On July 18th, 2009, at about 8pm, I was lying in a pile of sheepskin and woven blankets, wearing three pairs of socks, three pairs of pants, four sweaters, a down jacket, a scarf, mittens, and a fuzzy knitted alpaca wool hat. Amidst all of these layers, I was moaning, "I aaam sooooo CCCOOOOLLLLLLLDDDDDD!"
"Do you know why you're cold?" said my friend Viki, who was lying in the bed next to me, and who had been patiently listening to me complain for the last half hour.
"Because it's cccccoooollllllddddd!" I shivered back.
"No. It's because we live in a climate controlled environment."
My shivers missed a beat.
"A what? What do you mean?" I stuttered.
"A climate controlled environment. It's like this. Our air conditioning, and heating, and humidifiers, all of that, they allow us to live at 70 degrees, all the time. We control that. And so when we get out here, into, like, the mountains Peru, and our host family has never heard of heating, we get really, really cold. But they don't. Because they live with the cold."
And not against it.
About two weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times about people who don't heat they homes by choice. They say it's invigorating. They say it's peaceful. They say it's a reality check. And, of course, they say it saves them a boatload of money.
The article stuck to my bones for a few days. It made me remember my Peruvian host family, and how each of them owned only one pair of shoes with which to brave the freezing mountain climate - black rubber sandals. And how hard they laughed at the way my teeth chattered when we sat down to breakfast each morning. And I kept thinking of the photographs of the homeowners in the newspaper. They made the cold seem almost romantic. Revelatory. And in the back of my head, I thought about how heating is really expensive. And really selfish. And really, really, really bad for the environment. And I started to think, why can't I just turn the thermostat down?
So I did. It's nothing revolutionary. just five degrees today. And maybe five degrees tomorrow. But it's a start. I'll drink hot tea and embrace my ski hats and sweaters. And who knows. Maybe I'll actually start to like it.
