THE PINE TREE STATE

"Storm Warning" by Paul E. Marquart

Today's rain and cold temps evoke memories of the winter I spent in Limestone, Maine, many, many years ago. Although I endured below 15-degree weather numerous days during that sojourn, the memory of living in the bitter cold of an old farmhouse clinging to a low hill in Aroostook County makes me shiver. I feel compelled to write that the rugged scenery of that State held some appeal in an aesthetic sense and acknowledge that Maine's license plates advertise it as "Vacationland." Still, I've never regarded it as a place of enchantment.

My former husband and I were part of Army personnel attached to Loring Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command Base in the town of Limestone, Maine. At that time, the U.S. military suspected that Russian air attacks would be made on America's far northern shores.

Limestone, situated in Aroostook County, boasted mainly bumper potato crops, which began burgeoning in the 1920s. We lived inland and never enjoyed touring the coast country rife with lofty lighthouses (like my brother Paul's painting above) that mariners built along Maine's shores. In Maine's maritime history, these lighthouses, such as Saddleback Lodge Light Station, have been preserved and are a picturesque part of the sea life surrounding the Pine Tree State.

During the era of sailing ships, the direction of the wind impacted mariners' safety. Lighthouses abounded along the rugged Maine coast, each tower operated by a keeper who made certain the light was always burning. Electric lights caused the lighthouse keeper's job to become obsolete; however, sixty lighthouses still stand on Maine's shores.

When we lived in Maine, we were far from the sound of the Atlantic Ocean and near islands, some of them just mossy rocks rising above the waves. However, I always wanted to visit Acadia National Park, and Bar Harbor on the island's eastern tip was a "wannasee" destination. We were confined inland to wooded areas where deer, raccoons, skunks, possums, and ubiquitous squirrels roamed freely.

A major nesting ground for birds, Maine harbors warblers, thrush, wrens, and other birds familiar to Louisianians, but I'd never heard the weird cry of loons that often carried across lakes and ponds that we approached. We welcomed the sight of ducks and herons, our Louisiana water birds. Still, I never got to see the famous puffin shorebird that gathered beyond the mouth of Penobscot Bay on an island bereft of humans and reputed to be noisy with raucous bird cries.

Army duties prevented weekend tours, even as close as jaunts to Portland because my husband seemed to stay on 24-hour alerts, but I had a list — maybe it's now a bucket list — one that Covid keeps me from completing… but when I get my travel plans certified again, I hope to follow Route 1 from Kittery in the south to Madawaska in northern Maine, to buy a sack of those Aroostook County potatoes and Texas pinto beans, both of which kept us alive and well while living in "vacationland" (?) many winters ago. P.S. I gained ten pounds on that fare.

"Storm Warning," a painting by Paul E. Marquart; photographed by Laurel Marquart

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.

 

 

Maine-ly Cold…

Painting by my brother Paul Marquart

So you think that the temp at 32 degrees (and lower with wind chill) in Louisiana is icy? Think of Limestone, Maine at 22 degrees below zero this morning! I say Limestone, Maine, because years ago I experienced 52 degrees below zero (wind chill factored in) one winter night in this northernmost land of winter gales on the northeastern tip of the U.S. near the border of New Brunswick, Canada. I spent one year among potato, dairy, and beef farmers on the Aroostook Plateau because the U.S. Army had sent my husband to Maine. He worked in a radar shack perched at the border of the U.S. and Canada, on “Alert,” searching for any enemy planes that might fly overhead. In the upper story of a farmhouse equipped with an ancient oil stove and a red electric blanket, we survived a bitterly long winter, peering out of the upstairs window at nearly 100 inches of snow that season.

Maine is a place where the sun rises first in the U.S., so we saw sunlight before anyone in my native Louisiana, and I was told that the air was one of the healthiest in the U.S. However, if a person has no indoor interests like reading, listening to music, or writing (and no one owned a television set in my neighborhood), she’s likely to develop a raging case of cabin fever. Think of a place once covered with thick glaciers that smoothed and rounded the hills and mountains, filled rivers, and moved rocks around, and you may be able to envision where I spent that winter. Much of the surrounding land near Limestone included white pine, fir, maple, oak, and spruce trees in dense forests that added to our feelings of isolation. 

But potatoes made Aroostook County, Maine famous. Potatoes formed the mainstay at mealtime for struggling non-commissioned officers in the U.S. Army, and pinto beans came in a close second for a regular table staple. This menu proved so fattening that when we returned to Louisiana, our families marveled at our girths. “How did you gain so much weight living on next to nothing?” they asked. On this poor person’s diet, we managed to become rosy-cheeked and round, despite suffering from the extreme cold. On payday, we sought platters of fried oysters and mugs of beer down the road in Houlton, Maine, but this was a once-a-month occurrence.

Maine’s cold winters have fostered a pantheon of writers; e.g., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen King, disparate types of literary giants; however, both were born in Portland, Maine, and are examples of those who survived merciless winters by writing and reading. As did Sarah Orne Jewett who wrote a series of interconnected sketches of New England life and whose Country of the Pointed Firs became a literary classic. I also think of the essayist E. B. White, but he had enough sense to schedule his visits during summer months.

At one time in the Maine backwoods, moonshine was a thriving industry, and smugglers hid boatloads of illegal whiskey in coves along the Maine coast — a gracious plenty of bathtub gin and rum running provided farmers with extra income. By the time we arrived, prohibition had long ended, but today I wonder whether the dense forests hide illegal activities like meth labs.

Caribou, Maine lay right down the road from us and still has an extensive collection of artifacts from the Red Paint people, but we didn’t frequent places of culture during our stay in Aroostook County, although I should have done more research since French-Canadians in my background formed a large part of the population in my area of Louisiana. The Acadian Historic Village outside Van Buren, Maine contains sixteen fully restored or reconstructed buildings showing how Acadians lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

We left Aroostook County near the time of the great Northern Maine Fair and the Crown of Maine Balloon Festival, two occasions during warm weather that brought people out of hibernation. We had endured perhaps the worst winter of my life, and I’ve never returned to that region — perhaps I’ll venture to the Acadia National Park or Monhegan Island one day, but a re-run to Limestone, Maine isn’t on my bucket list.

By May, defrosting had begun in northern Maine, and freezing temps (32 degrees) like those we have been complaining about in New Iberia as “unbearably cold” actually allowed us to go outdoors in shirtsleeves. By June, we had been home in Louisiana one month, just in time to escape the scourge of Maine’s north woods black flies that descend in June and hover in gray clouds of thousands that leave no patch of human skin unbloodied (shades of Louisiana mosquitoes). 

In 1998, a storm President Clinton dubbed as a national disaster covered some areas of Maine with three inches of ice. Are you readers feeling warmer yet?

Painting by Diane’s brother Paul

WINTER II.

So the ice and snow have melted, and temperatures have climbed to Louisiana “normal” in the 50’s and 60’s — even Limestone, Maine, which I wrote about in the first “Winter” blog a few weeks ago, will experience temps above freezing for an entire day before dropping to 3 degrees tonight. I wrote about the most severe winter of my life when I lived in Limestone, Maine during the 1950’s, and last week I experienced a deja vu when temps here dipped to 17 degrees. We in Teche country anticipate spring in March; however, Mainers won’t see fair weather until May or June.

Today, rain is on the horizon. With the poet Shelley, we sigh and say, “O wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” The inclement weather changes have caused an acceleration in cases of humans experiencing that phenomenon called “winter sadness,” and with respect to Maine lore, I’m wondering whatever happened to the machines Wilhelm Reich, a Maine crackpot? genius? invented to control the weather. When I was doing research for my novel, The Maine Event, (which I mentioned in Winter I.) I came upon an entry about this eccentric psychologist who studied for a while under Sigmund Freud. Reich migrated to Rangeley, Maine in 1948 and began carrying out experiments to prove his theory that “orgone” controlled the energy in the universe. He constructed these machines for harnessing the power of orgone, including a destructive cloudburst machine that he claimed could cause storms. He started selling his machines throughout the U.S., but the Interstate Commerce arrested and convicted him of fraud, and he died in a federal penitentiary.

I didn’t get to visit Orgonon, the estate where Reich is buried, but it’s a tourist spot in Rangeley, Maine, and a museum there features Reich’s machines that supposedly created and controlled the weather. As I said earlier, he was either a crackpot or a genius, and he had access to fertile winter landscapes in the State as far north as Madawaska, not far from Limestone where I sojourned for nine months. 

Although there’s no permanent connection between Maine weather and Louisiana weather, I’ve mentioned in previous blogs the connection between Acadians who settled in the St. John Valley of Maine -- near where I lived the harshest winter of my life -- and Acadians here in southwest Louisiana. The Valley still has the highest concentration of French people in the U.S. and also has the highest percentage of French spoken in their homes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these small homes once held extended families, sometimes as many as 30 people under one roof! 

Interestingly, those early Acadians in the St. John Valley settlements seldom saw a priest but they devotedly practiced the Catholic religion. A White Mass was often said by an elder,(sorta’ like a deacon) with the exception of the Eucharist. When priests began to enter the Valley to convert Indians, the Acadians benefited from their mission. In 1792, Catholics who were members of the Acadian colony actually traveled 100 miles to receive Communion from a priest on Easter Sunday. The churches they built were barn-like and were scattered throughout northern Maine. During my sojourn in Limestone, I remember that, rather than attend services at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Presque Isle, I attended Mass on Easter Sunday in a huge, drafty Roman Catholic church near Limestone. 

For those readers who wish to read more about the history and culture of the north woods of Maine, a book in America the Beautiful Series entitled Maine is an excellent reference and good winter reading. 

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.

A COLD SNAP

When the newscaster complains of below freezing temps and ice in the deepest South, I remember a winter in New England and a night when temps dipped to 52 degrees below zero. Isolated in the northernmost tip of Maine near the Canadian border, I dreamed of sunflowers, Confederate Jasmine, summer afternoons on a screened porch napping under the cover of humidity while the north wind howled under the eaves of a farmhouse that never captured warmth. It was the season of plowed roads, snow piled as high as telephone poles, early nightfall, ghostly hours, and lit windows shining on an un-cleared table. The hush of trees without birdsong was almost unbearable.

At 8 a.m., cigarette smoke curled above a drip pot of coffee at a Formica table in the kitchen of my neighbor on the first floor of the farmhouse. The woman, a redhead from Arkansas with a liking for Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and Canasta, demanded we drop cards all morning. A few miles away, my husband, an intelligence specialist, kept watch for enemy planes in a radar shack on the Canadian border and played volleyball in the snow most of the day.

The earth was burdened with snow, so fresh corpses were stacked in the mausoleum to wait for spring thaw. The St. John River froze solid, and our eyelashes iced over when we stepped outdoors. We haunted the post office but hardly anyone wrote, and every morning I listened to my own heartbeat after his boots left the warm kitchen. The oven, having baked a pan of biscuits, stayed on all day. Boredom was a bedtime story for sleepless eyes under a red electric blanket.

The clock on the wall ticked slowly—slower each day until spring finally arrived. Mourners cleared the mausoleum and began to dig graves in the thawed earth. We opened the windows to let in the fresh air of living things. We had survived the winter. In May, we traveled to Massachusetts to muster out of the Army. But before we closed the door to the upstairs apartment, I left a question lying on the bare kitchen table: Why would anyone choose to live here?

After I recorded the above memory this morning, I began preparing for a short trip to The Mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee. The weatherman forecasts temps as low as nine degrees in the area, and I won't be surprised if we see snow on the hemlock in the backyard while we're there.

Such are the contradictions of human beings, for I vowed never to live in a clime where temps dipped below freezing again. At least I haven't ventured into New England to set up house, but friends living here in the mild climate of Acadiana would probably echo my remark about the Maine experience: So, why would anyone choose to live there on The Mountain?

As Mark Twain said, "Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it!"

P.S. The above saying is also attributed to Charles Dudley Warner who phrased it a bit differently: "The weather in New England is a matter about which a great deal is said and very little done."

Note: Cover painting of The Maine Event by my brother Paul who died a few weeks ago. Photo of hemlock by Victoria I. Sullivan.