“To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake it is necessary to stand out in the cold.”
Aristotle
On our recent research trip to Greece and Italy for books 5 & 7 of The Maqlû, my youngest daughter and I were comparing the worst showers ever. This was due to the minuscule showers our rooms often had (think hitting your elbows on both sides of the enclosure simultaneously) and the lack of hot water (due to small solar water tanks on the roofs) at most of our stays.
- I thought I had the worst experience in the bag due to my winter Ranger experiences in the Army. For instance, on our first morning (when they woke us up about two hours ahead of when they told us they were going to wake us up), we had to do an obstacle course. It was below freezing (since it was late November), and the first obstacle was to step up on a small post, jump into muddy water, then crawl through a mud puddle under barbed wire fencing. Luckily, I wasn’t the first up because those guys broke the ice when they jumped in!
- Believe it or not, that experience wasn’t the coldest I got in Ranger School – not by a long shot. We were out in the woods a lot and got pretty grimy, so one time, they allowed us to take showers – in below-freezing temperatures with cold water. That was invigorating, but it still wasn’t the coldest I got in Ranger School. The worst was when we had to do the ‘Slide for Life – Log Walk & Drop.’ Now, I’d done that in the summertime at West Point, so it didn’t bother me that we had to climb a 60-foot tower, slide down a zip line across the lake, and drop in. Nor was the 35-foot log walk, shimmy across a rope and drop into the lake again the coldest. The worst was having to stand out in the parking lot in near-freezing conditions for what seemed like forever. I can tell you, there was nobody who wasn’t freezing after that experience.
- So, when my daughter and I were talking about our ‘less than optimal’ showers on our trip, I bragged about my experiences in Ranger School. But she came back with an incident where she got shocked in the shower on a business trip to Africa (they had exposed wiring in the shower). I reluctantly admitted defeat and gave her the honor of having the worst shower.
- And then my oldest son, who’s a corpsman in the Navy, went to ‘Cold Weather Medicine Training last month. As you probably know, California, especially near the Lake Tahoe area, has had a brutal winter this year. One of the activities my son had to endure (he thought it was fun) was to sit in a pond in frigid conditions (see picture below). They had to stay in for 10 minutes so they could learn more about hypothermia. The air temperature was 7 degrees. The water temperature was 32.3 degrees. And he said it was fun. (By the way, he’s the one to the left of the man in the yellow jacket).
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