European explorers always seemed shocked at how cold and cruel the polar winters could be. "Our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause," wrote poor Captain Robert Scott on his South Pole expedition in 1912. "My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes – two days ago I was proud possessor of best feet."
It has been a cold winter here — the wind-chill got down to minus-29 degrees Celcius recently, probably still daiquiri weather in Canada — and we've been looking for ways to make use of it, or find where it is all the people went (I miss people!!), or try to stave off SAD. Upstate (and up-Earth), there is a mid-winter Polar Plunge tradition, perhaps to remind you "it could be even colder right now than it is, take off your clothes and see."
Initially, we were sold, a plunge seemed the right way to start a new (frozen) year. “Everyone wants to be Robinson Crusoe,” wrote Marian Engel in an argument for diving on in to your northern habitat, “and to be a half-hatched Robinson Crusoe is unbearable.”
The New Year’s Day polar plunge was called off due to COVID-19, and I was kind of relieved, because in single-digit temps, clothes begin to feel like your rightful outer layer, and your body a delicate being, like a baby echidna, that should not be peeled from its packaging. But then we heard of another plunge being held ten minutes out of Troy at the state park. We were at the thwarted-Northwest-Passage point in winter where you're casting around for things to do before anyone eats one of their shipmates, and jumping into a frozen lake seemed as good an idea as any, so we signed up.
The Grafton Lakes Polar Plunge kicks off a carnivaleee of activities—Brazilian emphasis, mine—at 11:30 a.m. on a single-digit Saturday in some hills near the Vermont border. There would be sled dogs and ice fishing and s'mores and snowmobiles and chainsaw sculptures and what are you doing anyway, other than hiding in your houses watching Highway Thru Hell?, challenged the event listing.
It takes forever to load the kids+mittens+hats+masks+puffy coats in the car and pull out onto the road, and I'm worried we'll be late, even as I dread doing the thing. Not Noodles, he lives for peeling off his clothes and leaping into frigid vats of water. "We're in the prime of our lives!" he hoots over our wheezing CRV. It is times like these that I realize there is more left in him of the Albany undergrad than previously thought. At the highway turnoff, we join a line of cars queuing to get into the park; there must be 30 people ahead of us all sitting high in their thermal undies looking out over their dashboards for a glimpse of the hole in the ice, their motor cortexes each a little Judas, preparing to betray their bodies.
The 11:15 a.m. deadline for "check-in" passes as we crawl toward the carpark still in the queue, and I feel more and more shirty. I hate being late. "What, you think they're not going to let you jump in the hole in the ice because you're late?" says Noodles, chuckling and shaking his head. No one ever stopped him from stripping down to his whatnow in public, but yes, somehow it feels like the plunge hole might be something that only appears for ten minutes at solar noon on January 22, then disappears. Winter up here feels more superstitious than the city, where there was always an older neighbor cursing as they shoveled their footpath for comic effect. Up-river, the everywhere-winter alters you at the molecular level. You come out of a cold spell and find you’re wearing Carhartt bib overalls and are invested in the outcome of the Bills game.
One such quirk: the Cabin Fever event and polar plunge is run by New York State Parks, but you have to send your entry fee to some guy's Venmo; per the flier, "Ron" will then deliver the funds to a food pantry via the Knights of Columbus. Are the Knights of Columbus the KKK, you wonder, still new to this land. ("Absolutely not," says the top Quora answer to that question, typed by a "former Grand Master of the Knights of Columbus.") The KoC were a rival of the KKK in that era, apparently, but no one explains the common ground over which they might have fought. The knights are Catholic, is the main takeaway. Christianity, like the yellow flag of the charcuterie snake, is everywhere up here—when I go to sign up Japhy for Little League, the flier directs me to email Mark at godsaveus at hotmail dot com.
At 11:29 a.m., we are scuffling toward the lake with a duffel of spare clothes and two children who want to be carried. There is a large crowd gathered on the edge of the lake, which is powder blue, and a man—possibly the grand knight himself—is speaking through a megaphone at people shivering in their togs on a rubber walkway. Right as I scribble our names on the check-in sheet, people begin to enter the water with the card-shuffling speed and synchronicity of lemmings; men, women, and children. The mats lead them to the edge, where they step down into the lake and wade to the back of the hole, bob down, then walk back out, a baptism where everyone screams. The hole is lined with military men in rubber suits, there to make sure you don't get sucked under the ice like that scene in Cliffhanger.
In preparation for the plunge, I watched a video of a Nordic woman with Elsa hair lowering herself beneath the water and exhaling a trail of bubbles to synthesizer music—this is not like that. It is an assembly of people in crooked tutus and drum major hats, plus someone in a Winnie the Pooh costume that looks like it will quickly drag them to a submarine grave once the lake gets its fingers on the first plush corner of gold. I think Journey is playing. Some of the pros wear rubber shoes, and the overall effect of a half-naked bunch swathed in bands of lycra is slightly post-apocalyptic, everyone looking like they are dressed in the remnants of a dragon fight.
I hate rushing, but have to throw a blanket on the snow, peel down to my floral UPF swimsuit and hurry to join the line of plungers. Pondering the stretch of ice between my blanket and the rubber mat, I leave my socks on, and—no time to think—keep my beanie on also (for warmth?), looking like an elf on the shelf stripped down to its fabric torso, the hat stitched to its scalp. I'd like to write something poetic about the dip, about stepping into the frigid embrace of the lady of the lake, but it was so sharp and brief it registered as a single whack from a giant ice mallet, and then I was out. Noodles was the final plunger, and the men in the rubber suits yelled "last one has to dunk their head!" which was no big deal for him, as he has ice for bones.
Here, I realize that my wet socks are rapidly giving me frostnip, activated by the frozen ground beneath me—just minutes ago I was proud possessor of best feet!—but I can't get my snow boots on because my feet are too wet to slide in and didn't bring a spare pair of socks. So I try to tiptoe with woolen mittens pulled onto the balls of my feet, bent over and wrapped in a blanket, looking for the women's warming hut. "Stay with your dad!" I tell my children out here in the woods, shuffling off.
I am dead last to the hut, which is presently at capacity, so I balance outside on pointe. When a woman finally exits, slow but strident in her warmed-over body and dry clothes, I hobble in, and listen to the conversation taking place around an enormous flaming fuel can in a hut made of kindling.
"How cold do you think the water was?" asks someone massaging their feet in front of the flaming can in a polyester bear onesie.
"Well, there's got to be six inches of ice on top of the water, so, I don't know, five or six degrees below freezing?" says another.
It is cold enough that the air cannot hold scientific reasoning anymore, it falls out of the air and lands in crystalline form with a tinkle. (We hear a rubber man say the lake is 38 degrees F.)
Later, Noodles and our friend S. discuss the raging bonfire nearby. "How does it not burn a hole in the ice and fall into the lake?" Noodles wonders inside his down jacket. At this point he is standing on feet he cannot feel.
"I don't know," S. replies thoughtfully, staring at a sun so distant it looks like a Mentos.
I googled how does bonfire frozen lake, and came across an article titled "It's Real! Burning The Snow Does Not Make It Fake Snow." After Texas’ damaging snowstorm last year, the article explains, "viral videos going around social media claim the way snow reacts to fire proves that it is fake. Meteorologist Michael Behrens says not so fast!"
Who thinks snow is fake, I need to know. The Hudson River is halted mid-ripple, frozen even as it tries to leap over the bottom lock. You are in the snow globe, and someone is taking off their clothes and whooping.
After rewarming my feet and returning to the frozen lake in four layers of pants, I feel AN AFTERGLOW. This could also be the hot toddy talking, but the wind is drawn back and the lake glows like an overhead projector under the pale sun.
The rubber men are now under the ice, conducting an "exhibition" that cannot be seen. They dive on ropes and are gone. Everyone wanders away from the hole in search of snacks. Where hockey players had been looping a section of the lake cleared into a rink, red-cheeked children in snowboots are now skittling about in puffy costumes and periodically flopping onto their backs. Over my spiked Lemon Zinger tea, it takes the shape of the bear dance from the Nutcracker, the enormous heads following the bodies. I forget I’m responsible some of the floating heads until I connect the grizzles I hear to Japhy, who is lying dramatically on his side like an invisible rock has been dropped on him. I skate over in my shoes, stand him back up and he immediately goes back to trying to fall over with his friend C.; this is the game. Some of the other parents practice sliding their toddlers over the ice like curling stones. There are several activities here that revolve around tossing your baby, including “snow bowling,” where you slide them into tenpins.
The dispossessed hockey players are attempting to shovel a new ice rink a short distance away. One has skates on and is circling a bath mat-sized rectangle of ice — he must be the foreman of this operation — and the rest are scraping a hopelessly small clearing into the vast windscreen of the lake. It seems futile, and yet, here we all are together, if nothing else, with someone to try to clear an immense winter away shovel by shovel.
The sun is out and things are good, unless you’re Noodles and wore old sneakers to the thing, your frozen toes petrifying beneath a thin layer of mesh.
"Have your balls descended yet?" our friend asks Noodles. "Sorry, I probably don't know you well enough to—"
"—Not yet," he replies at the same time, looking vaguely happy.
As it happened
Japhy: I’ve had floor food, it’s good.
Meanwhile, it’s probably colder in Russia:
Goodies
“Tree 103 was scarred and scabby; it creaked in the wind; it sagged in the rain. It had lost the dewy glow that it had back in 1675, but haven’t we all?” — Susan Orlean gives us a tree obit.
“Late into his thirties, after a divorce from his wife, Cardoza moved back to his childhood home in Torrance to take care of his aging parents and fix appliances. ‘I was the Maytag Man for a while,’ he jokes. Cardoza began riding again and now races as often as he can. ‘I just take my bike and go wherever I feel like going,’ he says, ‘as far as I can.’” — an older Narratively story on the the BMX stunt doubles of E.T.
“They really enjoyed ‘Redemption Song.’ When I finished, Bub said, ‘Man, that's really Christian. It really is.’ Darius made me teach it to him; he said he would take it home and ‘do it at worship.’" — John Jeremiah Sullivan at the Creation music festival in 2004.
The star shines on fuckers and saints alike, and the saints are fuckers too, or so the Bible tells us. It shines on the characters as they plan parties and drive drunk; it shines on the dumbass Emil as he drops a baby on its head at his nursery school job. (He’s so stupid that the act takes on a mystical aspect, as if the baby he drops is himself.) - Patricia Lockwood on Knausgaard’s novel
I wrote a thing on creepy children’s murals for Dirt! If you don’t know Dirt yet, it has all the sharp writing that media outlets would edit into faff (if you don’t know the work of Daisy Alioto, Dirt co-founder, read this).
If you are feeling winter RN, you might find this Evil Witches dispatch useful!!! <3
I’ve also been loving Yoga With Adriene’s 30-day move series, which does not ask much of you!!
PUMP YOURSELF UP WITH THIS. <3 <3 <3
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S! Do share if you feel at all inclined! And if you liked this, you might like some previous KAFKA’S on:
<3
Wish I was there! Great article ! Sounds amazing to do!