I’ve never liked being called the “baby of the family,” even if it is accurate.
My sister, Denise, is 12 years older than me, so naturally our adolescent life experiences didn't have a lot of overlap. By the time I finished kindergarten, Denise was already out of the house. After she moved away for college, it didn’t take long before I noticed her spending a lot of time with a "friend" of hers named John.
I liked John, but we didn’t have much in common. He was a few years older than Denise, so the age gap between him and me was even greater than the one that kept my sister and I apart.
I didn’t realize Denise and John were dating. John was just kind of with her a lot. It wasn't until Denise showed up at our family home on Christmas Eve with an engagement ring that I put it all together, I guess they weren’t just “friends.”
John had proposed marriage earlier that day. And like any love-struck young girl, Denise’s instinctive response was,
"Did you ask my dad already?"
John admitted that he hadn't, so Denise deferred her answer pending her father’s approval. She kept the ring though.
When they arrived at the Beaty family home Denise excitedly showed off her fancy new jewelry. My mom was squealing, but John’s agony only grew. My dad wasn’t there. He had gone to Sam’s Club, his favorite wholesale food outlet.
Now, my dad loves Sam’s Club. We went there after church every single Sunday. He never purchased snacks in quantities less than 45 and John had taken notice of this characteristic and liked to tease Denise about it. So, John wasn’t exactly thrilled when the future of his love life hung in the balance until my dad got back from bulk grocery shopping. We heard the garage door open. My dad was pulling in with his company mini-van filled with two rotisserie chickens, 36 rolls of paper towels, a gallon of dishwasher detergent, and a 4-pack of electric toothbrushes.
John got to him as soon as he was done unloading, he even helped carry some items inside to speed up the process.
"So, Randy, this morning I asked Denise a question."
"Oh, yeah?”
"Yeah, I asked if she would marry me."
"Oh, OK."
"…Is that OK with you?"
“Oh, well, sure… you probably know her better than I do."
As I watched this exchange unfold from the dining room, reality started to set in. I was getting a brother-in-law.
I didn’t get to know John (or Denise, for that matter), much better. After the wedding, they moved to Minnesota, where John picked up a new hobby: Polar plunges.
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A Polar Plunge—or Polar Bear Plunge depending on whether or not your event is using the official trademark—involves allegedly sane people immersing themselves in freezing lake water, usually for fund-raising purposes.
In Nebraska, you hear about people running into a cold lake and then running back out. In Minnesota, that's not a Polar Plunge. That’s just taking a bath.
This is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where people drive their pickups to ice fish on the middle of all ten thousand of those frozen-solid lakes. A chainsaw is used to cut a hole in the thick ice of one of those lakes and that's what you jump into. If it sounds insane, that's because it is. This was John's new thing.
I had grown to view John as a sensible brother-in-law, I thought he was someone I could trust and follow alongside.
Little did I know following in his footsteps would lead into an excruciatingly cold hole of frozen lake.
The Plunge is a fundraiser for the Special Olympics, and each year John came up with a theme and a team name that corresponded. Eventually, I got an email invite to join Team Saturday Night Live: Part 2. (John decided to Polar Plunge twice that year).
I went as the “Need More Cowbell” version of Will Ferrell and was the only one on our 5-person team that didn’t do a partner costume. John's sisters went as Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World. And John coordinated with my Uncle Trevor to jump as Ace and Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo, because gay jokes were still funny back then.
Trevor was fun and more outgoing than the typical member of the Beaty/Wolf extended family. For Trevor’s birthday, my dad gave him a plastic device you use to shove up a dead deer's butthole to twist and pull out the rectum. Trevor was pumped. My Dad also liked to buy Trevor’s kids Tootsie Rolls and bicycle horns each time he visited. It's not as funny now that I have my own kids, but it’s still pretty funny.
I didn’t know Trevor very well either, and like John, he had his own Minnesota themed hobbies. He lived in Austin, Minnesota: the birthplace of everyone’s favorite processed meat cube—Spam. The only time I really spent with him was during the half a dozen times he took me to visit Austin’s Spam Museum. He always encouraged me to come out during the summer for the Spam Jam Festival, but I never made it. I always regretted this, Trevor really talked up the festivities, like when they fill up kiddy swimming pools with the gelatinous goo used to package Spam inside the tin cans. Kids can take turns wading through these life-sized containers of gelatin to search for buried prizes. It’s like bobbing for apples, except instead of a sticking your face in a bucket of water, it’s gooey meat by-product.
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We arrived at the lake for the Plunge. The first thing you notice is the giant tents supported by steel stakes driven into the ice, then a mass of people crowded around a 20-yard stretch of lake hole with rescue scuba divers in full wet suits on standby. Scattered off to the side you could find the four-foot-square blocks of crystal-clear ice harvested from the lake to create our nemesis.
There’s a hot tub in the middle of the frozen lake. The route goes: In the tent to stash your towel and change of clothes, out the tent to the side of the River Styx, down into hell, back out, and into the hot tub to frantically restore your core body temperature before death sits in. Then back into the tent to change into your cool new Polar Plunge long-sleeve t-shirt.
Inside the tent, the ice was covered by soggy carpet. An industrial heater was blowing hot air inside and melting a hole through the floor— making it difficult to find a dry spot to put your towel and change of clothes. No one was worried though. There was a lot of depth to go before the entire tent was swallowed into the lake. I deposited my things and stripped off all layers of clothing not Will Ferrell-related.
I was already cold.
Our entire team perched on the edge of the lake hole while a local radio host counted us down.
And then we jumped.
Animal instincts kicked in.
Stress hormones flooded my brain and overrode any rational processing. It was fight or flight. The five of us had to labor across 20 yards of liquid agony and lake sludge to reach a single ladder on the opposite corner.
A gentleman would have waited patiently to climb out, and let the women go first. A gentleman would have recognized that all five of us were suffering the same torment.
But there are no gentlemen in anguish. When I reached the exit and my salvation was near, I wasn't waiting my turn. I crawled over John's sisters and exited as quickly as my cold-numbed limbs deprived of blood flow could carry me.
I cast a passing glance over my shoulder and saw my role model John just standing there in the lake in his Ambiguously Gay costume. He was letting everyone climb out in front of him. He wasn’t in a hurry. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
Never has a jumping into a hot tub fully clothed in jeans and a Goodwill purchased long sleeve shirt been so welcomed. All of us piled in, made those “W0000OOOO" noises you make after doing something stupid, and laughed.
We did it. Then we had to get out of the hot tub so the next round of idiots could warm up.
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''I didn't realize this was the women's tent!”
Trevor yelled as we all stepped in. We mingled with another bunch of wet, cold, naked men whose more prominent male bodily features had been shriveled to feminine proportions. Yes, that’s a penis joke.
We all laughed and laughed at Trevor’s one-liner.
“Hey, look at this!"
One naked old man yelled, a clump of hair in his fist. It was his own ponytail. The cold had frozen it off from the back of his scalp. I hope he kept it.
I wore my complimentary long-sleeve Polar Plunge t-shirt like a badge of honor and headed into the lakehouse. Our families greeted us warmly, as if we were conquering heroes returning home from an Odyssey.
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I joined John the next two winters. I crafted a cereal bowl out of cardboard for Team “Breakfast of Champions,” but the following year I tried a bit harder for Team “Freeze Your Fairy Tale.”
I wore a child-size Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume that I had torn apart and sewn back together to fit a 20-year-old body. I decided I would be the tortoise from the Tortoise and the Hare fable. I knew it would be a little confusing without the Hare, but I already had the costume from a Halloween party.
Trevor was no longer my uncle; things didn’t go well once my aunt discovered his Ashley Madison account.
Since Ace no longer had his Gary, John was also out a sidekick. A few weeks before the trip to Minnesota, he sent me a text message.
To go along with my Tortoise, he asked if he could be the Hare. My brother-in-law and I were now a tandem act. We had a shared interest, even if it was the most miserable hobby someone could have.
Then again, it was nice to get to know him better.
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