The weather begins to break in April. While there’s a lot of variation during the month between the multitude of locations in Maine, a person can be sure of two truths; the air warms and the light becomes plentiful.
So much of the winter in Maine is dark. I don’t mean it’s always cloudy or the sky is black at high noon, what I do mean is that the days are short and the sun hangs low. During the month of January, it seems like the sun shines for only a few hours per day. If you’ve got to get something done during the daylight hours, a person needs to act quickly. This urgency dissipates in April and people become much more visibly relaxed. Spring arrives in earnest and the sun sits noticeably higher in the sky. And if the weather is warm enough, it’s almost the best month of the year. April and October are my favorites with October beating April by just a hair.
The thing is, the month isn’t perfect, or nearly perfect, in all respects. I can imagine the atmosphere near the coast and south near Portland being downright glorious, but for us up here in western Maine, it can be frustrating, annoying, and demoralizing. What am I referring to? Mud season and horribly bumpy roads.
If you aren’t familiar with mud season, please allow me to tell you a bit about it. You see, during the winter, the moisture in the ground just about everywhere in the state freezes from the surface all the way down a good few feet. It’s fine because when the ground is frozen, dirt roads feel like blacktop. They’re rock hard like cement and are easy to drive upon. When April and the warmer weather begins to arrive, the ice that has intertwined itself with the dirt on said dirt roads thaws and a whopping mess is born. When the ground thaws, it does so from the surface first until it reaches the lowest point of freeze. Again, that can be a few feet underground. So while the first few inches of road thaws and becomes mucky, that moisture has nowhere to go. The ground beneath can’t absorb it because…well, it’s frozen. As more inches on top thaw, the deeper the mud becomes until the entirety of the ground is frozen no more. The ordeal is disgusting and is a huge turnoff. That’s just my opinion, of course. Others may like mud.
While mud season is bad, what’s worse are the bumpy roads. In Maine, backroads are oftentimes terribly constructed. No more than a few decades prior, many of today’s backroads were simply dirt logging roads. Slap a bit of blacktop on top of that dirt and, bam, you’ve got yourself a horrible backroad that needs tons of maintenance. That maintenance generally arrives every decade and a half, so until then, we drivers endure heaving winter roads that transform into semi-heavy and radically bumpy spring roads. It isn’t until the end of the month that they begin to smooth, but by that point, people have begun pulling their hair out.
I mentioned that the coastal areas and Portland most likely enjoy a more pleasurable atmosphere during the month of April. What I meant by that was that I’m sure they’ve got better roads than we do here in the sticks. There’s more money on the coast and I can’t imagine those people putting up with anything like what we put up with. Otherwise, it’s all good. The sun shines more and there are no bugs to deal with. They don’t arrive until May. Ah, May.
