MAINLY COLD

 

Over a half-century ago, I lived in a place unsuited to my Louisiana warm blood. Although the temps here are closer to 48 degrees above zero, I was reminded of the 48 below zero temps I endured in Maine one winter. The place: a small town called Limestone; the reason I’d been displaced there: the US Army. No, I wasn’t a GI at the time, but my former spouse had been assigned as an Army radar specialist attached to a SAC base in Limestone. The big joke was that we had endured the heat of El Paso, Texas because of some perverse military reason and were then sent to Limestone, Maine, where winters were harshest in the northeastern US. 

 

Maine was a place where native Abenaki tribes called themselves “People of the Sunrise.” The irony is that the sun was seldom seen, especially that winter in 1954. However, like the Abenaki, we reached out for the rising sun daily.

The average Maine temps in January that year I resided in Limestone dipped to about 15 degrees Farenheit and summer came late. L. L. Bean of present-day fame hadn’t become a popular outdoor outlet, so I didn’t have access to bulky sweaters or sturdy shoes, and my first walk in downtown Limestone in southern loafers resulted in a fall on ice. However, the air seemed clean, and the town boasted of the Robert Frost Memorial library.

 

Due to Scots-Irish immigrants' efforts, the potato had become a leading crop in Maine, and Aroostook County (Limestone) remains the primary producer of this crop. Potatoes were the major daily fare on our table. When we mustered out of the Army after trying to live on non-commissioned officer’s pay, we’d gained weight. The leading causes of our change to "rotundity": potatoes and Texas pinto beans!

This present state of isolation due to Covid reminds me of that winter isolation in Limestone when I spent hours reading and listening to Tchaikovsky (his 5th symphony, for some melancholy reason), and trying to escape a neighbor who wanted to play Canasta from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. while chain-smoking Herbert Tareyton cigarettes.

We were discharged in May, so I never saw the Annual Crown of Maine Balloon Festival that occurs in Caribou, a few miles away from Limestone. Nor did I get to visit the Acadian Historic Village near Van Buren although most people who live in and around Van Buren are of French Canadian descent, and I would’ve been at home among these Acadians.

While visiting the Frost Memorial Library, I discovered the writings of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) who spent most of her life in South Berwick, Maine and whose writing featured the speech and character of ordinary Mainers. I’ve read and re-read The Country of the Pointed Firs, perhaps because a teacher of English Literature once told me my writing style reminded her of Jewett’s writing. I’d have preferred a comparison to Maine born Edna St. Vincent Millay who became famous for “Renascence,” but Jewett’s A Country Doctor is a notable classic, and I still appreciate the comparison.

Snow fell constantly that winter and reached the height of telephone poles, but French fries and pinto beans…and, oh, occasionally a bowl of blueberries…sustained us. And bravo the earmuff, invented by Chester Greenwood, a fifteen year old boy who saved us from frostbite.

 

Image on cover by Paul E. Marquart, my brother.

 

 

WINTER

Friends think I’m stretching the truth when I say that I lived in a place where the temps dipped to 52 degrees below zero in January 1954. This morning, people in that place — Limestone, Maine — are experiencing only thirteen below zero, but their winter won’t be over until May. I know because in May of the year I experienced the 52 below zero temp, I went outdoors wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Sub-zero weather lasted long enough for me to memorize most of the quatrains of the Rubaiyat and listen to recordings of Tchaikovsky’s music so much that I could hear the music reverberating in my mind even when the little 45 rpm record player wasn’t turned on. What became apparent to me is the same thing that became apparent to me while living in the desert province of Khuzestan in Iran — people who live in extreme climates had better develop a gracious plenty of indoor pursuits. 

Right now, temps in Louisiana have been in the 20’s, and winds from the north bluster over the swamps at 17 and 18 mph. We laugh when someone kids us about returning to the South from The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee to get warm. Temps at Sewanee hover around 7 and 8 degrees, and I receive e-mails from friends on The Mountain complaining about the hard winter. When I read them, I cite my famous statement about living in Maine during the winter that temps dropped to 52 below zero. It’s almost as good a line as the one that an old-timer tells school children about trudging a mile or so to school in the snow back when…

Many authors based, and still base, their writing habitats in wintry Maine: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edna St.Vincent Millay, E. B. White, Stephen King…Sarah Orne Jewett remains among my favorite Maine writers. I didn’t visit her home place in South Berwick, Maine because I was rather isolated in northern Maine, but I discovered The Country of the Pointed Firs, a series of sketches written about New England life, in a Limestone library while I lived in Aroostook County, Maine. In this volume, Jewett talks about the “unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities, all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the center of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told…”

Jewett lends a kind of romanticism to the stark winter I spent in Limestone; however, truth told, an old oil stove and an electric blanket were my only defenses against the wind that whistled under the eaves of a two-story farmhouse in which we lived. No heat in the bathroom; no heat in the bedroom; no garage to keep the block from breaking in an ailing Mercury station wagon; meatless meals and much beans-and-potatoes fare; no washer/dryer and lots of washing clothes in the bathtub of cold water. I have a long list of discomforts, but oddly enough, over forty years later, I began to write a novel entitled The Maine Event and last year, I had the novel recorded by a professional reader and put on Audible. As I listen to it, I find that the descriptions of the area and the primal forces of nature loom larger than the story, but, no matter, I enjoyed relating the memories of that winter of the 50’s.

I lived near descendants of Acadians who settled in the St. John River Valley after being exiled from their homeland by the British. Their homeland Acadia had been renamed Nova Scotia by the British in 1710 which ended one hundred years of war between the British and French in North America. New France consisted of the colonies of Acadia, Louisiana, and Canada (Quebec). The St. John River had been a prime communication route between Port Royale, Acadia, a port from which some of my ancestors departed! I had no knowledge of this family association when I lived in Maine or perhaps I’d have been more interested in the history of Aroostook County. In my readings today about this history in Land of Promise edited by Anna Fields McGrath, I discovered an arresting sentence: “The Acadians remained dominant due to their very large families, economic control, and stubborn adherence to oral traditions and melancholic memories…” And why was I not surprised at that description of the Acadians?!

Meanwhile, the temps have risen to 31 degrees in New Iberia, Louisiana and dropped to 9 degrees below zero in Limestone, Maine, and I am happy to be reminiscing rather than living in the harsh “Land of Promise” first inhabited by humans 11,000 years ago.