Many times this winter, I’ve cut holes through Michigan’s lake ice, just large enough to fit a body. My body, of course.
It is well known that the evening warm bath is soporific, and so it should make sense that the morning ice plunge is the polar opposite—an immense tonic. Trust me, there’s no combination of nicotine, caffeine, and cocaine that can give the adrenal glands a squeeze like cold water.
In addition, cryotherapy is also thought to reduce anxiety and depression. Indeed, there is no way to emerge from below the ice lugubriously. It also drowns intrusive thoughts.
Once on the frozen surface, I use a manual augur to bore three small wells as the vertices of a triangle. The augur is effectively a giant drill, commonly used for ice fishing. At the end of its shaft are two blades that burrow down toward the wet stuff, churning up crystal shards along the way.
Then I use a spear-fishing ice-saw to cut through from hole to hole, until I sever free a slab of Lake Huron, Michigan, or Superior.
Slabs like this were harvested from the Great Lakes before the invention of the electric refrigerator. In fact, many farmers in the Mitten earned their winter cash by collecting ice cakes, loading them on horse-drawn wagons, and storing them in icehouses.
The ice would then be sold to preserve food in the summer months. The practice became intercontinental in the mid-19th century, when blocks of ice were taken from northeastern U.S., insulated with sawdust, and then shipped to India. On arrival, the British Empire could enjoy a cool gin-and-tonic on the sweltering beaches of Calcutta.
Sometimes I, too, extract chunks of ice; but some pieces are nearly a foot thick and are much more easily dislodged by pushing down and under.
Thick ice is not the only challenge. At the beginning of winter, as the lake’s surface starts to harden, it’s impossible not to cut your shins while wadding out past the sandbar. As I write this, warm weather has broken the ice into perfectly straight, massive segments.
The strong winds have blown these slabs on the mounds of shelf-ice forming stacks. They appear like monoliths stampeding for an exit, climbing on top each other while caught in the frenzy.
Here’s what usually happens. I slip into my hole with the water up to my neck. Immediately my inhalation deepens. My surroundings appear perceptively brighter, which is likely from the noradrenaline dilating my pupils.
On occasion, my friend Eddy has cut another hole beside me. We never talk while in the water; not out of decorum, but because the cold is overwhelming.
You hear every crack of the expanding or contracting ice, and its vibrations sound like fictional laser beams. All you can see is the sky above and the expansive lake, which has the uncanny appearance of a desert (the frozen lake’s hot-blooded twin).
We stay in the water for one to five minutes and dunk our heads at the very end.
Once out of the water, Eddy and I make the predictable jokes about wilted masculinity.
But the cold doesn’t only bring smiles and laughter. There have been a few times when nature plays her tricks.
The water, which at its coldest is 30 degrees, can be 40 degrees warmer than the air. I’ve caught myself staying under the water longer than I should, only to avoid the much colder air: My confused instinct has created its own fatal logic.
Getting out is always the hardest part. We are red as if we had been sunburnt, except where below the skin are underlying blood vessels, which have turned pale; our bodies show vascularity like an anatomic diagram.
To get efficiently dressed after coming out of the lake, the disrobing that precedes the dunk must be strategic. I stack my clothing to give priority toward what I first want to wear after drying off. At the top of the pile is my hat, since my ears are the first preyed upon by frostbite.
On the coldest days, toweling off is merely a gesture. Within seconds, wet hair turns to ice, which when rubbed vigorously sprinkles to the ground like dandruff. When I take off my swim shorts, I realize they’ve frozen solid, and although carefully removed, they still scratch my thighs on their way down.
I’ve learnt the hard way that it is better to only dress in one layer, since the added time exposed to the frigid air is not worth the supplemental warmth from thermal underwear. Since I need my hands to put on everything else, they are at last put in mittens.
The hands are most severely affected, and lose their dexterity while positioning pants, zipping up a sweatshirt, and pulling socks onto wet feet (one of life’s eternal struggles).
Often my hands feel like rubber prosthetics, almost congealed since they’ve lost all sensation and functionality, and my jacket zipper must go undone. The hands don’t so much warm up as they do thaw or defrost like two chicken breasts on a weeknight.
The pain is excruciating, and Eddy and I regularly curse and yell.
It is doubtlessly difficult to convince anyone to join in who doesn’t share some appetite for masochism, though I think we are all drawn to certain kind of self-infliction.
Maybe because pain is a hint of our own mortality—a reminder that we’re still alive. Just look around. Pain and success are partnered everywhere.
There seems to be a paradox about self-harm as a protective tactic: If I am the author of the most pain I will feel today, then everything else is merely a pinch; if I can voluntary submit myself to pain, and overcome it, I leave stronger.
Indeed, I’ve often thought it was the cold that I was wrestling with, but now that I’m reflecting upon my icy submersions, I realize that it’s pain that I’m trying to overcome.
Mitch Miller is an adventure writer and conflict journalist. He’s more than happy to join in on any extreme activity, and can be reached at mitchenjoyer@gmail.com. Follow him on X at @funtimemitch.
