Until this past weekend, I was of the mind that the only thing more unpleasant than finding yourself shoulder to shoulder on an airplane with a newly-minted grandmother was finding yourself in a movie theater surrounded by the percussive chomp of four hundred popcorn-starved humans masticating in unison.
That’s because I had not yet been introduced to the concept of the shared hot spring. For the uninitiated, a hot spring is what forms when river water seeps deep into the Earth and comes in contact with magma, or hot underground rock, then bubbles back up to the surface, thereby infusing the cold water with hot. Somewhere along the timeline of history, someone discovered that if they arranged rocks in a ring around the spot where the hot water bubbled to the surface, they could corral it, effectively creating a small, hot pool in the midst of a cold, flowing river.
I can’t imagine their glee upon making this discovery, particularly if they were cold-natured or in dire need of a bath. But what I can imagine is their dismay when other cold-natured or dirty strangers happened upon their hot, private paradise and proceeded to pile in, thus birthing the concept of the shared hot spring. It would not surprise me to learn that Sartre wrote “hell is other people” following an afternoon at one such spring.
Frankly, I’m bothered by the oxymoronic fact of hot water existing in a river. Nothing can prepare you for the experience of stepping full-footed into a clear, burbling stream and expecting a rush of cold water to instantly sober up whatever inebriated cells are left in your body from the previous evening’s indulgence, and instead finding yourself howling in a boiling caldron like the unsuspecting human ingredient in some unforeseen witch’s potion.
But mostly I’m bothered by the fact that hot springs have no gatekeepers. Just because you got to one first, and it’s really only large enough to accommodate you and your husband and your outsized anxiety about personal space, it doesn’t mean other people can’t crash it. At the hot spring my husband took me to in Ketchum, Idaho last weekend, one stranger led to another until we were surrounded by an entire family of strangers in various stages of undress, all of whom slipped unasked into our tiny hot pool, went belly-up like pale salamanders, and rolled their eyes back in a disturbing show of ecstasy.
I tried to train my gaze elsewhere, I really did. There were pretty pebbles in the water and tall green aspens all around, and overhead was a bright blue sky unmarred by the smoky haze we’d seen hanging over downtown Ketchum. I tried to fix something like a smile on my face that said I, too am relaxed to the point of ecstasy, but my face wasn’t having any of it.
Mercifully, fifteen minutes in, my husband asked if I was ready to go. Was he serious? Where upon our arrival I had gingerly picked my way down the steep bank to the river’s edge, I now scaled it like a lemur and was in the car before he could get his shoes on.
I feel the need to clarify here that I do not, as a rule, dislike other people. I do, in fact, feel warmly toward most folks, owing to decades of therapy the details of which I won’t go into here. People, as a rule, are fine; it’s people in chummy proximity I loathe.
It’s this dislike of proximity that makes me sit at the very back of a movie theater, on the rare occasion I will go. It’s why you will not find me swaying dreamily or cheering raucously in the crowd at a music concert. It’s why I cringed my way through the teeming halls of the Sistine Chapel and Buckingham Palace. It’s why I will never go to another hot spring unless I’ve bought the private rights to it.
And it’s why, at the end of my last plane ride during which I avoided making eye contact with my seat mate for the entire four hours, I was tempted to smile sweetly as I rose to leave, and say, in all truthfulness, “It’s been great not getting to know you.”