Lesson from the cold

 The flipside to our domestic isolation during the pandemic -- 9 months now, today! -- is the natural wonder of this valley. The boys and I, and sometimes Sara, have roamed dozens and dozens of times across the landscape, far and near, closed in by gullies and boulders or face to face with the sky atop ridges and hills. While I feel sad we are not traveling to Utah this Christmas vacation, I relish the thought of more tramping up, down, and around. 

But after this last weekend, my anticipation has a note of caution to it. The cold is here, and it can be dangerous. On Saturday, I waited an hour and a half to get into Walmart. They have a 75 person limit! Which means a long time outside, and then a glorious 2 hours with the place practically to yourself. On Saturday I had brought a little camp stool to sit on and my journal to write in. But a rumpled trucker from California stood behind me in line, one of us said something, and we ended up talking the entire hour and a half. People laughed at my stool. "What are you selling?" a woman in a Santa suit asked. I also had my load of grocery bags. Anyway, maybe 15 minutes before we got in, I suddenly felt cold. And I instinctively stood up. I recognized that sitting totally relaxes the muscles -- not a good thing in the cold. It was around freezing, but windy. My sturdy coat could block the wind, but couldn't warm me up on the inside. I couldn't believe the thin jackets people were wearing, even old people. The trucker who had brought a grandson on a grand tour of the country as a graduation gift (and then instead of slipping easily into the business, wrecked "a little hot rod," a 3-5 year stain on his driving record) himself was a study in layers -- three or four or five or six layers of hoodies, so many and so faded it was hard to tell where the fabric ended and the skin began. Finally allowed into the building, it took a good quarter hour to shake the cold off me. 

On Sunday, I was determined to get the boys out for a long walk. Saturday night Toby had, as he does once or twice a week, called out from their room, "I can't sleep!" And Sara had gone in and spent an uncomfortable night, with Toby falling asleep late and Pax waking up early, incensed at the sound of the heat going on in the hallway. I knew they were not sleeping well because they lacked exercise. So after finishing a final exam for New Mexico History in the morning, and eating lunch, I gathered everything I thought we might need, from apple crisps and granola bars (the no-cook "meals" provided by the school district last week) to an old knife bought somewhere as a teenager and never once used, and a big bottle of water. I also brought a history book bought used. Then I nagged the boys to get their shoes and socks on. These two boys have some deep-seated hostility to wearing socks. The floor in this apartment is bone chilling. And yet they stroll around barefoot unless properly hounded. 

The weekend curfew was in effect, so our options were limited to heading across the now-dry Zuni River and into the reddish hills directly north, or -- as I thought more likely -- eastward toward a stream that feeds the river, and habitat of beavers. With the cold night, there should be good ice for the boys to crack or walk on. But Toby insisted he wanted to go up the hill. I guess he's broken enough ice for a while. We headed straight across the meadow behind our apartment, staying off the curving path that leads near the fence separating us from our neighbors. Even though we were still plainly visible -- there is not a tree around -- going straight across was my way of saying, "Yes, I am breaking the curfew, but I'm doing it discreetly. I don't want to be noticed." In my mind, a blanket curfew with no exception for heading off into the wild, with no chance of encountering a single soul, is absurd. So I don't mind breaking it. These kids will go insane stuck inside all weekend. And so will I! The apartment is a hothouse of buttons pushed and tempers flaring. 

We dipped down into the dry riverbed, and followed the channels through cattails, channels carved by the beavers who fled last summer when the water disappeared, to the other side where we mounted bare earthen banks. We crossed the field over a path we had made over the summer, ducked under a single strand of barbed wire, and then went under another fence across the road. We meandered through the sage brush and juniper trees, following animal trails now and then. Finally we were atop what we call "the V hill." It was sunny and not exactly cold. I lifted a flat rock and put it next to another one like it, pulled out my book, and lay on my side on the rocks to read about the 1930s. 

The boys did what they do. Pax focuses inward, finding something in the rocks or snow or dirt to interest him. At first he used a metal ruler to crack thin crusts of ice around plants or rocks where snow had melted. Toby focuses outward, roaming this way and that admiring the view of Blackrock and the water tower and the pink cliffs eastward, Dowa Yalanne straight south, the village toward the west, the red ridge northward, with one of the "twin mesas" peering from behind it. 

After quite a while reading I suddenly felt my feet were cold. I finished the chapter, got up, and told the boys it was time to walk. But it would take a good 10-15 minutes for my feet to stop being cold. And even when they did, my face still felt cold. We raced the sun home. I urged the boys to hurry: not because of coyote tracks or fear of dark, but because I was cold. The sky was briefly burnished as we crossed the meadow home. I closed the door gratefully behind me. When I drank some hot water, I felt a cold sensation in my throat melt eerily away. I had made the same mistake as I had on Saturday. By relaxing, my body had slowly gone cold. It wasn't extremely cold. But I couldn't fully warm it up again. 

I remember reading on NPR that hunter-gatherers are so healthy because they are always moving -- that they rarely are seated, that squatting is a "third world" habit whose benefits we ought to reconsider, and that a lot of modern health problems are due to long periods sitting, when the muscles are totally relaxed. The same goes for the body's ability to heat itself. I'll remember it. This afternoon I huddled in the blankets, wanting the cold to go out of my knees. I can hardly imagine people living in bad housing in winter.