{"id":2031,"date":"2007-12-10T00:10:10","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T07:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/10\/the-freeze-out\/"},"modified":"2007-12-10T00:10:10","modified_gmt":"2007-12-10T07:10:10","slug":"the-freeze-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2031","title":{"rendered":"The Freeze-Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

One thing my family did not<\/em> do was travel.<\/p>\n

During the summers, a long trip was the 150 miles or so from Albany, New York to Worcester, Massachusetts\u00c2\u00a0via Route 20 (before the Massachusetts Turnpike was completed). During the winter, we\u00c2\u00a0barely traveled at all and, even then,\u00a0our travel was restricted to the Albany area.<\/p>\n

One trip during the holiday season\u00c2\u00a0I do remember, though, was not exactly a family trip. My Boy Scout troop went on a winter camping trip, a Freeze-Out,\u00a0to the Helderberg Mountains to the southwest of Albany.<\/p>\n

\"Map<\/a><\/p>\n

My father accompanied my troop on this particular camping trip and, to this day,\u00a0he revels in relating the experience to anyone within earshot. He’s told even me the story dozens of times, even though he knows I was there. His story goes something like this:<\/p>\n

The\u00c2\u00a0morning we arrived in the Helderbergs, the\u00c2\u00a0skies were crisp and clear. There was not a cloud\u00c2\u00a0in the sky. There was no wind. The temperature was below freezing, but none of us really noticed the cold all that much.<\/p>\n

The side of the hill on which we set up camp was treeless, and would have been covered in grass during the summer, but was now blanketed with a thick pallet of snow, mostly unspoiled by footprints of man or beast.<\/p>\n

We unpacked the cars, set up the tents, and started a campfire.<\/p>\n

The\u00c2\u00a0boys grabbed their sleds, saucers, and inner tubes to enjoy this perfect winter day sliding down the hill .\u00a0They packed down the snow to make fast sledding tracks down the hillside .\u00a0They built ramps to propel\u00c2\u00a0their sleds and saucers into the air as\u00c2\u00a0they slid down the hill.<\/p>\n

After sledding all day, we all gathered by the campfire for a simple, hot meal – beef stew. Nothing tasted so good.<\/p>\n

And, then, the sun set. And the wind rose. And the temperature plummeted.<\/p>\n

I have never been\u00c2\u00a0so cold in my life.<\/p>\n

We dove into our\u00c2\u00a0tents and crawled into our sleeping bags without worrying about cleaning up the dishes.<\/p>\n

Exhausted from the day’s activities, we all slept soundly and woke the next morning to another clear, crisp day. We approached the remains of the previous night’s supper to find that, had we any intent to clean the dishes before we broke camp, those hopes were long past. Everything was frozen solid including the ladle, frozen in the remains of the beef stew. The stew, in turn, was frozen in its pot.<\/p>\n

No matter. We packed everything up into the cars and\u00c2\u00a0headed home .\u00a0The dishes\u00c2\u00a0would wait.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Written for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories<\/font><\/a> – Day 11 .\u00a0<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Stephen J. Danko<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing my family did not do was travel. During the summers, a long trip was the 150 miles or so from Albany, New York to Worcester, Massachusetts\u00c2\u00a0via Route 20 (before the Massachusetts Turnpike was completed). During the winter, we\u00c2\u00a0barely … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[161],"class_list":["post-2031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-journal","tag-advent-calendar"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pyBfX-wL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}