Housatonic — I can’t pronounce pibloktoq, but I know what it means. It’s a “psychological phenomenon associated with the cold dark snowy parts of the world.”
When an Eskimo has had just about enough of the long Arctic dark, he or she simply goes off, i.e., the sufferer becomes extremely agitated, rolling around and screaming, and whipping his/her arms about. If the whole thing really gets out of control, the afflicted party runs out into the snow and madly pulls his/her clothes off and rolls around naked in the snow. In extreme cases the individual may eat either his/her, or perhaps the sled dogs’, shit.
I wouldn’t think pibloktoq would be too difficult to diagnose in the Arctic, but given this winter extreme cold and dark I think I’ve had a couple of symptoms of the stuff myself. Maybe if I describe what’s happened to me, you’ll be able to figure out if you’re afflicted in time to acquire some restorative before it’s too late.
I felt the first onset of the disease standing on the stepladder at the base of one of the valleys in my roof. Just having my shoulder sewn back together, I shouldn’t have been near the roof in the first place. But after watching the roofs collapse in Boston, I was anxious to the point of obsession to get my valleys open so any melting snow could have a free run without being held up by ice dams.
I was too late. Ice five-or-six inches thick had crept like a glacier two feet up the valley and had spread a foot or two off to the left and right.
Frenzied, I hurried into the garage where I had already filled pantyhose legs with calcium chloride. It wasn’t enough to stumble through the knee-high snow and hazard the ladder to lay down my snow snakes. I had to watch and listen to the calcium chloride crack the ice. As soon as some tiny fissures showed in the ice sheet I went at them with my jackknife, not content to let things run their course. I didn’t accomplish much, but I still rushed out at first light to make certain things were clear. They pretty much were. So much for messing with chemistry…
I figured by late February or early March the sun might have warmed the stones on a wall I was about to move for the fifth or sixth time.
Two feet of snow covered the rocks and made any sort of melting moot. I took matters into my own hands, running into the garage and grabbing a dustpan, the first possible snow-moving tool I saw, and then began hacking at the snow covering the rocks. Reaching the top of the wall, I flung the dustpan away and began tearing at the rocks I had unearthed, or perhaps ”unsnowed,” there.
I pulled and dug and yanked enough to have a rock on the ground, a rock in midair, and the rock in my hand ready to toss.
After fifteen minutes or so, I figured the whole thing was madness, managed to stop digging and flinging, and sought a remedy which I’d never tried for pibloktoq, but which had saved me from myself over and over again.
Fewer than five minutes later, I had compounded the medicine and dragged my old, white, plastic chair out onto the black-top driveway warmed by the sun. It was so comfortable I was even able to take off my heavy coat and sit quietly in just my sweatshirt, holding a glass with two fingers of good bourbon in one hand and a seven-inch Baccarat Churchill in the other.
Sipping and puffing, I whiled away the rest of the afternoon, sipped gently and puffed contentedly, pleased I noticed my symptoms early enough — and had been smart enough, for a change — to seek the perfect cure.
