A few years ago, when I started going to Arizona for the winter, one of my friends, asked me why and when I told him to be warm, he called me a wimp. This man had a job inside of a warm building his entire career but he still seemed serious with his banter so I did get a little defensive. I didn’t argue the point with him however, because he was a friend who didn’t know my past. If I had used some kind of a rebuttal that day, I would have said something like this.
As a child growing up my brothers and I slept in an unheated bedroom. For all practical purposes it was the attic. My dad burned wood and the fire went out at night but even if it had been kept going all night, our upstairs bedroom had one small register in the floor, where heat could theoretically leak through to our room. Needless to say it didn’t. Three of us boys slept in one bed in that room, not because we wanted too, but to keep warm. When we went outside, we wore homemade knitted caps and mittens. Shoes, inside of uninsulated six buckle rubber overshoes.
Several years later, when I was in my late twenties. I went to work for a large municipal park maintenance department for 13 years. In the winter 10 of us flooded and maintained 56 skating rinks. The colder the weather, the more you worked because that’s when you made the best ice. That went on for the better part of three months. You drew tanker loads of water from hydrants and then you went to the rinks and sprayed it on the ice. Some of the men rode in tractors with no heaters to speak of, fitted with rotary brooms to sweep the ice first. In the hockey rinks-- 14 of them—after they were swept all the shavings would be piled up against the boards when they were done, so you had to shovel them out before flooding. It was like shoveling a four hundred foot long sidewalk, a foot deep with snow, 14 times a day.
I also had at that time, joined the paid on call fire department. Our fire trucks had two men in the cab and the rest of us rode outside, in the elements, on a kick board across the back of the truck, while hanging onto a chrome bar. We had long rubber coats, thigh high rubber boots and metal helmets with thin earmuffs inside. If you think twenty below is cold, try it on the back of a truck going fifty miles an hour. Both flooding rinks and fighting fires requires you to work with water. Your mitts were wet with in a half hour of going to work, or at a fire. Spend an hour on a thirty-six foot ladder with water spray falling on you at a fire and everything ice coated, while it is far below zero and you will also know then what cold really is.
There is a word called acclimated and its often used to describe getting used to the ascending heights when mountain climbing but it also applies to getting used to working in the cold and you do. My story isn’t unique and I am sure there are many examples of people who lived and worked like this and still do. Construction workers, high line workers and people who have fought wars in such extreme temperatures. I’m no stronger and braver then any other person who does what we did back then. But I choose to go where its warmer now and I know in my heart I have nothing to prove to anybody, when it comes to tolerating the cold. The wimp.
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