Cold Plunge

Kicking off Wild Story on a balmy, 28 degree Maine day.

Today was my first cold plunge of the season. The air temperature was 28 degrees in Portland, Maine, and the water was 46.

This madness started last winter, when I’d be out for a morning run at 7 a.m. and see my friends wading in and I’d get FOMO and jump in, too, sports bra and bare feet and all. Lately, I’ve been more of an indoor cat. It’s been dark and cold when I open my eyes, and I’ve been good at forgetting that I write a lot better when I move my body in the morning. 

But today, for whatever reason, I woke up and stuffed a towel and wetsuit booties into a backpack, and took the whole thing on a run. This time, the fact that I ended up in the ocean was not an accident. Wetsuit booties! I’m coming up in the cold-dipping world. We stayed in for six minutes. 

There’s only one trick to cold dipping: you have to keep walking. Once you start taking your clothes off, you can’t stop moving toward the water until you’re in it. That’s it. That’s the trick. 

I think this trick can actually be applied to a lot of things. Like this Substack. For a handful of months now, I’ve had this idea of creating a place where my outdoor life meets the creative journey. On paper I am a writer, outdoor guide, public speaker, and visiting professor of creative writing. I freelance for magazines, and I’m working on a book about my solo trek across Finland following the footsteps of a legendary woman beyond the Arctic Circle. What I really am, in simplest terms, is a person who wants to live her life like she’s alive. You can look all the way back to where I started, as a musician, and see that. I write to try and touch that which is holy, wild, and strange. I write to feel connected to myself, to you, and to this world. 

Wild Story brings together glimmers from my 14 years in the field as an outdoor guide and adventure enthusiast, and nearly a decade as a creative writer and writing teacher. Some of the stories you’ll find here are wild in the sense that they revolve around wild places, rivers, mountains, and backcountry (mis)adventures. Some wrestle with the creative process. Some are wildly funny, or just plan weird. Others are quieter; wild in the sense that they’re about radically paying attention, following deep knowing, seeking truer truths, becoming more ourselves – in other words, staking a claim as a wild being in a society that would have us forget that’s who we are. 

But wait, I’m making it sound like I know where I’m going. The truth is I don’t have a map, and even if I did, I’ve never been great at directions. That’s kind of why I’m here. A core practice of creative writing is showing up to the page open, and listening for what is asking to be written. The best things come out that way. What a gift, in life and in writing, to lean into the skid. Apparently, sometimes I’ll write about cold dipping. I actually showed up here expecting to write about a particular way of keeping a calendar that I’ve been trying out this year, but that will have to wait for later. In any case, thanks for walking with me for a while. 

I have always been aware of the time we don’t have. This awareness was cemented in me forever two days before I moved to San Francisco in 2009, when I survived a near-death experience on an icy New York Interstate. From my book:  

What sets a life in motion? 

For me, it was the sound of tires hitting black ice. It’s more like the absence of sound, really. When tires hit black ice you expect to hear screeching, but you hear nothing. In the absence of sound there was only my white Toyota flipping over the guardrail and rolling three times into the median. 

When the car stopped rolling I sat very still, suspended at an odd angle by my seatbelt. Outside, the world was white-glazed grass. Freezing rain fell like ticker tape on the passenger door window, which was now strangely above my head. 

A rush of cold air. Three wet faces, spotty in the dark, appeared above me. I stared blankly up at them and waited for someone to tell me what to do. 

“C’mon,” said a man’s voice. I unbuckled my seatbelt and slumped onto the driver’s side window. Found my feet and stood. The sound of my boots on the plate glass confused me. 

“Missed the river by this much,” someone whispered, as hands hoisted me out into the ice-crusted night. “Jesus.” One hundred yards up the road, a river bent through a yawning ravine. 

Those words did not register then, nor did the hushed, anxious ministrations of the school nurse who pulled over to check me for shock. I nodded my head yes and no, answered the state trooper’s questions with an odd, robotic calm. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said when he asked how fast I’d been going and I told him, too stunned to lie, no more than ten over. I did not tell him about the phone. It wasn’t until my father came hunching through the freezing rain, his face lit up red and blue by patrol car lights, and hugged me—strong, soft, and breathless, like he’d just had the wind knocked out of him—that I understood what had almost been lost. 

What I remember most from that night is the slow motion. Right side up, upside down, I floated. The nickels and pennies in my cup holder hung in midair as if someone was about to catch them on the back of their palm, heads or tails. Right side up, upside down. I didn’t have time to think, didn’t wonder if I would die. I just felt my life inside me, a shimmering string that stretched through my center, and knew that I wanted it. 

I still hear that voice in my head all the time: missed the river by this much. 

It reminds me to do things that I don’t readily admit in the company of other adults. Sometimes I pretend the stairs are a piano, and I sing as I go up and down. When I check into a hotel, the first thing I do is take off my pants and bounce on the bed. At the moment the sun dips below the horizon, I jump to try and see it set twice. And I still, at 37, talk to trees. I wrap my arms around their trunks and whisper my questions. Murmur their names like prayers: birch, ash, pine, spruce, maple, hemlock, cherry, aspen. When I see an old growth tree standing thick and strong in the woods, I cry. Kiss the bark, say thank you, thank you.

So, back to this morning. There’s a lot of hype out there about cold dipping and how it’s good for your mood, your circulation, your metabolism, your immunity. I like it because it reminds me that I am alive. I spent this dawn watching the sun edge the clouds in orange light. The eiders chased fish, cutting smooth V’s through the glassy ocean. There was the tingle of cold slowly swallowing my body. Flushed skin, goosebumps. The shock, the sharp breath. And then there was the moment when everything settled, where my vision cleared and my body let go of what it had been holding and I became part of the water. 

We are constantly made to forget that we are alive. Please don’t forget. But if you do, I am here to remind you.