Locked Out Abroad

Harrowing survival tales of wannabe British-ness

I recently had a near-death experience during which I realized I have reached an assimilation milestone. My housemate locked me out of the house, trapping me in our garden, and I went to great lengths to seek rescue. But while the temperature dropped and I considered the serious risk of hypothermia, one thing was far more terrifying than the threat of death: the possibility of accidentally disturbing the neighbors.

It’s a tent! It’s a sauna! It’s a sauna tent! (And it’s honestly fantastic)

I write a lot of product reviews for my job. The latest toy I’ve been testing, for a review for Outdoors.com, is a portable sauna called the SweatTent*. It’s a strange thing to have in London: a 6-foot x 6-foot insulated tent with a chimney sticking out of it, which takes up almost our whole garden. It arrived recently after months of anticipation, and we set it up immediately and invited over a few friends to try it out with us.

After a late dinner, we got the fire roaring and gave it a go. One housemate went up to bed, and the other went to entertain a specific guest who had come over to “check out the sauna.” This housemate, whose name shall be changed to Lorey to protect her privacy, wasn’t thinking when she went back into the house and automatically locked the garden door behind her, as we always do.

It took me quite a while to realize the dire straits I was in. Lorey was probably upstairs with her gentleman caller for 10 or 15 minutes before I discovered I was locked out, at which point it sounded like she was rather occupied. I whisper-shouted a rather feeble “I’m locked out!” and pounded on the kitchen doors and windows.

No luck.

I called to our other housemate’s dog, Tilly, who howled back with me from the other side of the window and caused a ruckus. Still, no one came running.

I saw two cell phones on the counter, mine and Lorey’s, and banged my head against the glass.

Fuck.

I knocked some more, to no avail, and Tilly gave up her howling to stare at me. Stop causing such a scene! she seemed to be thinking. You’ll upset the neighbours!

Now. If you are unfamiliar with British architecture, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t just go around to the front of the house and ring the doorbell. Alas, we don’t have a doorbell. Also, we live in a classic terrace house, which is like a circle of townhouses built around a green space divided into individual gardens with tall fences. You can’t go around to the front of the house, because the only way out is through. And the only way through is with a key, which I did not have.

I considered other ways to get attention and thought about every high school romcom I saw in the early aughts. Yes! I thought. Bingo! I will throw rocks at Lorey’s window!

I found a few small pebbles and chucked them up toward her bedroom.

Unfortunately, I have terrible aim, and they all bounced off the brick wall and rolled back to my feet. So, I looked for something slightly heavier. I found a snail shell in our raised tomato bed. I flipped it over and realized this snail was very much alive, and did not deserve to die for Lorey’s sins.

I paced around the garden and tried all the doors and windows again, just in case I was out of my mind with sauna brain and had missed something open. Negative. I climbed up on the bench underneath our living room window, hauled myself up on the windowsill, and tried that one, too.

No luck.

I looked down and saw that we had a surprisingly diverse array of brooms and broomsticks behind the bench (why!? Where did they come from? I cannot explain this) and tried to hit Lorey’s window with the longest one.

Too short.

The broomstick bounced off the stone window ledge completely unnoticed. In spite of some wide-open curtains, the bedroom’s occupants were far too enthralled with one another to notice the SOS signals.

So, there I was, dressed for the beach, at 10:45 p.m. on a Tuesday in early April, in London, wrapped in a damp cotton towel and clad in felt slippers, balancing on a window ledge, wondering what on Earth must the neighbors be thinking?!

Surely, I thought, someone would spot me trying to Spiderman my way into my own house and broadcast an intruder alert on our very wholesome neighborhood WhatsApp. That would not do.

I decamped to the SweatTent to warm up and plot my next moves. The way this thing works is that it’s an insulated tent with a small wood stove inside. I took stock of my supplies: I had one log left, all the matches were inside the house, and anything in our garden remotely resembling firewood or flammable refuse was soaking wet from a rainstorm. Already, I was rationing supplies.

Sensing an impending descent into hypothermia, I tried another round of pounding on the windows. Tilly, now bored by my despair, sat calmly in front of the window as if she were watching TV. Some of my favorite songs from the Swedish band First Aid Kit blared on the kitchen speaker, mocking me as they masked the sounds of my distress. “Oh the bitter winds are coming in / And I’m already missing the summer / Stockholm’s cold but I’ve been told / I was born to endure this kind of weather.”

I considered that I was in the unique position of choosing how to die, and appreciated that I had quite a few options. I could freeze to death, sweat to death, fall to my death trying to break in through an upstairs bedroom or bathroom window, or die of embarrassment if I had to wake up a neighbor I’ve never met and climb over a fence to seek refuge in their house.

In British parlance, this situation was not ideal.**

After sufficient pacing and contemplation of the many headlines that could be written about this (“East Londoner Falls From Windowsill While Brandishing Broomstick, Dies,” “Backyard Sauna in Hackney Share House Leads to Demise of Product Reviewer,” “My Housemate Locked Me Outside and I Almost Froze to Death: How I Survived”), I thought back to watching TV Land with my grandparents 20 years ago. I asked the quintessential survival question: WWMGD?

What Would MacGyver Do?

I looked back to our tomato beds and realized our plastic, collapsible tomato cages could prove fruitful. I unclipped them and reassembled them into one long stick with arms on the end of it, resembling something like a green murder claw. I moved to go back to Lorey’s window and jostled the string lights in our garden, somehow blowing a fuse and plunging myself into darkness. Full-body sigh. At least I can write about this, I thought. As long as I survive, anyway.

I went back to Lorey’s window and gave it my best shot.

And of course… it was still too short. My green plastic murder claw lightly tapped the bricks as if they were muttering a too-polite I beg your pardon. No match for passion, I went back into the sauna, which at this point was cooling down because I was rationing firewood. I glared up at Lorey’s window. She was certainly having a lot more fun than I was.

Still reluctant to pester the neighbors, I made a game plan to spend the whole night outside and took stock of what I had: one remaining firewood log, no matches. One damp towel. One bucket of cold water. One pair of slippers, one pair of shorts, one sports bra. One cardboard concertina stool, which I could burn in a truly dire emergency. I debated whether it was safe to take a nap or if I should plan to stay up all night, and if so, how on earth I would survive my own brain. According to the clock in the kitchen, I had at least seven hours to kill, if they didn’t kill me first. What the hell was I going to do?

I put the last log on the fire and went back outside to give the murder claw one last go. I got as close to the house as possible, stood on my tiptoes, and hoisted this dumb contraption as high as I could. I swung and… BAM.

FINALLY, an impact.

I backed up so I could see the window, which was now quite foggy, probably due to some yoga exercises happening inside. A blurry face peered out, finally, then disappeared.  

“COME BACK!!!!”

“WHAT?!”

“You locked me out!”

Shock and mortification were evident on this blurry face before it disappeared. I could hear the rustling of someone pulling on decent apparel, a privilege which I had not had for quite some time. I heard the creaks and groans of the staircase as someone flew down the steps, and finally, finally, Lorey appeared at the garden door.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I am so, so, so so sorry.”

“I’m definitely going to write about this,” I said.

I have to admit I’ve delighted in telling this story. One English friend congratulated me on behaving in an appropriately unbothersome way. Another said he was quite grateful. Not grateful that I had survived, mind you, but grateful that this had happened to me, because the tale made his day. I also got to scold another English friend who lives a few streets over for being unknowingly complicit in this affair. Lorey had texted him a few hours prior to ask if he wanted to come join for the maiden voyage of the sauna tent, and though he didn’t reply, thinking she was pranking him (who has a sauna tent? In their garden? In London?), Lorey had assumed that all the knocking she did, in fact, hear, was this friend deciding to turn up after all. “Oh, that must be him, Kassie will get that,” she thought.

Of course, Kassie could not, in fact, get that, because she was busy dying of hypothermia 15 feet from Lorey’s window.

Obviously.

*Should you also wish to get locked in your backyard with a sauna tent—which, honestly, I highly recommend, as I haven’t gotten this much mileage out of a misadventure story in a long time, and also it really is quite nice—you can get $100 off with the promo code OutOfOffice. (I’ll get a commission if you buy one through this link).

**Not ideal: [British English] “The worst possible outcome”

A media opportunity for innovative outdoor gear

I’m a member of the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild of the UK, and I’m on the judging panel for this year’s Technical Innovation Award. If you represent a hiking/camping/adventure/etc. product that you think is truly new and innovative, we’d love to hear about it. Email me by June 15 at kassondracloos@gmail.com with “OWPG award” in the subject line to nominate a product for consideration. Products must be available in the UK and samples must be available for testing.

Until next time…

Thanks for reading!

Kassondra

Moment of zen on a southwestern section of the England Coast Path. Coming soon: some notes from a long coastline