Waking up cold. Freezing while sitting for any length of time as the circulation slows.
Drawing too many hot baths is a sign of mental instability. As is lingering hopelessly in patches of warmth-free sunlight. Staying longer and longer in bed. Building light boxes to bask in the electric glow. This is all familiar from last year, and the year before, and the year before that. There is no cold like cold metal gripped by bare hands. Terminal is the cold. Cold enough to lay outside in a jacket and jeans and wake up dead.
Anticipating icy monotony, one turns to meteorologists to better predict the duration.
The coldest month of the year in Kingston is January, not February, with an average of 34°F. The lows are much lower. When cold sinks to very cold, then comes freezing and finally frigid. Then you’ve arrived at the bottom. While the meteorologists say the cold season in Kingston lasts until March, April can still break spring’s heart.
In the interim, one must do what passes for a good time among the fourth-generation descendants of Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, Germans, Finns and Poles.
Skiing. Snowboarding. Ice fishing. Drag a parlor couch behind a pickup truck across a frozen lake. Take up iceboat sailing. When frigid drops down to the positively arctic. Without snow, all this cold is suffering without meaning. Go lunar soaking. Moon bathing. Sure. The groomers of Belleayre activate their snow cannons to cover the dry, bare, shame of the mountain with fake snow. They weep, and their tears turn to ice drops. Real snow is cloud snow, as everybody knows.
Steamroom
The cold is still hanging around like a rude houseguest. Outside, the misery remains. But this is how I end up in the YMCA in Midtown, in a dark, dank, tiled room near the showers, heated with steam. Real industrial. No palm fronds or massages here.
Men sit naked, for the most part, in silence as the temperature rises. The searing hot air hisses out from a pipe and carries the moisture with it. Everything is wet. The benches, the floor, the ceiling, dripping. In an environment like this the bacteria must multiply. When anyone coughs there is some comfort imagining that the microscopic germs are trapped in the wet air, sputum enveloped in drops of moisture and taken down to the floor.
It happens that a younger man has forgotten his sandals. He comes in walking on the edges of his bare feet to minimize contact with fungal infection. It must be said that while it is hot the steam room lacks charm. It happens that one man will regale another with an anecdote at top volume, like a noisy businessman on his cellphone in a train car.
It happens that one man will splash a mentholated tincture into the pipe where the steam emits or the drain in the floor and everyone has to breathe in the oil. This is just the place for a toad. Or a salamander.
Outside, the cold is smothering the world. And the wind is rattling the branches. In this wet dark room at least, there is not enough heat hissing in through the pipes to keep despair at bay.
Cold yard
Hours later, when I walk into the back yard, Regina is outside under the bright, blue-white moonlight, wearing a long, matted fur coat drawn tightly about her. And boots, and a beanie with a pom-pom on top, and mittens. She places glass bottles of filtered tap water around the circle of bricks surrounding her ash-cold fire pit.
“I’m harnessing the moon’s energy,” she says.
“You don’t wear pants for that?”
“Obviously,” she says, “not.”
She’s making moon-water is what she was doing. The practice has gone mainstream, but it’s unclear who’s to blame.
At a gas station yesterday, fingers frozen in a gnawing wind, I lifted the gas nozzle from its cradle and inadvertently activated Maria Menounos. From the video screen of the gas pump she offered meditation and mindfulness advice. There is no shutting her off. Her wisdom is included with the price of gas.
There must be more and more would-be seekers of ancient wisdom trapped running errands in the suburbs because USA Today has taken notice. I came across that news operation hocking astrological predictions on the Internet, and since the planetary divination act confused me, I clicked on another article, which like Regina, touted the desirability of making one’s own moon water. The article quoted someone named Lisa Stardust.
“The moon can shed light on our reactions in certain situations,” said Stardust, before the author interviewing Stardust cut in to write, as if she was leaving signage for an interstellar tourist, “The Moon has held deep cultural significance, often symbolizing life’s cyclical nature.”
Certain situations. Yes. Often. Well, good to know.
Gannett has no idea how to make moon water. But the creatives get paid. And every year, Yuletide breaks the heart of winter like a battle axe embedded into the heart of a tree trunk. So why not Maria Menounos?
Firepit
I offer to light the fire.
Regina winces and then sneezes. “That interferes with the moon water,” she says. “Fire is sunlight, in case you didn’t know.”
One does not argue with Regina.
“Moonlight is sunlight, too,” I mutter.
She shakes her head from side to side sadly. “The moon changes the composition.”
Cold, white and dead is the moon above us. It isn’t even full. Regina at least says she knows what she’s doing. Infusing the water with the reflected light of a waxing moon is what she’s after.
As we speak, the wind is 20 mph in Topeka. And 25 mph in Albuquerque. Some monster winter storm is stalking the country. Dumping a blizzard of snow on Denver and killing people wherever it catches them unaware. Newscasters advise that with only a single candle burning you can stay alive inside a broken-down car.
In Chicago five years ago, it got so cold they had to set fire to the subway tracks to keep the hot-rolled steel from cracking. Fire is what I need. Not moon water.
“There’s that hipster convent down in Accord. They’ve got a fireplace.”
She means the outdoor venue where the faithful worship at an indoor bar.
There are living fires there, outside, that one can gather around.
“But we can’t go there,” she said. “They have a stingy fire.”
Nothing worse than a stingy fire.
Hearth
So the moonwater ceremony is left to percolate. A roaring fire is what’s required, and the eternal blaze of the Hoffman House in uptown Kingston rises up in the mind’s eye. The stone-built tavern has a fireplace large enough to shuffle inside of, all crouched over, and ignite like a wadded-up newspaper in a campfire. Which at first blush, appears to solve the cold question. But when everything has burned what’s left? More cold. The definition of life is motion. Bones are stationary.
As it happened, lie down and die cold was the message sent from the universe. As it happened, Hoffman’s was closed that night after all. Counterintuitively, people suffering from hypothermia have reported the warmth that seeps across the body and the overpowering passion for sleep. Lovely, the warmth unto sleep.
It was a 16-mile drive to the Boiceville Inn on Route 28. Parete family turf. The dirt of the parking lot had turned to mud and then froze. There’s the smell of real wood smoke drifting up out of the chimney.
All the trees behind the inn are naked and mysterious in the darkness. Inside, massive wooden beams span the width of the room overhead. Walk the length to where the hearth waits, the throat of the fireplace sheathed in old iron. Wrought-iron doors stand open. Pull up some chairs. Outstretch arms, elbows deep into the heat. Fortify the spirit with wine while sap in the logs explode. Sparks pop out and bounce onto the red-tile floor. Chunks of embers smolder and glow orange as the flames off the wood are sucked up into the flue of the brick chimney and out into the frozen life-killing air above.
The radiating heat makes one lazy and calm and inclined to manage the burning wood with a long, thick wrought-iron poker. Forget the cold. Sitting at the bar are gathered a small group in their seventies and eighties. None of them are in any rush. At least 350 years combined among them. A long time coming.
A classic publican, John Parete presides. He served a long stint in the county legislature. He’s been 50 years in the same barroom while around him his family has increased and prospered.
“Whattaya call it? The opera. In Woodstock. They lost it. I don’t know why. I heard it was going to Kingston. That fell through. Then it was going to New Paltz. That fell through …. People don’t care about opera any more! Ladies singing like they got ice down their back.”
After talking opera, the group recounts the confounding, inexplicable behavior of acquaintances and family. Then the talk turns to judges. Judges and the land they bought. Judges who got caught drinking and driving. Judges who were known as bad drunks. For who will judge the judges? The elderly.
Sitting near the chimney, staring into the fire, the attention wanders. The cold is forgotten. The heat taken for granted.
Parete comes over to trade some conversation. Mounted on the wall above the fireplace is a massive wooden yoke with two U-bolts made of pig iron, used for locking in the beasts of burden and hitching them by a ring to plow or cart. Trying to elicit details about the plow, I muse about how it works and egg Parete to weigh in.
“What, you think I was alive back then?” he says.
I turn my hands palms up and shrug.
“Oh, I see,” he says, gearing up. “One of my sons gets here I’ll have him punch you in the face.”
Two weeks ago, John Parete turned 83 years young.
Sauna
Out here on the sandy beach of Oakdale Lake in the city of Hudson, the Big Towel wood-fired sauna operation provides saunas which look something like gypsy wagons have been pulled in from some other place and will leave again to some other place but for now they’ve been set up next to the lake.
Set on two wheeled axles, each sauna is built onto a tow-trailer. The whole operation could strike camp and disappear into the night in short order. Hitched to a truck and towed off. Only the frozen beach will remain.
Inside one of the saunas, the first thing that happens is a feeling of tightness at the skin over the cheekbones. And the bridge of the nose. Eventually the sweating starts, but the heat evaporates fallen moisture up off the benches.
There’s room for six strangers, no more, on two benches, one upper, and one lower. Everyone sweats together looking out a picture window which frames the beach and the frozen lake. Outside, there is honest-to-god shrieking and whistling from time to time, emitted from a frozen wind which comes whooshing down out of the woods and crosses the lake. But it doesn’t matter. It’s anywhere from 180° to 200° inside the sauna, the heat emanating from the igneous rocks surrounding an Estonian Huum wood stove in the corner.
There’s a man in the sauna from Siberia who bemoans the fact that the memory of his genetics isn’t strong enough, that the heat is too much for him. He should have been used to the heat, he reprimands himself out loud, because the saunas of Siberia and the frozen Taiga should be in his blood.
“You can handle the heat,” he says to me, nodding appreciatively. “You have a very large tolerance.” Despairing at his lack of endurance, he leaves early.
There’s a basket pouch which holds a bowl full of water. Sprinkle the pile of rocks radiating the heat from the wood stove like a benediction. Murmur some words. Steam hisses and humidity enters the air.
Two other women in the sauna were talking tractors and then talking about a woman they both knew. An aerial gymnast. One marveled to the other how exciting it must be after climbing up into the air.
“I wonder how she got into it?”
“Well, she dated a circus performer.”
“That makes sense.”
Outside on the sand next to the short deck covered with rubber mats and frozen water slicks, there’s a body-length washtub full of ice-crusted water. What you do to get inside, first you crack through the crust to the ice water below, smashing it with your heel, and then you lower your body down inside until you’re sitting with your legs stretched out before you and with your armpits up on the rim, like a cowboy bathing in a water trough. Lying in the ice water like Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic.
The imagination worries the cold will stop the heart. A stupid death, lying in a washtub of ice water. One can imagine the emergency responders shaking their heads.
“Another one dead, Charles, where will it end?”
“I dunno, Ozzie. The hallmark of a life without purpose is the search for cheap thrills.”
After the sun has set, the two girls have gone. There is no light inside the sauna. The headlights of distant passing cars reflect and bounce off the frozen surface of the lake. Three times have I plunged into the ice water, three times did I return to the heat.
Along with the silence made louder by the occasional moaning wind is the chocking sound of logs being split by axe to feed the fire in the wood stove, a reminder that wherever there is someone relaxing, enjoying, benefiting, there is always somebody else at work, laboring to make it all possible. They accept tips.
After an hour and a half, I stand outside in a robe and beanie, and for a transitory enchanted moment I hold my breath, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understand nor desire, face to face for the first time this winter with something commensurate to my capacity to crave heat. Tell F. Scott I did not weep.
Join the family! 
