It’s early October as I write this, and getting to be that time of year again in the Northern hemisphere. There’s a chill creeping into the morning air, and t-shirts, shorts and sandals are disappearing… but not quite as many as one might think.
I’m not going to go into all the issues of what is best to wear in what conditions here. Although I’m normally happy to discuss such things as the value of hats, the relationship between thickness (not weight) and insulating value/warmth or why “cotton kills”, there is a much more fundamental issue these days that I feel needs to be the subject of intelligent discussion, one seldom brought up. That issue is why it is desirable to even think about what to wear in practical and not just aesthetic terms. I want to talk about “why”, and not “what”.
The need to even bring this up would have shocked our ancestors from just a few generations ago and on back into the past to a time before we were fully human. Dressing for the conditions used to be one of the first things humans learned as children in all temperate parts of the planet. It had to be, because everyone was out in the weather a great deal of the time. It was second nature, something everyone did almost entirely without thought, taking care of a more immediate and much more constant necessity than eating.
Now, however, in the “first world” we’re far more protected and coddled than any generations of our species has ever been. We spend huge amounts of our time indoors or in our vehicles, in conveniently heated and climate-controlled conditions. Our exposure to the actual environment consists of at most hurrying through the weather for a few minutes a in a day on the way from one climate-controlled and protected bubble of air to another, and this has been steadily increasing for generations. Some of us are the third or perhaps even fourth generation that has barely had to deal with the outdoors in our lives, and in many cases we’ve lost the ability to even think that it might be different, a situation made considerably worse by discontinuity that we’ve introduced by the fact that we now sequester our old folks and prevent them from teaching what they’ve learned in their long lives to our children, so the simple requirement to dress adequately for the weather has faded from our culture and our minds. Now that necessity has to be explained as though it were a curious antique, much like one has to explain to young folks the importance of fire or why it was once necessary to carry water.
This loss of understanding of the most basic necessities is not just a shame from a perspective of understanding history and learning from the past, it is a real and current vulnerability that will, inevitably, someday, kill a great many people one way or another.
The number one killer of people in the outdoors is hypothermia, loss of body heat, once called “exposure”. IT is in the physical nature of our bodies that we need to maintain our body heat within a relatively narrow range or die. When people think of “survival” they often first think of food and water, but temperature can kill much faster than lack of food (at least weeks for a healthy person) or water (days), or even lack of air (minutes). In some conditions cold can kill in seconds. The old-fashioned admonition for people observed being dressed inadequately for conditions was “you’ll catch your death”. It was not a joke. Even temporary chilling can lower the body’s defense mechanisms and be the beginning of disease, and not infrequently the beginning of the end. Such “exposure” dangerous for babies, children and the elderly. Not many years ago I foolishly kept riding a motorcycle in the cold although my neck was exposed, rather than going through the hassle of pulling over, removing my helmet, putting on something to protect my neck, re-fastening my helmet and rejoining traffic. Other than my neck I was reasonably warm, and although it became acutely painful I “bulled through” the situation for a half-hour or so. I paid for that- within twelve hours I had a severe sore throat, followed by two weeks of flu-like symptoms that just kept cycling rather than fading away after a single iteration, which is my usual pattern if I get sick in that way.
If my condition had worsened and I had died it’s very unlikely that anyone would have said my death was from the weather.
The weather is a at least a contributing cause in so many human deaths worldwide that it’s taken for granted. People die in huge numbers in hurricanes, typhoons, in desert and other arid areas for lack of rain, in cold snaps and winter storms, from flooding and storm surges and from illnesses brought on by chilling or overheating, in winter flu epidemics, even of starvation in famines brought on by drought or heart attacks brought on by shoveling snow, but weather is seldom cited as the cause of death because it’s almost as obvious as saying that they died because they quit breathing, or that their hearts stopped.
And yet, every year I see lots of people out and about in frigid or soaking conditions or both who are inadequately dressed. A large percentage of them are young people who are clearly more concerned with appearance than caution. The current fashion is to dress as though one gives absolutely zero thought to clothing at all, and dressing adequately for the weather doesn’t fit in with that mode, it’s not “cool”, so every year I see young folks out for morning coffee in all conditions in pajamas or “leggings” (currently the term means very tight and very thin stretchy tights), no jacket or coat, no hood or hat, often wearing short-sleeved t-shirts in freezing weather. They’re literally betting their lives that they will not have to deal with the cold for more than a few moments.
Like most things, perhaps all, that will be true until it isn’t, someday.
Some examples:
One time in the center of town, when the temperature in the 20’s (Fahrenheit) with a stiff wind I watched a young man on the sidewalk waiting for the light to change to cross six lanes of traffic at a crossroads. It was hard not to notice him, he was jumping up and down in place as though he were on a pogo stick, and probably higher than he would have on a pogo stick, because he was literally and not very slowly freezing to death. He was dressed in a short-sleeve t-shirt, torn jeans and sneakers. I was waiting at a light to turn, and after a few minutes of evidently increasing panic he gave up on waiting for the light and bolted across the street, though heavy traffic, Horns blared, drivers swerved and slammed on brakes to avoid hitting him. He made it across, and then was confronted with having to wait again for the light at the other street that crossed there, again pogoing up and down in-place with all his might. He could easily have been killed. Again, if he had been killed, the weather would not be named as the cause of his death.
In another incident I pulled into a service station to refuel in bitter cold, and there was a similarly-dressed young man fueuling his car right in front of me in similar conditions. He was literally dancing around like a jitterbug, frantic spasms and slapping himself as though he was on fire. I was comfortable enough in coat and boots, and ventured to say “you must have an awful lot of faith in your car”, but from the expression he gave me it was clear that he had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently the thought of what would happen in these conditions if his vehicle or its heating failed never entered his mind.
Every winter I see another young man just a few blocks from where I live out walking in the cold in a thick down parka that looks very warm, but bare-legged in shorts, sometimes in the snow, sometimes in “athletic shoes” but more than once when there was no snow or it had been cleared from the sidewalks I’ve seen him in sandals.
It’s not just young people, and not just mid-winter. In this neighborhood there are a whole lot of people who walk their dogs-it’s actually a great neighborhood for walking. Walking the dog is not an event that happens to people by surprise, most of them are out there every day, and yet even when it’s been raining for days I see them out bare-headed, no jackets, no hoods, no umbrellas in pouring rain, often visibly completely soaked. They are so insistent and persistent that it can hardly be an accident or oversight. What’s going on here?
I gained some insight from a man I worked with, he outranked me in the workplace but was not directly in my chain of command. I’ve forgotten the details, but he was about to go on vacation to an area with a dire weather forecast. I mentioned that concern in the conversation, and he said “I never let the weather affect my plans”.
As a long-time backpacker, camper and sometime sailor this attitude struck me as pure idiocy and as a great way to die. It’s certain that millions of people die each year from causes directly or indirectly related to weather… but what really stuck with me was the pride with which he said it, and how much emotional content it seemed to carry for him.
I ran across something similar in an on-line forum. I mentioned in passing that in the fall it was my habit to put a down sleeping bag, snow boots, a parka and gloves into my vehicle “just in case”. This is not exactly preparing for Armageddon here folks, it seemed a reasonable precaution and there was no downside, it took at most a couple of minutes each fall.
I wasn’t prepared for the vehement negative reaction. I guess I should have been to some extent, I remember some of the vitriol directed to those who prepared for the Y2K non-event, they being characterized as “hoarders” and the premise put forth that it was immoral of them not to share- this when all the shelves were fully stocked and everything needed was readily available to anyone. In this case again, it seemed somehow emotionally important to these people that others not prepare, and it somehow was offensive to them if anyone did.
Over time, in observing similar near-angry reactions against the idea of being the least prepared again and again, I came to think that this ostentatious helplessness is both a fashion statement and to some degree a visible indication of a political position. Consciously or subconsciously, by refusing to take simple measures to help themselves these people are advertising their complete faith in being taken care of by others. Their conspicuous display of lack of independence is just that, a proud declaration of dependence and total faith in society, in the infrastructure, and most particularly in authority and government to assure their safety, well-being and comfort under any and all circumstances. Challenging that was, and is, like challenging a loyal dog to learn to be a little independent of its master. It is inconceivable to the dog that it will ever be necessary, and an insult to the dog’s sense of loyalty.
The truth is that you don’t know what is going to happen to you today. Nobody does. We act as though we do because we have no choice, but acting as though something is true is far different from being able to make it true. When you put on your clothes in the morning you have no absolute certainty where the day’s events will lead you, or what they may demand of you. Besides basic hygiene, the clothes that you put on in the morning are the result of the first and in many ways the most basic survival-related decisions of your day. When you pick what you’re going to wear you’re deciding whether or not to allow yourself a margin to deal with the unexpected. Clothing is survival equipment.
Sorry, but if you end up out in the cold, the rain, freezing rain and sleet, without a jacket or coat, without a hood, hat or umbrella, without adequate footwear, you don’t end up looking “cool”. You just look cold. You look like a cold idiot.
If you are so obviously unprepared for conditions that you knew existed or could exist, why would anyone trust your judgement and abilities to handle anything more complex than dressing yourself? Of course you are making a statement in what you choose to wear on any given day, but in large part the statement that you’re broadcasting is about basic competence. The most basic of competences, the first baby step toward being an adult- whether you are capable of dressing yourself to deal with a reality that sometimes contains unexpected events, or you’re still shunning that first responsibility,still protesting the reality of being abandoned to your own resources and advertising for an ersatz mommy to take over that responsibility for you.
– Robert the Wombat