Polly Does Not Do Cold. Tortuga Has Never Cared.
Polly Does Not Do Cold. Tortuga Has Never Cared.
Let’s start with what everybody who knows Polly already knows: she does not do cold.
Not a little cold. Not camping-in-October cold. Not any version of cold where cold is even a factor. She is a South Texas woman through and through — built for sun, heat, and the kind of air that doesn’t make your nose hurt when you breathe it.
Tortuga knows this. He has always known this.
He does not appear to care.
What follows are three trips into the cold. None of them were fully planned. None of them ended the way anyone expected. All of them are stories they tell at every campfire now.
Canaan Valley, West Virginia — Trip One: The Pretzels and Three Feet of Snow
The destination was Canaan Valley, West Virginia — a high-elevation valley in the Allegheny Mountains that gets enough snow in winter to support real Nordic skiing. Tortuga had the idea that they would go cross-country skiing for the weekend.
Polly agreed, because she actually loves cross-country skiing. This is the part people don’t expect. She likes being outside, she likes moving through snow on skis, and she is good at it. The cold is the cost of admission and she pays it.
What she did not agree to was Lacy.
Lacy — their German Shorthaired Pointer — had been hooked to Polly on a rope. The idea, theoretically, was skijoring: the dog pulls, the person glides, everybody wins. In practice, Lacy ran at full speed until she hit a corner, took the corner at full speed, and Polly — connected to Lacy by the rope — did not take the corner at full speed.
Polly went flying. Polly became a pretzel.
Every corner. Every single time.
Tortuga, running behind them, found this deeply entertaining.
They went to sleep that night in the van with temperatures dropping and a peaceful campsite around them.
When they woke up in the morning, the van was not visible from outside. Three feet of snow had fallen overnight. They were not just snowed in — they were encased.
There was no shovel. No snow brush. No tool of any kind designed to move snow.
Tortuga found the lid of one of their plastic storage boxes.
He used it as a shovel. He dug a path out for Polly to reach the bathroom. He dug a path for Lacy. He dug the van out enough to eventually move it. The plastic lid worked, in the way that improvised things work when there are no other options.
Polly was cold. She was also, in retrospect, impressed.
The Backpacking Trip — Negative Nine
Polly had never been backpacking before.
She was excited. They planned well — everything in the packs, every item weighed, every need accounted for. Weight distribution, layers, the right boots. Genuinely careful preparation.
There was one thing they did not do.
They did not check the weather.
“When you have a weekend,” Polly will tell you, “you take that weekend. You don’t ask questions.”
They hiked all day. The climb took most of it. By the time they reached the top — the precipice, the goal they’d been working toward — they were tired, successful, and pleased with themselves.
There was another hiker at the top.
He asked, almost immediately, whether they knew what was going on with the weather.
They did not know what was going on with the weather. They had been backpacking all day.
A bad storm was coming. Temperature drop. Wind. Starting soon.
It had taken them all day to get up there. There was no version of getting back out before the weather hit. They found a camp spot, turned toward it, and by the time they had it located the wind had already started. The temperature was moving — not slowly.
It dropped to negative nine degrees.
Polly shuts down in the cold. She will tell you this plainly: her body, when it gets cold enough, simply stops cooperating. It hurts. Thought becomes difficult. Movement becomes difficult. She shuts down.
Tortuga set her up next to the fire with Lacy and got to work. He did everything — the tent, the camp setup, the fire management, all of it — as if the cold was not affecting him. It was affecting him. He just kept working.
He gave Polly the cold-weather sleeping bag. It still froze. He took the lesser bag for himself and shared it with Lacy.
They did not sleep. They hid in their sleeping bags until the sky got light enough to see, then got out.
Polly calls it the sleep camp hangover: the snot and the pain and the headache that makes you feel like you’ll never get through the night. But morning always comes. They packed up and got out.
“I am thrilled,” Polly will say, “that I did it. I will never do it again. Unless we check the weather.”
Canaan Valley, West Virginia — Trip Two: The Blizzard, the Bar, and the Cereal Box
They went back to Canaan Valley.
Polly knew what to expect this time. The skiing, the cold, Lacy on a rope, the pretzels at every corner. She was ready for it. The trails were good and they were having fun.
They did not check the weather.
It was not just a storm this time. It was a blizzard — an ice storm on top of the blizzard, the kind of event that shuts entire towns down. Which is exactly what happened. The town of Canaan Valley was shutting. People were being turned back. You could not see past the hood of the van when you tried to drive.
They found a hotel called the Red Barn. The Red Barn accepted dogs, which is the single most important feature of any lodging when you travel with a German Shorthaired Pointer. They got a room, got Lacy inside, and held out.
That evening, looking for somewhere to sit and wait out the storm, they found a small bar.
Inside, mostly empty — everyone else in town hiding from the same weather — was a young man playing his own music. He had a bucket out and CDs for sale. There could not have been more than a handful of people in the room.
His name was Jamey Johnson.
Not quite famous yet. Not the Jamey Johnson who would go on to be one of the most respected voices in outlaw country. Just a guy in a bar in a blizzard in West Virginia, playing songs that weren’t on the radio yet.
He played one that stopped Tortuga cold.
The song — they believe it was Should’ve Seen It in Color — was one Tortuga had never heard before. None of them had. It wasn’t on the radio yet. But every single word of it landed. He lived through each one. By the end of it there were tears in his eyes, sitting in a bar in Canaan Valley in a blizzard, listening to something that felt like it had been written about something he’d lived. He had to explain to Polly what the song meant. She hadn’t quite been there with him in that way, in that moment — sometimes a song finds exactly one person in the room.
After the set, Tortuga shook Jamey Johnson’s hand and told him thank you. They put money in his bucket.
He did not buy the CD.
He will tell you that is one of his genuine regrets.
They still talk about that night. The blizzard outside. The bar almost empty. The song that hit something in the chest. The handshake. The bucket. The CD he didn’t buy.
The drive home from Canaan Valley started two days later, when conditions allowed movement.
On the highway, the Toyota van was the only vehicle going. Not just the only one they could see — the only one. Everyone else was off the road. In embankments. Sideways. Stuck, waiting to be hauled out. The van went ten, fifteen miles an hour. It kept going.
Then the heater went out.
A van with no heat, in an ice storm, in West Virginia, Polly and Lacy in the back. Tortuga pulled over. He looked around the van for something useful. He found a cardboard cereal box. He pulled it apart and covered the radiator with it — blocking cold air from the engine, trying to help the heater recover. An old trick. A desperate trick.
He got back in and kept driving.
It worked.
The cardboard cereal box worked.
They made it home. Cold. Very cold. But the van never stopped, and neither did they.
The Point of This Story
The point, as Polly tells it:
Tortuga pushes her cold button every chance he gets. That is not going to change.
But she has cross-country skied behind a lunatic dog and ended up a pretzel at every corner. She has slept at negative nine degrees in a sleeping bag that froze. She has ridden home through a blizzard in a van with no heat while Jamey Johnson played somewhere behind them in a bar in West Virginia.
She did not die.
She is, in fact, thrilled she did all of it.
Just, you know. Check the weather.
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Before You Go — If You’re Going Cold
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