The Hypothermiest Place on Earth

My timing is impeccable.

Actually, that's not quite true. It is, in fact, quite peccable. I really could be compelled to say it is actually rather peccful. Take today, for instance. I've been working 50- to 60-hour weeks for the last four weeks and finally put my foot down and decided to take a stand for sanity and family cohesion. We would take a day and coheed in that most familial of places, Disneyland! We planned it for about two weeks and I did everything I could at work to shuffle meetings and arrange for project backfills so I could subtly disappear for one measly day. I was particularly creative in my excuses for all my managers who really didn't need to know the full truth. ("I have to take the day off to attend to a large rodent problem affecting my family.") The triumphant day of escape was ordained from afar to be today.

The fact that today was the day I took off to go to Disney will not go down in history. It will not be noted by historians, nor will journalists chronicle its occurrence. (Apart from the humble offerings of yours truly.) What will go down in the books is that today was the day that the Arctic Storm of the Century descended in all its chilly and dreary gloom on the greater L.A. basin. In my years in Los Angeles I don't remember a more miserable day.

At first we were not dismayed. The rain would keep the crowds away! And how bad could it get? We were in Southern California, after all. Ten minutes of vague spitting and it would be done, right? We drove out, paid our exorbitant sum, parked and caught the tram into the park, all the while in a cold, steady drizzle. We hadn't gotten ten feet from the tram when the gale-force winds whipped Stacy's umbrella inside-out. I suppose that was an omen of warning that we were supposed to heed carefully. We kept going.

If it hadn't been established before, the tone for the day was firmly set within 15 seconds of actually entering the park. L ran from the gate right up to a landscaped lawn with a huge floral Mickey, trudging in the process straight through a puddle a couple inches deep. Instantly her shoes looked like recoveries from the Titanic. The hem of her pantlegs had dragged through the bilge and immediately the water wicked its way up her pantleg all the way to her knee as we stood there and watched in stunned horror. It took L a few seconds to notice, but she eventually did. Unfortunate. We usually get an hour or two in the park before the crying starts.

Within a half-hour or so N was an unprecedented shade of lavender. He didn't fuss much because his frozen shiver attacks kept stifling the cries. L kept bumping into people and things because her raincoat hood was pulled so tightly over her head that her eyes were warped and she had zero peripheral vision. Stacy and I were walking around with the seats of our pants dark, wet, and heavy from sponging up all the water in the drainage ditch-like seats on the tram ride. That sinking feeling of "this just isn't going to work" came pretty early. It was resolutely ignored.







Of all the little justifications and logical contortions we subjected ourselves to in order to drum up the will to go, one actually did hold water, so to speak. The crowds were indeed light. (They were also wet, but that goes without saying.) We were able to sprint from ride to ride with out so much as a two minute wait. Generally we would walk in the entrance and move immediately into the ride cart, where our bottoms would get to soak up another half-cup or so of water from the drainage ditch benches. Stacy and I both agreed, the best attraction was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. At the very end of it there is a thirty second descent into a faux purgatory where lots of cute and cuddly minions of Disney-Satan wave cute little pitchforks at you. While interesting from a theological perspective, we had a more physiological attraction, because for those thirty seconds you were treated to the blast-furnaces of Disney-hell and you were able to warm up just a tad before being flung back out the doors into the horizontally streaming rain.

They say that if you fall into a snowbank and can't get out, that for some reason you start to feel warm before you die. That was encouraging because it meant that none of us were anywhere near death the entire day. And it was an entire day. You have to understand that there is only one person in the world cheaper than myself -- that would be my Dad, but aside from him and me, the third runner up in the cheapness ranks is my wife, so there wasn't a whole lot of chance that we would be leaving the park without several hours of enforced fun under our soggy belts, unless it was because we got forcibly removed by a snowplow. I figured that until we saw all the Disney animals pairing up and heading over to an ark perched on Space Mountain, we were good. Over the next couple of hours we learned all of Disney's hot spots -- and yes I meant that literally.

Mommy from the merry-go-round.
Again, my timing is excellent.

Cold soggy reality hit around 4:00. We were in the Inoventions attraction (large, indoor, heated: woo-hoo!) when L started to do the shifty-dance. There are no bathrooms in Inoventions. I guess in the future, that little biological annoyance will have been overcome as well. The only bathrooms were, of course, scattered throughout the park proper. (Large, outdoor, unheated: awwwwww!) We knew we needed to get L to a bathroom, but it was so cold. And it was inconvenient. And it was wet.

OK, that's a little better.

So we dawdled and delayed. And sure enough, the inevitable befell: L suddenly stopped in mid-stride, stiffened up and got that half scared, half confused look in here eye. And Stacy and I watched in stunned horror as the dark spot appeared at the top of her pants and wicked it way down her pantlegs to join the bilge at the knee. The day's yin had met its yang and we understood we had reached closure. We began our trudge back to the tram and parking structure. L's strides were slightly wider and more bowlegged than earlier.

When we finally got to the car and stripped the kids down and tossed them into the pajamas that we had (in a rare glimmer of foresight) packed with us, we cranked up the engine and cranked on the heat. The over-the-windshield console immediately kicked on and shouted those numbers at me that immediately filled my soul with guilt and horrible-father conviction. The outside temperature was 40ºF.

I expect my next family investment will be season passes at the pediatrician's.