There was a time in my life that if something had to do with climbing rocks, climbing mountains, hiking, camping, backpacking, kayaking, spelunking (which is the scientific term for exploring caves by the way), canoeing, or just the outdoors in general, I was all over it. Sometimes it was all over me. Sometimes having it all over me hurt. The Stinging Nettles in Iowa, for example, were particularly unpleasant to have all over me especially if I had just fallen off the rock I was climbing in order to get them all over me. It's truly insult to injury to have to check and make sure all your body parts are present and functioning after a fall and then pull little thorns out of all the parts that hadn't gone AWOL. When I wasn't broken or insulted by something outdoorsy, I had a lot of fun teaching other people how to get the outdoors all over them.
It was while teaching a group of people from church how to rappel off of rocks people shouldn't be on, that I injured my back. I had gotten tangled up in my rope and wrenched my spine severely enough to incur a lot of doctor's bills and force me to make a lot of visits to a master of torture who claimed to be providing physical therapy. It was a good time to escape and take a mountain retreat. Fortunately for me, the same church group I had been with when I hurt myself was going on a singles retreat up in the Colorado Rockies and there would be little hiking trails to provide me with my outdoorsy fix without over exerting my back. One of the people that was coming on the trip was my friend Chris.
Chris is not a "morning person" and always looks at me like I've taken leave of my senses when I tell him that seven o'clock indeed comes twice a day. Because of this affinity for nocturnal prolongation, Chris missed the morning meeting at the retreat center when they warned us all that the retreat's pond, although not frozen, was pretty darn close to frozen and it would behoove all of us not to take a swim; this warning came as though some of us were tempted by the possibility of freezing off various parts of our bodies. The absence of this information was probably what removed any hesitation in Chris' mind about taking a kayak out on the pond.
I was just returning from a short hike and was, therefore, not present for the decision making process and hence cannot say for certain what possessed him, but I returned to find Chris in the absolute middle of the pond in a kayak that the retreat used for the elementary kids summer camp. This is significant because Chris is a little shorter than me and a lot heavier. It looked as though an orange was riding a dill pickle out to sea. His life preserver was used by the same little kids and had the appearance of a really puffy choker necklace and not that of an actual life saving device.
A guy named Steve, who had been on the hike with me, began to throw snowballs at Chris in his kayak and Chris, being Chris, was hamming it up by flinging his head to follow the snowballs as they soared by. It was all pretty funny until Chris hammed a little too far to the side and launched himself into the icy water. I think that probably his eyes surfaced prior to the rest of him because they had grown so huge from the shock of the cold water. He had his mouth open and I'm pretty sure he'd have been hollering if the water had not frozen the air in his lungs. Leaving the kayak to its own devices, Chris began swimming for shore with the little life preserver pressing his cheeks up and his winter clothing pulling the rest of him down and when he got about half way to shore he stopped. The growing crowd on the pond's shore started screaming at him to swim because all were in fear of him being too cold to continue and one of them having to get into the water, that was far too chilly to enjoy, and tow him to shore. Myself and one other person were already in the water up to our knees and coaxing him in. Chris did make it to shore and tottered up to his feet. He had a blank stare and had lost his humor.
The crowd, I guess, figured Chris was out of the woods now or maybe they just really didn't want to miss the next meeting, because everyone but Steve and myself left. I told Steve to go start a warm shower and I began to push Chris in the same direction. I was terrified that Chris would stop walking, or worse, lie down and with the way my back was now screaming at me I would not be able to get him moving again. I leaned into his back and kicked him in the calves, left then right over and over, in order to keep him moving and we eventually met Steve in our cabin. Steve took over and half helped and half shoved Chris into the shower. I had already laid down on the floor to rest my back and did not notice the massive amount of steam that had filled the little cabin. Chris noticed.
"Aaaaaauuuuuuugggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!" he said as the steamy water hit his skin. The poor guy was hypothermic and Steve, thinking that he needed to get Chris warm again as quickly as he could, had cranked the temperature up. Cold water would have felt warm to Chris and he was thrust into one hundred degree water. In a short amount of time, however, Chris was singing in the shower and making up songs about being a fish.
Sometimes when the outdoors gets all over you it doesn't end so well, but it does make for pretty good stories. It's a lot of fun and good exercise too.
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