Last night was the final night of my annual trek with my friend. We go each year for four to ten days, up and around and down mountains.
She’s retired and hikes a lot a lot a lot. We get along well together and are good walking companions, waiting for each other while one or the other of us takes photos, or pee breaks, or jump-in-a-mountain-lake breaks and so forth.
We agree, along with just about every other experienced hiker in our part of the world, that it’s healthier to leave the windows open a little (or a lot) at night in a refuge. People smell up there. I smell up there. People fart and wear the same clothes for days on end and haven’t properly washed their feet in a while. And most huts are not well aired, expecting that folks will air them themselves by opening the windows.
Knowing that this can sometimes cause issues, we took two bunks closest to the window in our dormitory, with the window basically next to my head.
When the other occupants arrived (late and loud) they closed it. My friend surreptitiously opened it partially and there it stayed until around 3am when one of the women sharing our room closed the window with a huff and a slam.
“Please don’t close the window,” my friend said. “It’s already too hot in here.”
“It’s cold in the mountains at night,” she said. “I already have a sore throat because of your open window.”
We argue, we cajole (hell hath no fury like two post-menopausal women being told to sleep in a smelly sauna) but the young woman was adamant that she would stay awake all night to close the windows on us if we tried to open it again.
“We already have compromised,” she said. “You had the window [cracked slightly] open half the night and now the other half I want it closed.”
I’ll come back to that.
She said she would ‘allow’ us to leave the door open. A light goes on automatically in the hallway if anyone walks there, so if anyone in any of the other dormitories wanted to pee, that would turn the light on, but I hung my towel up to shade my friend from the hallway lights (that wasn’t going to work for me; I had the upper bunk) and went outside to sleep on a picnic bench.
There was some wind but I managed to find a sheltered area and rolled myself up like a taco in a duvet to sleep on a hard wooden bench. The bench was not very large so that was the only real problem, and my hip bones hurt a bit. It was maybe 17° C? Like I wanted to have a duvet for the slight chill but being outside was fine. The last thing in the world I wanted was to share a room with no air circulation with someone possibly sick.
There was no other solution, I don’t think. The dormitory was objectively very warm, maybe 22/23°C. While sleeping outside, I took a photo of the other dormitories; all the windows were open or cracked a bit.
But being ‘right’ didn’t make me feel any better. I didn’t know how to talk to this ridiculous woman. I asked her if she’d ever been camping in her life. “How do you deal with the night air then?”
“I close the door of the camper van.”
She was not a lady to be found under a tent, then.
But I’d already realized the sort of person I was dealing with. I mean, people haven’t thought that ‘night airs’ cause illness since about the 1880’s. It made me wonder about all the other strange beliefs people have: flat Earthers, ´climate change is a hoax’, birds aren’t real, but like, for real.
What do you do when someone wants to force you to do something unhealthy and uncomfortable? (Seriously, sleeping in a closed environment with someone sick is not the best idea.) How do you begin to describe that illness isn’t caused by ‘night airs’? We were at around 2,400 meters in this hut, and the night was just tolerably cool. There are no trees up that high so allergies weren’t likely to be a problem, nor was air pollution.
But this idea of a « compromise » got me thinking. Her idea of a compromise is that she gets to do what she wants for half the time, imposing something unreasonable on others without their agreement.
This line could be considered dodgy for those who haven’t followed germ theory of the last 150 years or so. She wasn’t sleeping at 16-17° C in the room (I was, outside on a bench) but around 22/23°C in a closed, stuffy, smelly room. She believed that being in air cooler than that, and the night air, would make her sick.
It’s this idea of a « compromise » that I’m curious about. Was it a compromise? Was making it impossible for two people to sleep acceptable so that one person could do so? Was this a version of the trolley problem?
Did we, easily 30 years older than her, ‘merit’ respect? Did my friend’s 50 years of hiking experience ‘count’ more? Or my 40 years? (I’m truly asking, because I don’t know where that idea comes from. I would probably not have attempted this sort of attitude when I was this woman’s age with women that much older. She also made her mother sleep on the top bunk. Maybe she had some knee or back issue? Who knows what made that seem acceptable.)
That was an idea we had to deal with during COVID. Your liberty (not to be vaccinated) is more important than my right to go in a public space and not bring COVID home to kill grandma. I didn’t see my hiking friend for a whole year during the beginning of COVID. She’s older than I am and I was teaching. I was the most dangerous person in her entourage.
I think, in retrospect, that any ´discussion’ with this woman in the hut couldn’t have been productive at three in the morning. She started out pissed and self-righteous, and more or less convinced she was going to fall seriously ill if she breathed fresh, cool air at night, and I don’t think there was any reasonable discussion to be had. I also think she didn’t have the slightest problem with making a 58 year old, me, sleep outside on a bench. As long as she got what she wanted, everything was fine.
I slept relatively well, after I got over being furious with her. There were no stars out. A fog had set in and that’s probably why it was so warm outside.
Foro was with us, of course, for this hike. He wisely kept his head down last night and listened to nutty women have fits about the night air.
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