Long cold winter of ’03 a season to love?

Sea vapor rises from the bay in vast billows, not unlike the steady stream of smoke from the chimney but much higher into the gray sky until it partially obscures Cadillac Mountain.

A wall of snow lines the driveway, the mounds 4 feet tall at the edges of perennial beds. Walkways carved through the snow and ice lead to bird feeders and the woodshed out back.

Local forecasts call for more snow and wind today, on the heels of the President’s Day blizzard that buried every city from Washington, D.C., to Boston and gave those residents a heavy dose of what Mainers have endured all winter.

Around these parts, we’ve been in the grips of such a deep freeze that the only reading material handy to the circumstances has been “The Cold Weather Catalog,” published in 1977 by Dolphin Books/Doubleday & Company Inc., in Garden City, N.Y.

Not everyone is familiar with this paperback, but I’ve certainly thumbed through its yellowed pages for the past six weeks, trying to fathom why its editors, Robert Levine and Nancy Bruning, subtitled the catalog “Learning to Love Winter.”

I’ve tried to take comfort from reading about snowshoe racing and ice fishing, about tracking wildlife and building ice sculptures. I even took solace learning that people think more clearly on cold, dry days associated with high barometric pressure. According to “The Cold Weather Catalog,” “Tokyo researchers have found that people are more forgetful on low-pressure days, and a Canadian study found that most car accidents occur when the air pressure is falling (specifically on hot, humid days).”

Some of the reading has been chilling indeed, especially the cold temperature records set in a Vostok, Antarctica, weather station where a temperature of minus 127 degrees Fahrenheit was set on Aug. 24, 1960. In Siberia, on Feb. 6, 1933, a temperature of minus 90 degrees was recorded, and in the Canadian Yukon area, it has reached minus 80 degrees on several occasions. Caribou, take heart.

As for snow accumulations, records show that on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, 172.8 inches fell during February 1969. In 1975, Oswego, N.Y., received 44 inches of snow from Feb. 8 to 10. And way back in 1888, during the week of March 11-14, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston witnessed 40 to 50 inches of snow.

From reading the catalog, I have learned about wind chill factors and the creation of a formula to compute the wind’s effect on the rate of the body’s heat loss. “The wind chill factor may result in exposed flesh freezing at a temperature of 20 degrees Fahrenheit if the wind [is] of over 50 mph. On a calm day (wind velocity less than 1/4 mph), a temperature of minus 130 degrees would be necessary to achieve the same effect.”

I have read about skin care, herbal teas, fake fur, foot warmers, stopping your car without skidding, gas and kerosene lamps, knitting mufflers, avoiding snow blindness, packing emergency gear and snow shoveling efficiency.

During this long winter, I have learned just about all “The Cold Weather Catalog” has to offer. Except the subheading “Learning to Love Winter.”