Kevin Paquet is a 2009 JSC graduate. He, his wife, and their cats are currently crawling south in a camper from 1969 hooked to an SUV from 1994. For earlier installments see Basementmedicine.org.

On the morning of Jan. 23, there was a knock on the camper door.

This was the first knock we’d gotten after three weeks of being parked at the West Lebanon Wal-Mart, and we scrambled out of bed to see who was there. It was a reporter and a photographer. They wanted to talk to us about cold.

January in New Hampshire is not an ideal time to be roughing it. Our original plan had been to leave at the very beginning of November and head south quickly, but everything ended up taking longer than it should have, and so we found ourselves camping in front of the West Lebanon Wal-Mart in January, because sometimes life takes your plans and twists them into fascinatingly unrecognizable shapes. This is about as far as we’d gotten in my last dispatch.

That week, however, temperatures went from “really quite cold” to the kind of cold that kills the uninitiated. The single biggest part of this trip south was that I wanted to escape another cold winter; now, I was experiencing cold in ways I never had before. Frankly, I was experiencing cold in ways that I didn’t know were possible. I strongly feel that many of the people who experienced this level of cold did so immediately before death, leading to a scarcity of narratives on the subject.

Some of the strangest things I saw were related to water. If you have to bathe yourself with hot water out of a bucket (and in situations like this, you will), below a certain ambient temperature, you will produce steam. A LOT of steam, to the point where holding up your steaming hands and simply staring at them becomes a surprisingly legitimate form of entertainment. It’s good to have that distraction, too, since bathing yourself becomes unpleasant below about 40 degrees or so. Your mileage may vary.

Actually pouring the water out of the kettle into the bucket produced the most steam of all. When I did this, I immediately became lost in the fog and couldn’t see anything. When Cara (my wife) did it and I was sitting on the bed nearby, I would watch the steam rise up and form a cloud that would pervade the entire camper, and then just hang there. I’d never seen anything like it.

Every morning, we’d wake up in blankets covered with stray ice crystals. The blankets were dry when we went to bed (and if the crystals were from the homemade clouds I just described, I think I would have noticed them at the time). What I think was happening was the moisture in our breath precipitating out in the air as ice. It was that cold.

Naturally, the toilet froze solid as well, but that’s not quite as magical. The cats, it should be noted, were absolutely fine throughout all of this. The only real problem was providing them with liquid water to drink.

So now it’s January 23, and there’s a reporter, Sarah Brubeck, and a photographer, and they want to talk with us about this cold snap. We don’t have to take the interview, of course, but how could we not? I’d gotten us into a situation where we were camping in January in New Hampshire. You don’t do that and then decline the interview.

I will say, in light of what happened next, that Cara and I felt slightly misled. We were told that a number of people were going to be interviewed on the cold snap, and that they were starting with us because we were nearest (which was true – the Valley News is located just behind the Wal-Mart). I read the article when the paper came out the next day, and there were indeed others interviewed for the story. It’s just that they weren’t the ones who ended up in a color photograph on the front page. Above the fold.

Shame prevents me from itemizing this more thoroughly, but oh my God were there donations. For the next two days, when we left, we came back to find gifts outside the camper door. People gave us sleeping bags and propane and food. The staff of the Wal-Mart put together a donation pool and then ambushed us with a whole shopping cart full of supplies the next time we went in. Somebody stuck a gift card to Panera Bread in the door gasket of the car. So we went to the Panera Bread, where the hipsters hung out and it was warm. It was as incongruous an experience as I can ever remember having.

Even now, I don’t know to what extent our largely anonymous benefactors were cheering us on, and to what extent they pitied us. Largely it’s not a question that matters – they supported us in what we never actually admitted was a time of need – but it makes me wonder. How many human endevours only succeed but for the intervention of interested third parties? To what extent do people like that succeed, singly and in groups, in tipping the balance one way when it might have gone another?

I don’t know.

*****

We left on February 2, bound southeast for coastal Massachusetts. Darkness fell almost immediately.

It was a long and arduous trip taken largely over tertiary highways with letters in their numbers. As per our request to not have to drive on the interstate, Google Maps had cut us the shortest possible route directly through the heart of darkness. It was the sort of place where one expects warning signs along the side of the road to say stuff like “Caution: Hitchhikers May Be Wolfmen.”

Time passed, and we were back on a major highway that took us through a bona fide city. We stopped in the parking lot of a bank and walked across the shore of night to a Chinese restaurant, where we ordered food and asked for directions. After some discussions at the front desk that ended in uncertainty, a waitress showed us up to the bar.

The bar was half a story higher than the dining area, even though the building hadn’t looked like a split-level from the outside. A row of people I presumed to be locals were lined up on stools, watching a flat-screen TV that was tuned to Spike. “Independence Day” was playing.

The waitress introduced me to a middle-aged blonde woman who said her name was Teeny. I showed her my directions and asked for clarification on how to find a certain street, which the waitress had thought might or might not have been the one the resuatrant was located on. It was one of those situations where a road enters a city and gets a different name. Maybe. On the TV, scientists were beginning the dissection of the alien Will Smith had dragged back from the desert.

Teeny was all business as she and the man next to her ammended my driving directions. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the conversation was something like:

“You’ll want to go through the next three lights and then take a right at the McDonald’s”

“He could also turn at the Burger King,” said the guy next to her. “They’re next to each other.”

“Yeah, I suppose they are.”

“So I go through three lights and take a right at the McDonald’s.”

“Yeah.”

“STAB IT IN THE EYE,” said a woman further down the bar to the TV as the alien woke up mid-autopsy.

****

The Wal-Mart in Salem, Mass. let us stay two days and then a guy who said he was the landlord told us we had to leave. Apparantly he owned the property and Wal-Mart just rented.

So we went to the Wal-Mart in Lynn. They were OK with us, except that they said the police didn’t allow overnight parking. We talked to the police and they said it was OK since it was private property, as long as we were cleared with the property owners. So basically each side there was fine with us but was convinced the other wasn’t. I didn’t miss Lynn.

This whole ordeal of musical chairs would have been better except for two things: 1) Lynn is almost entirely one-way streets, and leaving Wal-Mart each morning with the sure, miserable knowledge that I would get lost was driving me nuts, and 2) something was wrong with the trailer. It had developed a grinding sound, something I still haven’t managed to pin down. I need to find a way to jack it up and take the suspect wheel off.

We arrived at the Danvers Wal-Mart just in time for a blizzard. The governor of Massachusetts simply closed all the roads in the entire state to non-essential traffic with the threat of a fine or jail time. We spent the day inside, listening to the radio and playing board games by gaslight. It was a radio I got for free at the Randolph thrift shop last fall. It has never needed new batteries.

The road ban lasted from 4 p.m. on Friday until 4 p.m. on Saturday. The space where we’d parked the camper was near where the Wal-Mart people were piling the snow from that end of the parking lot. The mounds were probably ten feet high when they were new, but the sun came out the next day and they shrank a couple feet, probably from compression alone. They haven’t changed much since.

****

And that’s where we are for now. The McDonald’s nearby has free Wi-Fi, and so we spend our evenings here. It also has a LOT of sports memorabilia. I’ve seen places that called themselves sports bars that didn’t want to be sports bars as bad as this place. There’s a signed hockey stick that sits above the drink machines, and a basketball jersey that sits in a glass enclosure in front of the bathrooms. And more. SO much more. It’s a good place to while away time while we wonder what madness is coming our way next.

Today’s lesson: STAB IT IN THE EYE!