Where to dip?

You don’t need a fund-raiser or cause to take a dip in frigid waters. Just go to any Maine lake, pond or ocean beach and make yourself an official member of your own Polar Bear Club.

However, if you like company for your chilly misery — or like to watch people writhe — there are a number of winter dips that take place throughout Maine every year. Here are a few you could “enjoy,” including one coming up next month if you can’t wait for the many traditional New Year’s dips:

• Camp Sunshine’s Portland Polar Dip, East Promenade Beach, Portland, Feb. 13, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Camp Sunshine is a relative newcomer to the icy party, starting in 2006. It uses the money raised to help send more children with life-threatening illnesses and their families from Maine to the camp’s retreat in Casco.

• The Lobster Dip for Special Olympics at Old Orchard Beach. Called “the original,” it has taken place every Jan. 1 for 22 years. Has been taking place at noon sharp in front of the Brunswick Hotel/Oceanside Grille at Old Orchard Beach, with proceeds to the Special Olympics.

• The annual Dip 4 Derek Polar Challenge on Lincolnville Beach in Lincolnville. The event’s been taking place at high noon on Jan. 1 to raise funds for the Derek O’Brien Trust, named after a local young man who suffered a broken spine in a 2005 swimming accident. Last year, the money went to the Penobscot Bay Area YMCA to help purchase and install a handicapped-accessible, automatic entrance door.

• The Farmington area Polar Bear Club’s annual dip in brisk Clearwater Lake in Industry. The event coincides with the annual Chester Greenwood Day celebration in Farmington in early December, honoring the inventor of the earmuff.

I will forever remember New Year’s Eve 2009 as the day I jumped into a blazing ocean of molten fire.

That’s what it feels like, you know. In the weird communication between human skin and the winter water of the Atlantic, the message imparted isn’t cold.

It’s HOT!

The entire body revolts at the very first rush of icy water against tender skin. Every stretch of flesh tries to crawl back on the bones that hold it. The lungs fill at once with air. The heart seems to stop and then quicken. Funny things happen to time itself as the other senses attempt to sort out the violence of this assault.

Have you been in the water for three seconds? Or three hours?

The most primitive parts of our minds understand that you should not ever — you should try to avoid this at all costs — jump into the ocean in winter.

And yet here we were, a semi-naked four dozen of us out there in 20-degree air preparing to leap into water that was clogged with chunks of ice.

Why, you sane people want to scream? Why do such things?

Because, we holler response, our words defiant plumes of frost on the air! Because we can!

Indulging in something so fundamentally stupid as swimming in a December ocean is an affirmation of free will. It’s a test of one’s courage and of one’s willingness to shrug aside common sense and cast it onto the frozen beach.

It’s also a good way to find out just how far your body parts can shrink.

For me, it was a plunge into bravado for bravado’s sake. But the event was organized for a higher purpose than machismo. The Natural Resource Council of Maine got this group together for the second year as a means of raising awareness and funds to combat global warming.

It’s an ironic cause, and an excellent one. Yet when it was go time, the charitable nature of our leap provided no warmth. Fifty or so men, women and quivering unknowns sped toward the water’s edge at East End Beach in Portland and merely hoped that the water wouldn’t suck the life from them as all those media cameras watched.

I remember the first moments of that dash into the sea with astounding clarity. A veteran of these dunks had told me moments ago that the feet would hurt at once, but he was wrong. For me, nothing hurt. When I hit the clear pane of the Atlantic, I felt like I was hurdling through a sheet of glass into some agony just waiting to come.

Here comes the pain, I thought. Here comes a hell of liquid.

But you know? There never was such unpleasantness. The blast of the ocean is so intense and so surreal, it baffles the human senses. As the heart and lungs do their work, so does the mind. It tells you that everything is good, everything is fine. Now get the hell out of the water and find a towel.

A dive into the ocean on New Year’s Eve was a touch of discomfort overwhelmed by a tidal wave of personal satisfaction. I would do it again and without hesitation. I recommend it to anyone who has been talking for years about doing something brash but who just hasn’t found the time. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all you do.

You may never get a chance to run with the bulls in Pamplona. You say you’ll jump out of an airplane someday, but you haven’t so much as bought a helmet yet.

But I’ll tell you what. Winter will be back every year and the Atlantic isn’t going anywhere. If you ever get tempted to rattle the ice of your long years of ennui, a Polar Bear Plunge isn’t a bad way to do it.

Go for it. Just do it. If not now, when?

And while you’re out there, please let me know if you stumble on any of my missing body parts. A few of them haven’t reappeared.

Mark Laflamme helps raise global warming awareness during the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

Mark Laflamme, second from left, helps raise global warming awareness during the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

Mark Laflamme, second from left, helps raise global warming awareness during the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

Mark Laflamme hopes the ice chunks will cause the Natural Resources Council of Maine to cancel the Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve. The event went on as planned.

Mark Laflamme runs into the Atlantic during the Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

Mark Laflamme shivers while waiting for the Polar Plunge to begin at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

News media interview Mark Laflamme after he was the last one out of the Atlantic during the Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

Mark Laflamme is the last one out of the Atlantic during the Polar Plunge at East End Beach in Portland on New Years Eve.

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