Subterranean Beefworks

Fall Lake George

Moderate Hypothermia - core temperature 95 - 93 degrees F
• Dazed consciousness


• Loss of fine motor coordination - particularly in hands - can't zip up parka, due to restricted peripheral blood flow


• Slurred speech


• Violent shivering


• "I don't care attitude" - flattened affect

The above snippet of info equates to, "hell yes."

I spent the weekend at this outing club event called "Fall Lake George" which was a camping trip hosted by RPI. Now, before I get into the cool stuff, let me just say that I retract any comparison I ever made to RIT and RPI. If you represented them both by bananas, you'd have the RPI banana in one hand. It's big, fresh, chocked full of potassium and a nice sunny shade of yellow. Then you'd have the RIT banana, a shrunken brown arc which you won't even pick up because it's got green fur growing on the rot patches. RPI people are A-OK in my book.

So this Lake George place is by Troy, NY which is by Albany, NY. The RPI Outing Club (ROC) rented this island about 1.5 miles from shore and had a bunch of other outing clubs come and just have a weekend together, ours included. We got to the launch point in the dead of night and my two new friends (Olga and Garrick) and I boarded our over-loaded two-man canoes and headed into the inky waters.

It was a good hour of canoeing in the general direction of this beacon light which never seemed to get any larger. As we closed in on it, the letters ROC emerged from what was nothing but a golden pimple for the last hour. Camp was set up and particulars organized. Some sandwiches were eaten and then we slept.

The next day was filled with canoeing our shoulders to arthritis, hiking up a mountain side, learning how to whistle with acorn hats, square-dancing, and cliff jumping a nice 20 foot drop. Up to that point, the milage was about 6.5 miles on our canoes. I suppose that's not a whole lot, but then, there's still some canoeing I didn't yet talk about.

That took place Sunday morning. About 7am, I awoke to a voice. "Time to get up! You in there, son?" It belonged to of Kevin (another LehighOutingClub member) shaking my dilapidated tent and thus my head, which was pinned against the wall.

The sour weather we expected every day of the weekend was finally there, making up for all the time it lost the other days by being especially rainy and cold. I was friggin' soaked from packing up my shit and cleaning up garbage, but the worst was yet to come.

With rain and wind come waves; they were great and threatening. Whitecaps tossed our over-loaded canoe like assholes toss around people who aren't assholes, but are too small to fight back. It felt like something out of a sailor novel or something, with grey washing everything in sight, water splashing into the boat, and the crew realizing for the first time that they just might be fucked.

We navigated our boat to the other side of the island, managing to get our belongings on a motor boat so we wouldn't sink on the way back. At that point, the t-shirt came off and I was ready for battle.

We fucking sailed back to the landing 1.5 miles away. Using the act of canoeing to basically save my life through cellular resperation, I chugged my ass off to get back, with my esteemed crewmates doing the same. In the driving rain, we fired across the lake, passing lesser boaters who had left in excess of 10 minutes before us.

We finally made it back. My speech at that point was slurred and my ideas brief and disorganized. I dried myself for a while using the air dryer in the bathroom at the suggestion of one of the RPI girls. But I made it. And we made it. And everything worked out. And I am a warrior.

After I got home, I did a little research about hypothermia out of curiosity, to see how close I got, and I pretty much hit moderate right on the money.

That was my weekend. I love camping.

Posted by Alchemae at September 28, 2003 09:36 PM