In Maine, the wind can be a pain

As I was driving through LaGrange in bright late-summer sunshine on the day before Labor Day, I met a large heavy-duty snowplow headed toward Milo. It occurred to me that the guy either knew something I didn’t, or he was rushing the season just a dite.

A couple of days ago, dressed in woolen ski cap, layers of winter gear and gloves as I mowed my lawn in a 30 mph breeze stiff enough to skin a pig, as an old acquaintance is fond of saying, I concluded that Snowplow Man’s prudence in preparing for the inevitable was not so premature, after all.

The calendar may tell us that another week of summer remains. But instinct tells us that the polar express out of Baffin Bay and points north has already left the station, and, as songwriter Bob Dylan put it, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. All week here in The County it has blown whichever way it can best make things the most inconvenient for man, beast and the gaggles of Canada geese that are beginning to form on the lakes and ponds pending their annual mass exodus south.

As I write, Furnace Tune-up Guy is thrashing around down cellar, working his annual magic on my aging furnace so that I might get the best bang for my buck from my new supply of heating oil at $2.53 a gallon after the old-fogy discount is figured in.

When he arrived, this premature cold snap that has made us long for one more go at those balmy dawg days of August was Topic A for discussion. Though in a business in which cold weather is good for business, Furnace Tune-up Guy is no fan of the genre.

A few years ago, in the dead of an agonizingly long winter, he had vowed to load his snow blower on the bed of his pickup truck and head south, not stopping until he had arrived at a location where the natives, never having laid eyes on a snow blower, would approach him to ask what in tarnation the strange contraption might be.

That’s where he would put down his roots, he said, far from the snow bank in which he was raised. He’d be comfortable at last, like the poet Robert Service’s character, Sam McGee, a southern-born prospector who was never warm in the Land of the Midnight Sun until a pal obligingly set fire to the wreckage of an old barge on the shores of a frozen Yukon lake and cremated the man’s corpse.

But my friend never did make his move south. Such permanent migrations are best not undertaken on the spur of the moment – cold turkey, so to speak. I suspect that like most any true son or daughter of The County, he knows there are worse places in this country to make your stand, the occasional arctic wake-up call prematurely barreling down from Canada notwithstanding.

Below sea level in New Orleans would be one. Astride the San Andreas fault in California, another. Any place where the snakes and the alligators outnumber the humans. Old Orchard Beach at the height of the summer tourist season.

Strong winds, the bane of steeplejacks, golfers, leaf rakers and crop dusters, are ill winds to most people. Color me contrary, but as befits a chap whose house sits on high ground where a good breeze is a near-constant companion, I like my winds scolding and tempestuous on occasion if for no reason other than it feels so good when they abate. And Lord knows it keeps the blackfly quotient just about nil around here.

We bad-mouth the wind, but where would we be without it? It powered our clipper ships of old, it cranks our windmills of today. It blows away the fog of politics, wards off frost, refreshes the air and makes things interesting when you’re trying to lay out a picnic lunch on paper plates. If it blows too hard and long it tends to keep the riff-raff from moving in and diluting the neighborhood gene pool, which is a plus.

The late Maine author Ruth Moore knew how it is with the wind. In her book, “Speak to the Winds,” she used up the better part of four pages in describing a coastal storm featuring “wild trumpeting gusts tearing down out of an immense blackness” which created a sound “like ripping canvas.”

That’s the sound I am hearing from outside my window at the moment. Soon, I will fill my pockets with rocks and head out to finish mowing the lawn.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.