My novel about a fumbling spirit is titled “The Gropes of Wraith.” It is a work in progress, and I will finish it before you see one of my articles about Maine winters published in any Maine magazine sporting glossy covers.
This is because I am congenitally spleeny and can say nothing good about a Maine winter.
Not all natives are so afflicted. When winter has pretty well run its course in Rockland, my friend Lawyer Crandall heads for Coyote Corner up in The County to look for more.
My brother Jim can stand for hours in freezing rain with a smile on his face – as long as there is a smelt pole in his hand.
There really are two Maine winters: One is enjoyed by our friends with ski racks on their Volvos. The other one is dreaded by elderly Maine natives, like myself, who have shoveled too much snow. The difference is in the eye of the beholder.
When you read of inhaling crisp, fresh Maine air as newly fallen flakes crunch beneath vintage L.L. Bean boots – with a sprinkling of the full moon’s reflection on sparkling pine boughs – you can bet the writer was raised in a Philadelphia suburb where knocking steam radiators exuded comfort into every bedroom. Every year, her parents brought her to Maine for two weeks of gunkholing between Maple Juice Cove and Narraguagus Bay – in August.
Properly disillusioned, for years she dreamed of living in Maine. After her schooling, with a bit of help from her grandfather, she bought an airtight house with triple-pane windows, contracted to have her driveway plowed, settled back with a cup of hot chocolate and commenced to grind out copy celebrating the Maine winter.
To a hapless native, however, the sight of a single snowflake recalls the kind of frigid misery that has even grizzled lobster catchers from Beals and Monhegan sneaking off to their Arizona condos.
Return with me, if you will, to the place of my birth on a January day in 1943 as we explore the probable cause of my post-traumatic winter stress.
Our chimney caught on fire. I was sent next door to Gram Rob’s for a bag of salt. Not bothering to put on my mittens, I froze my fingers – and never forgot it.
One of my first Saturday-and-after-school jobs was working in a garage for Russ Thomas. When the rear end let go on our school bus, the bus was too big to drive inside. I had to lie on my back in the snow to take the rear end apart. There is something about getting greasy slush down the back of your neck while executing these nasty little winter projects that returns at night to haunt a man.
On our high school playground in late May, you would have heard, “Spring must be here – Skoglund has his earflaps up.”
Fast forward three years. At 2 a.m., that same little boy stood watch on the bow of the Coast Guard Cutter Laurel somewhere between Two Bush and Moose Peak. Freezing fog dripped from his nose. Like Sam McGee from Tennessee, he was always cold.
These are only a few examples. There are dozens more. Add to all this thousands of stressful hours of driving on icy roads, and you have a textbook case of post-traumatic winter stress.
Money talks, so you might well ask – if his house were insulated, could humble slip into a Moncler hooded down jacket, pull on a pair of Hestra Seth Morrison Pro Model gloves and, with his attitude properly adjusted, wax poetical over Maine winters?
Probably not, because there is no hope for the congenitally spleeny. Some Maine men are genetically predisposed to hate winter and, no matter how bad and bitter the March, those afflicted will tell you that April will be even worse, with endless rainy days and foot-deep mud ruts in the driveway.
Try to remember how many of your neighbors called after a blizzard just to discuss the beautiful 4-foot drift on your back steps. Unless they are from “away,” the few men you know who like blizzards are usually several payments behind on a plow and pickup truck.
My neighbor Malcolm Wiley tells of a Tenants Harbor lobsterman who claimed that only fools work in the winter. He hauled out his boat, pulled his rocking chair up to the wood stove, turned off his phone and settled in. Good thinking, I say.
At the first sign of snow, much like a woodchuck, another winter-hating man moved into a small camp hidden deep in the woods. He lived on the few lean rabbits he managed to trap, and had his diet not been supplemented by the fat from fried doughnuts, he would have perished.
The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:
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