Half Cleansed

For the last five years I have done a cold water plunge on New Year’s Day. It started with peer pressure and then I realized it’s actually kind of transformative. Not just on New Year’s Day but whenever you need to change your frame of mind. This is not to say that I like it, because I do not. I hate it. But I like having done it. There is a huge endorphin rush that comes from not dying when it seems like you should have, it’s like a wimpy version of skydiving. The exhilaration and tingling skin makes me feel I’ve been purified.

This year, I planned to find a place to get into the river on January 1st to carry on the tradition. But I came up with lame excuses until the day got away from me and I didn’t do it. I felt some guilt because I’m both a Scandinavian and a Pacific Northwesterner and cold water should be be my reason for living. I told myself I could do it any day during the first week of January and still feel okay about it but deep down I knew I’d failed my people.

Then, the next day, I realized I was dangerously low pellets for the pellet stove (my main source of heat). I went to the garden shop around the corner and bought ten 35 pound bags and hauled them up the street and two long flights of stairs. This is probably the fastest way to warm up on a cold day and I worked up a quick sweat. It felt like a good time to have a cold dip, but it was getting dark and too late to drive to a swimming spot. I decided I’d just walk down to the river and put my feet in as a homage to the plunge. When I got there it was twilight. I found a secluded spot to sit and look at the water gurgling by. And I thought to myself, hey, what the hell. I hadn’t brought anything with me, no swim suit, no towel, no water shoes, but I stripped down and walked into the icy current. It was not deep enough to fully submerge but it was definitely cold enough to take your breath away. I crouched in the deepest spot I could reach and managed to get myself pretty well frozen from the waist down. I splashed a bit over the rest of myself in a failed attempt to feel as though I had fully completed the challenge and then took my pale white self ashore.

As we all know, it’s hard to dress yourself when you are wet. It’s harder when your feet are numb and you are standing on a riverbank in the near dark. I was trying to put my jeans on without getting sand in them and hopping around on one foot. I stumbled and one leg of my pants ended up in the water, the other, halfway to my knee. I laughed out loud picturing what I would look like if someone happened to see me from the medieval bridge just downstream. Wet, shivering, giggling, hopping around with my parts flapping in the breeze. And then I remembered something that could get me in serious trouble and it had nothing to do with the free range boob situation I had going on.

The Italians live in fear of un colpo d’aria, being hit with a wind. Any kind of malady can be blamed on this sneaky draft that is out to get all of us. Sore throat? Definitely un colpo d’aria. You probably left the house with wet hair (this is a danger no matter what the temperature outside). Stiff neck? You sat too close to the air conditioning. Upset stomach? Maybe you didn’t dry off immediately after swimming. Bad back? Uh oh. You might have gone and caught yourself un colpo della strega, a witch’s strike, which is, obviously, much worse. Clearly you let yourself get chilled and then tried to move something heavy. Or moved something heavy in the wind. Or moved something heavy and then cooled off too quickly, perhaps by getting into really cold water…

Looking into this a little deeper I found an Italian health website similar to WebMD that lists Colpo d’aria as an actual condition with causes, symptoms and treatments. It runs rampant in this country. Mothers everywhere are convinced that being wet or cold for any stretch of time will make you sick. Even worse is when you go from hot to cold too quickly. If it’s November-March you’d better be bundled up. I don’t care if it’s sunny and warm, there are cold winds lurking around every corner. Felix got a talking-to at school for not wearing his coat. I surrendered the battle of the coat ages ago when I realized that he just runs warmer than most people. Here though, he has come up against forces much more powerful than I am. Running warm puts him at terrible risk! If he is hot and sweaty and then goes out into the cool air, God only knows what will befall him. I’d better stock up on camomile compresses, flax seed oil, arnica and coarse salt because those are the only things that will save him, seeing as we don’t have a sauna.

So my whole plan to get hot carrying heavy things up the stairs and then swim in the freezing cold river was about as stupid as you can get around here. Right up there with chewing gum off the sidewalk or kissing everyone you meet no matter how sick they seem. Oh, wait, not that last one. I forgot where I am for a minute. That one is fine.

Anyhow, that is the way I started the new year. I was a day late and only half cleansed, sneaking home to avoid being seen in wet pants by the neighbors. The way I managed to be a disgrace to both my cold water loving community, AND my fear of cold air community in one fell swoop was quite magnificent.

And in case you were wondering, I woke up viciously ill the next day. Mamma mia.