Last things first
In the absence left by the hit-and-run snowstorm which drove everyone to the grocery stores for two days running and then blew over Ulster County Saturday night, it all felt a bit like an opera when the curtain of snow began to draw up and residents of each neighborhood spilled into the streets en masse.
After a muted silence of twelve hours plus, noise and activity burst forth. Out came snow-wise residents, impatient to get the accumulation shoveled off while it was still powdery and light. Not that there was much hope of the snow melting. Noon would see temperatures no higher than 34 degrees. But still. Left where it fell the snow could bind car door handles and fuse windshield wipers to glass. It could ice stairs.
Once the labor was performed, Sunday begged for recreation. A gang of quads up and down the hills in the Rondout. Couples promenaded. Children hunted and found sledding hills. Pastoral, yes. For others though, it shaped up to be perfect weather for a drive down to the Kingston Point Beach to walk out onto a surreal and forlorn theater set of beach sand buried in white snow, limited by a high tide of choppy gray water and where seagulls stand on the snow facing the wind in ranks, watching the water.. A play in one act, a plunge into the icy Hudson while the snowflakes sift down still.
So apparently was inspired by Tim Robathan, an Australian from Perth and his partner in the plunge with him, Ari Goldstein. For Robathan, this is his third time.
“The first time was last week on New Year’s Day,” said Rothaban. “Then I did it again. I’m getting addicted to it.”
For Goldstein, it’s already his thing. “I like it,” he says, and he’s representative of a group of like-minded plungers who generally keep to a weekly schedule, facing the shocking and painful cold for the result that it brings. The first minute is the hump and past that the body falls into line. The begging, pleading body falls silent, it’s said, and drifts in a glowing state of warmth
“It’s uncomfortable at first,” Goldstein explains, “but once you stay in for a while, what ends up happening is, you tend to get something like a calming response. I feel very relaxed after the first minute or so.”
Goldstein is not concerned if people know the when and where. He doesn’t worry about it becoming a fad.
“It’s not like some summertime waterhole. Everybody knows where the Hudson River is,” he says. “And really, it’s a self-selecting activity.”
Before they get their jackets on, the air finally starting to make them shake, Robathan gathers up some snow to make a snowball. Bare-chested, the water behind him, the snow below, he holds up the snowball to his camera phone. Robathan admits after the first time, on this same beach, with the same seagulls on New Year’s Day, he swore he was never going to do it again.
Tim says, “I just watched the Wim Hof video last night. The Dutch guy. Have you seen him?”
Wim Hof, I find out later, is some incredible incarnation of a superman who has control over his own body to such an extreme degree that he sets Guinness Book of World Records for barefoot half-marathons on glaciers, long-submerged ice water swims and occasionally mountain-climbs wearing nothing but swimming shorts. Hof appears to be eager to tell anyone who will listen about his method, a combination of breathing, cold exposure and meditation. It resembles a Scandinavian flavor of self-taught biofeedback.
Some allege however that a number of humans less superhuman than Hoff have passed out and drowned attempting Hoff’s methods in icy water. And this has brought lawsuits. He currently faces one from the distraught parents of a teenage girl in Southern California who drowned practicing the Hof method, they say, in their backyard pool.
Hof’s advice for pushing the boundaries, like all advice, is free and available on the internet to any level of pretender and would be superman.
First things last
A week before, on New Year’s Day, the beach is the same, only there’s no snow on the ground. The tourists that show up on New Year’s Day have all already left. Only the devoted now remain. And the same seagulls who watch them.
Julia Wilson and Ilana Berger have already gotten their plunge in, well acquainted with the freezing water. It’s an old friend for both. Wilson and Berger wear jackets and shiver more and harder the longer they talk. The warmth must be wearing and anyway it’s 39 degrees out of the water and the wind is blowing down from the north, absolutely merciless.
“I’ve been doing a New Year’s cold water swim for like 20 years,” says Berger. “I used to do it in Coney Island and now I do it here. Some of these guys started doing it every week.
“We do it for health benefits,” says Berger. “It stimulates your body to bring on a lot of health-forming properties. A lot of chemicals. The group that is here every week is into maintaining their health and every week bringing it up to a new level.”
While the women talk, a man has been doing the longstroke back and forth, swimming in the frigid river. Ed Gabriels. He’s the last in the water. He enjoys it.
When he comes out of the water, his cheeks are red, but seems otherwise unaffected. Gabriels swims in frigid bodies of water wherever he finds them. Like Lake Memphremagog, a fresh water glacial lake on the northern Vermont, Quebec, border. In late February, the organizer of this event cuts a pool out of the frozen-over glacial lake with an ice saw, and people swim in it.
“They have an official swim every year,” says Tom Hynes, also swam, now jacketed. “Ed does it… it’s just kind of laying in the ice.”
“The water was 31 degrees. They had to add aerators to keep it from refreezing,” says Gabriels. “You know why I do it? Because I can.”
Currently Gabriels says he’s training another bold soul who needed a swimming partner.
To swim the English Channel.
Hynes allows that the sort or rush one gets in the cold water is similar to the endorphin rush of a runner’s high, only it takes five minutes instead of the time it takes to run five miles.
“Very similar,” allows Hynes. “ You just feel better. You have that sense of calm. You get that calm all day.
While he’s talking Wilson and Berger have begged off and he’s shivering, even in his jacket. I’m shivering and I haven’t even swam yet. Only Gabriels alone stands calmly with a wry smile.
“Most of us who are plunging,” says Hynes, “are doing scuba boots and gloves. When you’ve got nothing, your feet hurt a lot.”
There’s even a little foot tub with water in it, warmer than the lake water, for those without.
We’re shaking hands all around. The remaining crew is leaving, Ed Gabriels, master cold water swimmer of Brooklyn says, “Enjoy that swim.”
I’m not a fan of the cold.
The Swim and after
You shake like a pensioner. You sing to yourself. You bargain with existence, make promises. The cold devours the heat, which is life. The spark without which no words are written. Once, twice, three times in and out is the proper number for my ablution. Douse out the candle three times, feel it burn back each time, fighting for air. The river’s beach is full of seagulls watching you die. And the waves don’t care either.
Some people baptize themselves in the freezing river and call it something else. Tourists do it to wash off the sins of the previous year, and call it something else and crawl out of the water, reborn. Bombs rain down on in far away wars, innocent reporters die on a snowy beach and in an hour from now the Mayor of Kingston will give a speech which begins his third term. Warm. On New Year’s Day we freeze down here like pyramid builders.
Walking into the waves is an intellectual decision. The cold, cold water. You say you’ll do such a thing and you do it. Staying in is different. But the decision-making device responds to the shock. Tries to turn back. The sky grows large and the moment reduces to nothing. Mindfulness in the face of catastrophe. One just wants to live. And look good doing it, if possible. All the personal mistakes, the catalogue of a lifetime, no longer matter. The late-night ruminations of age are forgotten. Which is a release really when you think about it, later, cold and naked in the parking lot. Or rather don’t think about it. Grateful just to be shivering to death.
Obstructed by the vehicle, struggling with the door handle, the choice to get naked in the parking lot is easy, after you realize your fingers aren’t working. Socks appear useless even though your toes are numb. Tie a towel around your waist instead. Pants and shirt are a glory, really laying there, humble on the asphalt. Warmth as the goal still doesn’t figure in. Death is cold but living also seems useless, as an idea. Heartbeat to heartbeat. Surviving. That’s different. It’s true when you’re freezing you feel warm. The soul there even if it gutters.
And when I’m picking up my pile of clothes to throw it all into the passenger seat, resolving to drive home in just a towel and get it over with, that’s when the swimming master pulls up in his vehicle. His window is down.
As recorded on Jan. 1 in the parking lot:
ED: How are you feeling?
RM: Good, strange maybe. Live forever. Bad things? I don’t know. But what happens now?
I’m going to boil myself a bath.
ED: When you’re warming yourself up, you should start with cooler water and then warm yourself up to warmer water, ease your way up because when you do it the other way your blood rushes to the surface.
RM: Am I Suffering hypothermia right now?
ED: You are. So you need to, like, get your clothes on as soon as possible. Get in your car. Turn your heat up. And just get your body back up to temperature. So what’s happening is you’re shaking a little bit so you’re like…
RM: I feel warm right now. That’s a bad sign, right?
ED: Right. So your body needs to warm itself up. So turn off your recorder. Get in your car, put your clothes on.
RM: All right, I’m gonna do that.
* Always plunge into icy waters with a partner. Maybe bring warm dry socks, underwear, pants, a thick jacket, a beanie, and a thermos with some kind of hot liquid. Those with cardiac or pulmonary disease should avoid cold water immersion. Maybe read up on cold shock, hypothermia and drowning.
Join the family! 
