Writing
We Can Do Cold Things
In my mind’s eye, I see a line of skeptical, even horrified faces, friends who wouldn’t get waist deep in the Green River on a scorcher in July, much less any day in late October.
It is early afternoon on an unseasonably warm October 27, and I know what that means. Maybe you know too. It is the perfect time for a dip in the Green River, the coldest body of water around. Clear and pebble-bottomed, the Green River originates in Canaan, N.Y., meanders through Austerlitz and Hillsdale and Egremont, and ends in Great Barrington, where it flows into the Housatonic.
One of the river’s more popular summer swimming holes is on Seekonk Cross Road, and that is where I am on October 27, wearing shorts and a tank top, finishing a brisk three-mile walk. I return my aquaphobic dog to the well-ventilated car and head briskly for the water, pausing to shed phone, glasses, towel, shoes, and socks alongside the asphalt. I take just a moment, and then, from my preferred entrance on the muddy left bank, downstream of the more popular pebbly beach, ease my way into the water. It is higher than usual thanks to a recent rainfall, and I am quickly in up to my waist, tugged a bit by the current.
I broaden my stance. Inhale. Exhale. Dip my arms in up to the shoulder. Pull them out. Splash my face. I bend my knees slightly. Gasp. I pause. The upper torso, I have found, is the least willing to be submerged. (Is it because we protect our hearts?) But today I can’t hesitate for long. Dog in the car. Kid waiting at school. So I look to the sky. Close my eyes. One more inhale, and then down, down all of me goes, into the nothing, into the everything. I stay there, in a blind, burbling medium where there is no time, no phone, no news, no needs, no thoughts. Only a bright, sharp now. I come up. And then do it again.
I have cold plunged three more times since October 27: once in Benedict Pond in Monterey and twice in the Williams River in West Stockbridge. I would like to make it an every-other-morning habit. I am starting to think of myself as a middle-aged counterpoint to Ariel, the Little Mermaid, who looked upwards and sang longingly of dancing and walking up where the people are. I want to swim down where the cold water is.
In my mind’s eye, I see a line of skeptical, even horrified faces, friends who wouldn’t get waist deep in the Green River on a scorcher in July, much less any day in late October. Up until some unclear moment in the muddle of the past three years, I would, like them, never have considered swimming in water whose temperature was not warm, easy on the body, comfortable. Yet now I find myself seeking out discomfort. Maybe it was turning 50, maybe it was menopause, maybe the start of my descent of the life mountain has afforded me wisdom. In any case, I have now got a voice in my head who shouts at me things like “Is this a good use of your time? When do you think you’re going to live, if not now? What do you want to remember about your life when you’re old and can’t go anywhere?” The simplest answer to that last question for me these days is “I want to remember the feel of cold water.”
The water in our lakes, ponds, and rivers ranges between 45 and 55 degrees or so in this season, and it does shock the system. But here is where I give you my hand and ask you to follow me off that muddy bank and into the water, if only for one minute of your life. This shock you are feeling, that is taking your breath away and stimulating your stressors, it is a good sort of shock, and there is healing at the end of the stress. If you come back tomorrow, the shock will be less—and maybe the stress, too. My body, for one, is becoming accustomed to this ritual and surrenders more easily each time. My body knows by now that cold water is excellent medicine. It swallows me whole, works its alchemy, and returns me to the world a little different, a little better. It works strange little miracles.
Cold-water plunging is a novelty to most of us, but it has a long tradition in Scandinavia, and it has been trending in the Western world in recent years. But there is no money to be made by prescribing a prophylactic dip in a river, or including it in a treatment regimen for a depressed, anxious, arthritic, injured, or immunocompromised patient, so there has not been much official attention paid to its health benefits—at least that I can easily find. No matter, cold-water lovers are here to report on them firsthand.
I find it to be a full-body benefit, bottom to top. I shimmer all over from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head once I am out of the water. I feel intensely alive to the world. Yesterday morning, while shopping after my Williams River plunge, I had the strange sensation of gliding through Price Chopper, like all the ligaments and muscles in my legs and feet had before been a stormy sea and had now been smoothed out by the river. I felt elevated off the ground. Cold water can’t possibly have improved my posture, yet I feel quite sure that it has. As soon as I emerge, I feel taller and straighter. My metabolism feels quickened, and I sense a shift in the way I digest the food I eat in my post-plunge hours. But by far the loveliest impact is not particular to my individual body, but to the increased intimacy I feel to water, to nature, to all living things. I walked yesterday afternoon along the rail trail on a parallel track to the Williams River, and its shining surface exerted a pull just like the pull of the current. The river, like my dog, was my walking companion.
Yesterday morning, I stayed submerged in the Williams for 50 seconds. Tomorrow morning, I will go for 90 seconds. Today I will publish this story and invite you to step off one of our river banks or lake shores and into your own cold-water experience. You will remember it.