Finally, the last few cold days of Winter are here. I can actually hear the season choking on its own bleakness, gasping for breath while its overjoyed victims celebrate over its prone form. Parents urge their small children to kick the bastard Winter in his cold, bony neck now that he can’t fight back with a sixty-below wind chill.
It’s the only of the four seasons whose demise is unapologetically anticipated. Signs all around town count down the days until the ground has thawed enough to dig a deep enough grave in which to toss Winter: “11 10 9 8 Days Until Spring!”
Another sign is quite succinct, but efficiently implies so much more:
SPRING? BAIT
The stereotypical Down East stoicism melts away with the snow drifts, at least until the tourists arrive. It feels like being ten years old, facing a two-week wait for your trip to Disney World. Excruciating anticipation.
Goodbye, Winter. I think we need to see other seasons. I’ve met someone new, who’s much more in tune with my needs. It’s best for both of us. Don’t cry, there are plenty of fish in the sea in the Southern Hemisphere for you. You can keep my wool jacket, it looks better on you anyway. Please don’t call.
Oh, and I faked all those excited yells on the sledding hills.
There’s nothing like a good ol’ theological conundrum to welcome the last two weeks of winter! Come with me into the valley of existential questioning, if you dare!
If you look closely enough at the photo — I’m currently without access to a powerful telefoto lens as a condition of my parole — you’ll see that a herring gull has lit upon a convenient crucifix atop Bar Harbor’s Episcopalian church. I’m sure being a seagull is tough work; flying all day, sorting through the variety of possibilities at the local dump for lunch, pooping ten times your weight every day. So I can understand taking a break on a nice high point with a killer view, if only to allow digesting of a few rancid burger wrappers.
But behind it: the weathervane. The craven image of another bird. The gull striking the same pose as the iron rooster. Worshipping this false avian idol while defiling the most holy of symbols to millions. And — and this is really important, everyone — what the hell is a chicken doing on the roof of a church in any capacity?
What does this mean, people? Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Or just a sign that I should get some KFC the next time I’m on the mainland?
The voting to name my palatial grounds is tied 19-19! Voting will end tonight at 11:59 PM, so vote early, vote often.
UPDATE: Cold Comfort Farm has squeaked past Morningwood by one vote! Final tally: 27-26. More on this later.
Last week, I went driving around on a lake.
No, I do not have a Jesus Car that can drive on water, spinning donuts that create little whirlpools of holy exhaust. What I do have is the luck to live in an arctic winter climate that freezes smaller bodies of water like the biggest damned Frigidaire you’ve ever seen. And thanks to the persistent chill, the ice on Maine’s lakes and ponds is thicker than it’s been in well over a decade.
My drive home from work takes me past Echo Lake, a beautiful glacier-formed lake nestled between two of the larger mountains on my side of the island. The boys and I go swimming in this lake in the summer, watching ducks steal food from other bathers and chasing little fish through the water grasses. But in wintertime, those little fishies are walled off from the world like an unfortunate Edgar Allen Poe character by winter’s masonry.
Instead of halting human activity on the lake until the spring, however, the ice actually convinces people to drive their pickup trucks — laden with wooden shacks and dragging trailers of snowmobiles behind — to the shores for ice fishing. Ice fishing! The bucolic monotony of fishing combined with potential frostbite and carbon monoxide poisoning! Truly the sport of kings. And, adding to the danger, many of these outdoorsmen will not simply drive to the edge of the water with their cargo, but will: drive onto the water, park in the middle of the lake/pond/puddle, set up their shacks, and live there until the ice begins to make the kind of sound you’re used to hearing from your old Led Zeppelin LP’s on a turntable.
I’m not the type of person who aspires to camp upon 12 inches of a substance that I could drink if I took it a few hundred miles south. I am, however, the type of person that enjoys the occasional brush with disaster — like picking fights with bigger people, or voting for a Democrat (I was young and foolish once). So last Thursday, I drove down the access road at Ikes Point, stopped at the boundary between earth and, well, solid something-else, then crept slowly onto the ice.
And I drove to the middle of the lake, the exact spot that I swim to in August. I stopped the car, closed my eyes, and dreamed about summer amidst a wind chill of thirty below. Parked right over some of the same little fish that my boys will chase in a few months, trusting my limited knowledge of the weak force of physics that bound the molecules under my vehicle, I thought of nothing besides the very warmth that would unmake the platform that made this activity possible.
I drove onto the ice to destroy it. I can’t wait.
There’s a poll over in the upper left column for you — You! Many of whom I’ve never met! What trust! — to vote for your favorite name for my sprawling Maine estate. Write-in votes will be accepted in the comments section.
Animals and crime! Animals and crime! A combination on this island that’s as natural as cousin and cousin.
Today’s Police Beat entry was reported from my hometown. No one should have to live in such close proximity to such dastardly evil.
SOUTHWEST HARBOR — A concerned citizen reported an injured duck on Feb. 13. Police notified the Acadia Wildlife Foundation, who agreed to pick up the bird and tend to it.
On the plus side, NBC has contacted me to develop a new television series in their wildly overextended franchise family: Law & Order: MDI. The pilot episode will involve a wig that has been removed from a lobster trap, and the injured duck who sold it to a group of wandering cattle. I don’t want to jinx it, but I think I’ve convinced Angela Lansbury to get on board.
I missed last week’s promised Police Beat. I won’t forget tomorrow’s edition.
As a weakly offered attempt at apology, please enjoy these four Maine-related entries from The Smoking Gun:
Do Your Daughter’s Panties Make Me Look Fat?
A Stamp Is Cheaper Than A Ticket
Which Year Is The “Milk Bone Anniversary?”
Martha Stewart’s Livid
I took the two ambulatory boys skating over the long weekend. I skated along with the younger boy while his older brother took his new hockey stick into battle in a little pickup game at the far end of the ice. After a few minutes of watching Zach’s adorable shuffling method of skating, I struck up a conversation with a guy skating alongside his four-year-old son. When I told him we’d just had the fourth child, he asked me, “So how’s it feel switching from man-to-man to zone coverage?”
It was a funny line, but it was also a perfect analogy for child-raising: you’re always playing defense. You need to guard against accidents, mean dogs, pedophiles, and Democrats, of course. But the kids are always on the attack too: sneaking ice cream, “remodeling” the house, placing roller skates and other high-comedy-potential toys on the stairs. So a parent must channel Bill Belichick to create a constantly-changing, anticipatory defense against the threats to your children and the threats your children pose to you.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter what defense you play, because Kobe’s coming to town every night.
(P.S. Yes, I mixed my football and basketball metaphors in one post. If you plan on being a regular reader of this site, I’d advise you to get used to such grammatical heresy.)
More complaining about the cold weather today. Yes, it’s repetitive and boring, like a televised bowling match. But I stand by the writing advice of “write what you know,” and boy do I know cold weather. We’ve lived together so long that we might be considered married by common law.
Anyway, today’s severe weather alert from the National Weather Service warned of dangerous wind chills for yet another night. But this bulletin threw a curveball:
THOSE PLANNING TO VENTURE OUTDOORS SHOULD DRESS IN LAYERS…
Venture? Venture? We’re talking about going outside, not trekking through the jungles of Zaire. When did going outside become a life-or-death decision?
