Mainers’ winter of discontent

I guess I wasn’t surprised to read in Monday morning’s paper that this winter really hasn’t been as brutal as we’ve been led to believe.

According to the National Weather Service, the unrelenting cold that started in December, the howling winds that made our furnaces run nonstop for months and the snowstorms that seemed to follow one after another didn’t conspire to break any records in the end. It just felt that way.

But the true harshness of this Maine winter is not something that can be measured merely by temperature readings and the depth to which an ice auger must bore before it reaches fishable lake water.

Winter is a state of mind, too, an endurance test that challenges not only the body but the spirit. Every year, the ebbing daylight of early winter threatens to plunge each of us into a cabin-fever funk that only blessed spring, mood-altering drugs and maybe a grow-light positioned in front of the couch can fix. Yet even as we bundled up against the external elements this winter, nothing could protect us from the despairing events that seeped like a chilly wind into our consciousness and made the dark days seem even darker than usual.

This has indeed been the winter of our discontent.

It began early, too, even before the summer had faded to memory. On Sept. 11, the nation turned out for a mournful anniversary of that terrible day a year earlier that ushered in our new age of anxiety. Suddenly, after a brief reprieve that allowed us to catch our breath and feel normal again, we were thrust once again into a collective state of high alert that promises to be with us indefinitely.

The winter that followed has been one long talk of war, of terrorism, and of the steady unraveling of old global alliances that has yet to end.

Our slumping national and state economies have kept us edgy and insecure, while the stock market appears to be in continuous free-fall, taking with it the 401(k) accounts that were supposed to help see us through our retirement.

Here in Maine, we never even got those few days of January thaw that in the past have always been able to brighten our moods. Just as the Arctic air began to lock us up in ice for the long winter, the paper mill in Millinocket went bankrupt, adding 1,100 more people to the growing list of idled workers and threatening an entire region of the state with economic collapse.

By February, the distant rumors of war with Iraq were fast becoming a frightening, inevitable reality. In the course of one dark winter, our national obsession with the evil Osama had all but given way to a new preoccupation with the monstrous Saddam. Hundreds of Maine National Guard troops – our friends, neighbors, teachers, co-workers, siblings, parents and children – were hurriedly wrenched from the security of their homes and workplaces and activated to fight in a war of terrifying implications.

And on March 17, when the wearing of the green should be the long-awaited sign of the gentle green spring to come, St. Patrick’s Day has been turned instead into a moment of anxious reckoning in the world, the eve of war.

“Statistically speaking,” the morning headline reads, “this winter hasn’t been that bad.”

That depends on how you measure it.