Lonely Maine Winter

Lovell after freezing rain

Maine can be dreary in February and March, especially for women. Ladies’ Delight Hill in Lovell, Maine “was not named for the view. Nor because it made a delightful walk for ladies to take on a Sunday afternoon or because it was covered with wonderful blueberries . . . [It was] named in sarcasm because women who tried to live in two houses built there could not endure the loneliness and isolation.” So says a history of Lovell called Blueberries and Pusley Weed.

View from my office

The hill isn’t far from me as I type this. In summer I can hear loons crying on Lower Bay of Kezar Lake on which Ladies’ Delight Hill borders, but in winter there’s not much happening over there. The road is plowed and some of the waterfront cottages are used year-’round. Caretakers go in and shovel roofs during snowy winters like this one.

I remember shoveling one over there forty years ago. Park on the road, climb over the snowbank, trudge through deep snow lugging a ladder and a shovel, and get on the roof. It was so quiet the only sound was the “whoomp!” of a big cube of snow I carved out dropping into deep snow on the ground below. I would think of those lonely ladies who lived here generations ago. Women need the company of others more than men do. They need to talk and have someone listen. Lovell Village wasn’t far away but there was no bridge over the Narrows back then. One had to take a ferry in summer or walk over ice in winter to get there.

Stone wall behind my house in Lovell

A hundred fifty years ago this part of Maine wasn’t “Vacationland.” There were no summer cottages on the lakes and ponds or on the hillsides either. There weren’t many trees because farmers had cleared them off, pulled the stumps, and rolled stones to the borders of their property to make the now-gray stone walls around which trees have grown up again in most places. Old timers told me you could travel up Route 5 all the way through town and see Kezar Lake constantly in view because it was treeless clear to the New Hampshire border in the west.

Maple Ridge Road in Harrison last weekend

Though Lovell is nearly all forested again, parts of western Maine still look like they did back then. Last Sunday I drove to Harrison along the Maple Ridge Road. It goes for over a mile with long fields on both sides. It starts just off Route 117 just beyond Crystal Lake and rises through woods to the height of land where it opens up. Fields slope off from the road but not steeply. Big old wooden farmhouses still stand along the road, but the snowbanks were so high I couldn’t easily see over them from my car and I wished I’d taken my pickup instead.

Maple Ridge Road looking west

Those big homes would have been built in the early 1800s, a generation or two after the first settlers cleared their tillable land, sold crops for cash, and their children or grandchildren became prosperous enough to build them. A couple are now horse farms which may bring in a little money here and there, but are probably hobbies for the most part. There was so much snow on the ground I couldn’t tell what the other farms were used for but it was nice to see long fields with unbroken snow cover surrounding them. 

Maple Ridge Road Schoolhouse

Some areas had become overgrown since I was there about thirty years ago. The old wooden schoolhouse was still standing but it’ll need work if it’s going to last another thirty years. I’d liked to have looked in the windows but didn’t want to trudge through deep snow to go up to them. Across the street I could see an old windmill still standing in what had been a field but is now overtaken by new growth. There were the faint outlines of old building further back in the bare trees. I would like to have explored that but the deep snow prevented.

Separate doors for boys and girls

I can only imagine what it took two centuries ago to travel any distance during a winter like this one. It would have been an all-day affair: feed and water the livestock first; hook up the horse to the sleigh; break the runners out of the ice; head to the store or to a neighbor’s farm across town all bundled up and shivering on the seat. Then head home again; unhitch the horse; wipe it down; put it back in its stall; feed and water the livestock again; then go into the house and stoke up the stoves to warm things up — all that just so you could pick up some necessary items and the wives could visit.

Woman ice fishing alone last weekend

Rhythms of Life

“I got rhythm, I got music,” goes the old Gershwin lyric, and I like both. I can’t dance well and I don’t play any musical instruments, but the rhythms of life? I’ve willingly subjected myself to them and I’m better off for it. I’m in bed before nine o’clock every night and asleep minutes after, then I’m up and at it by 5:00 am. That makes me a morning person, but I wasn’t always. During the first half of my adult life I was a night owl who hated to get up in the morning. As a child, however, my daily routine had been parentally imposed — bed at 8:30 pm and up at 6:00 am, so I’ve gotten back to an older, more natural routine.

Day's End Casco Bay

On that note, three Americans recently won a Nobel Prize for medicine because of their research into the benefits of what they call “circadian” rhythm. They claim bad things can result when we upset our daily sleep cycles, things like increased risk of cancer and “degenerative neurological conditions.”

New Nobel Laureates

Important as daily rhythms are, I think our annual rhythms are too and this year seems strange. As someone born and raised in New England I like my seasons, all four of them — even though up here in the mountains of Maine winter can be a bit too long. By March, nearly everyone wants it over and all of us long for signs of spring, even the tiniest manifestation, like a glimpse of bare ground between snow storms can be enough to sustain us for weeks, but we got none of those last spring. March was colder than January and April wasn’t springlike either. Summer was fine when it finally arrived, but now it has stretched into October. It feels unnatural.

From Portland Press Herald

One of those new Nobel Prize winners, Jeffrey C. Hall, lives in rural Maine. He’s retired with seven dogs and several Harley Davidson motorcycles in Cambridge, Maine, which is in the geographic center of the state — in the boonies. He’s not a stereotypical scientist with a lab coat, but instead looks just like any other pot-bellied, middle-aged, balding, white-guy, Harley driver you often see on the back roads of northern New England. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Washington DC, he gradually migrated north to New England, first to Massachusetts and finally to Maine. I wonder if he’s noticing how our seasonal rhythms are off this year.

Kezar Lake Sunset

I’ve been living in rural Maine forty years and we always expected the first frost shortly after Labor Day. We’d would get out the winter jackets for Fryeburg Fair week — not every day, but one or two. This year it was shorts and tee-shirts for most of October’s first week. I like wearing shorts with those little socks under my sneakers from June through August, but then I’m ready to don long pants and taller socks come September. We’ve always gotten a few warm days in the fall and they’re nice, but not every day. I’ve had to put a fan on me to sleep in both September and October. That’s not supposed to happen and it’s throwing off my annual rhythm.

Autumn in the Yard

Autumn in New England has its own smells too and they’re comforting to me as my olfactory sense gets stronger as I get older, although maybe it only seems that way as both my eyesight and hearing get measurably weaker. There’s a certain very pleasant scent detectable when I first step outside on a crisp, clear fall morning. I get a burst of energy when the weather cools that I used to expend on things like splitting and stacking firewood. Cool air and autumn breezes would keep me from sweating too much and I liked smelling smoke from a woodstove while I worked. I also liked keeping at it until sunset, then going inside for dinner.

Early snow in the yard

In November, I look forward to the first snow. I can always smell it before it comes and it’s comforting as long as I’ve got all my autumn chores done. November can be cold enough to break out the flannel-lined pants and woolen socks which I’ll then wear right through most of March, or all if it as I did this year because it was often below zero. If the first snow doesn’t come in November it’ll surely come not too far into December.

By then our days will have shortened, but government upset that rhythm by imposing Daylight Savings Time, which ends at midnight, November 4th this year. I wonder what Mr. Hall and his Nobel laureate colleagues think of that. I’d like to ignore the mandated time changes, but then I’d be an hour out of step with the rest of America.

Snow Woe

Stories of rooves collapsing under weight of snow give caretakers the shivers. Last week, the rush was on to find people willing to trek on snowshoes into regions where snowplows don’t go, carrying ladder and shovel. I don’t have to do that anymore, but I’ve done my share of it over the years. When heavy storms come fast on the heels of other big storms, demand for shovelers goes through roof, so to speak, and those willing to do it can almost name their price.

One of the properties I manage

As a teacher who had week a off in February, it was often a good way to pick up some quick cash. Driving from Lovell to South Portland last Thursday, I noticed the few other vehicles on the road with me were pickup trucks, either with plows on the front or ladders tied on the top. Those were guys heading somewhere to shovel a roof.

It’s exhausting work, better suited for young men but I still do a small roof of my own, much to my wife’s consternation. “Why don’t you just hire someone?” she says, but it’s an aging guy thing. If I stop doing that, what else will I stop doing? I intend to keep it up as long as I can. I hire people to shovel the properties I manage though. I call myself a property manager instead of a caretaker because I do very little of the physical work anymore.

Another property I manage

I take care to find good people to do it and make sure it gets done properly. That’s my stock in trade now. Guys with shovels in their hands sometimes resent the managers who hired them, thinking managers don’t have to work as hard for their money as they do. Those thoughts passed through my mind more than once when I was starting off, but now I know that managers earn their pay too.

Roof shoveling is an entry-level position. Not a lot of skill is required, mostly just a strong back and a willingness to use it. There is some thinking required though because each roof is different. Most of the remote camps on the back side of the lake are small with shallow-pitched rooves. A small ladder reaches them and they’re not dangerous if you should fall off. The job is done quickly and most of the work is getting there and back. Some, however, are larger with two or even three stories and steep-pitched rooves. For those, it’s best to start at the ridge line and work downward because the danger of falling off is greater near the eave. If you started at the top, then by the time you get to the eave there’s a deep pile to cushion you where you’re likely to hit bottom.

Several times snow gave way under my feet near the eave. Down I went feet first into the pile up to my shoulders. I was grateful to be unhurt, but it took enormous effort to get myself out. It’s a helpless feeling being stuck in deep snow. Last week, for example, I was on snowshoes packing down a path for the delivery man to my oil fill pipe in Lovell, which is on the other end of my house from the driveway.

Snowcraft Snowshoes from Norway, Maine

The first forty feet or so was easy because it was already packed by snow that had slid from the metal roof, but when I got to the gable end and stepped down, one snowshoe slipped off I fell backward into about four feet of loose snow, some of which had gotten up onto the bare skin of my back. When I tried to right myself, I discovered my arms weren’t long enough to find solid ground. I felt around for the lost snowshoe then used it to pack snow around me enough to push off and get vertical again.

From Norway, Maine Historical Society

I bought those snowshoes at a yard sale and thought I’d gotten a good deal. I changed my mind while trying to get the snow out from under my sweater that was melting against my skin. The bindings were poorly designed and the shoes themselves were too small. I think they were meant for following behind someone on bigger snowshoes breaking trail. I have some bigger ones I used for many years but they’re older than me.

From Norway, Maine Historical Society

They were made in Norway, Maine by Snowcraft, Inc. sometime between the 1920s and 1940s back when Norway called itself the “Snowshoe Town of America.” They have curved ash frames and netting of shellacked cat gut. Leather bindings have dried out and are tearing in a couple of spots. I’d been meaning to have them repaired but kept putting it off. For that, I’d have kicked myself in the butt but the snow was too deep to accomplish that maneuver.

Stepping Into Solitude

My favorite season is always the one just emerging. I’m a New Englander and grateful that my homeland has four distinct seasons so I can feel that pleasant sense of expectation quarterly. Spring can be short some years — rarely because summer arrives early, and usually because winter lingers long. Sometimes it lasts only two or three weeks but it always makes an appearance. Right now winter is coming. I see it, smell it, feel it, and pleasurably remember all the sixty-plus times I’ve experienced this.

The remembrances are not specific. Rather, they’re generalized sensations most often triggered by smell. Every evening before going up to bed, I like to step outside in the dark, breathe the air, look at the lights, listen to the night sounds, and feel that I’m the only one out there. When I’m in the city where there’s a lot of ambient light, I stand in the shadows. A few windows in each of the houses surrounding ours are lit up. Parts of TV screens are visible. Occasionally people walk by on the sidewalk unaware of my watching. Then I wonder what other creatures may have heard me come out, themselves in deeper shadow and knowing I’ve joined them. Sometimes I see a gray fox making his rounds, always plodding the same path. Sometimes a raccoon is out exploring. Occasionally a jet comes over low. There’s a cell phone tower behind our house and pilots use it as a marker sometimes to approach the Portland Jetport a few miles away.

Stepping outside our Lovell house at night, noises and lights are nearly all natural, except some far-off lights on hillsides in neighboring Chatham, New Hampshire. If I’m out long enough, I’ll hear barred owls call to each other. There are usually two or three within earshot on a quiet night and sometimes one will perch on a limb overlooking our back field. A coyote pack prowls the swamp at the bottom of the hill and sometimes they’re on the hunt, howling away. Other times I hear only one yelping at the night.

If there’s no moon, it takes longer for my pupils to dilate enough to see even vaguely what’s around me. Night creatures in Lovell are more aware of me than I of them. I’ll hear deer snort and jump into the woods as soon as I step out. Other, smaller creatures stay still a long time, usually until I go back inside. Sometimes a fox, a raccoon, or a coyote will make its way across the back field. I see jets, but they’re miles high and silent. All I can make out are their lights moving from star to star. I imagine rows of people seated in coach sleeping, reading, or talking. I wonder if any are looking out the window in my direction. If so, they may see lights from the village a mile down the hill, but not my house or me outside staring up.

I have the same habit in the morning — if I don’t have to hurry off somewhere. I’m an early riser. After showering and exercising, I get dressed and go down to make coffee. Then I’ll step outside and stand quietly. Morning smells are different from night smells and change with the season. I smell a season coming before I see it or feel it. I think animals do too and even more acutely, as they must prepare more to survive the coming winter. In late fall I smell the sweet odor of decaying vegetation, but that goes away when everything freezes. After standing still a while, I may walk around. It’s usually dark when I’m out there this time of year, but sometimes the day is just starting to fill with light.

When the kids were little, I’d invite one or two to accompany me on my evening walkouts. When we had animals, they had to be fed and watered, then we’d just stand in the dark and quietly take it all in. I might point out the stars in the Milky Way, describe how many there were, how wondrous it all was, and Who created it. I remember those moments fondly.

For a while we had an outside hot tub. My wife and I would soak in it winter evenings. I especially liked it when the heater/pump cycled off and I could hear the night sounds. I’d savor the odd sensation of being suspended in hot water while feeling frigid Maine air on my head and shoulders.

Such solitary outside moments seem fitting ways to both begin and end each day, standing there until the cold penetrates to my skin, then stepping back inside a warm house, grateful to have it.

Quest For Fire

One can scarcely drive a mile in Maine without seeing little bundles of firewood wrapped in cellophane or tied by twine for sale beside the road— $3 each or two for $5. Sitting by a crackling fire is something tourists visiting the north country like to do. Kids will find sticks and roast marshmallows. If it’s dark, people may tell ghost stories. Lovers hold hands. Children snuggle with parents and older siblings. People tend to talk and listen better around a fire. They’re more intimate in that setting than almost any other and don’t tend to take out their cell phones either.

Campers might cook over a wood fire either by roasting something on a spit or frying after it burns down to coals. Cooking and eating lend another dimension of intimacy to the fireside experience. Few, if any, of us grew up cooking over an open fire except at cook-outs or when camping, but many of our ancestors prepared meals with a wood-fired cook stove little more than a century ago. Before cook stoves they used a fireplace equipped with a swinging iron arm upon which to hang a cooking pot. Next to that was a brick oven. few of us alive today in America grew up that way but many of us still prefer smoked foods like meat, fish, nuts, or even beer made with hops that were smoked. Where does that come from? Some primitive collective unconscious perhaps? If we go far enough back in our family tree, all our ancestors cooked over an open fire.

Soon it will be cool enough that we will light a fire in the fireplace, and we’ll do that the first few cold days before turning on the central heat. I’ve already begun wearing long pants some days and taking a fleece with me in the car when I go out, just in case. September is like that and I’ll put my shorts away for good sometime in October.

Not long ago that I spent Sundays in October and November laying in the firewood I had cut during summer. For more than twenty years, I worked it up from stump to stove to ash pile. I didn’t think much about how much energy that took, but now it makes me tired just to remember. Looking out over my back field, I recall cutting seven or eight cords each year and twitching it up with an old tractor as I opened a view to the western mountains. Now I can feed my fireplace with just the trees and limbs that blow down each year. I don’t miss all the work wood heat entailed I’ll always enjoy a fire.

I grew up in suburban Boston with oil, forced-hot-water heat. It came on automatically and kept the house at an even temperature. I don’t remember hearing the boiler kick on and the only thing I noticed was a kind of crackling sound the copper pipes and baseboards would make as hot water moved through them. My father paid the oil bill and I never had to think about it. I can’t even remember how my first apartment was heated because it was included in the rent and I didn’t have to think about that either. Then my wife and I moved into an older apartment heated by a natural-gas-fired stove. The farther we were from that stove the colder we felt. We paid for the fuel too and that’s when it really intruded into my consciousness.

When we moved our young family to Maine in the seventies we had to pinch pennies. Fuel prices were way up back then so we heated with wood. Keeping enough on hand was my responsibility and I had to be conscious of it year-round. It’s only been eighteen years or so since we became prosperous enough to rely on the oil furnace to stay warm and the kids are grown up with families of their own now. Two of them heat with wood, and I notice that all three have a fire pit in the back yard.

We humans have a primitive fascination with fire. When we want to set a mood, we don’t turn on a light; we light a candle. We know fire is a powerful thing that can keep us from freezing to death in these northern climes, but we also know it can kill us. As New England endures another prolonged drought, older citizens remember fires that wiped out whole towns here in Maine. 

Brownfield, Maine Fire, 1947. (Photo Jo Radner)

We’ve all been warmed and we’ve all been burned, and we learn not to play with fire. Used respectfully though, it enriches us.

Dismal Season

Out like a lamb? Not this year. Not here in Lovell, Maine anyway. Going out, March is more like the Ram of Aries putting its horns to us again and again. There have been no balmy days with sun and warm breezes - the flirt and foreplay Spring usually offers in March, if only occasionally. This year March has been nothing but an extension of the very trying winter that tested the strongest among us and is still very much with us as I write this Saturday morning, March 29th. It’s 25 degrees and windy. Snow blew off the trees and down my neck as I attempted to blow off Friday’s snow from my driveway. There are no flowers in sight, no bare ground even, just huge, dirty snowbanks that block my view of passing cars. Perhaps by the time these words are published my outlook will be different. Part of me understands that, but I’m not feeling it today. Maybe I will tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Not now.

My garage is as dark as my mood because of the plywood I had to put over the windows to prevent ice chunks falling from the roof from crashing through the glass. I thought I’d be able to remove them long before the end of March, but there just hasn’t been enough melt. They’re still barricaded against the sashes by huge piles of snow interspersed with ice. We’re supposed to be in mud season now but the ground hasn’t thawed enough. Usually we see the first green sprouts of crocus and then even daffodils in time for Easter. Well, Easter has come and gone and there’s not a sign of growth, unless something is sprouting under the ice where I can’t see it. I have seen buzzards flying around today though and they usually follow the receding snow pack looking for corpses of animals that died and were covered in snow months earlier. I don’t know what they’re seeing from up there, but down here on the ground I see nothing but deep snow.

On Sunday, my drive to Portland offered some glimpses of brown ground. It isn’t warm enough to smell the mud, but I felt a bit more hopeful. That’s what drew the buzzards I saw yesterday. They strayed far inland but there’s nothing to eat in Lovell yet. The closer I got to home the higher the snowbanks were. Behind them were more porches and buildings collapsed into a mess someone’s going to have to clean up. Then it snowed again on Monday, the last day of March.

Misery loves company and most people around here have been depressed as winter was followed by an alleged Spring. That depression has been exacerbated by the economic downturn now becoming the biggest issue in the presidential campaign. As snowbanks on the north sides of roads begin to shrink, we can see the tops of all the real estate for sale signs that have been buried inside them all winter. Soon we’ll be able to make out the words “price reduced” as well. It won’t be long before they say, “price reduced again” because we don’t know where bottom is yet. All we know is that the value of our most valuable asset is going down while the price of food, oil and gas is going up fast. We go to work every day as our net worth goes down and cost of living goes up. Then it snows again.

It doesn’t help that our three presidential candidates are less-than-promising and unlikely to lead us out of it. One speaks eloquently but says nothing. Another is shrill, saying the same old things over and over. The third one is just old, calls us “My Friends,” then can’t remember his lines very well. One will replace the stuttering lame duck next winter. After the longest, most expensive campaign ever, this is the best we can do?

I can understand the sub-prime mortgage aspect of this economic mess. People borrowed too much, betting that real estate prices would keep rising. Banks issued the loans believing the same thing and both have been caught when the market tanked. Should government bail them out? I don’t think so. They gambled and lost. A fool and his money are soon parted.

The aspects I don’t understand are “derivatives” and “hedge funds.” Evidently these were government bonds, but were changed somehow, then sold and resold until nobody knows what they’re worth anymore - not even the people who designed them. They’re worth hundreds of billions one day and nothing the next. The dollar is worth less because the world is losing confidence in America’s ability to manage itself. It’s all very confusing. Economics isn’t called the “dismal science” for nothing.

Will our emotional depression over this endless winter lead to economic depression? I hope not. I just want the snow to melt. I want to see some green.

The Last Month

Things freeze deeply in December. The earth hardens. This last month of the year has a sharp smell - not unpleasant, just not soft like organic smells that travel on a medium of warm, moist air in seasons just passed. Warm-blooded creatures know profoundly that we’re vulnerable to northern elements in winter and must take precautions to survive. When we venture out, that knowledge makes us keener. If we’re incautious we freeze, perhaps to death. When we brave the cold in New England, it gives us a certain state of mind. We’re vigilant when we’re outside. When we’re dressed right, with the proper socks, boots, gloves, and jacket, we’re confident, secure. It’s the security we feel indoors when the stove is burning and we know the woodshed is full.

There’s little light this month when the shortest day of the whole year comes three weeks in, but what light there is reaches us through bare hardwoods and reflects off smooth-barked trees like beeches, birches and some maples. When snow comes, the angle of the sun is so low, the white surface reflects bright beams right into our eyes whenever we look south. But even the glare feels good. There may be little duration to December sun but we’re very aware of it at more than a conscious level. We know why the ancients marked winter solstice, building elaborate stone monuments to pinpoint and mark it. It’s a northern thing.

December is quiet, but the slightest sound can carry a good distance. Cold things move sluggishly. Some animals go down underground and curl up on themselves in hibernation and dream the dreams of their species in that dormant state. Others burrow around under the snow looking for seeds, and still others prowl above the snow listening for that burrowing sound to pounce on and eat whatever is stirring. Coyotes below Christian Hill seem to howl more in December. Was it the full moon recently passed? Have they done it every year but I was too sleepy to awaken? When I hear their high-pitched yipping, I picture a pack of them chasing deer wounded during the just-ended hunting season. Or, perhaps it’s just the coyotes’ nature to howl at night - announcing to all that they exist, that they’re making their way in the world just as the rest of us struggle to, each in our own realm.

Though it hasn’t yet, the thermometer can really plummet this month. The coldest temperature I ever witnessed occurred early during week one of my first December in Maine. My third daughter was born December 2nd and I returned alone from the hospital while my other children stayed with in-laws. Before my eyes opened the next morning, I smelled cold. The stove had nearly gone out, but there were a few tiny embers left to get it going again. I refilled it, got it cranking, and tried to turn on the faucet in the old dogleg tub for a bath, but nothing happened. I got dressed and went out to warm up the car but it wouldn’t turn over. The thermometer read almost forty below zero. I’ve never seen it that cold since but it was good basic training for this newcomer to Maine’s winter.

The lakes and ponds ice over this month. Lazy loons will linger while open water remains, but they have to vacate in December. When the entire surface freeze over and it gets really cold, loon cries are replaced by the echoing booms of thickening ice. I have childhood memories of skating around ice fishermen as a red would flag go up and, hand-over-hand, a fisherman would pull up a struggling pickerel or eel that had its own life way down beneath the cold, thick ice I was standing on. How different those cold-blooded creatures were from us mammals on the surface in our thick clothing and boots. If we assumed their temperature, we’d be dead, as each of our bodies would be sooner or later, cold and lying horizontal beneath the hard ground when our struggles were over. Another part of us, however, would transcend it all and abide somewhere else.

That’s why Christians chose to celebrate the birth of Christ at the end of this cold, dark month, I think. That birth gave hope to us creatures His Father created in His image and likeness - the hope that we could indeed win our great struggle in the end. In that Spirit, I wish you a Merry Christmas.

Going Inward

Take down the screens. Bring in the firewood. There’s snow on Mount Washington and it’s time to go inward. People who don’t like this are packing up to go south if they haven’t left already. As Tom Rush put it, they got the urge for goin’. Although it can get tiresome in March, I like being inside during late fall and early winter. I feel different outside too. Wearing flannel-lined pants, a quilted shirt and wool socks, I’m protected against the elements inside my clothing even if a chill wind reddens my cheeks. A whiff of woodsmoke from someone’s chimney turns my thoughts to home and if I smell something cooking as I go back inside it feels even better.

New Englanders are accustomed to changing seasons, having four distinct ones every year. Though we see more transformation, each season unfolds in customary ways with familiar sights, sounds and smells bringing memories of seasons past. Autumn chills make us grateful for warm, dry homes and hot food. It’s no wonder Thanksgiving originated here. If we should forget what’s really important, we’re reminded more often than people in many other regions. Changing seasons put us through familiar cycles and, I think, help us to accept the cycles of life more graciously than we otherwise might.

We go to bed hours after it’s dark in these latitudes and a lot of us wake up before it gets light. There’s something about seeing stars still in the sky as the eastern horizon is just starting to become visible. I feel I have time to get ready for the day, that I’ll be able to deal with it as it unfolds. By the time it’s light enough to see, I’m showered, dressed, and drinking coffee.

Daylight is more precious as it diminishes quickly in November. We savor the dim glow before sunrise, the twilight after dusk and evening’s bright starlight. The Milky Way on a cold, clear autumn night will mesmerize whoever turns his eyes upward. Unlike some city folk who seldom if ever see stars, we who live in the woods of northern New England know that they really do twinkle. Usually I’m out in the yard at such times and I can look back at the house and see into the lighted windows. Use to be it was full of children. Now they’re grown and out in the world somewhere, but under the same stars.

Inside, we contemplate things at fireside. Deeper thoughts and feelings come while watching flames turn to embers. Conversation is subtle, personal. Going out into the cold for another armload of wood and returning to fireside renews contentment. We don’t forget the tumult of the wider world, but it’s way out there beyond the town. There are layers between us and it. We can keep it out there and be safe for a time. Then sleep will come and take us to a new day.

Inside, we read. We write letters because writing is personal. It’s still a conversation but we don’t loose trains of thought because the words are right there. We take time to write because the reader will focus as much as the writer. And if he wants, he can go over the words again or share them with others.

This morning, even Baldface is white. Early wet snows like yesterday’s will soak through my workboots if I don’t treat them with mink oil. An old toothbrush works to apply the stuff and it needs to absorb overnight next to the fire or over a furnace vent. With a good pair of merino wool socks, treated workboots will do for autumn. I have 50-below Sorels for deep winter, but they stayed in the closet last season because deep cold and snow never came. Might need them this year though. Winter’s coming, but I’m ready. Going inward for a while is a good thing.

Hot Tub Chronicle

Published 11-27-05

Sitting in the hot tub, I can see mountains and stars above them. Coyotes howl and yip in the swamp below, probably chasing down a deer, perhaps one wounded by a hunter earlier today. Occasional headlights show through bare hardwoods along the Shave Hill Road a half mile off and from Route 113 in Chatham further away to the northwest. My wife’s large, unintelligent dog growls at the distant sounds. There’s something charming about being immersed in hot water outside on a cold evening with snow all around. It’s best when there are no lights on in the house behind me and nothing to hear but distant, muted sounds that would not be audible but for the cold quiet around me.

Blinking lights of four passenger jets move slowly from star to star, two going southeast and two northeast. I imagine passengers crowded in those narrow seats and stewardesses pushing carts between them high above the dark mountains. Seems like a lot of planes to be over my lonely portion of northern New England at once; maybe because it’s the night after Thanksgiving and people are heading home. Though it’s quiet now, it was bustling in the house behind me the night before, as my grown children and their partners were here for turkey dinner. My daughter Sarah and her husband, Nate, announced they were expecting their first child - my second grandchild - next August. Life goes on. Bearing children is a sign of hope. Hope is good. I think it’s a girl. We’ll see.

With a barely-audible drone, one jet disappeared in the trees to my left as another appeared over the mountains ten miles away. The worn-down mountains have been there for hundreds of millions of years. Coyotes arrived nine or ten thousand years ago after the ice melted and humans around the same time, but jets have been flying over these parts for only about fifty years. I visualized people in the plane because I’m out in the quiet night alone with nothing else to think about, but it’s doubtful any of them are aware of me. Nobody knows what I’m doing except my wife, who scampered into the house trailing steam a few minutes earlier to sauté the asparagus and portobella mushrooms to go with baked scallops we’d already prepared.

I don’t bring the phone out to the hot tub and don’t play music either. I leave the jets off and I’m alone in the dark with nature, distant jets, a glass of shiraz and my own thoughts. Even a barking dog can sound charming if it’s a half-mile away or more away. In that melieu, it’s surprising what comes to mind. When the kids were little and we had animals, it was my job to feed and water them morning and evening. It wasn’t easy to leave my seat near the wood stove in the old house and trudge out behind the barn to break ice out of plastic buckets and add fresh water, but the animals were always grateful. Though I wouldn’t have walked back there in the cold if I didn’t have to, it was nice to feel the quiet and see the Milky Way above, smell the cold forest and animals, feel the air numb my cheeks and watch the moon rise over the pines to the east. I’d usually enjoy it for a few minutes before going back in. Sitting in the hot tub reminded me of all that. It was much the same except for the smells. Vaporous chorine scent replaced the fragrance of woods, but it wasn’t unpleasant, bringing back as it did memories of my mother doing laundry in the basement of my childhood home. The bleach smell was on clean sheets I’d lay down on Saturday nights after my bath - fond memories I didn’t know were still somewhere in my memory.

For fifteen years, my wife has wanted a hot tub but the idea of sitting in steamy water with other people didn’t appeal to me. It seemed like a yuppie thing. For two years in Massachusetts I was technically a yuppie - Young, Urban and Professional, but I didn’t live the stereotype. However, now that I’ve lived in rural northern New England for twenty-eight years and grown to middle age, I guess I’m a MARPie - Middle-Aged, Rural Professional and I’m not the only one around here. I don’t know yet what the stereotype for a MARPie is supposed to be because I just invented the acronym, but this one likes relaxing in a hot tub. Next time I’m out there, I intend to ponder the MARPie stereotype for part II of the Hot Tub Chronicles.

Hot Tub Chronicle II

First published 12-21-05

For many years my wife told me she wanted an outdoor hot tub to ease the strain of Maine’s winter. I’d listen and visualize the getting in and the getting out. An image of my wet, bare feet sticking to the hard-frozen ground the way a boy’s tongue sticks to a frozen metal pole of a school yard swing set played out in my mind’s eye. Looking behind me, I could see in my footprints the skin from the bottom of my bare feet, followed by others stained red with my blood. The hot tub idea had little appeal for me.

What I’ve discovered, however, is that only getting in is difficult. Getting out is easy. In my fleece bathrobe and slippers, I go out the door and into the frigid night shivering. I lift off the cover over the hot water and set it aside before removing my robe and stepping out of my slippers. There is a second of freezing misery as, shaking with cold, I swing my legs over the edge of the tub. After I’m up to my neck in hot liquid I can sigh with relief. Tense muscles loosen in the warm buoyancy and my internal temperature rises. In only a few seconds I’m relaxed and listening to the silence.

There’s probably no such thing as total silence, really - not for the average person here on earth anyway. Maybe it exists in space where there’s no atmosphere to vibrate and carry sound. Maybe it exists for the totally deaf, but for the rest of us there are just different degrees of noise. In the hot tub on a winter evening, I relish the relative silence around me. As mentioned in an earlier column, there’s no music and no telephone with me when I go out there. Neither are there any lights on in the house behind to leak out the windows and intrude on the light of the moon, the stars, and from distant houses on the high western bank of the Cold River in Stow and Chatham. Occasionally a faint, flickering light is visible on top of Mount Washington. The only sounds are those from nature, like coyotes or wind in the trees. Occasionally, there’s a distant whine of truck tires on Route 5 a mile or more away and down the hill - just loud enough to hear, but not intrusive on my mood. Sometimes there’s the drone of a passenger jet five miles up among the stars. It’s not really silence, but some might call it that.

We’re programmed to respond to certain sounds in certain ways. Genuine laughter elicits a positive reaction from anyone within earshot. Crying stirs an agitated response. Car horns during a traffic jam can be stressful, but listening to a baby gooing and gurgling is endearing. The soft, nearly-silent sounds of a winter night relax me. Maybe I’m hard-wired by the Creator to respond that way, or maybe it’s the human software bundle I came into the world with.

If I relax them totally, my arms float out in front of me - a rather strange sensation. The old bathtubs of my youth weren’t deep enough for that and neither were the little swimming pools in the yard. By the time I could swim in the lakes and ponds, I was too adventuresome to linger in the shallow water and see if my arms floated. Could warm, semi-weightless sensations tap unconscious memories of when we were in utero? The womb would have been warm and cozy too. Or maybe such thoughts are residue of the psychobabble I heard in all those liberal arts courses. Nonetheless, I imagine other mammals out there in the winter night. I visualize mice snug in in the woodpile in their nests of leaves and the wooly material they manage to accumulate from somewhere - probably insulation from one of our vehicles in the dooryard. I visualize chipmunks curled up snugly while deep in the ground under the snow. I feel an affinity for other warm-blooded creatures, but not for the grubs or the reptiles I know are out there too - another result of programming from the Creator I guess.

As I said, getting out of the tub is easy. Last Friday’s storm blew a half-inch of snow around the patio and I actually stood in it, barefoot and naked, while I put the cover back on before going inside. It was a strange sensation. I was aware of the cold, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I had no urge to roll around in the snow as some do, but walking in it left no bloody footprints behind me.