Snowshoeing Back In Time

It’s been a long, rough winter in northern Maine, and it’s not over yet.  The other day, for the first time this season, I got to do one of my favorite winter recreational activities: snowshoeing.  Up until mid-January, there had not been enough decent snow to do it, and since then, there has been one howling snowstorm followed by another, with extremely frigid temperatures and wind chills sandwiched in between them.  There have been a few snowshoe-worthy days here and there, but without fail they have come on days when I have been working.  When the thermometer read a tropical 25 degrees (‘nice’ is relative) on my most recent day off, I tossed my snowshoes into the back of my car and headed out into the country to my grandparents’ old place.

Much has changed on that property from the days when I spent at least a part of every school vacation there as a child.  The forest has encroached on much of the land, most of the outbuildings are now gone, and many familiar landmarks on the property like clotheslines and flower gardens have disappeared over time.  The house itself is still inhabited by my cousin, though his housekeeping and landscaping habits are worlds apart from those of my late grandparents.  As I trod around the property on my snowshoes, enjoying the exercise and lamenting the effects of the inevitable passage of time, I began to sharpen my focus a bit, and found that there were still some reminders of the days gone by.

For instance, I noticed that a pair of very old and heavy swinging gates were still standing near the rail bed that runs adjacent to the property.  The railroad tracks led past my grandparents’ place to the local airport, which was an air base and prisoner of war camp during World War II.  The gates had to be manually opened and closed whenever a train passed into or out of the base.  I tend to doubt that the gates would have kept an actual train from entering the base, but they probably provided some security that no one would be able to easily drive some other type of vehicle on the tracks into the base without authorization.  The rest of the base was ringed with barbed wire fencing, about four feet high, which is not much more than would be used to keep livestock corralled these days.  Some of the barbed wire can still be found in the woods there.  Securing a military base on home soil meant something very different in the early 1940s compared to today.

By the time my siblings, cousins and I came along in the 60s and 70s, the air base was long defunct and was now functioning as a somewhat sleepy regional airport.  The swinging gates near my grandparents’ place no longer served any purpose, but they still stood, leaning a bit with age even then.  They still swung however, and that was what mattered to us kids.  With great effort against the weight and rust, we would push the gates up to their nearly closed position, and then jump onto them.  The gates leaned enough that they would swing back to the open position on their own, providing a pretty cool ride with a very abrupt stop at the end.  The challenge of holding on when the gates crashed open against the brush that they normally leaned against was the best part of it all.

The gates were certainly not moving that day I was investigating them on my snowshoes, buried as they were in deep snow.  I would be surprised if they would move at all now under any circumstances, age having taken more of a toll on them.  That doesn’t mean I won’t at least give it a try once spring comes.

One of the gates in question. There was no swinging on it this day.

Just beyond those gates, a little ways along the rail bed, there is a small tree-covered hillock that seems out of place if you stop and think about it.  I recognized it immediately.  Underneath all that snow, and probably under quite a bit of brush, I knew there was a thin piece of steel sticking up from the ground.  My grandmother and I used to walk by there quite frequently when I was young, and she said that it was the site of a fatal plane crash years before I was born, occurring not long after the air base made the switch to a regional airport.  The pilot was killed in the crash, she said, and the remains of the small plane were left there  in the woods along the train tracks for some time afterwards.  She told me that it wasn’t unusual for people to walk in to see the remains of the plane and take pieces away as souvenirs.  My grandmother said she once saw a man carrying out a large piece of what looked like the plane’s tail.  In time, railway officials buried the remains of the plane in hopes of discouraging visitors.  

By the time I first saw the site in the mid 1970s, the railroad tracks were seldom used, and the trees still growing over the plane’s burial mound today were already taller than a grown man.  As a kid, it was quite sobering, thinking that a man had lost his life on that spot, and it still was on that snowy day of my recent visit, so many years later.

At the end of my snowshoeing trek, another memory of the days of my grandparents came upon me, also somewhat unexpectedly.  It had been my first snowshoeing adventure of the year, and that meant breaking new trails in deep snow while not being especially physically conditioned to the activity.  Quite simply, I was wiped out when I got back to my car.  Before I packed everything away to head home, I flopped down on my back in a nearby snowbank to rest and just listen, and was reminded of the sounds of being so far out in the country in mid-winter.  I used to do much the same thing when I was staying with my grandparents during the winter time and had spent a long afternoon outside playing in the snow, which I often did.

Mind you, there are not many of sounds out there in mid-winter.  The silence is almost total.  If you’ve been playing hard, as I was that recent day, the only thing you can hear for a while is the sound of your own heart beating.  There are no busy roads nearby, and all the birds have gone south for the winter or are laying low, except for some hardy chickadees.  I could hear several of them twittering in the trees nearby, calling to each other in their language.  There has always been a large population of chickadees around that property.  To my amazement, my grandmother used to be able to hand feed some of them, who were possibly ancestors of the little birds I was listening to now.  A breeze came up and blew through the evergreens with a distinctive hiss.  There are no leaves on the deciduous trees at all, and the snow has buried anything on the ground that might rustle.   The shushing sound of the wind in the pines and spruces remains the defining sound of wintertime for me.  

Before I got up out of the snow, a jetliner passed far overhead with a distant rumble. I remember hearing planes high overhead after a long day of playing hard, and wondering where they were going and who was on them.  I liked to follow them with my eyes if I could spot them until they were out of sight.  A Cold War-era air force bomber and refueling base was located about an hour north of there when I was a kid, so the sound of B-52s and KC-135s flying high overhead was very common then.  I watched the jetliner from the other day leaving contrails in its wake until it was gone behind the trees, just as I might have nearly 40 years ago in that very spot.  

As I was putting my snowshoeing gear into my car, it occurred to me that none of the things I had been pondering had any monetary value or even meaning of any kind to anyone, except maybe to some of my siblings and cousins.  A rusty old gate, a small tree covered hill buried in snow, and the sound of jets high overhead would likely go totally unnoticed by most people who had walked the same path I had just taken.  Yet they opened up a floodgate of memories for me that day.  I want to try to remind myself that it is never a waste of time to stop and take the time to just look around and listen.  You never know the significance that seemingly insignificant things might take on in the future.

The Annual Winter Whine Post

The winter season trudges on unabated here in Maine, despite the fact that the calendar flipped over to March not long ago.  Our friendly local meteorologist tells me that today’s high temperature is going to be 12 degrees.  12 degrees fahrenheit, not celsius.  That’s cold for this time of year, even by Maine standards.  There’s at least a little comfort in knowing that a good chunk of the North American continent is experiencing a harsh winter as well. There are few things left that we all go through together in today’s culture, but the weather is one of them.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve either uttered or heard “I’m sick of the cold” and “I’m sick of the snow” lately, I could probably settle the national debt.  While freezing temperatures and snow are the most common subjects of complaint, I’d like to offer a list of ten less-often-heard but equally valid concerns about winter, as my annual “winter whine” blog post.  (See here and here for past examples of winter whines.)

10. I’m sick of those buildups of slush in the wheel wells of my vehicle.  If they freeze solid, they can seriously damage your tire by rubbing against them, not to mention cause you to break a toe if you give it a good kick to remove it.

9. I’m sick of taking the garbage out in the cold.  Taking out the trash is an odious task under the best of conditions.  Having to do it when the snot in your nose is freezing every time you inhale just adds insult to injury.

8. I’m sick of getting more heating fuel.  Lugging in another ton of wood pellets or another cord of wood in mid to late winter because you are running low is no picnic.  Writing a large check for another tank of heating oil you didn’t budget for isn’t either. 

7. I’m sick of changing from shoes to boots to shoes.  While boots are great at helping one’s feet stay warm and dry, they tend to go on hard and come off even harder.  I’ve fallen on my keister several times this winter already doing the footwear changing dance when coming in or going out the door.  With small puddles from the snow melting off your boots, you don’t want your socks to touch the floor, after all.

6. I’m sick of being snow-blind. Yes, I am actually complaining about the sunshine here.  Don’t underestimate my whining skills.  The sun reflecting off the snow almost has the same effect as an allergy on my sensitive eyes: watering, sneezing, squinting, headaches.  Sunglasses help, but spring helps more.  Less white, more green!

5. I’m sick of these crazy cats with their cabin fever.  I am an animal guy, and enjoy watching the birds, squirrels and whatnot gather at the bird feeders outside my window in the winter.  Trouble is, so do the cats, and it makes them absolutely insane.

4. I’m sick of stale air.  Sometimes one of the cats drops a bomb in the litterbox.  Sometimes I cook things that have a lingering smell.  Sometimes I raise dust when I am cleaning around the house.  During the winter, one can’t just open up the windows and air things out.

3. I’m sick of tall snowbanks and narrow streets.  I drive a relatively high-profile SUV, and yet I’ve still had more than a few times this winter where I’ve had to stick my nose so far out into and intersection to see if anyone was coming in either direction that I’ve nearly had it clipped off.  Just a bit of a thaw to shrink those suckers down is all I ask.

2. I’m sick of not being able to make travel plans in advance.  Any out of town appointment or event at this time of year is a crapshoot, contingent upon travel conditions.  A concert you’ve been dying to see for months finally comes to a nearby city, you have tickets and hotel reservations, and then BOOM, an ice storm hits.  Epic bummer.

1. I’m sick of my feet always being cold.  My feet are almost perpetually cold anyway.  I tend to wear wool socks from October until April.  Even then my feet are chilly, only slightly less so than if I didn't wear them.  If there is such a thing as electric socks, I would seriously consider them.  I’d probably need a very long extension cord though.

Even though it seems impossible now, the temperatures will warm up, the snow will melt, and spring will arrive, just like it always has for as long as the seasonal wheel has turned.  

Of course then I’ll need to find some new things to whine about. 

Don't Give Me Any Static

January is a trying time in this part of the world.  The holidays are over and spring seems eons away.  The nights are long, and the weather comes in one of two varieties: clear and cold enough to freeze the snot in your nose, or furious blizzard from hell. Those such as myself who are into snow sports cannot even enjoy them very fully, since the temperatures routinely are lucky to make ten degrees (that’s Fahrenheit, kids) and a howling wind is almost constant.  So, we huddle inside as much as possible, dreaming of spring and watching funny cat videos online.

There is one nasty aspect of winter that follows us inside however, and that is static electricity.  During December, January, and February, which are typically the coldest and driest months, we practically glow with it.

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As I understand it, the lack of moisture in the air at this time of year causes things to retain stray electrons and thus build up electrical charges.  When it is humid, the tiny water droplets in the air tend to draw those electrons off and keep our electrical charges relatively low, but in the winter when it is dry, watch out! Having those excess electrons clinging to us is just not cool with Mother Nature, who is a big fan of balance.  So, if you are more charged up than something nearby, the electrons are going to jump from you to it, and a spark, large, small, or otherwise, is going to result.  (This same principle on a larger scale is what causes lightning.  Why we have lightning in the summer when it is very humid and not in winter when it is very dry is completely beyond me.  Who do I look like, Mr. Wizard?)

Except for the kitchen and the bathroom, every room in my house has carpeting.  As someone with a very, very low tolerance for cold feet, it’s pretty nice actually, and I don’t regret having it installed.  Nonetheless, I still wear wool socks and slippers around the house from November until April.  The problem I have is that carpeting and warm, fuzzy footwear are two of the key ingredients in creating static electricity.

I get zapped constantly from every direction.  I get shocks from touching the TV remote, from picking up my laptop, from petting the cat, from grasping the handle on the refrigerator, from a faucet on the sink, or even from a soda can.  You can never be sure from where the next mini-electrocution is coming.  It reminds me of the old Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers.  In them, Sellers’ character, the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, has directed his manservant Cato Fong to attack him unexpectedly and repeatedly.  Cato is skilled in martial arts, so these are some pretty hard-hitting attacks.  Clouseau’s thinking is that these will keep his combat skills and vigilance sharp, though it usually just ends up getting him beaten senseless at the most awkward moments.  Static electricity is like my own personal Cato Fong.

Static electricity likes to play practical jokes on me too.  I am pretty faithful about using antistatic sheets in the clothes dryer, but don’t always locate all of them when I take out the laundry to fold.  More than once I have been working with a client and patient at the animal hospital, and a dryer sheet that had adhered to the inside of my medical scrubs has fluttered to the floor.

Getting dressed and undressed is the worst when it come to static electricity.  Anything that I need to pull over my head brings down a shower of sparks that you can actually see in the dark.  When I drop the shirt or whatever to the floor, it often is still sparking.  I’ve never heard of house fires starting from such phenomena, but it does give one pause.  Plus, my hair is so dry and light that it stands straight up in every direction in these situations.  The extra money I spend on hair gel alone in the winter could probably fund a winter vacation to someplace less staticky, like Barbados.

And mind you, these are not small tingles I’m experiencing.  They downright hurt sometimes!  I’ve inadvertently shut off my television and closed programs on my computer thanks to static shock.  Animals, being more in tune to nature than the rest of us, seem to know when the risk of shock is greatest, and I can see the cats visibly cringe if I reach for one of them on an especially dry, cold day.  There have been times when they and I  have shocked each other so badly upon contact that the cat in question has run away and hid, thinking I have done some horrible wrong to them.  I can’t blame them, frankly.

I’ve wondered at times if a shock from sitting down on the toilet seat is possible.  It’s never happened to me, and I truly hope it never does, since it could have ramifications that I’d really rather avoid.  Most likely, I don’t need to worry though, since any electrical imbalance would discharge when I reach to lift the lid.  Ladies, if you ever needed to give your man another reason for putting the seat and lid down, there it is.  You’re welcome. 

As irritating as this static electricity problem is for me, I’ve never bothered to do much about it.  I am NOT giving up my cozy warm slippers, so don’t even suggest it!  Taking up all of the carpeting, removing all metals from the house and shaving the cats and myself are also not options I choose to entertain.  I suppose I could buy clothing made out of fabric softener sheets, though it would probably make me sneeze a lot.  On the upside, I would save money on deodorant.

The most practical solution is probably to get myself a humidifier.  I’ve had them in the past, but find that they not only can only do so much in preventing static electricity, but can also invite a new set of problems if not used carefully, namely in the form of mold.  If I had to choose between high voltage shocks at every turn during a few months in the winter or a slick of smelly and possibly toxic black slime forming on various surfaces around the house, I guess I’d prefer the former to the latter.  Air ionizers are said to be good antidotes to static electricity, so maybe I should look into one of those.

As problems go, I could have much greater ones than the constant zapping of static electricity in the house.  In olden times, there was a belief that static electricity was the result of demons.  Maybe I could get the parish priest to stop by and exorcise my fuzzy slippers.  For now, however, I will just have to endure this adversity with a brave face.  Watching funny cat videos on YouTube will surely ease the hardship.

A Bath Towel's Cry for Help

(In order to make any sense of this post, you need to have read my post “Long-Term Laundry” from last month. If you haven’t, click the link to go there first.)

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Editor’s Note: A piece of paper with this message on it blew into my yard yesterday, and I thought I should share it with my readers.

December 29, 2012

If anyone happens to find this note, we desperately need help.  My laundry mates and I were given a nice and much needed wash back in mid-October, and were put out to dry on the clothesline on a warm sunny morning.  It had happened before, and getting out in the fresh air always made us feel good, especially the underwear, who arguably have the toughest job among all of us.  (The towels used to wipe up after the dogs might take issue with that.)  Sometimes we would be out here for a few days, but we always were brought back inside to resume our normal activities.

Not this time, much to our horror.

Days passed, and those days turned to weeks. The temperatures grew colder, the nights longer, and our circumstances increasingly difficult.  We were dry, then wet, and then dry again.  We were warm, then very cold.  We ended up frozen stiff regularly.  Birds and squirrels have perched on us.  The children from inside the house spent an afternoon throwing rocks and sticks at us.  It was that day that the red flannel shirt fell to the ground, an omen of things to come.  Over time, the hunter blaze orange hoodie next to me has faded into more of a beige color, and a nasty crow left some droppings over on the “Triple H” wrestling t-shirt shortly before Thanksgiving. 

The month of December has been the toughest of all.  Some of us have been starting to show tatters from being whipped in the wind.  Snow and freezing rain has fallen on us, weighting us down and causing some of us to drag on the ground.  The socks and underwear were lucky enough to stay out of the mud and snow, but those of use with some length, such as myself, the other bath towel and the jeans with the worn-out knees, became filthy once again.

My fellow laundry refugees and I literally reached a new low just after Christmas.  A howling snowstorm came raging into town, and the winds toppled over one of those portable basketball hoop things right onto our clothesline.  It snapped, and we were plunged into the deepening snow below.  In no time, many of us were buried.  Only a few lucky dishcloths and one gym sock were fortunate enough to have their end of the clothesline stay above the snow, though they continue to be battered by the harsh elements.

“What have we done to deserve this?” we ask ourselves.  We have covered their bodies, kept them warm, wiped up their messes, and in some cases made them look, if not fabulous, at least okay.

Sometimes, late at night, buried under all the snow, I dream of the good old days, when I was on a warm shelf at JC Penney, brand-new and neatly folded, with no knowledge of my future of wiping someone’s soggy bottom after a shower, and then…this.  It all seems so long ago. 

So now, we wait.  We can only hope that someone inside the house will eventually remember us out here, shivering under more than two feet of snow now.   Don’t they know that laundry was not intended to be left hanging on the clothesline for more than a day or two?  What are they wearing without us?  How are they drying themselves off after showers?

If anyone gets this, please, for the love of all that is clean and fluffy, send help!  To say we are getting desperate is an understatement.  The wool socks are starting to look hungrily at the washcloths, and the frilly blouse can’t stop crying.  A family of mice has taken up residence in the pocket of the pink sweatpants with “Baby” printed across the rear end, and the holes in the jockey shorts are getting bigger and bigger.  At this point, we are nearing three months out here.  I don’t think we will make it until spring at this rate.

Please send help, and pray for us.

Sincerely,

The Red Striped Bath Towel

Winter Wonderland Is Just The Worst Song Ever

Knee-deep in the Christmas season as we are, it is almost impossible to avoid holiday music.  It’s on television and radio, over public-address systems in businesses, and frequently being whistled, sung or hummed by people around us.  My own personal rule is no Christmas music until after December 1st, though after that point I will listen to and enjoy some Christmas tunes.  The Vince Guaraldi Trio, the Brian Setzer Orchestra and Bing Crosby are particular favorites of mine in the holiday genre.  Not only do they elevate my holiday mood, but their styles are quite different from the typical fare I listen to during the rest of the year (e.g.-grinding guitar-based rock), so it’s a refreshing, albeit temporary, change.

Yes, I am okay with Christmas music for the most part.  I can even tolerate some of the cheesier tunes like Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Holly Jolly Christmas in manageable doses.  However, there is one holiday song that will send me screaming into the hills as soon as it starts playing.  It’s a song that stands high atop the pile of the most ridiculous songs ever recorded.  A song that makes me yearn for something with a more pleasing sound to it, like a piano being fired from a cannon into a wall of Styrofoam.  That song is Winter Wonderland.  I just cannot stand it.

It's more of a Winter "It Makes You Wonder" Land, actually.

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There is no specific reason for why this song has gotten so far under my skin, but with every passing year it gets worse.  It could be that the lyrics are so incredibly hokey.  Maybe it is that the song romanticizes snow and winter weather in general, which can be the bane of our existence here in my part of the world from November until April.  It might be that the melody is one that gets in your mind and refuses to leave for hours.

HISTORY

According to that unimpeachable source of information Wikipedia, Winter Wonderland was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith.  It is said that Smith wrote the lyrics while looking out the window of the sanitarium in which he was hospitalized for tuberculosis.  I suspect that he was under the influence of some kind of prescribed drug with unspecified mental side effects at the time, but have no proof other than the song itself, which ought to be enough.  Winter Wonderland has been recorded by more than 150 different artists.  Among the versions that would likely cause me to claw out my eardrums are those done by Ozzy Osbourne & Jessica Simpson, the Three Tenors, Billy Idol, and Radiohead.  It’s not even a Christmas song, really.  Nowhere is the holiday mentioned in the lyrics.

One of the hokier lyrics in the song involves a love-struck young couple building a snowman and fantasizing that it is a member of the clergy who will seal their relationship in holy matrimony. Surely you remember:

"In the meadow we can build a snowman,

then pretend that he is Parson Brown.

He'll say 'Are You Married?' We'll say 'No man,

but you can do the job while you're in town!'"

Seems to me that if you are goofy enough to think of something like that, then you are probably not of sound enough mind to get married anyway.  If you do take the plunge under those circumstances, you’d better get cracking on building two divorce lawyer snowmen pretty quick.

In 1953, the lyrics about having a hand-molded pile of crystalline water officiating at a ceremony initiating a lifelong commitment were considered by some to be inappropriate for children, likely by the same people who would later only allow Elvis to appear on TV from the waist up so as to protect America’s youth from those dangerous swiveling hips.  I mean, if we allow people to pretend inanimate objects can preside at marriage ceremonies, who knows where that may lead?  Next thing you know, toasters will be opening their own wedding chapels.  

But I digress.  At any rate, the lyrics were changed to the following, which did not completely supplant the originals, but can still be heard in some versions of the song:

“In the meadow we can build a snowman,

and pretend that he's a circus clown.

We'll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman,

until the other kiddies knock 'im down!”

It was out with ridiculous puppy love, and in with fear of bullying. Hooray for progress. Is it just me, or does this seem like something Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character from Saturday Night Live back in the day would have come up with?

FULL AVOIDANCE MODE

It has become a game for me to make it all the way through the holiday season without having to listen to the song all the way through.  I’ve eliminated any and all versions of it from my music library.  If it comes on the radio, I switch the station.  If it comes on TV, I hit the mute button or switch the channel.  When in a store or other public place, I have been known to leave or at least go into the restroom for a few minutes if the song comes on over the P.A. 

It’s kind of silly to do this, and I fully realize that.  My evasion of Winter Wonderland is purely for my own amusement and is not even remotely serious.  Think of it as my grown-up version of that game many of us played as kids, trying to move from one side of a room to the other without touching the floor because “the floor is lava”.  I have successfully avoided listening to Winter Wonderland all the way through for four Christmas seasons now, with one tragic exception last year.  I was sitting in a chair, halfway through getting a haircut, when it happened.  The worst possible version of the song imaginable, one by 80s pop cheesemasters Air Supply, came on over the P.A.  There was no way to escape.  My head was wet, it was -10 degrees with the wind blowing outside, and only one side of my head was trimmed at that point.  I explained my avoidance streak of, at that time three Christmas seasons, to the lady cutting my hair.  She just laughed and kept on cutting, never even offering to turn the music down or off.  She did a great job on the haircut, and I've gone back to her many times since, but I still hope she got coal in her stocking that Christmas.

I can’t help but wonder if my behavior in this regard may be genetic in some way.  My 87-year-old maternal grandmother absolutely cannot stand Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, and will mute her television or turn off the radio if the song ever comes on.  It’s kind of funny, since my grandmother on my father’s side used to practically worship the ground Bing crooned on.  (See post: Out Home at Christmas with Bing from last December on this blog.)

HOW ABOUT YOU, FAITHFUL READER?

There must be at least one Christmas song that makes your toes curl and your skin crawl.  Maybe it’s just a certain version of a particular song.  I know from listening experience, for example, that even the best Christmas songs can become cruel instruments of torture in the hands of the otherwise-talented Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland.  I’d like to hear from you about the Christmas songs that are your Kryptonite.  Leave a note in the comments section below, or you can contact me via Twitter or e-mail using the info in the “About Me” box at the top of this blog.