I couldn’t feel my legs. That might have been a little more disconcerting than it was, for at least it had a rational explanation. I had been standing in near-freezing water for nearly a minute (I have it on good authority that I could tell it wasn’t freezing because it wouldn’t have been water anymore). I was standing, barefoot, in the Big East Fork, a river that drains an area flowing from the Black Balsam/Graveyard Fields area of the Pisgah National Forest. It wasn’t for no reason that I was doing this. I didn’t recreationally try to catch hypothermia. It was the only way I had found to get a good picture.