We walked into a storm on purpose, and the only bad part was the beginning

The woods behind the house. No trails, no markings, nothing managed.

A storm rolled in just as we were about to leave to go for a trek int he woods behind the house. Torrential rain, no sign of a break in it. We talked about waiting it out, and went anyway.

The first five minutes was unpleasant. Not being wet — becoming wet. Rain finding the gaps in our clothing, cold arriving on skin that was still dry, everything tightening up against it. Then we were soaked through, and it stopped.

We were out for about an hour, climbing and pushing through undergrowth, picking a route that avoided the heaviest of it, and the work kept us warm. After forty-five minutes we sat down on a fallen log in the pouring rain, both of us drenched, with nothing to do and nowhere to be. Dan said: "I could sit here for hours."

Neither of us suggested turning back. It never came up, and I could have stayed up there for hours myself. The only reason we went home was the light going early under a storm.

What was interesting was where the discomfort actually sat.

If I had thought about it beforehand, I would have assumed that an hour of being cold and wet is an hour of being cold and wet, and that the enduring would be spread evenly across it. It was not. Almost all of it was in the first few minutes, and I do not think it was about temperature. It was about still having something dry left to protect.

Once there was nothing left to keep dry, there was nothing left to manage.

Two things I keep coming back to.

(1) The part I would arrange an entire day to avoid is the few minutes of getting wet, and it was the only part that was bad. The hour on the other side of it was the best hour of the weekend, by Dan's account and probably by mine.

(2) He said it in the rain, sitting on a wet log, and not afterwards with a hot shower behind him and a beer in his hand. I want that on the record, because I think I would trust it less if it had come later.

I did not do anything here. The rain did it. All that was required was walking out of a door that was already open, into weather that was already happening, and then not going back in.