Something there is, that doesn’t love a road. Especially in March, which is the roughest month hereabouts.

So many blast holes and heaves appear in paved surfaces at this time of year that the towns start stocking up on orange “BUMP” signs ahead of time, as if they’re trying to ward off hexes or elves. A stretch of road that was flat and passable this morning appears to have been excavated by afternoon. Ball joints crumble and shock absorbers bounce. It’s as if a tug of war between winter and summer has begun, and it always seems at first like winter’s going to win.

It does not like to surrender. Its secret agents are not elves, exactly, but cold and water that may amount to the same thing, and it uses them in two ways: to create heaves and to create holes.

Frost heaves occur where ice lenses have formed underneath the road. An ice lens is, well, a lens-shaped formation of ice. As winter digs in, soil and pavement freeze deeper and deeper. Ice fills cracks and pores. At a certain depth, the soil remains above freezing, and at the dividing line between the frozen and unfrozen soil, liquid water below is attracted upward through nooks, crannies and capillaries in the soil to the ice pockets above.

How this occurs, exactly, is not conclusively understood. Strange things are happening in the water down there. Some of it is actually “supercooled,” meaning it’s colder than the freezing point, but yet still liquid. The supercooled water freezes on contact with the ice pocket, adding to it. It grows in the shape of a lens and sends the frozen ground swell under the pavement, exerting pressure upward, and heaves and humps form in the road.

While frost heaves are created from the bottom up, potholes are created from the top down. When ice melts on warmer days, it leaves gaps in the pavement, and liquid water running off the snow and ice seeps down in. At night winter seizes its opportunity to drive the temperature down again and refreezes everything. Freezing water expands naturally by 9 percent in volume, so there’s more ice pushing inside the pavement. When the March sun rises, higher and warmer than it was in February, more ice melts and more moisture gets into the gaps. The pavement expands, contracts, gets stressed by the ice, and cracks. As cars and trucks rumble over, the pavement breaks up and tires kick out pieces and form holes. Heavy, overweight trucks, of which Maine has an abundance, are winter’s special allies in demolishing pavement. So there are at least two things that don’t love a road.

The war between winter and summer goes on for a long time in these parts. Despite the fact the sun is getting higher in the sky, in March the prospects for victory seem bleak, especially on the back roads in Waldo County. Some think the world will end in fire, but right now ice seems so great it will suffice just about anytime.