Seeing photos of the Quebec Ice Hotel (Hotel De Glace ) over at India Ink made me recall some of the coldest nights of my life. In order, from merely amusing to miserable:
4. [ Snow camping in tents in Ontario in January] Sleeping was not too bad, it was the getting up. All our clothes had frozen into ice. You never realize how much moisture you emit all day, even in winter, until you leave a pair of jeans in a tent overnight. It was stupid but cotton jeans were just what every camper wore in the 70’s.
3. [A temple in Nagano, Japan.] This was a wooden building in a snowbound mountain regio near the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. We knew the monks would put us up for a small donation. The temple was unheated and had paper doors like you see in Japanese movies. I was traveling with a fellow teacher (Jack Hildreth if you’re out there drop me a line!) and our host gave each of us two futons, one to go underneath and a second one to pull over you, as if the futon were a blanket. This futon-human-futon sandwich made for such a crushing weight that I wondered if it were possible to stop breathing accidently during deep sleep, sort of a Sudden Infant Death syndrome but for an adult.
The sleeping in the Japanese temple wasn’t too bad but the evening shower was sort of crazy. The mandatory wash up was done while squatting naked on a plastic milk crate in an unheated room, naked, and squirting yourself with boiling water from a garden hose between frigid sudsing up episodes. The sensation approximated the dilemna of a space walker, alternating spells of unbearable cold followed by unbearable heat. Passing aShinto monk in the hall afterwards he commented "that was pretty exhilirating, right?" or something like that.
2. [The winter of 1999 in Taiwan] It's not supposed to get very cold in the tropics, so none of the Taiwan buildings have heat. Ninety straight days of living and working in rooms where I could see my breath was really hard to take. Day after day you could see your breath indoors everywhere, at work, at home, in the shops. It was cold enough that people wore ski jackets, ski hats, ski gloves. My teachers dormitory was an all cement basement room. The temperature was 45 to 55 degrees for days and weeks on end, with no place to ever get warm.
You’d get home from a rainy day motorcycle ride or bicycle ride, or a long walk from the city bus. You’d take off your damp clothes and change into less-damp clothes (the country is humid, winter or summer alike) and then sit under a wool blanket. The constant rain and ubiquity of fluorescent lighting made it even worse. This went on for about forty days, at least.
1. [An autumn overnight hike, 10 miles from my Michigan house]. The other Boy Scouts brought actual sleeping bags. I saved weight by bringing a US Army poncho liner, basically just a nylon bed spread. We slept in a cornfield and I chattered in the pitch black tent interior for a couple hours before building a 4 am fire and just sitting there til everyone else got up a few hours later.
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