Plunge At Lighthouse Point Not So Polar

The wind was blowing down the beach at Lighthouse Point Park as a crowd of 100 people gathered on New Year’s Day to race into the surf of the Long Island Sound. They wore bathing suits, wetsuits, a smattering of costumes. The Pig Man (a.k.a. artist Tony Juliano) was back from last year. I took off my coat, hat, sweater, shirt, pants, socks, and shoes to reveal the bathing suit underneath, and planted my bare feet in the sand.

Right about then I had an unexpected thought: It’s not that cold.

When I first told my editor, Paul Bass, that I was planning on covering the Polar Plunge, he sent a short reply: ​“First person would be fine.” No way, I thought at first. I recalled last year’s plunge, done in below-freezing temperatures that kept everybody huddled inside the carousel building until it was time to brave the waves. But then I took a look outside. It was over 60 degrees out. There were buds on a few trees. Crocuses were starting to come up.

If not this year, I thought, then when?

I had friends visiting town for the holiday, and convinced one of them — Nathan Day — and my son Leo to join me for a January swim.

After a hearty breakfast, we got to Lighthouse Point Park early to make sure we were registered.

We were by no means the first. Dozens of soon-to-be participants were already partaking of the brunch that the Elm City Parks Conservancy (which organizes the fundraiser) provided for swimmers and non-swimmers alike.

The Shellye Valauskas Experience did some straight-ahead rock ​‘n’ roll right.

Outside, kids played on the playground dressed more like late March than the first of January.

As noon approached, Nathan, Leo, and I joined everyone planning to plunge.

Someone blew a whistle, and we all ran toward the surf.

Leo took several steps into the water, dived in, got a wave in the face, turned around, and ran out. Was the water colder than he expected? ​“Way colder,” he said.

Nathan is on a outrigger canoe racing team based in Washington, D.C. He travels around the East and West coasts competing in races. He was right behind Leo for the plunge. ​“I saw the people in front of me dive, and I thought, ​‘OK, I should dive,’” he said. ​“It was super-cold, but I’d been in super-cold water before, like the time I fell out of a canoe into the ocean in Vancouver, in the middle of winter.”

I grew up in central New York and, as a willfully ignorant teenager, had done some early-spring swims in the winter runoff surging through the gorges in my hometown. So as I ran into the water Friday and dove headfirst, the shock that hit me was familiar. It took me back in time a bit. I came up short of breath from the cold. Finally, a laugh forced its way out of me. Most of the people who had gone in were already out of the water, though there were maybe a half-dozen people still frolicking in the waves. Still exhilarated, I dunked myself back in the water up to my shoulders, came back up, and waded out. The air felt warm. I wasn’t shivering at all.

Which, to be honest, seemed a little weird.

Leo was the first of our little team into the hot tubs. Nathan and I joined him moments later. Warmed up, we changed back into our clothes and headed home for lunch.

It’s hard not to think about the polar plunge in the context of the strange weather we’ve been having. I know that you can’t ascribe individual weather events to climate change. The taste of late spring we had this December, they say, is more the result of El Niño, and not global trends, though it’s possible that general global warming exacerbated its effects. But on the way to Lighthouse Point, driving through Morris Cove in the unseasonable warmth, I couldn’t avoid thinking about the damage the neighborhood sustained during Hurricane Irene, or about the noticeable changes in the beaches ringing New Haven harbor, even since I moved here in 2002. They’ve gotten smaller.

What is in store for us? The most catastrophic projections of rising sea levels put an awful lot of downtown New Haven underwater. Will we lose I‑95, after all the work that’s been put into the bridge over the harbor? Will we lose Fair Haven? Will there be a point where Union Station is on the coast again, as it used to be, before it, too, ends up flooded? How will the city adapt?

Maybe this is the stubborn optimist in me talking, or maybe my brain hasn’t quite recovered from the shock of its submersion. But having seen how New Haven can come together when it needs to — and even when it’s just for fun — I’d like to think that the city will roll with it like the divers did at Lighthouse Point, so that, even after the shocks, we come out of it shaking and hungry, ready for a new year.