Five Minutes of Feeling
Weather was not always important to me. As a kid, winter only meant my mother forcing me to wear a ridiculous pom hat and moon boots. As soon as I was out of sight on my way to the bus stop, I stuffed them in my backpack and put on my inside shoes. I could stand the cold long enough for the bus to show up, and it was worth it not to be seen in public bundled up like a five-year-old.
When I see kids now at a bus stop shivering in their street clothes, my heart goes out to them in solidarity with the girl I once was, the one who said, “Weather doesn’t bother me.”
In my teenage years, I wrote poetry and thought of weather in a metaphysical sense:
In the wind
Two strangers blew together
They called it love
But it was weather
I didn’t experience hypothermia until my early thirties. After I wrote about it, the trip’s sponsor called it “an incompetent effort at survival.” My account reflected poorly on my abilities and implied that I was sent into unsafe conditions. If I published it, I would have to repay all expenses, including the raft rental.
The temperature never reached freezing, but I remember sitting in the tent with my wet sleeping bag wrapped around me. I had stopped rocking and watched Steve through the tent flaps. He was walking back and forth at the edge of the river when he finally stopped, raised his Colt .45, and fired three shots into the air.
A group of guided fly fishermen picked us up. A woman whom my memory has dressed in a nun’s habit ran down to the dock and ushered me into the boot-warming shack. Someone handed me hot chocolate. I told them how we had dropped into the canyon in pack rafts, how I had hit a sweeper and soaked all our gear, how we paddled nearly 30 river miles in the rain before we dragged our rafts to shore a few miles short of the Bering Sea.
By the time I finished telling it, I could smell the damp neoprene. My senses were coming back just as my thoughts escaped whole fields of feeling. I had been rescued.
A friend once told me, “People say they want an adventure, but most people want to have an adventure, not be on one.” As a bush pilot, she had dropped off and picked up many people on remote trips in Alaska.
Most adventure stories focus on competence. I prefer ones that include struggle and give you a chance to show who you are, make you aware of how fragile and small you are. If the story goes through too many drafts and edits, what’s left may only be a fragment with no sense of the cost involved. It might show the highs without the lows and create an image that lacks weather and context – you can’t hear the cold water hitting the raft, lulling you to sleep as you fight to stay awake and maybe alive, the way you watch a king salmon dart away beneath the surface and think you ought to be fishing and not pondering a symbol of life escaping death.
I mistook my first real adventure for its advertisement. The initial blast of cold water was vitalizing. I didn’t have the experience to realize I was going under. I couldn’t see the days ahead – the ones where you could die 100 miles from the nearest road system or crawl up a sandbar and collapse because it felt so good to stop moving.
By the time I got back to work and people asked how my trip went, all I could manage to say was that I had never been so cold in my life and had lost seven pounds. The adventure itself seemed to dissolve into the dawning realization that you can’t frame the moment when you are at the whim of forces greater than yourself.
I am a lover of the idea of something. I even love the first five minutes of the reality behind the idea, too. It’s just about the length of a song.
Maybe people like me build our lives around five minutes of feeling – the big mountain summit, the cabin in the woods with smoke coming out of the chimney, the warm feel of beach sand. You can view these vignettes on a screen without being subject to their weather system and game of chance. You view them as things. Somehow permanent in structure.
Weather, whether real or metaphorical, wakes you up from the dream of life. It shows up as a worthy opponent. It demands attention, relationship. It says things may not go according to your plans so show me who you are or become a creature of oblivion. It challenges you.
Maybe it is part of growing up and maturing to become fascinated by weather and perhaps all systems in flux that are beyond our control. As a child, I had no real concept of illness or disease. It seemed rare and random. Years later, I began to realize everyone is suffering from something. The weather is constantly changing, predictable and unpredictable at the same time.
Now, my adventures are almost an inverse of what they once were. Instead of failing to anticipate what could go wrong, I imagine worst case scenarios. I am filled with anticipatory dread. My sensitivity to life no longer has the bullhead of the adventurer but the soft heart of someone who has loved and lost, tried and failed.
You know what the punches life throws feel like, and maybe now you try to anticipate them, dodge them. Yet somehow, you feel those hits in the form of a thousand doubts – tiny punches that never land.
The week before Rigby’s vet appointment in Anchorage, I kept checking the weather forecast. I worried about whiteout conditions through the pass. The car was packed with all the right gear – an adventure shovel, a milk jug full of gravel, blankets, and the old bunny boots I once would’ve refused to wear.
The vet tech had asked us to bring Rigby’s medications. I didn’t understand why until she explained that people sometimes get stranded between home and the appointment. Of course, I thought. You travel with your medications. That’s a good piece of survival advice I hadn’t considered. I am getting older, and medications are now part of my adventure kit.
Despite my dread of a much longer office visit – a previous appointment for chemo treatment had lasted five hours, Rigby was done in an hour. The storm in the forecast did not come, and the roads were dry on the drive home mid-afternoon. Rigby snored from the back seat. The November supermoon floated like a ghost in the pale blue sky.
I was still making incompetent efforts at survival and had still survived
Lovely. After fifteen years of volunteer SAR work, I’ve become very attuned to what it takes to survive adverse conditions. Glad to hear Rigby is doing well.
I love your stories! The beginning, the meat (middle), and the summary. And, of course, incite. Thank You.
Uncle Tom