Page 168 - Louisiana Loop (manuscript Edition)

Cold. I knew I was cold, even if I was temporarily distracted. I was sitting on a chair, with a blanket wrapped around me.
I know I was cold because I was shivering. I know to the touch that there was no warmth anywhere on me. In fact you
could say the cold had gone through and through. And yet, I was distracted.

There sitting in front of me on top of the oven that was open that I had wrapped my blanket around the sides of there was
fried chicken sitting on top of the stove. Do you know how distracting it is to have freshly fried chicken all loaded up on
top of the oven just a few feet away from me in fact it might've been 6 inches.

Yes I was still cold, yes I was so shivering, yes I was depressed. That chicken had caught my eye. It was a weird
thought, to be thinking about chicken when I was so cold I wouldn't have been able to eat it anyways.

But there it was, some of the best looking chicken I had seen in the last three weeks. Now it's not like I am obsessed with
chicken but I like fried chicken. And of course camping out some of my choices for lunch breakfast and dinner hadn't
been as delicious as that chicken looked.

Wrapped in a blanket naked cold trying to get warm from the heat of the oven and at times the space heater while sitting
inside a tugboat that was transporting me to an ambulance all I kept thinking about was the chicken.
Have bad chicken not been there to keep me distracted I'm not sure if I would've been able to handle the devastating cold
and near death experience I had just gone through.
Now I don't know who cooked that chicken, and I don't know who ate that chicken but I do know every time I think back
to being on the towboat, I keep seeing that chicken.

*******
Looking up, port side bow, or basically the front of the towboat with the rope draped down, my position in the water, the
towboat look like a giant.
I had no idea how I was going to get up the side of the towboat onto the towboat from the water with my hands hurting
as bad as they were and the fact that I was unable to grip at that moment.
Everyone looked concerned at least the two people that I could see who were trying to figure out also how to get me out
of the water or I think they were because really I have no idea what they were thinking.

I was too busy looking at the side of the towboat and thinking that I would never be able to get up the side. I really don't
know if someone told me to grab the rope or if I just desperately reached out and grabbed it anyways, I only know that I
saw my hands grip the rope and I have no idea how they did it.

Like rappelling up or down the side of the clip by holding a rope and leaning out I grabbed the rope and planted my feet
against the side of the towboat and I don't know for sure if the rope was being pulled in and I walked up partway side of
the towboat so I was grabbed and pulled aboard, or if I just hung onto the rope till I could be grabbed.
I only know I felt a sense of urgency to get out of the water and to rub my hands which were screaming in pain.

On deck I think I was wrapped in a blanket or maybe a blanket was held for me, I only recall that I felt extremely small
as though I had shrunk down to 3 feet high and these people around me were giants.
Optical illusion maybe, maybe a side effect of freezing but stepping over the portal into the cabin part of my mind was
still active as a writer and I kept thinking oddly I always wanted to go inside of towboat.

It was obvious my mind was trying to disconnect my body from my consciousness because of how much pain my hands
were in absolute cold had permeated and probably started some organs to shut down.

By estimate I can only guess that I had been in the water 20 minutes. The general temperature of the area north of where
I was in the water was 40°. I was told later by I think the Coast Guard that the water there with about the high 30's.

The wind was blowing so there was wind chill and though the air temp sunnsyside earlier had been warm, I had been
freezing to death when rescued.
I was asked several times if I ever had a heart attack and I had to remind myself that at 60+ years old, the sheer shock of
the cold water could have induced a heart attack.
I had been cold before in Alaska and I had even suffered frostbite in my toes in Minnesota on the Mississippi, but I had
never felt| the type of cold that I felt when I touched my leg.
It wasn't the chill that scared me but the thought it felt like death.