Cold-Plunging With Maine’s ‘Ice Mermaids’

Once I met Ida Lennestål for a plunge on a chilly January day, she was pulling an ax from her automotive and switching into hotter boots. A couple of minutes later, she lit a fireplace in a close-by sauna — a small constructing cobbled collectively from a former fish home and an previous range — earlier than we walked the quick slope right down to a frozen pond close to her residence in Georgetown, Maine.

She took to the ice with the ax, chipping away at an oblong opening and shedding a layer of clothes as her physique warmed from the work. When her arms or again have been drained, she’d pause and stretch. Finally her accomplice and kids joined us, lacing up skates and swirling or toddling alongside the pond’s floor. Two buddies from the world, Nicole Testa and Ariel Burns, joined, too, utilizing a ladle to scoop chunks from the water, clearing a path for his or her our bodies.

Ida grew up in Northern Sweden, near the Finnish border, within the arctic local weather of her mother and father and grandparents. The observe of mixing saunas and chilly plunges, a facet of her cultural and familial traditions that stretches again for generations, is one thing she introduced along with her to Maine; she sees it as a option to share her tradition along with her group and to really feel linked to her residence and to herself. “This became especially important during the pandemic when the distance between me and my people back home felt even bigger than before,” she mentioned.

When the ice was prepared and the sauna was heat, all of us stripped to our bathing fits and boots and took turns dipping our our bodies into the chilly water. The solar got here out, nevertheless it appeared to supply no heat.

“The sauna and dip for me is a way to get out of my head and into my body,” Ida mentioned. “When I’m in a hot box” — what she typically calls the sauna — “or in an ice-cold body of water, my body doesn’t worry about the future or the past, how it looks or whether it is loved. The body just is.”

After the preliminary plunge, our our bodies felt calm and sluggish. It was time for the sauna. Inside, the air, which smelled like cedar, was scorching sufficient to drag sweat instantly. My physique appeared to relish the expertise of opposites, the way in which the chilly and the warmth affected my circulation and altered my respiration. The group repeated the plunge thrice: plunge, sauna, plunge, sauna, plunge, sauna. Every transition felt like a little bit renewal.

“These sessions are a direct experience of the body, anchoring me into the present moment,” Ida mentioned. “It has taught me to sit with the uncomfortable, both the hot and the cold, to breathe through it. To pay attention. It has taught me to listen to my body and hear what it needs. It’s a ritual. Sacred almost. And the bliss when it’s all over lasts for hours.”

Afterward, intrigued by the expertise, I began asking round about different ladies who search out chilly water. I’d began winter browsing a couple of years in the past and understood the methods the water may impression my physique and thoughts, particularly when it was chilly. I normally surf with ladies, a lot of them freshmen like me. However the means of chilly plunging, I discovered, was its personal distinct expertise, with its personal intention and energy.

Later that winter, I parked my automotive by a farmhouse in Bremen, Maine, and walked throughout an icebound meadow to the shores of a lake. The snow had frozen right into a slick crust. Undaunted, a small group carried provisions and snacks to share right down to the lakeside. Taking turns with an ax, hammer, noticed and drill, the group spent hours reducing an unlimited coronary heart into the lake to have a good time Valentine’s Day.

A 12 months earlier than, Caitlin Hopkins and Kelsy Hartley, who organized the dip, had posted indicators round their group in all caps: “VALENTINE’S DAY MERMAID SIGHTING!” They went to their native seaside and shimmied into mermaid tails, taking part in on the rocks and within the water. A couple of households introduced their youngsters to witness the episode; some winter seaside walkers have been thrilled, the remaining befuddled.

That day, Caitlin and Kelsy started calling themselves Two Maine Mermaids. They dip year-round and in several places, typically in costumes or crowns and to have a good time new moons and full moons, typically utilizing the title the Ebb and Move group. “We started with our small group celebrating birthdays, solstices, full moons and anything else we could think of right at the beginning of Covid,” Caitlin Hopkins defined. “Some days it’s serene, peaceful and just calming. Sometimes it’s a party. Either way, the water always gives us exactly what we need — never fails.”

Solely half of the group determined to plunge into the cutout coronary heart on that chilly day in February. In swimsuits, booties and mitts (like the sort surfers put on), they lowered themselves into the water, mingling with little icebergs and slush. A couple of hugged the ice, or pulled their our bodies onto the bigger chunks, their spirits buoyant. They monitored the minutes each to check stamina and to guard their our bodies from frostbite. Most stayed in for 5 minutes, a couple of for seven. After they emerged, they smiled by way of bluish lips.

“After I get out, I don’t try and rush into my towel or dryrobe,” mentioned Kelcy Engstrom. “I like to stay in my swimsuit as long as possible. I just like the way my skin feels in the air after being in the water.”

“After swimming, I feel very strong and happy and calm,” she added. “I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been in a bad mood after a dip.”

Katie Stevenson, who additionally dips with Two Maine Mermaids, is taking a 12 months off from medical college and has enrolled in a course about medical chaplaincy. “I don’t practice a formal faith tradition at this point in my life, but being in the water feels more sacred to me than any church service I’ve ever attended,” she mentioned.

“When I’m stressed in the hospital, I try to find the nearest window with a view of any water,” she instructed me. “I envision myself in the water, feeling the lapping of the waves against my chest, the pressure of my lungs contracting and expanding in protest to the deep cold, focusing my energy on slow measured breaths, seeing whatever incredible sunrise, sunset or full moon I saw most recently. Sometimes when I have particularly troubling patient visits, I envision the suffering that I or the patient and their family are experiencing getting carried away by the waves.”

The annual custom of the polar bear plunge has existed in the US and past for greater than 100 years. However casual chilly plunging teams appear to be proliferating: the Red Hot Chilly Dippers in Vermont; the Puget Sound Plungers in Washington State; the Bluetits Chill Swimmers and the Wild and Scilly Mermaids in Britain, to call only some. Lately, what feels completely different is the sense of mindfulness across the means of the plunge. Lots of the individuals I met by the water instructed me they have been there as a result of chilly plunging gave them a option to dwell with a sure fullness. It gave them a course of to have inside intimacy with grief, trauma and ache, whereas connecting tougher feelings with pleasure and humor.

Amy Hopkins organizes a gaggle of dippers in York, Maine. They meet at native seashores and bays, typically with water so chilly and slushy it has the consistency of a margarita. I met her and a gaggle of girls on the fringe of the seaside round dawn on a foggy morning, the sky milky and the solar sluggish to emerge. They waded into the water and submerged their heads, their dips fast like baptisms.

For them, essentially the most rewarding a part of the ritual is the act of submersion, a second of complete submission to the chilly. “When your body is in that fight or flight, it’s shocking,” mentioned Amy, who began her profession as a labor and supply nurse. “That cold temperature immediately makes everything constrict and protect. Blood rushes to your vital organs.”

Amy discovered her option to chilly water whereas mourning the lack of her two mother and father and the collective lack of the pandemic. She is now facilitating dip journeys for girls and dealing with college counselors to offer chilly plunges for top schoolers in a enterprise she has named the Saltwater Mountain Co. However she began by organizing free, open group plunges — just like the one on the chilly, foggy cove — underneath the title Dip All the way down to Rise Up. In that post-dip feeling, contributors typically splash or hug each other, rising from the water holding arms.

In a spot like Maine, for six months out of the 12 months, the connection with nature is one in every of hardship, even ache. The chilly air hurts your uncovered pores and skin; the wind can chap your lips and make your eyes water. Working errands normally requires scraping the windshield and shoveling snow. Winter is harsh and erratic, nevertheless it’s additionally simply lengthy, maddeningly so.

And so the prevailing tradition retains a way of delight concerning the harshness, a capability to search out pleasure within the endurance of all of it. Mainers perceive that there’s a symmetry in residing in a spot with extremes — that there isn’t any heat with out stretches of chilly.

“You can’t think about a Maine winter without talking about depression — the depression that comes from just being in a long winter,” Amy Hopkins mentioned. “But with this practice, you’re meeting the season. Instead of complaining, you are meeting the season.”

“I never loved winter until I started doing this,” she mentioned.