Culture of the Cold in Caribou, Maine

Last January, about a week after the infamous subzero temperatures of the polar vortex burst the pipes of half a dozen homes in my neighborhood, I traveled almost 300 miles north, to the 8,000-person town of Caribou, Maine, to see if the cold temperatures in my home state could get any colder. Part of growing up on the coast is living with the strange knowledge that no matter how frigid it might seem in your town, there will be always be other towns, farther north, that experience a degree of coldness that you, in your mild state of southern luxury, will never know. For the previous few days, I’d been keeping an eye on the Caribou weather forecast, hoping for a cold snap—but I soon realized that it was either going to be sunny and cold or snowing and cold for days on end, and that if it was cold that I was looking for, it didn’t really matter when I went to Caribou.

I left Brunswick on a Tuesday morning, just before 8:00 a.m., when my car thermometer read a balmy 18 degrees. By noon, the sun high overhead, I got off I-95 in Houlton to stop for gas, and checked my car thermometer again: 3 degrees. I’d been in 3 degrees before—hundreds of times. Three degrees was nothing to be afraid of. As a boy, 3 degrees just meant that you walked to school instead of riding your bike. But 3 degrees in Aroostook County just feels different. It was the wind. I was wearing a down jacket, a sweatshirt, and a hat and gloves, but the wind across the plains seemed to carry all that cold under those layers, to my skin, and hold it there, firmly. Before my tank was full, I had to shove my hand into my armpit and work the pump handle with the hand I’d been hiding in my pocket. When I got back in my car, I exhaled quickly and swore before continuing north along U.S. Route 1, through Mars Hill and Presque Isle. Earlier that fall, I’d come to this part of Maine a few weeks before the annual potato harvest, to write about a farmer whose family had been cultivating the fertile acres of Aroostook County for six generations and counting. Then, the rolling fields of potatoes and barley were green and golden, and all but shimmered with the fertile, purple hues of the late-dusk light. Now those same fields were featureless, bright white, and empty, buried beneath a vast sheen of windblown ice.

As I drove along them for another 30 miles—one thing about Aroostook is that for a visitor, as soon as you feel you’ve come north, there’s always more north to go—there seemed nothing fertile about the landscape at all. And yet to say it looked dead isn’t right, either. The weathered barns and century-old farmhouses along Route 1 rose above those vaulting, frozen pastures with a kind of fragile solemnity—as if there were something stoic, monastic even, about the barrenness they endured. The road to Caribou doesn’t make for smooth driving: Now and then I was blown suddenly right by gusts ripping out of the west, and every hundred yards or so, I found my car plowing through foot-deep snowdrifts—and then jerking forward again across stretches of bare, windblown pavement on the other side. Around 1:00 o’clock, I was driving along the Aroostook River, downtown Caribou to my left, headed for the National Weather Service station—where, I’d read, some of the coldest temperatures in America had been recorded. In the Skyway Plaza mall parking lot, I pulled over to ask a man for directions. “How’s it going?” I said to the man, who, his nose running, his cheeks bright red, dressed in a tan work jacket, was swapping out letters on a “Save a Lot” sign advertising that day’s specials in capital letters. He paused, then smiled. “Oh, you know, a little bit chilly!” he said, gamely slapping his gloves together. I told him where I was headed; he told me how to get there in that way that New England people prefer to give directions: as a series of vague landmark references, without street names or mileage, but that five minutes later turned out to be totally spot-on. The weather station is on outer Main Street, near the compact Caribou airport. Inside, science and operations officer Todd Foisy—a self-described “weather nerd” who, despite growing up in Alabama, came to Maine from a job in Alaska—met me in his office and showed me a digital map of this region on a large computer monitor. Foisy referred to the dark, 70-plus-mile-long crooked finger running along the Canadian border from Houlton to Van Buren as “the Potato Belt”: a sparsely wooded region that, trimmed to the west by the millions of acres of North Woods, resembles a Midwestern plain. Here, the unobstructed westerly winds, without breaks or natural obstacles, transform the cold winter air into some of the most frigid temperatures in the nation. “A lot of mornings,” Foisy said in an eager voice, “the wind chill will bring the temps down to minus 40 along the riverbeds. It’s just a shame I can’t be there to record it!” Caribou sits more than 400 miles north of Boston, a drive of about six and a half hours; Foisy said that Boston sees, on average, no more than a single morning of subzero temperatures per year. Caribou? “We get about 41,” Foisy said, proudly.

With the temperature dancing around zero, I ducked into Sleeper’s Store on Lyndon Street. You can buy jumbo lobsters, cat litter, blueberry pies, seafood platters for Valentine’s Day, freshly baked breads, pork chops, and cleaning supplies here. But in winter, you can also buy snowmobile suits, wool socks, work boots, insulated coveralls, longjohns, and snowshoes. The store was founded in 1914 by Joseph Sleeper—a Lebanese man who immigrated to Maine through Ellis Island, after a tropical detour in Colombia. Sleeper began his retail career selling wares (sewing needles and thread, tools, fabric, pots and pans) to local farmers, year-round, from a horse-pulled cart. Today his flagship store is run by his grandsons. “They must have darn near frozen to death,” David Sleeper said, when reflecting on the life of his hometown’s early residents. In his office, which overlooks his grandfather’s store, there hangs a portrait of Joseph and his wife, Alma, surrounded by pictures of all their descendants. In recent years, Sleeper told me, “a lot of the big-box stores have moved into town. But we’ve been around for a while, so we kind of know the right jackets to buy.” When I asked him where I might be able to see other examples of how his community was carrying on the cold-weather heritage of his ancestor, he didn’t pause before telling me, “You gotta go see the high-school kids.”

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That afternoon, as the light began to fade and the temperatures—irrespective of the wind chill—still hung out around zero, the 40 or so members of the Caribou High School Nordic ski team were gearing up for another day of practice inside their small—but very warm—building, located on a hill overlooking the football field. The ski center was built, in part, by New Sweden native Carl Soderberg’s construction company, which specializes in earthmoving and heavy equipment. Soderberg traced the passage of the Nordic course as it wove in front of the football field, through a grove of pine trees, and back up a hill past a lift-serviced alpine skiing pitch, which Soderberg’s crew built from old dirt excavated from the soccer field.

“We wanted to build all of this,” Soderberg told me, “so that anyone who wants to ski can. It was all about access. I wanted it to be as easy for kids to get to ski practice as basketball practice.” In two weeks, Soderberg said, the local Olympic biathlete, Russell Currier, would be competing in Sochi. One legend of Currier’s success: As a young man, he used to ski to school every morning, on trails that local people groomed for him by snowmobile. Before heading out for laps, Sirena Cyr, a senior at CHS, bundled up. She’s been skiing since age 6, when she entered a local Nordic program called “Lollipops.”

“If you can’t embrace it, you’re never gonna like it,” Cyr told me. “Just dress warmly. Wear layers. I mean, if you stay inside, of course you’re gonna get cabin fever!” Cyr believes in growing where she was planted. Next year, she’ll head to UMaine, to study mechanical engineering; she hopes to come back home afterwards, to work for the city. “It’s just so pretty up here,” Cyr said, gathering her poles from the ski locker. “When I come up that hill every day and I see the sunset, I just think to myself, ‘I could never go south. No way.’” Then she pulled her neck warmer over her face, set her skis across her shoulder, and marched outside as a gust of wind ripped through the door behind her. I looked at Soderberg, who shrugged slowly. “Sure, it’s pretty cold today, but you know what?” he said. “They’re okay. None of these kids are dying, and not one of them said, ‘Aww, do we have to?’ You saw them. They were all set to go!”

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Later that night, while I was eating dinner at Reno’s Restaurant, my waitress, 57-year-old Nicole Michaud, didn’t have anything bad to say about the winter either. “To get through it?” said Michaud, a part-time certified nurse’s aide who began her career at Reno’s as a dishwasher and who, to this day, snowblows her own driveway. “I just keep working! That’s what happens when you’re French,” she said. “You’re tough!” I paid my bill, but before leaving spoke with Paul McEwen, a snowplow operator who had just finished dinner with his family. Eyes hooded with fatigue, face wind-burned, McEwen had begun that day’s shift at 4:00 a.m. and finished up around noon. A typical winter, he told me, demanded that he stick to this schedule for 16 weeks straight, even on days when it wasn’t snowing.

Today, McEwen was on a 2013 International snowplow doing routine road maintenance, what he called “scraping the yellow line.” And, in the same way that the winds of the potato belt influence so many aspects of life in this part of Maine, they’re also the force that can make McEwen’s work particularly difficult. “The wind? I hate the wind,” he said, adding that it wasn’t uncommon for a three-inch snowstorm to turn into a four-foot drift that could, literally, stop a car in its tracks. McEwen’s solution: “Just pray there’s no one on the other side, and drive by the seat of your pants.” That night, on my way out of Caribou, I watched as the car’s thermometer fell—from about zero to minus 7 or so—every time I crested a hill or descended into the vague valley of a riverbed. While driving, I searched for a final symbol of how the people here embrace, and have always embraced, this kind of cold. And then I found one: Just north of Presque Isle, I saw a family of snowmobilers refueling at a gas station along Route 1. I glanced at my dashboard; the thermometer read minus 2.

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Several weeks later, while I was going back through all the notes I’d taken, I found myself flipping through a loosely bound book that a woman named Wendy Lombard Bossie had given me when I went into the public library to do “research,” but also just to warm up for a spell. Titled Caribou, Maine: 150 Stories for 150 Years, the book was put together in 2010 by Bossie and several other residents on the occasion of the town’s sesquicentennial celebration. At night, on the local radio station, each story was read by members of the community—many of whom, Bossie told me, had since passed away. The stories in that book are endless. There’s the one about Caribou native John Gagnon, who, in the early 20th century, was deemed the world’s strongest man after achieving a 4,000-pound dead lift; of the 1969 basketball team, which won a state final on a 50-foot buzzer-beater, an event listed 9th in the Maine Sunday Telegram’s 10 greatest moments of basketball history. Of course, the stories that most caught my attention were the ones about the winter and the intensity of the cold: the moose races at winter carnival; the ice harvests on the Aroostook River; the 20.7 inches of snow that fell in the winter of 1951–52. Many of those stories seemed not remnants of a bygone era but early chapters in a book that, based on the people I’d encountered in just a single day, was still being written. The Caribou Nordic team, training in the 3-degree cold, was just another incarnation of the Caribou team of the 1930s, which won the Maine Inter­scholastic Winter Sports Meet—in skiing, snowshoeing, and skating—over much larger schools, two years in a row, coming home on the train from Rumford to drums and music and a parade on Water Street. Todd Foisy seemed not all that different from Milton Lufkin, who, in his book Henry, recalled “Cold Friday,” in February 1861, when the single thermometer in town, “which was marked to register but 60 below anyway … froze up and busted.”

The four-month-old 2013 Inter­national snowplow that Paul McEwen proudly operated seemed just a newer version of the “town roller,” a horse-drawn wooden wheel; operated by town commissioner Will Frey, it packed the snow, rather than plow it, for horse-drawn sleighs.

The page I’d dogeared belonged to the story of a strong-looking woman who, dressed in a trim wool suit, held the reins of a white horse while perched behind a sulky. Her name was Valeska Ward, and she was among those who raced horses at the old winter carnivals, on a track cleared atop the ice of the frozen Aroostook River. Beneath Ward’s photo the caption read: “Getting ready to race.” It took me a minute to recall why I’d folded that page, and then I remembered: as Bossie showed me the book, she’d turned to Ward’s picture and said proudly, and with a little bit of longing, “She was my mother.”