbed onto the flank of Baldhead, when I heard someone call out, “Hey, I know you.” I jumped.

I turned to see a big, big man dressed in khaki stride towards me. He turned out to be the late Fred Foss, a gentleman who had designed computer systems for the Apollo moon missions. Tall, friendly, and with a river-wide smile, Fred came over to shake my hand. “Say, aren’t you that trail fella, Nilsen?”

Somebody left a hand weedwhacker called a swizzle stick high on Mt. Sanguinary. Odd. Why would someone leave a good but unusual tool like that up here? I leaned down and picked it up and learned firsthand why the thing had been abandoned. A white-tailed hornet the size of a crow, from a huge nest just overhead, nailed me precisely between the eyes.

Got a call from a fellow who wanted to offer his services to build hiker hostels. Good. His material of choice when building structures? Bales of straw.

A good friend of mine, a seasoned trekker, too, was cutting blowdowns out of a trail near Dixville Peak when the beauty of the place got to him. He put his saw down and wandered about in an old logging meadow to enjoy the country. He lost his way. Got “turned around” as we say. Now he knows the woods and how to get out of them, so he bushwhacked downhill a mile or so to a road, then retraced his steps back to where he started. “You know,” he said, “If one of my students had done what I did, I’d be all over ‘em. No pack, no water, no compass. Good God in heaven!”

So, you see, in Coos County, from the northern Whites to the Canadian border, things can get a bit skewed up here. Isolation breeds independence, self reliance, and that oh so special altered state.

After using my bubble pipe in the deep freeze, I came back inside and decided to take a hot shower to warm up. In the bedroom off the bath, the window nearest the bathroom door didn’t have a storm window buffer back then. So there was only one pane of glass separating the warm interior from cryogenic hell.

I took a long shower, hot as humanly possible, and filled the bath with steam. I got out and opened the door and toweled down. Steam rolled from the little water closet and filled the bedroom. As I threw a robe around myself, something caught my eye. Something moving. Something white. I went over to the window, below which was a big stuffed easy chair. The steam droplets cascading next to the window were turning white. Turning to snow. And the snow was falling onto the back of the stuffed chair and it was covered with a dusting of white. It was snowing in my bedroom. Inside! And it was sticking.

Then it must be the cold after all that keeps people away. I don’t know why I stayed so long in that big lost corner of New Hampshire. Probably because I could blow bubble-pipe bubbles at absolute zero and nobody up there paid me any mind.