Linda was sitting on a log at the water’s edge, smoking a cigarette and nipping at a flask bottle of hootch. If ever there’s been a more fitting image of the Haines Polar Bear Dip, I haven’t seen it.
We’re a ragtag crew, not an elite athlete in the lot. Linda is neither young nor petite and she sank in deep snow a couple times getting down to the Port Chilkoot Dock beach on New Year’s Day.
I don’t know what motivates Linda to make the icy plunge each year and I didn’t ask. Ask five people and you’ll hear back five different things. I imagine for most of us it’s an annual vaccine akin to how Charlie Jimmie once explained to me the health benefits of eulachon oil.
“If you take a tablespoon of it in the morning, you can be pretty sure nothing worse is going to happen to you the rest of the day,” Charlie said. We are built to survive strong medicine, not to enjoy it.
My wife Jane and I started the Haines Polar Bear Dip in 2005 after living in Juneau and making the annual dip there. Our first outing started with the notion of camping out on New Year’s Eve, as we had camped on a Death Valley sand dune to watch the odometer roll over to year 2000.
In Juneau we spent the night at Auke Rec, shivering next to a sputtering campfire, Jane eventually abandoning me for a party of teenagers nearby. They’d brought shipping pallets and a jug of diesel as keeping warm in a downpour is one skill that Juneau kids acquire.
Compared to spending the night in a cold, damp tent, dunking in the cove the next morning seemed almost pleasant. We were hooked.
Copying the event in Haines presented some challenges. The most centrally located and practical dipping beach, the one downtown next to the cruise dock, faces north – right into the winter winds out of Skagway. As opposed to placid Auke Rec Cove, as often as not Haines dippers sprint into a brutal gusts and breaking waves.
The toughest dip came in 2009, when the New Year’s Day temperature dipped to about 2 degrees F. and a north wind dropped the chill factor to minus 15. I had a mind to cancel or postpone the dip so I phoned Erwin Hertz to talk it over.
Hertz was then 73, had lived most of his life with a back broken in a logging accident, and still liked a dare. Membership cards we once gave away listed Hertz as president of the Haines Polar Bear Club because he showed up an hour before the Dip every year with waste oil and rags to torch the shoreside bonfire that is our one nod to precaution.
Hertz also gave a blessing at the start of the dip, a convincing measure of reassurance coming from a man who survived a tree falling on him.
I told Hertz I was afraid the cold would kill someone and I didn’t want to be on the hook for that. He laughed and told me that conditions were fine, as he had dunked into the bay the day before.
Turns out, walking into Lynn Canal was what Hertz was using as back medication.
So we went ahead and we all survived New Year’s 2009 and every year since. Hertz died seven years ago at age 80 and Al Badgley – who showed up at the first couple dips with the town ambulance – took over making the invocation.
Besides a few regulars, the dip every year attracts newcomers and as many or more spectators than dippers. The whole thing happens so fast we never know who’s there until the photos start rolling on Facebook later.
On a video made this year by Sam McPhetres, a girl about 10 years old is jumping up and down before the mass rush into the sea. Then she’s at the front of the crowd of about 50 people heading for the water until she gets about ankle deep. Then, without breaking stride, she spins around and retreats to the bonfire. Two boys, just behind her, follow her lead.
Dipping into frigid water isn’t for everyone and curiously, more old-timers go in than youngsters.
The event maybe means nothing, or nothing more than a person has survived another year and is still game. In the darkest, coldest part of an Alaska winter, that’s affirmation enough.