Eighteen inches of snow for Christmas Eve? What happened to global warming? Mainers, especially our television meteorologists, love to speculate about the next “storm of the century.” Hyperbole and selective use of data are the norm: “December was 6 degrees colder than average!” To hear the grumbling, you might think we lived in Greenland rather than our balmy little island community.
We arrived here in October 2007, in time for the last real winter I can recall. (Our plow guy made 23 visits that season.) Still, we quickly grew to love winter here, since each snowfall was followed by two days of sunshine to gladden any cold heart. We had lived in southern England for 14 years, where a rare inch of snow caused chaos on the roads and shut down life as we know it.
Anywhere you visit around the globe, people complain about the weather, and they always trot out that ridiculous old saw: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 10 minutes.” My dad was a hardscrabble hill farmer who was never satisfied with the weather, driving us mad with his complaints that had no effect on Mother Nature. So, to weather-grouchy Mainers, you should bless your good fortune.
Believe it or not, I am a snow expert. The foundation came from a childhood near Rochester, New York, along Lake Ontario. Winter was serious business there, since we lived in a region known as the Snow Belt. This runs from Buffalo on the east end of Lake Erie to Syracuse and north to the polar cap in Watertown. Snowfalls up to 5 feet are well known in the Belt, with the Tug Hill plateau recording more than 300 inches in peak years.
In our first winter of marriage, Mary and I rented a small cottage perched on the lakeshore. In January 1978, huge storms slammed the area on three consecutive weekends. The furnace in the old house struggled to raise the temperature above 60 degrees amid fierce northern gales, and I feared layers of rime ice would collapse the cottage. In one six-week stretch, there was no recorded sunshine, and we shoveled snow until I could throw it no higher.
My “snowhow” flourished when I led a biotechnology company that pioneered the use of a product called Snomax Snow Inducer. We grew microbes called Pseudomonas syringae to produce a patented powder added to the water pumped through snow machines at resorts like Sunday River. We even saved the ski events at the 1988 Winter Olympics, but that is a story for another day.
Snow defines winter in many places, but not all wintry spots experience snow in the same way. Heavy, wet snow in the Snow Belt is nothing like the skier-coveted champagne powder of the Rockies. The Inuit and the Swiss are famous for their dozens of words to describe varied snow conditions. Snow is not just a meteorological event, but also a force that affects cultural identity, language and daily life.
Maine’s winter climate is a product of latitude, but is shaped by proximity to a vast body of water that moderates temperatures in summer and winter. While Caribou and Rangeley suffer persistent cold and annual snows up to 100 inches, Harpswell receives far less. Rarely will you see a neighbor here shoveling snow from their roof, with mercifully fewer emergency room visits.
Winter here is more an annoyance than a life-altering event. While the evening news yammers about subfreezing temps and 4 inches of snow, consider the folks in Carrabassett Valley, with temperatures below zero and snowfall above 200 inches on Sugarloaf Mountain. That pales in comparison with Mount Alyeska in Alaska, at 650 inches. Consider yourself lucky not to be a snowplow operator at Mount Baker, Washington, with a 1998-99 world record of 1,140 inches (95 feet)!
Every community on Earth adapts to what comes from the sky, be it snow, sleet, hail or rain (or, of course, sunshine). Snow and other forms of precipitation drive how we build, work, recreate, travel and speak. In our town, with many new homes drawing from limited freshwater aquifers, we should all rejoice when the white stuff blankets our surroundings.
