Pinching Myself (alternate title: I never Claimed to be Hard Core)

I don’t know that I have ever experienced such polar opposites within a shorter timeframe. Within a couple hours, we went from one extreme to another, and found ourselves somewhere I don’t think we ever expected to be during our year-long wilderness experience.
Situation 1: We wake in our teepee tent, to a hard-edged cold that could crack glass. We haven’t experienced these temperatures since way back in December when the cold snap hit and I wanted to move to Hawaii. And this was our first time camping in our hand-made tent. “Sure picked steller weather!” is all I could think at the time, not amused by the thickness of the frost on the inside of the tent in the morning, or the fact that our -20 degree sleeping bags had only barely been sufficient. Lets just say that we certainly were not “overly warm” that night. That, coupled with the fact that I woke in the middle of the night with a yoke of pain heavy around my collarbones and shoulders that had me fairly immobilized, and panicked. But Isaac dutifully crawled from his sleeping bag to help me prop my body up and get more comfortable. The rest of the night was spent staring at the crystallized tent roof in the cold glow of a waxing moon, concentrating hard on yoga breathing to ward off the just-under-the-surface panic that was never far away.
Situation 2: Isaac and I sit naked and immersed up to our necks in the 105 degree, mineral-laden water of a hot pool built of elegant grey stone, loopy grins laced from cheek to cheek (I think I was actually audibly giggling), while gazing out at the rushing expanse of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River dotted with glittering ice that had formed overnight, bellies happily filled with a gifted lunch from the owners of the Middle Fork Lodge.
[Does this bring up all sorts of raging contradictions in your minds, of wilderness values and uses? Well, it did for us, and yet at the same time we were (and are) extremely grateful for the incredible experience, happy to have met a slew of very kind people, and at least speaking for myself, so confused about what exactly this thing called wilderness is anymore, in my own mind, that I’m not even sure I can find any good reasons why a place like that shouldn’t be in the wilderness anyway. I mean, they are doing an awful lot of things to bolster appreciation of wilderness for some people who perhaps otherwise would not come to wilderness at all, that it is perhaps hard to prove they are having anything but a positive impact?]
How we got there: The polar opposite experiences of situation 1 and 2 hardly need any explanation of how we got from one to the other. It’s almost more interesting that way. But in brief, this is how it happened. Isaac was up on a ridge filming on our first morning there, and who should come hiking by but the owners of Middle Fork Lodge, with three “Great Old Broads” in tow. They immediately invited Isaac and I to lunch and a soak, that very day, which we gladly accepted. So all we had to do then, was hike the short mile up the dirt lane from the airstrip, across the bridge to the Lodge, and slip off our cloths and trip into the hot pools. Not too bad, really.