Getting a Season Back (at least temporarily)

Despite the fact that the planet just recorded it’s hottest January since human civilization developed the capacity to measure such things, I am feeling a bit of sentimentality at having a ‘real wintah’ here along the coast of Maine. It’s -5°F as I write this, there’s a foot of snow on the ground and another foot in the forecast. It’s been a few years since it’s really felt like winter here. One of my principal harbingers is whether or not the river freezes.  We live next to a bend in the Sheepscot River with fast water. The first decade that I lived here, the river froze across most years, usually by the first or second week of January. I used to snowshoe on it, but it’s been a number of years since that’s looked like a good idea, even if it looked frozen and there was enough snow. From experience, I know that snowshoeing on a ‘it looked frozen’ river is a bad idea.  

The river -- starting to freeze

The past three years, the river has not frozen at all. This year, the river was still open on the 20th of January, with no snow on the ground. My bet was that it would be another year without the river freezing. To be honest, I’ve basically stopped thinking about winter along the coast, for example, I don’t bother to move the grill off the deck, since I figure I will probably use it at least a few times in January and February. Sure, it will certainly get covered by snow, but a warm spell with rain will get rid of that, and then everything will turn to ice, the worst!  But this year it turned consistently cold in mid-January, and the river froze somewhere around January 24th, and is now blanketed with snow after our January drought has given way to a more normal February.

This weather is making me realize I miss ‘the real Maine wintah’. Once it’s here you get into the rhythm of it, your body adjusts, after a morning of 0°F, an afternoon of 30°F feels pretty good. It sharpens the senses, knowing that the cold is a real thing that can be downright deadly if you are not prepared. There’s actually some security in that, a feeble winter still has plenty of cold weather hazards that can put you in peril, especially if you aren’t paying attention. I also feel like I’ve started to accept losing real winter along the Maine coast, but then this dose of the real thing makes me realize what I’ve missed. There’s some sadness in that, but right now I’m happy to be looking forward to a snowshoe trip up the River!

The river -- frozen!