Weather report | The upcoming winter could be balmy or bone-chilling. Who to believe?
I walked down to the mailbox the other day and there was my “Farmers’ Almanac” for 2009. Normally I’d put it aside for a week or two until I was ready to read what I knew would be dire weather predictions for the coming winter. But I couldn’t put it aside until I was ready because right there on the cover as bold as brass the almanac announced there would be “numbing” cold winter in store. That’s right — not just cold, numbing cold!
It wouldn’t upset me as much to read stuff like that if the “Farmers’ Almanac” wasn’t right so often. So, I put the almanac on the shelf, started reading the paper and came across an article under the headline, “Heat’s on to limit global warming.” The article said an international panel of scientists had concluded that the evidence is clear: Global warming has already begun.
Here I was getting ready to bank up our fieldstone foundation, seal all our doors and windows, and order new snow tires and antifreeze for the cars and now international scientists say instead we’re warming. Which is it?
After last winter, I have to admit I didn’t get too upset to read that a panel of scientists — international or otherwise — says it’s getting a tad warmer outside. I remembered that my grandfather — in his time — had been way ahead of these international scientists. Back in the 1950s my wise grandfather tipped me off to this global warming business, and as far as I know he never met an international scientist in his life.
As a kid, whenever it snowed and they called off school I’d walk down our unplowed road to visit my grandfather. On such visits I’d ask him to tell me a story about the snowstorms they had when he was a kid back in the 1890s. That was all the encouragement he needed.
“When I was a boy,” he’d begin, looking out the window at the swirling snow, “we had real snowstorms, not these flurries they call snowstorms these days.”
Once grandfather got started I’d sit there wide-eyed as he told me about the fierce blizzards of his childhood that raged for days, weeks or even longer. Grandfather couldn’t remember for sure how long the blizzards lasted. He just knew that once they got going they went on a long time.
“After a day or two of howling snow, we’d notice the small sheds were the first to disappear, and then the bigger outbuildings. As the snow continued to fall, whole houses would disappear, and people would have to tunnel from their attic windows to get outside. When the storm finally ended it was so still you could hear for miles and eventually you’d see people walking around sticking long poles in the snow, looking for their buried chimneys.”
Grandfather also said it was much colder back in those days. “Cold?” he’d say. “I guess it was cold. One year the lake up to camp froze right to the bottom — fish and all.
“One winter the mercury in the thermometer outside the kitchen window dropped so low we had to go down cellar to read it,” he’d say.
“In the bitter cold winter of 1896 — the coldest ever recorded on the North American continent — the harbor froze before January. By early February the Gulf of Maine froze clear out to Monhegan,” he’d add. “Packets from Boston couldn’t come any closer to Maine than that ledge-of-an-island way out to sea. I guess it was cold that year.”
Now, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — one of those international scientists — says here in New England global warming could have severe repercussions.
If global warming gets serious here in Maine, we’ll have to deal with it the way we’ve always dealt with difficult problems — blame the “summer complaints!” Just kidding. Mainers tend to look on the bright side of life, or the tad less dark side, anyway.
This MIT scientist says global warming will lead to declines in the fall foliage season. That’s bad news. The good news is there’ll be fewer “leafers” coming up here in their BMWs clogging the roads just to gawk at our trees.
Global warming, the MIT scientist says, will mean a reduction in forested land, which is bad. But the good news is there’ll be fewer people from Massachusetts coming up here in December to snitch a Christmas tree.
And as far as the prediction about the erosion of the coastline due to a rising sea level, that would be unfortunate.
However, if I live long enough, my place in Oxford Hills might become prime, deep-water ocean frontage. I’ll have to check and see when the next boat show is.
John McDonald, an author, humorist and storyteller who performs throughout New England, can be reached at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.
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