Well, if it’s 20 February, it must be… the anniversary of the birth of Peter Freuchen, anthropologist, arctic explorer, writer, WWII resistance fighter, quiz show contestant, film star, friend of Mae West, fucking enormous geezer, and maker of tools from frozen excrement.
Apparently, he
quit school at 20 to sail to Greenland … after seeing a student play about polar exploration and realizing that it was his life’s calling. He spent the next three decades living in and exploring some of the coldest parts of the world.
…and spent some time living in a cabin in temperatures as low as -24˚ C, which Rebecca Solnit wrote about in The Faraway Nearby:
It was so cold that even inside … the moisture in his breath condensed into ice on the walls and ceiling. He kept breathing. The house got smaller and smaller. Early on, he wrote, two men could not pass without brushing elbows. Eventually after he was alone and the coal — “the one factor that had kept the house from growing in upon me” — was gone, he threw out the stove to make more room inside. (He still had a spirit lamp for light and boiling water.) Before winter and his task ended and relief came, he was living inside an ice cave made of his own breath that hardly left him room to stretch out to sleep. Peter Freuchen, six foot seven, lived inside the cave of his breath.
But what he’s (arguably) most famous for is getting stuck in a blizzard in 1926 and trapped in ice. According to one of his memoirs, he spent 30 hours trying to claw and punch his way out before a solution presented itself…
When it had reached the desired consistency, he used the Shit Chisel to escape his icy tomb, crawled for three hours back to base, and amputated his gangrenous toes with pliers and a hammer. Obviously. (Eventually, he had his leg amputated under anaesthetic, by an actual doctor.)
He also found time to appear in an Oscar-winning film (Eskimo, 1933), hang out with Mae West, and win $64,000 on The $64,000 Question. But the dedicated popbitch readers among us have a big question of our own, because a 2019 scientific paper says
…which suggests this is all a tall tale of Freuchen’s (he did write a lot of memoirs and journals, and with that much space to fill, the temptation to elaborate… well)
However, those scientists were looking into the story of a different man “manufacturing a knife from his own frozen feces” to kill a dog, gut it, turn its ribcage into a sled and its innards into a harness with which to attach another dog to said improvised vehicle. Freuchen’s adventure was a little more straightforward than that, and the (seven!) authors concede that
a chisel is a very different tool than a knife [and] the mechanics of use are distinct
In other words: hacking through compacted snow is different to cutting bone and sinew. They add:
to our knowledge there is no verifiable evidence beyond Freuchen himself that this event occurred
…but as yet, no scientists have volunteered to get stuck in a blizzard armed only with a full bowel to test Peter Freuchen’s life story. Bloody cowards.
