To friends and family:   At an after-dinner speech to the New England Society in 1876, Mark Twain remarked, “The weather is always doing something there: always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in Spring than any other season.”  And he went on about New England weather in his distinctively hyperbolic style: “Probable nor-east to sou’west winds, varying to the southard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.”

And 46 years later in “The Waste Land”, the grim fatalist TS Eliot penned these foreboding lines:  “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”   This bleak appraisal seems so far removed from musings of the romantic poets who praised April for its allegedly magical power to rejuvenate life forces after a winter of hibernation.

Such disjointed conundrums ruled the day of April 12, 2017, when at the end of a long and snowy winter, I drove three miles north from home over the shoulder of Cape Cod Hill, en route to Farmington.  At the zenith of the spring thaw, Crowell Pond had overflowed the more direct Route 41 as usual, necessitating the detour over the hill to connect up with 27, the main ocean-to-Quebec artery serving this part of the Pine Tree State.  This comparatively low bump (the top is only 890 feet above sea level, the roadway only 700 feet up) provides a surprisingly idyllic vista of the Sandy River Valley spread 300 feet below and stretching upstream to the high ridge of the Longfellow Mountains on the horizon, a view opened up by the enormous 75-acre meadow on the gentle hillside cleared two centuries ago to create the Hawes Farm.  The hill is beyond the northwestern end of the 6000-acre preserve known as the Kennebec Highlands, a natural area west of the storied Belgrade Lakes made famous in the familiar Ernest Thompson play from 1979, “On Golden Pond.”

This lookout… or more precisely just a stopping point with no turnout…is a favorite spot among locals for watching or photographing the sunsets year round, when all the ingredients are on display within and above a harmonious 180-degree arc of landscape: The great arboreal woodlands; the patchwork of farms on the fertile bottomland along the Sandy, a swath of the 73-mile-long tributary of the mighty Kennebec; the intricate topography of smoothly worn but durable landforms building up toward the Appalachian spine 20 to 45 miles away on the horizon; the occasional homes along the two-lane lifelines, the silent precession of headlights along route 27 that guide forest products south and vacationers north; the wonderful variety of evocative names of the rumpled summits, from Old Bluff to Bald Mountain to Tumbledown to Big Jackson to Mt. Blue, and on to Saddleback and the Horn and massive Mt. Abraham and triangular Sugarloaf with Bigelow beyond.  To a native Mainer or one who has come from away to appreciate this rugged state, such names roll off the tongue with reverence and recollected flashes of inspiring hikes and thrilling ski runs.   For the Western Mountains of Maine remain untrammeled, too far north of the big cities to have been colonized and ruined by those who who would dare to tame or even enslave the natural beauty to their liking.   No urban sprawl forces a repressive grid on the undulations, no coal-burning plants sully the bracing atmosphere, no paper mills remain to negate the pervasive scent of uncountable balsam firs, no ugly scars appear from ruthless clear cutting, no multi-lane expressways roar through the passes or decimate the riverfront, no towns grow out of control from there to the Canadian border eighty miles distant to shelter any more than a few thousand residents, no self-serving oligarchs nor military bases scar the wilderness, no sound or light pollution blanket the senses, no tacky advertising billboards deface the roadsides, and only when southwest winds blow, comes the incursion of the spoiled air from Megalopolis, a hundred to four hundred miles and usually far from one’s keen senses and utopian sensibilities.

But on this day as on most days at the transition between the paralyzing stillness and storm-wracked Siberian violence of winter and the depressing quagmire of emerging spring, the unsightly aspect of Maine’s sloppy springtime is readily apparent.  To the surprise of none of the stalwarts who live here, April in Maine might be chosen to be the ugliest month.  The roadways that had been cushioned by reassuringly high embankments of January’s pure white snowdrifts now thread beside dismal gray piles of sand and salt, the detritus of a pitched battle with slippery conditions and sub-zero blasts racing downwind from Hudson’s Bay. Rusted farm equipment and rotting stacks of scrap wood reemerge from the pristine snowfields of the February post card.  Gravel roads once firm and smoothly plowed to stave off winter’s grip turn into rutted death traps that suck down SUVs and trucks into bottomless corrugations of fender-clogging mud. No buds appear on the red maples and any grass poking through the melting mantle of snow reveals only the dead brown hues of winter kill, with no hint of the riot of luscious greens poised to break out in May.

Into this bleak landscape entered the unexpected:  As I drove toward the crest of the road, there came into my peripheral sight the arrival of wave after wave of evaporating snow in sinuous billows…a strange vision fueled by a pair of unusually mild April days that gnawed fiercely at four months of layered deposits now turned to corn snow, or what snowboarders and skiers know as “loose granular”, on top of the compacted but weakening ice.  Thousands of probing tendrils of insistent fog burst forth from the once dormant snowpack, wafting close to the forest floor and into the huge meadow, threading their mindless way up toward the two-lane from every direction.  Flowing, dividing , and recombining in myriad vaporous strands around the gaunt leafless skeletons of hardwoods and fruit trees in hedgerows, the land came alive with this unforgettable earthly vision of natural forces in a state of flux.  The old adage is that “fog eats snow.”  In truth, fog is snow that has been devoured.  Carried on silent winds, the living, writhing, random fragments of the silken cloud lifted their gray tentacles from the deep cleft of the Sandy River and its adjacent fields and woodlands, but their bold territorial forays never reached as high as my vantage point on Cape Cod Hill.  Viewing the scene from above, I sharpened my awestruck gaze to see if the Headless Horseman or the Hound of the Baskervilles would come charging out of the gathering armada of misty fingers to cap off this nightmare display, a compelling vision that unfolded before me as I slowed to a halt at the crest of a lonely country road.

Deep in the valley below the springtime flood of 14,000 cubic feet of meltwater per second from the high mountains to the northwest flowed inexorably towards the Kennebec and on to Merrymeeting Bay, some sixty miles south on the coast, with a companion river of thickly flowing fog clinging overhead several yards above the roiling waters.  In eerie tandem the twin streams snaked and churned under the high bridge at New Sharon.   The image of these driven armies of raging waters beneath the onrush of turbulent fog through the plunging channel was as indelible as it was immune to any imaging by means of iPhone.

I rushed through my errands in town where I breathlessly told checkers at Walmart and tellers at TD Bank and friends encountered along the sidewalks about the unique beauty I had witnessed, but to my disappointment on my way home the entire hill was shrouded in a dense fog with only limited visibility, the sculpting wind that had driven the remarkable currents had subsided, and the world had returned to a more typical fogbound appearance.   It was a clear reminder, as if we mortals need another, of the absolute irreversibility of time itself.  Reality is built of an infinite sequence of indivisible nanoseconds that exist only in their one fleeting moment, the lives and thoughts and configurations of forces transmuted for eternity before the next quantum of time arrives; and though seasonal cycles are repeated as the cosmic clock winds down through the eons, the state of matter and energy remains unique in each and every instant of time, never to be recorded nor duplicated but just temporarily remembered in their march to the future.  And as these theatrics were playing out so mysteriously on Cape Cod Hill, the same spectacle, give or take a few hours or a day or two, was no doubt dancing across similar hillsides and river gorges all over the state from Blue Hill to Katahdin, from Sebago to Moosehead, and from the Height of Land to Acadia, and countless overlooks in between.

I thought of my friends and family and of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau and the millions of people who had passed through Maine over the centuries, and wished that each of them…just a handful at a time out of respect for the overwhelming gravity of the event…could have been there that day to witness the entwining fingers of fog as they signaled the coming change of seasons in their unscripted choreography, uncaring of whether sentient eyes were there to bear witness.  For we know that the 10 to the fiftieth power atoms and molecules, the disconnected, unconscious units forming planet earth and all that lives or merely exists, were merely obeying unwritten physical laws governing this intriguing facet of reality, as they always do.   It was a day to remember.

Roy Van Til Vienna, ME

p.s.  And by sheer coincidence this rare exhibition of majestic power nearly coincided with the 105th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on April 14-15 of 1912, another time when ice and fog conspired to put on a show…in a tragedy that author Walter Lord called “A Night to Remember.” Fortunately, most glimpses into nature’s majesty lead to better results.  HD Thoreau wrote in “Walden”, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”  I never believed that philosophy, but his dictum definitely keeps me alert to the possibility of coming across the truly sublime moments awaiting just over the next hill.