If You Get Into That Lake You Can Carry On

On doing stupid things that are good for you.

There are, obviously, quite a few stupid things to do that are also bad for you. I suppose definitionally it’s almost all of them.

But an overlooked, if narrow, category is “stupid things to do that are also good for you.” (I don’t mean the kind of thing that is good for you because it makes you learn the lesson not to do that stupid thing, which is a separate phenomenon.)

Over the weekend I had occasion to practice one of those stupid things that are good for you. Along with my wife and five of our friends, I backpacked to Upper Lena Lake out in Olympic National Park. The lake sits at 4600 feet above sea level, with 3900 of those vertical feet required of hikers who want to reach it. At this time of year there is still snow and ice covering much of the lake, but the parts that are visible are so vivid and stunning that they leave one with an inescapable desire to do something dumb.

That’s right, baby. We’re talking about jumping in.

Despite its reputation for rain Washington’s summers are almost violently blue, clear, and cloudless. Up in the mountains, with their long exposed ridges, this manifestation is especially stark. So by late morning we were sunbaked and a little giddy, and within minutes of walking out onto a little spit of rock extending into the lake, we had talked each other into throwing ourselves in.

Most people have tried something like this at one time or another but in case it’s been a while for you, I’ll describe the feeling. There is a moment—at the instant when you become fully submerged—where you and your mind become a blank void. No thoughts, no feelings. This moment, which might pass for something like nirvana if it lasted longer, quickly gives way to a full-body panic. There’s no avoiding it, I don’t think; you’re not in control. All your biological systems are screaming for you to find an exit. (The footage of our swim back to shore is not a record of grace and serenity, as you might imagine.)

Standing on shore once more you whoop and shiver and make all sorts of involuntary noises. But within a minute or two of standing in the sun the cold, and the memory of cold, are wiped away completely. What’s left is a blissful, total release. I’ve heard the splash of milk after a Carolina Reaper pepper described the same way. An immediate cessation of pain feels like getting high.

It’s not just the high that’s good, though. There are, it turns out, a number of physical and mental health benefits to throwing yourself into a frigid body of water every so often. This is a relatively new area of research and the science is far from settled, but the anecdotal evidence is considerable. Much of this comes from the United Kingdom, where it’s become something of a “thing” for people to swim and even race in cold water during the winter months.

The Guardian quotes a woman named Sara Barnes who started the practice after an operation that took a major toll on her legs:

After the operation, I was very scared and felt very lost,” says Barnes. “And I still have a lot of time where I feel quite lonely and afraid of the future. But swimming has given me back my self-confidence. When I go, it brings me back to myself. I think: ‘Right, come on Sara, you can do this, if you can get into that lake you can carry on, keep going.’ Swimming gives me a community, it gives me friends. It’s taken nothing and given me loads.

Our experience last weekend was hardly so weighty or dramatic. But it did feel good—the blankness, the high, the feeling of having done something daring. The feeling of pulling just a little bit closer to the grandeur of nature laid out before us.

I came across a passage in Peter Heller’s Celine the other day that speaks to me the same way.

The water is black and the peaks are dusted with new snow and the cottonwoods along the banks are yellow, their smoldering ranks throwing the scale of the mountains into perspective…it is only to remind us that the grandeur and shocking beauty are not of human scale. That the most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

So: I urge you to find time this year to do something stupid that’s also good for you. You may or may not have alpine lakes accessible to you; you may not even be able to swim. But there are certainly other acts that fall into that category and I trust that you can reason them out for yourself as they fit into your own life.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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