A Survivor’s Guide to the Worst Maine Wintah Evah

from Portland Monthly Magazine Winterguide 2010

It Was a Dark & Stormy Branding Opportunity

ASurvivor’s Guide to the !EVAH BY ROBERT SKOGLUND Worst Maine Wintah

There are people who aren’t suited to live up here during the deep free e, and I’m one of them, even though I’m a dyed-inthe-wool Mainer. Fortunately, it’s possible to buy insulated garments that keep heat in against your body and the cold out, and for countless people like me who can’t stand the cold, sensible winter clothing is the only thing that makes our ice capades up here tolerable. As early as the first of October, I’m already wearing fu y socks and warm, woolly, World War II Army Air Corps boots that keep my feet and ankles warm. I wear insulated pants over my dungarees. I put on a warm sweater, and on top of that my snowmobile suit. It goes without saying that I wear mittens and a knit watch cap that comes down over my ears. And, dressed like that, I can manage to stay toasty-warm and comfortable unless I have to go outdoors.

The difference between surviving a Maine winter and en oying a Maine winter has to do with your genes. Give my brother Jim or Lawyer Crandall a smelt pole and they can stand in the free ing rain for hours with perfectly balmy hands, wearing nothing but a smile of contentment. They are Real Maine Men RMM . When it’s 20 below ero, RMM lounge outside Maine dance halls during intermission, wearing only dungarees and a Jimmy Parker T-shirt that says, “If you can’t stand Maine winters, you don’t deserve the summers.”

A wimpy man, however, can’t survive a Maine winter without a Type A woman like my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, who generates heat summer and winter. On the coldest winter day

New Mainer at Wal-Mart’s checkout line: “I know the black stuff in the parking lot is technically snow, but the pretty, fluffy, white snow I’ve always heard about–the real snow–that’s going to get here soon…isn’t it?”

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I can stick my hand down the back of my wife’s shirt and warm an ice-cold hand on her sweaty back. Marsha says, “Oh, that feels good.” I say, “Oh, that feels good.” We have the ideal symbiotic relationship. Wide-eyed starter couples planning to survive 0 or more Maine winters should also seek out a mate with whom they’re genetically compatible.

If you’ve heard the old snow-removal ape that ends, “Harry plows deep” a variation on the vaudeville gag behind Eugene O’Neill’s play The Ice an Co eth ‘Has the

iceman come yet?” “No, but he’s breathing hard” you can understand why the cognoscenti in my socioeconomic class do whatever it takes to keep professional Maine snowplowmen out of our driveways.

But plowing on your own can also be e pensive. A while back, my doctor says to me, “You’re lucky to spend the winter in Maine, where there is no stress.”

No stress in a Maine winter? Wouldn’t you like to see that doctor’s wife drag him out of bed at five o’clock some January morning when it’s two below ero? Wouldn’t you like to see him bundle up and head out to start his 19 diesel tractor the one with the plow but no cab on it? Wouldn’t you like to see him go out through a window because last night’s slush on the doorstep had turned into solid ice when the temperature dropped 0 degrees? And after spending an hour free ing his fingers while getting that old tractor with no heat plug started, wouldn’t you like to see that doctor try to move three feet of ice and snow in front of the garage door so his wife could get out and drive 0 miles to teach school? We’re speaking hypothetically, you understand. And then wouldn’t you like to hear

his wife yapping at him to take an a e and chop the ice off the doorstep so she, who is already half an hour late in leaving, can get out of the house without climbing out the window like he did? And after he’s knocked a corner off his granite doorstep and ruined his a e while chopping away the ice, can’t you see his wife stepping into a two-foot drift and getting snow in her boots because he hadn’t had time to shovel a path? Oh, wouldn’t you like to be there right then when he turns to his wife and says, “I love to winter in Maine, where there is no stress.”

I once fro e my nose while standing watch on the bow of the cutter Laurel between 2 and a.m. one January morning while running from Southwest Harbor to Moose Peak. Even before that, I worked in Russ Thomas’s garage where I fro e something else s uirming around on a snow bank while taking a rear end out of a school bus that wouldn’t fit into the garage.

So many of the cheerfully uninitiated, outfitted by L.L.Bean, who ip up hill and down dale on skis or snowmobiles have never really e perienced Maine winters or even begun to earn the second sight you get after making it to the other side of life’s black ice. So it comes down to this

Regardless of your fortunes, here’s a tip If you’re not bothered by the cold but simply can’t afford to live through another Maine winter, move in with your parents anyway. They’ll be glad to see you, and, when you move back to your own digs in the spring, you can make them a present of your pet dog or rabid cats.

How do most Maine natives get through a Maine winter? Ask master stonemason Jay Cook, and he’ll tell you “Denial.” ■