What It Really Feels Like to Have Skin in the Game: Hint, Bring Band-Aids

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

Photo by Adam Le Sommer on Unsplash

One intrepid traveler learns the hard way

The cold was just awful. Outside the wind and snow were battering the windows. The glass was thin, and my hotel room’s walls weren’t much to speak of either. Our small hiking group was spread through the upper floor of the tea house. We were thousands and thousands of feet about sea level.

May, 2014. The best time to climb in the Himalayas. The first few days were sunshine, flowers and warming breezes.

High country, however, is unpredictable. We’d been hit by a blizzard just shy of Memorial Day.

In a few hours, as is so typical of extreme high altitude, we went from this:

the author on a dry day on the way up

To this:

Welcome to the world near Everest

We were two days away from summiting at Everest Base Camp, which is just under 18,000 feet.  The tea houses where we stopped for the night largely had no electricity and only one single big stove in the common area.

Invariably the great rooms were festooned with people’s sweaty socks drying on every available surface. Unless you mercifully had a head cold or consumed enough alcohol as to be insensate, the smell was enough to scorch your nose hairs.

Once we hurriedly got hot food down our gullets, we all tramped to our freezing rooms to set up our sleeping bags and pass the time until bedtime.

this looks a great deal warmer than it actually is

I was 61. Had just done Kilimanjaro and Macchu Picchu. However, my body is a sieve, especially because I drink a lot of liquids.

In order to warm up on this trip, you drink tea, lots of it, a natural diuretic. We were also eating noodle bowls, which meant even more liquids.

What’s a body to do?

Wake you up at night and demand relief. Of course it does. Bet you can relate and you don’t have to be camping.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but after trekking for six hours on average, every day, up very steep slopes, my legs were fried. Quivering, at best. Full-on wobbling at worst.

Before you complain about how heavy your backpack is…..

We typical tourists who trek the EBC are wimps compared to the locals for whom heading up and down the mountain every single day is just life. Their legs are stone, hewn from years of schlepping bottles of water and Coke and Fanta and great boxes of junk food for those hungry hikers every single day.

Some balance long, heavy beams of wood, slated for repairs in someone’s home or a sagging tea house roof.

.

Those who owned animals had it better but they still had to climb.

As with Kilimanjaro, most of us are terribly proud we make it at all, when the locals make that trek daily. It’s one of the steadier sources of income on the mountain.

We Westerners? If we’re smart, we train hard for the trek. Even then the relentless demand on our thigh muscles can leave them vibrating like a guttering candle by day’s end.

Those wobbly pegs had to launch me out of my warm sleeping bag and up off the hard surface of my rock-hard “mattress” so that I could relieve myself.

My breath pluming, I would click on my headlamp and sleepily pad way down an unlit, bitterly-cold hallway to the water closet.

Now this wouldn’t be so bad, except. These toilets are, or at least were at the time, basic. Plumbing as we know it just doesn’t exist on the high slopes. I think the seats were porcelain. Perhaps painted wood. I can’t remember, I was comatose at the time.

But this, I vividly recall. They were frozen solid.

I would drop my drawers in the deep sub-zero of the tiny room. On the way down, my legs would just give out. My warm bare ass would land with a resounding thud which I swore woke up the whole hallway. The seat was, of course, freezing cold.

After blessed relief, well.

I grabbed the cold edges to help myself back up.

Except now, my warm skin had frozen to the seat, the same way a kid’s tongue gets frozen to a cold pole after a dare.

DAMN.

As I struggled my way back up, the seat came with me, frozen to my butt skin.

After a mighty effort, I peeled myself loose. The frozen seat peeled skin off my butt, then landed with another sharp bang.

THAT is real skin in the game.

Happened every single time. I was too tired to remember, and my legs were way too wobbly to hold the air drop position.

I’ve never been brave enough to investigate whether or not I have a semi-circular scar on my rear. I suspect there’s evidence.

That trip was the inspiration to come up with a way to relieve myself without leaving the relative comfort of my room/tent/whatever.

Interim versions involved open cups.

I pee a lot. Tents are small.

You only knock it over once. Just saying.

My final version was, and still is, a well-marked water bottle with a tight screw top. That allows me to take care of business right where I am: in a tent, in a yurt, in a car sometimes, without losing my dignity or, for that matter, more skin.

It’s WELL-MARKED. Just in case.

These days when I hear someone talking about having “skin in the game,” I offer to show them what that really looks like.

Nobody’s taken me up on it yet.

Let’s play.

I hope you got a laugh at my expense. Trying to relieve yourself during adventure travel continues to be one of the best sources of hilarity from all my travels. It most assuredly keeps me humble.

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