The Wikiness

One chilly December day,  the Eco Club sponsor, a former Eagle Scout, and current Chemistry teacher at my school asks me, “How would you like to go winter camping up by Lake Superior in January?”

A natural enough question once you know that I’d enjoyed chaperoning several week’s long camping, kayaking, rock climbing,  hiking, and canoeing expeditions with the Eco club before. But camping in the cold? How feasible is that?

“Oh, that’s taken care of,” he says, with the confidence of a man preparing to be a camp outfitter in his next career. “I just bought some used all-season tents off eBay. The campsite is beautiful, and we’ll be an easy distance from the trails of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest where we can cross country ski. ” 

Hmm. Cold kills, but my colleague was once an Eagle Scout, and aren’t Scouts all about preparedness? And hadn’t I learned valuable lessons from him outside my comfort zone, in the Porcupine Mountain Wilderness and on the Flambeau River? What the hell.

“Sure, Bob. I’ll do it.” 

Early on the Saturday of MLK Day weekend I find myself in the back of the school’s Suburban, grading papers. Bob is driving with one of his camping buddies in front, and there are but four intrepid students, all male. We make our way north on I-94 through frigid January weather, but only one snow squall. Our eight-hour drive is full of male platitudes covering diffident attitudes.

When we arrive at the campsite, a wooded plateau at the end of a frozen lake, the air is clear. Air temperature is zero, and there is a steady breeze from the west, so we quickly unload the Suburban to set up the tents in the dying light. Since there’s a six inch blanket of snow on the ground, we stomp the snow under our boots before laying the tarps. I notice that the weight of Bob’s tarp material is the same as what we used in summer camping.

The ground under the snow is solid, so we anchor the tents with special snow stakes and place sandbags to hold the lines taut. I note with concern that these tents–the stand-up, five-person capacity type–are made of the same thin nylon as summer tents, but say nothing. Our first concern is to erect shelter, and Bob is our captain, we his obedient crew.

Soon we have a Coleman lantern lit for our first propane stove meal–a large pot of spaghetti and meatballs with garlic toast. We build a campfire, but the wind picks up, making us colder despite the flames. After standing and shivering with hot chocolate and smores for a bit, Bob explains what we’ll do to keep warm tonight. He has boiled a big pot of water on the stove, and he now presents each of us with a rubberized hot water bladder that he advises we take into our sleeping bags with us. We collectively retreat into our unheated tents.

I take off my snow boots at the tent’s opening and get inside. Outside, the wind moans through thousands of Silver Birch and Maple branches. And temperatures are dropping. By 7:30 pm, Bob tells us, it is minus 13. Inside the tent’s flimsy fabric, we are spared the worst gusts of wind, but even with the collective body heat, the air does not exceed fifteen degrees above zero. 

The extreme temperature has cooled the social impulse. Unlike other Eco Club trips, this one has none of the summer camp’s casual joking. Each of us sets grimly about enduring the cold as best we can, by ourselves. I claim a corner of the tent and inflate my 1.5 inch mat, over which I roll out my insufficiently insulated sleeping bag. Before slithering in,  I remove my outer coat, keep my hat, scarf and mittens on and use the coat as a blanket over the bag.

Withdrawn into my little cocoon, the hot water bladder warming my chilly feet in their woolen socks, my body starts to relax. With the plastic earpiece of my AM radio warm under my Bears hat, a most wonderful treat I can never enjoy in Chicago distracts me: the strong signal from Montreal stations and French language programming. 

By 10 pm, the soothing cadences of Quebecois and the cold air temperature have lulled me to sleep. In a few hours, however, the cold has provoked my need to pee, most unwelcome in this setting. It means quietly extricating my body from its layers and getting to the flap without disturbing the boys too much when I blast cold air through the portal, no matter how quickly I zip it up behind me. The zip of a tent zipper is always quite loud, so I disrupt my fellows’ sleep, and I regret it. 

The outside air must now be twenty degrees colder than the tent. My sighs bloom into steam clouds in the sub-zero air. I yank on my unlaced boots and tramp directly to the forested edge of the campsite, then begin the exceedingly tedious peeling with increasing urgency through my pants layers, and underwear, and finally, with a sigh, relieve myself. The snow and ice under my vigorous stream cracks and pops.

Breathing the arctic air a little calmer now, I reverse the whole disruptive process, and within another half hour, have settled back into my cacoon with French talk radio, and then into sleep. 

The next day dawns clear and still. Negative ten degrees, Bob tells us as we emerge from our tents and start breakfast preparations. We glance at each other’s eyes over our balaclavas and scarves. A slight glimmer there. For we have survived the night. We are getting through this set of strenuous exercises. Everything in this extreme situation that we have chosen to place ourselves into feels otherworldly, hyper-difficult. The simplest activity–brushing one’s teeth, emptying one’s bowels– is an extraordinary challenge. It occurs to me that we are like astronauts in outer space, who like us must burden their entire body merely to function and move about.

I gaze down to the frozen lake more than a mile away, to ice fishermen at work outside their cabins. Smoke rises from their chimneys. We are not the only ones around here deliberately testing our survival functions. The extreme cold air carries the fishermens’ muffled voices as though they were at the site next to us. They can probably hear us, too. It feels safer, knowing we are not alone in this place where normal rules of physics do not apply .

We go on to have fun that Sunday cross country skiing, and we undergo another obstacle course getting through that night, but on Monday morning the Suburban won’t start and we have to be towed into the nearest town for repairs, Ashland, on the shores of Lake Superior. 

A couple days later, on our way home, I felt an exhilaration–strange to me–a warming thought that Nature itself has tested my limits and found me strong, and as I looked at the eyes of my fellows, even our fearless leader Bob, I saw that small glimmer of pride.  Like soldiers, we have outlasted this challenge to our very lives. And now, and forever after, I can more truly weigh what people in Chicago mean when they observe, “It’s cold out there.”