Think With Favor On This
I can’t remember ever being in a situation, whether eating dinner with friends and having a pleasant conversation or sitting in a bar watching a game with someone, in which the question “So where was your most memorable shower?” came up. It’s probably not that interesting a question. Not nearly as interesting as, say, where is the strangest place you’ve ever had sex or what’s the weirdest thing you ever ate or where were you when (fill in the blanks with your favorite–JFK was shot, 9/11, Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, e.g.).
If it ever did come up in conversation, one of my candidates would certainly be the shower I took in a filling station in Talkeetna, Alaska after coming down from three weeks climbing Denali. There actually were showers in this place, probably mostly for climbers, where we all hustled, practically dropping mountain trou as we did. It was coin operated and you put in quarters for however long you were going to use it and I’ll tell you what– The absolute second your money ran out the water turned cold and I mean icy bitchin’ cold. There was no transition, no margin for error, no thirty-day period to pay before service was shut off. There was a good deal of screaming and yelling and oh shit in every stall as we dealt unexpectedly with the shock after luxuriating in the first hot shower for many days. This is after not changing our polypro underwear the whole time and using a pee bottle in the dark in your sleeping bag and, well, you get the idea. One of the less romantic parts of big mountain expeditions for sure.
I remembered “The Most Memorable Shower” recently because of the fact that we can’t use ours here at home yet due to these gas explosions and still having no gas service up here in the Merrimack Valley area and having to shower somewhere other than at home until such time as we have service again. I was thinking about how often I have referred to the simple pleasure of a hot shower. In fact I looked and in slightly over seven percent of these posts I have said something about it. I wondered why hot showers became almost the ne plus ultra for me of feeling and expressing gratitude. It cries out to be poked at.
I mean, hygiene is important, of course. We Sapiens learned that after a third of Europe died from the Black Plague in the 14th Century. But humanity had figured out ways of showering and being clean using cold water long before the invention of indoor plumbing (circa 1850). It’s a convenience, and a wonderful one, of modernity. I could make a fire out back or use the barbecue or camping stove for coffee, but couldn’t come close to approximating a shower, at least without a serious pain in the ass. I could hang a bucket with holes from a tree and heat up water I suppose.
Edward Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire about having a gas refrigerator. “Not indispensable,” he noted, “but useful. It is in fact one of the few positive contributions of scientific technology to civilization and I am grateful for it. Every time I drop a couple of ice cubes into a glass I think with favor of all the iron and coal miners, bargemen, railroaders, steelworkers, technicians, designers, factory assemblers, wholesalers, truck drivers and retailers who have combined their labors (often quite taxing) to provide me with this simple but pleasant convenience, without which the highball or the Cuba libre would be poor things indeed.”
You can look at hot showers in the same way. It’s a commonplace everyday joy for most people (not all, of course), yet I wonder how we will do with the big things, tough things like getting fired or finding out your partner or child has cancer without practicing with the small things as often as possible. Let’s each enjoy our hot shower today and give thanks and think with favor of how it got to us.
