Word: arctics
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...Bridge the chill of the wind hits its peak. Billowing gusts whip down the Charles from the Atlantic, chilling to tears, and anyone crossing the construct stiff-leggedly because his joints feel frozen, wishes to hell he'd never dragged himself out of his humid sheets to face this arctic wasteland...
Everyone gets through the arctic morning, huddling in blankets and blowing on fingers. The sun joins the party after lunch, and the audience, by now a fairly good lawnful ("Round it off to 4,000," says Morse with a promoter's optimism), begins to thaw out. There is a lot of good-natured yah-HOOOOing when one of the contestants gives a good down-home rendition of Whisky Before Breakfast or Chinese Breakdown. Dancers weave among the lawn chairs. A beery college boy with a painted face gyrates for a while and then collapses, to rise no more...
...from snout to tail. Name: Nyci (pronounced Nicky), an acronym for "New York City's first." The big, blubbery infant is a beluga whale, and if it survives, it will be the first of these small, white, toothed marine mammals from the icy waters near the Arctic Circle successfully bred and born in captivity...
More threatening than the shallow Arctic waters is the ice; it can punch holes in sturdy tugs and treat barges like pincushions. The passing floes can make a landsman as giddy as a child finding shapes hi clouds. He sees ironing boards and beached seaplanes and dolphin tails and animals that guard the doors of ancient Egyptian tombs. But to the Cavalier's crew, there is nothing fanciful about these floating hulks. The ice is fragile from the summer, and if the tug sails too close, its wake can make the bergs crack or explode. Depending on the density...
...last load of equipment to Prudhoe Bay. The tug will return to Wainwright, hook up with a bargeload of pipes from Japan and once more swing east. Feeling the menacing bite of the chill September air, the crew will be praying harder than usual that the Arctic not mistake Kardonsky's nerve for defiance. -By Michael Moritz