Nows and Forevers

One of my favorite stories to write as a young reporter had to do with weather, and every year someone had to do the traditional article about the chances for a white Christmas.

I didn’t do that story every year, but I always tried, no matter where I was. It was always a fun story.

There was only one place I lived where you could be as close to guaranteed of snow on the ground on Christmas: Caribou, Maine. I saw a story in The Washington Post that there’s a 95 percent chance of a White Christmas every year. There was a 97 percent of a White Christmas in Caribou, Maine, in the ’90s. I remember writing that story back then, but it’s not online. I did find one, from the same newspaper, online from 2015.

Either way, there’s pretty epic snow in Caribou and the rest of Aroostook County, the very top of Maine, every year. It gets an average of 97 inches of snow a year, and recent years it’s been over 100 inches a year.

That’s not the highest average amount snow in the United States, records that according to one search I made are Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Syracuse, New York, each over 100 inches. But Caribou’s 97 inches every season beats places that you wouldn’t think, from Buffalo (a mere 93 inches) and International Falls, Minnesota (64.8 inches). It’s even higher than Anchorage, Alaska’s 73.1 inches.

But there have been plenty of stories about Caribou’s Christmas snow fame, from the Boston Globe and and United Press International, among others.

I grew up in New England, so I’m not a stranger to winter weather. But I grew up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which is nine or so hours from Caribou and a world away from what I was used to. A winter in Connecticut is nothing like a winter in Caribou.

I lived in Maine from 1996 until 2001, all but one of those years in Caribou. (The other year was near Bangor, in the center of the state.) I had spent a week or so in Wisconsin, one of the coldest ever recorded there, when my mother was dying in the winter of 1993-94. I don’t remember it above zero that entire time I was there. It was bitter cold.
So I thought, when I moved to Maine three years later, that I was ready. I was wrong.

Caribou is next-level cold, as is the rest of northern Maine. It’s Potato Country, and potato fields are everywhere. It’s small (about 9,000 residents) and about 10 miles away is the city of Presque Isle, which isn’t much bigger. And there are a whole lot of small towns within about a 50-mile radius.

It gets cold and it gets snowy up there. The first full year I was there, 1997, it snowed on Halloween, about 8 inches. Halloween went on as scheduled. They are hardy souls up there. Look up snow and Caribou on YouTube and you will see what I mean.

And there’s snow on the ground almost every Christmases. I was looking it up and since 1940, there have only been four snowless Christmases — 1957, 2001, 2006 and 2010 — which is incredible if you think about it. Compare that to my hometown, near New Haven, Connecticut, where there’s only a 31 percent chance of snow on Christmas since 1940. There have only been 14 in my lifetime, although my first Christmas, 1967, was a White Christmas. So was the year before.

But Caribou was different. Snow on Christmas was one of the benefits of living there. So was having one of the most fabulous, comfortable summers — if short — than I could ever imagine. The downside was that it got awful cold from December through March every year. And it got dark quite early around the winter solstice, only about eight hours of sun a day, with sunset on Dec. 21 just before 4 p.m. That took some getting used to.

The year before, I was working in Caribou at the newspaper for about a month, filling in, in late November until just before Christmas. It snowed, quite a bit, while I was there. But where I lived, about three hours away near Bangor, it hadn’t snowed at all.

Christmas 1997, I was up in Caribou as a resident, having moved there about two months before for work. I had always wanted to live in Caribou, ever since I heard classic WTIC-AM host Bob Steele give the weather in Caribou every day on his morning show.

Yes, it’s true: I made a career choice based on a radio show I heard when I was a kid.
That Christmas Eve 1997, we had gone to the late-evening candlelight service at the church we had found. It was starting to snow when we arrived and on our way out with the candles it had begun to stick on the ground and on the road.

It had been a long time since we had seen snow on Christmas Eve. There’s only about a 20 percent chance in Connecticut, where I had lived from when I got back from California in 1984 to 1996.
We drove around town afterward, marveling at the big flakes falling and the way the Christmas lights reflected in the snow. We listened to carols on the radio and were alone on the road as we circled around town, the snow making it even more Christmasy.

This was the first time either of us had been away from our families at Christmas, 10 hours’ drive, and we weren’t going back home to Connecticut for the holidays. We didn’t really know anyone yet. The Christmas Eve snow made us feel a little more at home.

I still think of that moment on Christmas Eve into early Christmas morning as a warm Christmas memory.

I thought about that the other day when I saw an article in The Washington Post about the chance of a White Christmas across the country. Like I said, Caribou came out very well with its 95 percent chance. But the highest amount of snow falling on Christmas since 1940? It was that Christmas Eve into Christmas Day in 1997, when 8.7 inches eventually fell.

That made me smile.