First Person | Discovering the Joys of an Arctic Plunge

During the winter of 2021, I spent three months living solo on an island in Maine. I’d been seized with the idea a few summers earlier while walking along a sun-splashed road on Monhegan, thinking, Gosh, this is nice. I wonder what it’s like in the middle of February? After some fits and starts, I found myself in a sweet timber-framed year-round house on the south side of Little Cranberry Island, far enough from my nearest neighbors that I could go a week without seeing anyone if I chose.

The project, if you can call it that, was to take my well-worn, extroverted, relational self (son, friend, husband, father, worker, all-around glad-hander) and put him on the bench to see what or who would emerge in his place. That’s another essay, but it’s also how I found myself sitting by the woodstove late one February afternoon, reading Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which my sister had sent me as “just the thing” for her kid brother’s wacky adventure.

May writes about the salutary effects of following nature’s cycles, allowing oneself to withdraw, rest, even mourn, rather than relentlessly pursuing the headlong linear rush this society encourages and rewards. One of her chapters recounts her experiences with cold-water swimming, and it was utterly captivating. Her first time into the ocean, it was drizzling and 43 degrees, the water 37. Entering, she writes, “was so absolute. So vicious.” I shuddered as I read. Minutes later, when she was back on the beach, she gasped, “That was brilliant.”

I closed the book and looked out at the ocean in front of my house. The sun was setting, the wind brisk; there was some snow on the ground. I said a string of phrases that I can’t share here. I knew what I had to do.

Cursing some more, I headed down to the beach, terrified but slightly tickled by my sudden resolve. A little back from the waterline, I began taking off my clothes, shocked by the coldness of the sand and, as each layer came off, the strangeness of my bare body exposed to the air. This continued up to the toughest moment of the whole process for me, when my shirt came off and my mind said, Really? And there I was, buck naked and dry as a bone.

I walked into the water. It was indeed absolute in the way it grabbed my attention. Up to my knees, the small waves splashing the martini-cold onto my poor warm thighs. I ain’t waiting for the crotch, I thought, and I turned around and launched myself backward into the Atlantic.

My body and mind were so astounded by the novelty of what was happening that pain or terror or even alarm didn’t register. But I did want to stand up as soon as possible, which I did, finding the bottom, jumping to my feet, gasping for air, and shaking the water from my hair. I was fully wet and vibratingly electrified. Now what? I crouched back under the water, up to my chin, trying to tame my breath. I started counting—one thousand one, one thousand two—and made it to about 20 before bolting to the beach, where I looked out on the ocean, bellowed an exultant and again-unprintable phrase, gathered up my clothes, and ran back up to my house and into the hot tub.

Which is where my buzz instantly ended. Yes, I was warm again and yes, I had DONE IT, but the feeling that I’d just read May describe—“My blood sparkled in my veins”—was now gone.

Still, I felt acutely alive for the rest of the evening, and I would end up sleeping even better than normal. This thing was real, it seemed. And uttering another, gentler curse, I knew I would do it again tomorrow.

I went in every day for the remaining month and a half of my stay, following the high tide and ignoring the weather (wading in with snow on my shoulders was memorable). I worked my way up to staying in for a minute, which seemed plenty, and I never had another hot tub buzzkill, instead walking on the beach, tomato-soup-red as my capillaries flushed with blood, feeling utterly bulletproof for five minutes or so, spectacularly present in nature. One of my favorite times was an early morning with a good surf running; crouching in the water, I looked into the rising sun through the tube of a wave. The last day I got out of the water was the only time I cried that my island sojourn was over.

Since then, I’m less regular in my plunging, but when presented with an opportunity I’ll usually take it. I’ve been in Cape Cod Bay in January, Wildcat Brook in February, and Walden Pond at the drop of a ski hat, wading in while ice chunks banged my shins and hockey players skated past me. Canada, Scotland, the Faroe Islands—my trips are now more vivid for these immersions, connecting me to place in an indelible way. My wife and I even fill the bathtub with cold water on winter mornings, getting ourselves revved up for the workday. The high never fails, and the benefits linger.

It’s brilliant.