Too Cold To Walk

I Have mentioned that my collegiate years were spent at U.C. Santa Barbara. It’s a lovely campus matched by scenic coastal beauty and wonderful weather. The weather, at its coldest, can reach the 40s-F, however. Sure that’s a long way from frostbite, but cold presents a nuisance for students prepared to go the length of the year with an abbreviated roster of jeans, plaid shorts, t-shirts, and a flannel shirt.

A large student community lived immediately adjacent to campus in overstuffed sub par overpriced apartments. The students, naturally, want to be close enough to campus so that they may walk, bike, or skateboard to class. This creates a strong gravitational pull to the rental dominated community described above. Isla Vista.

With such a large collection of pedestrian related personnel, Friday and Saturday night socializing often entailed walking the streets looking for parties denoted by people spilling out of an apartment and loud music blaring. A keg was often at hand. A smile, self-introduction, and a smattering of decent manners yielded access with surprising success.


Q1 1989

It was very late and very cold on a Saturday night. Parties had concluded and stragglers could be seen in the streets making their way back to their apartment units on foot. A friend and I were amongst this straggling classification. We’ll call this friend McGettigan the Elder. Our hands were tucked in deeply into our jeans pockets and we were shivering. The sound of footsteps quickly approached from behind, a jogger passed.

“Jogging at this hour,” McGettigan asked loudly with no intended mockery of the running man.

“No. It’s just too cold to walk,” replied the jogging stranger with his body swiveled slightly toward us to project his voice before continuing on his way.

“Good point,” McGettigan said to me.

We were a block away from our apartment. We were neighbors in the same apartment building. We jogged it.


The weather would return to its gentler temperature range within weeks. In the meantime we did occasionally jog when motivated by cold. Though infrequent, those impromptu jogging fits, we enjoyed a sophomoric chuckle as one of us was bound to say, “It’s too cold to walk.”
-klem