Getting into Hot Water . . .

How good it feels!

The expression “getting into hot water” means getting into trouble, or, according to Dictionary.com, getting into a “bind, difficulty, jam, mess, predicament, scrape.”

Isn’t that peculiar? Because for most us, whether we’re entering a shower or a bath or a hot tub, getting into hot water is an unalloyed pleasure. People travel hundreds of miles to lower their bodies into natural hot springs, and spas have been popular for hundreds of years. As a species, we love getting into hot water.

The Romans were doing it more than two thousand years ago. They had an advanced system of aqueducts, pipes, latrines, sewers, and public and private baths and showers, heated by furnaces. The public baths allowed one to bathe in waters of various temperatures and were spaces for social engagement. Conversations were more candid, no doubt, when the togas came off and the tensions dissolved in hot water.

Then, with the decline of the Roman empire, their elaborate systems were allowed to deteriorate, and for some twelve hundred years, people forgot all about plumbing. When I learned this as a child, it just about killed me. How could Europeans simply forget about running water? How could they disremember sinks and toilets? How could a people go backward like this? No wonder they called it the dark ages! Europeans didn’t get back to Roman-level water tech until the eighteenth century.

Water cleanses and purifies and relaxes. Orthodox Jews have their mikvehs; Japanese have their onsen.

Americans have their showers. The morning shower is a reliable pleasure. It’s impossible to feel grumpy in a hot shower. Perhaps it’s the warmth and force of the water; perhaps it’s the negative ions produced by the water colliding against the tiles. Negative ions are oxygen atoms with an extra electron and are thought to reduce stress and improve mood.

In the shower, your responsibilities melt, and you relax. And this relaxation allows thoughts to flow. The shower is where many people have their best ideas.

A bath is even more relaxing, as you are lying down, but oddly enough, I’ve never heard anyone (except Archimedes) say they had a great idea in the bath. Maybe baths make you too sleepy.

For many years I had a hot tub, but about eight years ago, it started leaking and could not be fixed. Finally, it was hauled away. Now I am thinking of getting another. “What’s so great about a hot tub?” asks my sister. “It’s just an outdoor bath.” “Well, sure,” I say. “But you’re bathing under the moon and stars. And sometimes you’re with other people.” I’ve been in the hot tub with my husband, my children, my granddaughter, my friends. “The jets are good for sore muscles,” I add, glad for a health rationale.

One of my sons has a hot tub on his deck. We all get in it after dinner; it becomes a conversation pit.

Sometimes he and his friends go to a natural hot spring a couple of hours from his house and spend the weekend bathing and reading and eating vegetables.

On the island of Guadeloupe, my husband and I went to a hot spring on the beach. We sat in the sand and the rocks, with hot water bubbling under our thighs and the cooler Caribbean Sea on our feet. We were in hot water, all right—and it never felt so good. We gazed out to the horizon.