Maine weather part of our lives

Here in Maine’s central highlands, they began to be heard only about a couple of weeks ago, more than a murmur but less than full-throated: human voices rumoring spring.

Suspicion and skepticism often accompany the first gentle weather at this time of year. For many of us, these were intensified by 1989-90’s winter having seemed more daunting than usual, no matter that Paul Knaut Jr., Dover-Foxcroft’s weatherman-in-residence, says the maximum snowfall was 99 inches against an annual average of 103 since 1975; or that the cold, excepting that often below-zero December, was mainly average or above. Still, the winter was harsh enough to make those first toothless days difficult to believe in as a sign of things to come.

When I, for one, first stepped outdoors into that sudden presence of light and warmth, I swear I was on the verge of a mystical experience. I pulled myself together and back into a winter mood by deciding that the prospect of betrayal was very real and also intolerable. And, in fact, as Paul Knaut says: “You can expect to see snow on the ground up here until mid-April.”

That’s why, although spring at this very moment is the season across this whole continent, we in Maine have to remember that weather and seasons can be two very different things. Maine, of course, isn’t alone in this respect. Robert Frost was likely thinking of Vermont and New Hampshire, where he lived for years, when he wrote:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

That line, “But if you dare as much to speak” — Frost knew it was a sentiment that people would connect with, perhaps half-believe: that weather acts in a personal way with us and is ready at all times to jolt us with surprise. As one who viewed weather as being not only outer but “inner,” meaning our own psychological weather, Frost appreciated the profound interaction between the two. He knew a lot about the fear and loneliness, as well as the joy, to be discovered in different kinds of weather.

At a time when we may feel we are over-reacting to the vagaries of fronts and pressure systems, it might help to remember how closely tied we are to weather, that it’s what we live in, are immersed in. When we look out a window in the early morning and see a horizon burning or cannot see any horizon at all because of rain or fog or snow, we are affected, however subtly. Nor is it coincidence that we use words such as brilliant, thundering, foggy, chilling, etc., interchangeably to describe both people and weather. The ties are indeed close, as they have been since our ancestors found gods, no less, in forces like baying wind. And those ties may become much closer: When we fully comprehend that our environment can be calamitously altered by, say, cutting down a tropical rain forest, we will give our relations with the elements a new and dramatic dimension.

In the meantime, whatever may be the state of our relations to this specific day’s weather, spring is truly here — simply spring doing spring the Maine way. And some of us, exercising the inalienable human right to complain about the weather, are already calling this spring unforgivably muddy. Some, including me, are even taking swipes at unborn black flies and mosquitoes, summer weather’s agents of irritation. Who know, perhaps these other natural things will so distract us, we won’t think of that possible switch of cloud and wind that could bring us back, on some April day, to the middle of March. Or, perhaps it will be on some May day, like the one in 1945, when cold and 14 inches of snow lambasted this little town on the Piscataquis, damaging not only trees and other property, but surely some presumptions as well.