Glacier Rinse

After five days in the wilderness, I was dying to wash my hair. It was long, tangled, matted, and flecked with bugs, Spanish moss, and bits of mud from the trail. I was in the middle of a forest in the Cascade Mountains, not exactly the right moment for a wash and a blow dry. But I hated having dirty hair. On the day before our arrival at the river’s edge—and our turnaround point for the trek—I knew I couldn’t put off washing my hair any longer. Danny laughed much longer than necessary. He was going to enjoy the sight of his city cousin washing her long hair in the wilderness stream that skirted our campsite.

Without hot water, we had been washing our cooking pots in the swift-moving streams, scrubbing utensils with wild horsetail stalks. My hands had gotten used to managing without warm water. But the human head has much more tender demands. The stream was small enough for me to lower my head into without being swept away into oblivion. I lay down on my back and tilted my head backward. Just before my head touched the water, Danny shouted to me from the campsite, “By the way, that water comes from a glacier up the mountain!”

Something like an electrical current zapped through me as my head hit the icy stream. The cold knocked the breath out of me and it took all my willpower to keep from snapping my head back out and running back to camp. But the major shock had already happened. I might as well get on with it, I figured. I reached around, located the shampoo bottle, and managed a quick lather before dunking my head back into the frigid water to rinse. I emerged screaming. Danny threw a small towel in my direction and I dried off by the campfire. No campfire has ever felt so good—ever.

I left some of the city back there in the wild splendor of that forest, but even more of the forest came back with me to my real world. I brought it back in the form of moody weather, sensory beauty, aching feet, cold nights, and strong muscles. I felt physically toughened. I had acquired an expanded vocabulary of extreme sensations. My scalp can still feel the shock of that glacial water as if it just happened.