I promise I’m not a hippie. I actually hate hippies. No offense to hippies.
Cold plunging into icy water is something I thought only Alaskan hippies did. (Most real hippies are from Alaska. All the fake hippies are from California)
I accidentally became one of the cold plunge people. Right after I quit smoking.
Quitting smoking made me much less stingy with my time because I had all this excess energy that was normally spent on wallowing over wanting a cigarette.
Nicotine fiends are in a constant feeling of withdrawal that’s why they are so impatient and high strung.
So when I lost my constant feeling of withdrawal and could no longer wallow in it, I had all this extra time. Therefore I was much more willing to do things I normally wouldn’t be all that interested in.
Like going to the river.
At that time it was still summer. About ninety degrees and 65 degrees in the water.
For context most recreational swimming pools are kept at around 80 degrees. Around 72 degrees is considered chilly. When it bites just a bit when you first get in.
So 65 degrees is cold water.
And I’m a big baby. I don’t like uncomfortable things. It took me twenty minutes to get all the way into the water and I bitched about it the whole time.
But the current of the river was very strong. Once I got all the way in and I let myself float that’s when the addiction started.
One of my friends likes to take mushrooms. She’s a hippie. But. She’s pretty so she can get away with it.
She said taking mushrooms makes her feel so incredibly present in the moment that she feels like she’s apart of nature.
That’s how I felt floating in the river. Entirely present. No future. No past. And I did feel a sort of invincibly as though I’d become something too vast and too complex to ever be damaged. Like I’d become apart of the river.
I know I sound like a hippie. But it was an incredible euphoric feeling that got very addicting very fast.
At first I did not associate the cold with that feeling. I tolerated the cold to get that feeling.
By the end of summer the water temperature had fallen from 65 degrees to 60 degrees.
Then it got to 55 degrees in the early fall.
Then 50.
This morning I got to the river at eight in the morning. The temperature outside was forty five degree, the water temperature was 48 degrees.
Some days it hurts to get in and the euphoria hits after I’ve adjusted to the water. Some days I get the euphoria the instant I fully submerge.
Today it was instant and some people that sounded Russian walked by and shouted, “is that girl in the water?! Americans are crazy!”
I’m sure I looked like a hippie.
Jess lanai 