The photograph in the morning newspaper showed members of Bangor High School’s track team shoveling two feet of snow off the all-weather track at Cameron Stadium in order that the kids may have some hope of getting in a halfway decent season before school lets out for the summer.

My first thought as I glanced at the photo may have been shopworn, but it was real: Been there, done that. And I suspect that I am not the only one to harbor similar recollections of springtimes long past. Here in The Real Maine, when a young man’s fancy turns to baseball and other springtime diversions, the snow shovel is the weapon of choice to nudge Mother Nature into getting on with the job of making things turn green again. It’s who we are.

A lifetime of this ritual has made me as firm a believer as the next guy in the unique Maine adage that the sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up. But this particular winter has been The Guest From Hell who never wanted to leave from the minute we first took him in. We got so far behind early on that we have precious little time to evict him and catch up before the first summer complaints begin arriving, demanding to be catered to in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

And so we grouse about the weather and threaten to take matters into our own hands. It is a Maine tradition at this impatient time of year, and has been ever thus throughout New England, as well. Even Mark Twain got into the act on a regular basis, carping about what he called “the dazzling uncertainty” of New England weather.

“There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger’s admiration – and regret,” the revered author and humorist told the New England Society in a speech in 1876. Especially in springtime, he said, “The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go.”

Each spring, when the schizophrenic weather gods of March knock heads with those of April to sow despair among the natives, I suppose that more than a few Mainers are reminded of Twain’s mythical New England weather forecast: “Probable nor’east to sou’west winds, varying to the southard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning …”

The old boy did have a way with words, to be sure. Still, for my money, when it comes to the apt turn of phrase, the precise put-your-finger-on-it details of New England weather at this unpredictable time of year, no one has ever been able to nail it as dead-solid perfect as The Master.

I speak, of course, of Robert Frost, the late, great Yankee bard for the ages. (OK. So the man had the poor judgment to get born in California. But he came from solid, transplanted Yankee stock. And he possessed enough common sense to return to his New England roots by age 10 to finesse the statute of limitations and qualify as One Of Us).

Never a big believer in poetry as a way to waste perfectly good newspaper space when there are so many other ways to accomplish the task (including Exhibit A, presently before you), I nonetheless feel compelled to cite a portion of Frost’s “Two Tramps In Mud Time” to remind you of the master’s deft touch in capturing the essence of fickle April:

“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.”

It is Frost, drilled into us in grammar school – not Twain – who springs to many a veteran Mainer’s mind when April teases with promises of a better life beyond Mud Season, as only April can tease. Whether we are frazzled old fogies who have made it around life’s track more than a few times, or energized high school kids shoveling their way around the stadium track for the first time, his words ring true.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His -e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.