It’s 3:15 a.m. and I’m awakened by a primal, don’t-freeze-to-death instinct. I check my phone. Still four hours till the alarm. Damn. I’m tired, but I don’t want to sleep. I don’t think I can. I want to get moving. The northern winter nights are always long, but this week they’ve felt exceptionally long—a 30-degrees-below-zero kind of long.

I shift in my sleeping bag, wincing at the icy burn of cold metal from my zipper, and try to ignore the soft crunch and crackle of frozen goose down. Grabbing a book from the makeshift shelf, I skim through two paragraphs of Gladwellian prose by the light of a dim headlamp before deciding my hands are too cold to flip the pages. I curl back toward a fetal position and resign myself to listening to the muffled serenade of idling semis just beyond my icy windows.

It’s worth it. Always is…

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