One of my favorite works of alternate history is Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Sur,” in which a woman reminisces about taking a secret expedition with her girlfriends to discover the South Pole.

On a day like today, when the temperature in Wisconsin is -28F and the wind chills are approaching -50F, I find myself thinking about that story. In particular, I think about how much courage and determination it would have taken for a group of women in the early 1900s to travel someplace as hostile and as winter-cruel as Wisconsin, let alone Antarctica.

Le Guin’s narrator guards her secret with humble pleasure. Unwilling to take any glory away from insecure male explorers, she leaves nothing at the South Pole, “not even footprints.” She keeps her adventure under wraps, contenting herself with telling children “fairy tales” about “a river of ice eight thousand feet high,” and fantasy stories about drinking tea while “standing on the bottom of the world under seven suns.”

I have never seen seven suns, but on Tuesday morning at dawn I saw three. It was -19F, and the sunlight refracted itself into a pair of beautiful sundogs.
The cruel winter has its consolations.