Uphill, Both Ways

This is the next in the “Sunday Story” series.  No politics here – just a story about  snow, and cold!!!!!!

We are in the age of global warming – right?  Doesn’t that mean the weather should be warmer in the winter?  Isn’t the theory that someday Ohio will be like Tennessee or Georgia, and that Upper Ontario will have the “typical Ohio” winter weather? 

It’s 13 degrees outside right now (with windchill – 0) so you can’t convince me were living in Chattanooga yet.  But it does seem that our weather was so much worse “back in the day, when we walked to school in the blinding snow, uphill, both ways!!!”  And here’s a story about it.

Winter Camp

I was in a “hard core” Boy Scout Troop in Kettering, Ohio, in the late 1960’s, Troop 229.  It was the height of Boy Scouting, with over six million Scouts nationwide.  We Boy Scouts were not scared away by a little cold, or snow, or freezing weather.  In fact, we took great pride in our “winter campout”, an annual January event.  We went out in February too, that was the annual “Klondike Derby” with the younger Scouts acting as the sled dogs.  (Maybe that’s where I got my later attitude about track and cross country meets. Except for lightning we always ran!!).

I was in sixth grade when we went out on what turned out to be the coldest day (and night) of the year.  I was still a “novice” camper, and didn’t have the down sleeping bag that would protect me in the mountains later on.  My equipment was what every Tenderfoot Scout had at the time:  a Sears and Roebuck sleeping bag and high topped boots.

During the daytime on Saturday it wasn’t too bad.  The temperature hovered in the single digits above zero, and we Tenderfoots spent a lot of time gathering as much firewood as possible in preparation for the night. We also learned how to erect canvas wall tents, looking much like they did in a Civil War Camp.  The canvas was stiff, from age, and even more from the cold.

We put four kids in a tent, lined up parallel to the entryway.  If you were the kid “in the back”, you wanted to make sure you did your nightly “duty” in the woods – before everyone got settled in.  Otherwise, you had to try to walk out over everyone in the dark.  If you did that, you learned another important lesson of Scouting, the appropriate use of profanity.

The Fire

So there we were, huddling around the fire, as the sun went down early and the temperatures began to drop. The “Dinty-Moore” Beef stew was tasty, but froze to the side of the aluminum pot before it was cleaned. We had to boil more water to melt it off.  

How cold was it?  You could stand a couple of feet from the fire, so close that the tips of your Sears boots were starting to smoke, and still feel the icy cold on your backside.  Turn around to warm that up, and now your whole front was shivering.  We dressed in layers, thermal underwear, blue jeans and sweatshirts.  I added my Uncle Buddy’s Navy Arctic jacket, good for wear on a World War II destroyer’s bridge in the North Atlantic, but it was still really cold.

The Experiment

We Tenderfeet had a mission. Mr. Fella, our Scoutmaster, brought a thermometer, and it already had dropped below minus ten.  We heard a rumor, that once it got past fifteen degrees below, your pee would freeze before it hit the ground.  This fascinated us – a story for the ages!  (By the way, we weren’t the only ones interested in the topic – Google it, something we couldn’t do back in 1969.  There are lots of answers, with temperature gradients and values for volume and angle of release).   

So we shivered and shifted around the fire and drank a lot of hot chocolate.  One kid melted the toe of his boot, another lost a glove (that was serious, one of the older kids had backup gloves).  But in the dark, under the amazing stars that made it feel like we were in outer space itself, we waited for the mercury (do thermometers still use mercury?) to shrink past the 15 below mark.  And finally, it was there.

Scientific Method

So it was really cold, and there were several layers to get through, but a gaggle of eleven and twelve year-olds lined up with flashlights to proceed with this advanced scientific investigation.  We were all primed to find out the answer – hot chocolate will do that to you.  The first discovery we made was that whether or not our urine would freeze before it hit the ground, other parts were freezing from the moment of contact with outside air.  The mercury wasn’t the only thing shrinking.

So the experiment was a quick one.  What we hoped would be a “frozen rope” really didn’t work out.  Later academic investigation when I was in my twenties (involving beer at a bar on a very cold and snowy night) showed it would have to be much colder, even more than 25 below, for that to happen.

But we discovered that, on contact with the snow, the pee froze solid.  So while it wasn’t “clinking” as it hit the ground, it froze soon enough.  And soon enough satisfied us, as we realized how cold our exposed parts were getting.  We closed up, and headed back to the fire. 

Cocooned

That night I slept in my clothes, hat, and gloves. I used my Arctic Jacket to close up the top of my sleeping bag, and huddled in a hopeful cocoon of Sear’s “Satisfaction Guaranteed” warmth. Any leak brought frigid air pouring in, so sealing up the top was critical. But even sealed, there still was the zipper that ran the length and bottom of the bag, and that was icy no matter what I did. It was a long, shivering night, talking to my brother Tenderfeet about whether we should re-evaluate our experimental results, or our choice to be in Troop 229.

The early light raised another question for us.  Sure, we were freezing in our sleeping bags.  But to get up, pull on frozen boots, and go outside required even more exposure to the cold.  The only answer was to build a fire (Jack London wrote a short story on the subject), and our theory was that the Scoutmasters should do that for us.  After all, they needed coffee more than we wanted to face more cold.

So we huddled, sharing the little warmth in our cocoons wadded next to each other.  Shivering, we talked in jerks and starts, staying quiet less someone in authority might “order” us to move.  And soon we heard axes of the wood being chopped, and smelled smoke and coffee, the aura of every good Scouting adult I ever knew.  We finally staggered out of our frozen solid canvas tent, drawn to the fire like moths, hoping for a little heat.

A Little Numb

That day my toes went numb as we marched a five mile winter hike.  Two of them remain numb to this day, some fifty-three years later.  But I learned so much from our experience, and not just about peeing in the cold.  The next time we went winter camping, there was a down sleeping bag, and double socks in my boots, and even more layers on the rest of me.  

I bet they don’t do those kind of winter campouts anymore.  Parents would be “helicoptering” in to keep their child from such brutal exposure.  And maybe they’d be right.  But those kids will never have the stories to tell, of huddling in the cold, staring directly into space, overcoming adversity – and of course – watching pee freeze on the snow.  

You don’t need to feel all your toes anyway.

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.

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