Most of us can recite Maine’s four seasons by heart: almost winter, winter, still winter and mud season. Our seasonal travails may not make us the most joyful people on the planet, but they do teach us patience and a Buddhist like understanding of the essential nature of the human condition.
This winter came early and often, and left its most recent calling card a week or so ago after one particularly foolish optimist had stowed away his snow shovel and winter boots.
He might be forgiven his lapse in judgment: it was the momentary hint of warmth from a sun now 15 degrees higher in the sky that made him lose his bearings, but hadn’t he detected a tendril of spring? But now the slow melting of foot-high piles of snow over solidly frozen ground has combined to remind him of his precise latitude.
Perhaps the most compelling testament to the power of mud season to defeat the most cherished goals in life comes from the story of a pair of adolescent Maine brothers.
Years ago, the older brother got a tent for his sixth birthday and promptly set it up in his backyard and camped there with his 4-year-old younger brother to mark the celebration. It was a big adventure, which they repeated the next night and the next and so on through the summer and fall until winter arrived.
Their worried parents consulted the family doctor to see if their sons’ youthful enthusiasm should be curbed. But the family doctor assured the parents that winter’s cold would be healthier for them, assuming they had warm sleeping bags, based on the simple medical fact that cold and flu viruses cannot survive outdoors in freezing temperatures.
After the brothers’ first successful winter in the tent, the question that hovered in their inquisitive little minds was what the record for the most continuous nights in a tent might be? It turns out that the Guinness Book of World Records had no such a category, but their mother vaguely recalled a newspaper story from her own childhood of a girl who had slept outdoors on her parents porch for 12 years. “Twelve years,” they said almost in the same breath, “Oh, we could do that.”
And so their future was charted. They became equipment testers for L.L.Bean (their first tent had deteriorated in the ultraviolet light after the first season), and then when the novelty of their story wore off with Bean’s, Patagonia sent their tents to the two brothers for testing.
Their father recalls the question that was most frequently asked of the boys in the early years, especially during the winter: “Don’t you get cold?” one incredulous adult after another would ask them. Their father also recalls the succinct answer from the younger brother when first asked this obvious question. “Yes,” he replied.
Year followed year. They wrote their reports and sent them dutifully to their corporate sponsors and dreamed of one day entering the Guinness Hall of Fame. In point of fact, winters were quite cozy in their various tents. They had eventually erected a tent platform and had dragged an old mattress out to their own little fort and their mother had provided a down comforter, so they were quite snug, especially after it snowed and insulated their tent from the wind.
April is the cruelest month, some gloomy poet has remarked. And it always was. One spring evening, their father had to coax a frightened mustelid with a large white stripe down its back out of their tent without triggering its scent glands. Raccoon kits also inspected the encampment regularly. But these were welcome visitors. As each winter, however, gave way to recalcitrant spring, the brothers would slog their way back across the back yard in untied boots to the aptly named mudroom door in order to have breakfast and get dressed for school.
Here we might digress for a brief discussion of Maine’s Quaternary history. After the mile-high sheet of glacial ice that had covered all of Maine for millennia began to melt, the massive volume of water that had been tied up in the ice poured into rivers and streams to create floods of Noah-like proportions. The effect of these floods over a landscape that had been depressed — not psychologically but geologically — contributed to 400 feet of sea level rise that proceeded all the way up Maine’s river valleys to places like Millinocket and left behind a fine deep glaze of marine clay.
These omnipresent clays create the perfect conditions for the annual event we celebrate as”¦ mud season!
It is impossible to know whether their father’s lesson in geologic history made an impact on the two boys. What did make an impression on them, however, was mud season. Each spring, year in and year out, they were greeted as warmly as the family dog, as they tracked into the house every spring morning more wet and cold than during the winters they had recently conquered.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that on one cold, gray morning, after seven years into their quest, when the slowly melting snow had again puddled over a poorly drained clay surface in the back yard that the brothers, now 13 and 11, arrived at the mudroom with a short announcement.
“That was our last night,” the older brother said solemnly. And his younger brother nodded affirmatively. And that was that.
The dream of the Guinness Book of World Records defeated by Maine’s mud season.