“Argh! What is that?” cried an adult, suddenly flinching and raising her hands, as if under bombardment. She was standing beside the staircase leading to a loft where two teenage boys were staying during a two-family ski trip, but there was no outward indication of anything attacking her. People looked up, puzzled. The woman clawed at her shoulders, and cried: “Is that … chocolate?” She looked up. Above her, looking down, were two guilty faces. The guilty hands attached to their guilty bodies held packets of hot chocolate mix, which they’d been chugging — and aerating. It was this sandy mixture that had sifted down on to the head of the unsuspecting adult.
“You guys!” she said, brandishing her fist.
“We’re just trying to warm up!”
“With hot chocolate!”
“Even though it’s not hot!”
The woman couldn’t help but laugh. Everyone was still trying to warm up after a stunningly cold day, and everyone had his own method. Some people ate dry hot chocolate mix (yuck); others clustered around a gas fire. One child had draped herself along a wall-mounted heater, and chased off all comers like a jaguar protecting a fresh kill. Teenage girls had commandeered the hot showers.
The woman herself had spent most of the day shuttling back and forth between the rented condo and a ski shop and the slopes, filling in the gaps between what people generally pack to go skiing and what, in -20F winds, people should have packed. Short of a full-body ski suit, such as Olympians wear, a person needs an incredible number of wraps and patches and layers to stay warm under such circumstances.
How cold is -20F? Cold enough that you feel you are in your own personal Jack London story. Cold enough that if there’s the tiniest opening between your goggles and your face mask, it feels as though an ice pick is stabbing you. Warm enough that if you’re wearing five layers and standing in the sunshine out of the wind, you say, in a voice made fuzzy from the frozen condensation around your mouth, “Well, this isn’t so bad!”
Oddly enough, it’s not nearly as bone chilling as, say, the 47F in a suburban house after three days of a Pepco outage. You can take off your gloves in a temperature like that and your fingers won’t freeze, but your morale will be somewhere in your boots.
Mind you, morale is not always high on the ski slopes when it’s this cold, either, though it can be difficult to tell when everyone is swathed almost beyond recognition. For instance, as a multigenerational party of skiers traversed a hillside, one of the smaller children could be heard singing as she snowplowed along. She was the last to reach the bottom, at which point she let out a wail.
“Oh, no, what’s wrong?” Everyone cried. “You sounded so happy, singing your way down the mountain.”
The child struggled to free her mouth from its wrappings. “It’s so cold,” she said, with a sob. “I wasn’t singing, I was crying!”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
