Everywhere I go in Maine I meet people who are threatening to leave one day.

For some, it’s a desire for better jobs. For others it’s a thirst for the bright lights and abundant cultural offerings that come with city life. For most, however, the urge to flee Maine stems almost entirely from a dissatisfaction with the weather.

Maine, they grumble, is simply too dark and cold most of the year for human habitation. Having lived here off and on for 30 years, I tend to agree with that disenchanted assessment. A Maine winter can seem like an eternity, especially when it’s followed by a spring that in other places of the country would qualify as a routine February. When summer finally does arrive, we view it as a brief glimpse of paradise, a teasing reminder that what we get to enjoy for only a few glorious weeks each year is what the other half gets to enjoy most of the time.

The other half, of course, refers to those people fortunate enough to have fled to the sunny South. There, they find more warm, sunny days than they thought possible. But what the refugee from the frozen North also discovers south of the Mason-Dixon Line is a menagerie of snarling, hissing, slithering, stinging, poison-fanged beasts that no amount of Ole Woodsmen’s Fly Dope can repel.

Whenever I’m thinking of making a bonfire of my heavy winter clothing and dancing around the flames, a man-meets-alligator story that I came across years ago makes me reconsider my hasty relocation plans. It told of a man in Louisiana who, while attempting to jack up his sagging house, crawled under his porch and found himself staring into the gaping maw of an 8-foot alligator. Before the man could scuttle away, the gator chewed up his leg so badly that the poor guy required 200 stitches.

In Maine, we have field mice.

Florida, the traditional image of Eden for many Mainers, is thick with alligators, which are notorious for creeping into back yards and dragging off family pets. My golfing friends tell me it’s not uncommon down there to see gators lazing around water hazards on golf courses, which could give even the steadiest of putters a bad case of the yips.

I once thought South Carolina would be an idyllic place to live, too, until a Maine-bred woman who moved there years ago told me how she had to check her bedding at night and her shoes in the morning to make sure they weren’t harboring scorpions. And her dogs, she said matter-of-factly, often trotted into the house with large venomous snakes in their jaws.

While trout fishing the other day, I met a man who moved to Maine a week ago after spending his life in the South. He ran through a litany of the wild critters he grew up with during his extended summers – everything from alligators to poisonous spiders and snakes to an especially nasty form of chigger that gnaws on your bare flesh until your legs feel as if they’re on fire. When a wild animal in Maine goes on a rampage, I told him, it tends to leave a trail of destruction no more terrifying than an overturned garbage can.

I suppose I should have mentioned black-fly season, but I didn’t want to scare the poor guy off.