No cure for a winter in Maine

By the time a person reaches middle age, he has either made peace with winter in Maine or he has not and probably never will.

The former is a blessed individual, indeed, a person who has found a way over the years to extract some measure of joy from Maine’s five-month assault of icy wind, snow and darkness.

The latter, on the other hand, is simply a poor shivering slob doomed to suffer an annual bout of cabin fever, a gloomy disorder whose symptoms are eased only by a regimen of UV lamps, mood-elevating drugs and the occasional visit to the chiropractor for a spinal adjustment after shoveling snow all day.

There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground in one’s relationship with a Maine winter. Either you love it and revel in its icy splendor or you hate it and long to escape its clutches. Have you ever met anyone so ambivalent as to suggest that winter was an OK time of year? Of course not.

After enduring more than 30 Maine winters so far, I am forced to admit that I dread its arrival more with every passing year. Like many of my ilk, I can feel my spirit begin to sag just about the time the Super Bowl is over, and with it that merciful distraction that watching televised football in a warm living room provides.

“If it’s any consolation,” a fellow winter-hater chirped the other day, “pitchers and catchers report to spring training down in Florida in another 10 days. Think about that!”

Well, I did think about that, for about five sun-drenched seconds, before remembering that I was neither a pitcher nor a catcher and therefore would not have the chance to frolic in the warm sun until sometime in late June.

Yes, February marks the onset of dreaded cabin fever, and I’ve got it bad.

Winter-loving people are an enviable lot. They tend to smile radiantly from December through March, eagerly awaiting their next opportunity to bundle up and go outdoors to play, happy as polar bears. I’ve tried to follow their example, but have never been able to discover winter’s secret appeal.

Whenever I get the urge to take up skiing, for example, I recall my single disastrous experience on the slopes years ago and my enthusiasm plummets to match the mercury. My debut took place in the midst of a blinding blizzard atop Sugarloaf Mountain in the company of a friend whose only instruction to me as he schussed out of sight was to remember to keep my weight on my downhill ski.

Two hours later, after a truly death-defying run accomplished with only one ski on the snow and the other flailing aimlessly in the air the whole way, I smashed into the ski rack in front of the lodge and vowed to find a cheaper way to humiliate myself in front of perfect strangers.

I’ve tried ice fishing, too, and concluded that standing for eight hours on a frozen, windswept lake in a snowmobile suit while sipping blackberry brandy and yanking the occasional listless perch through a hole is not my idea of fun. A snowmobile would cost more than my car, so that’s out, and trudging around the woods on snowshoes seems nearly as desperate a form of winter recreation as lacing up your Nikes and jogging in a snowstorm.

Which leaves me nothing better to do during long months ahead but to complain about the weather, which is a time-honored Maine tradition that gets a bad rap from winter lovers. Grousing is a free activity, after all, that doesn’t cause frostbite or broken bones, and never wants for willing participants or topics to vent one’s spleen over.

We complain when there’s too much snow, and we complain when there’s too little snow to make a decent buffer against the howling wind. It’s either too wet or too dry, too brown or too white. We complain if we have to go out and buy a snowblower to keep up with the endless storms, and then we complain when there’s not enough snow for us to use the thing.

Whatever the weather, it’s never quite right for everyone.

One of the more inventive complainers I ever met was a born and bred Mainer who kept a constantly wary eye on the winter sky, searching for bad omens in all its vagaries.

“This ain’t natural,” the elderly man said, shaking his head as the melting snow ran in rivers during an especially warm spell in mid-January a few years back. “Something’s gonna happen, Mr. Man, you just wait and see. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but I just know we’re gonna pay for this nice weather before the winter’s over.”

I understood the old guy completely.