Weather Station Echo Charlie Alpha
Back in January, 1966 we moved from Middleton, Wisconsin to Poland Spring, Maine. The names alone tell you a lot about that transition. Middleton can’t help but sound pretty ordinary. Wisconsin is the Dairy State, where Maine is Vacationland. One doesn’t allow you to buy margarine rather than good ole butter within its boundaries and the other has so many French Canadians in it that one car dealership used the tag line “We speak English, Parlez-vous Francais, but most of all, we talk Turkey!” And Poland Spring with its historic ritzy resort and famous mineral-free water, bottled historically in glass Moses bottles (did they not recall that Moses died early on Mt. Nebo and that it was Methuselah that lived 969 years and was grandfather to Noah?), was a veritable playground. But we rolled up in the dead of winter in our 1962 white Chrysler New Yorker and promptly lost the car under a twelve foot snow bank brought on by a three-day blizzard. While the older and bigger buildings of the resort were shuttered for the winter, the Poland Spring Inn, with its roaring fire and warm welcoming skiers bar, was open and awaiting our arrival (we just made it in ahead of the storm). That gave us three days of total isolation at the Inn with the other small band of snowed-in guests and staff. It was a good introduction to life in Maine and it served to fill in some local trivia which we might never have otherwise learned. Boredom has a way of prying open the memory circuits.
Poland Spring sits on the top of a hill in South Central Maine, north of Sebago Lake, but still south of the bustling shoe-capital of America, Lewiston-Auburn. It seems a random spot for a resort until you hear about the famous spring water and the uninterrupted westward view of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast and the topographically most prominent peak East of the Mississippi (the Blue Ridge Mountains are slightly higher, but less prominent since they cluster where Mt. Washington stands alone). While I know that the porch rockers at the resort all faced the mountain view, what no one could have foreseen was that in the early days of television, that clear sight-line made Poland Spring the ideal spot from which to broadcast to allow the mountain beacon to create the broadest imaginable range for WMTW TV to speak to much of South-Central Maine, Northern New Hampshire and even parts of Northern Vermont. At 6,288 ft. in elevation, it does not seem like it would be of meteorological significance, but in fact, the U.S. Weather Service and before it, the U.S. Signal Service have been on site at the summit year-round since 1870. The Mt. Washington Observatory had become quite a phenomenon not only for its longstanding continuous record keeping, but because it also housed a TV studio where the nightly weather report was broadcast to the region from the top of the mountain. This summit is notorious for its cold (-47 degrees) and its snowfall (282 average inches per year…with only the month of July having no more than a trace) with a long-time record-holding top global wind speed of 231m.p.h. Recorded in 1934.
That broadcast antenna started working its magic in 1958 and was bought by Tonight Show host Jack Paar in 1963. Paar was the owner in 1966 when we moved to Poland Spring and was a regular at the Inn. We met him on several occasions as he was hard to miss with the whirlwind of entourage that always surrounded him. One of his innovations was to partner with the Mt. Washington Observatory crew and broadcast that nightly news piece from the isolated and snowed-in shack at the summit. For much of the year that was not necessarily anything special, but in the wintertime it became very amusing. You see, in the summer, the road up the mountain was a tourist attraction so the observatory crew had lots of company. But for about eight months of the year the road was closed and that crew was pretty much on its own. To say that they would get a severe case of cabin fever in the last few months of the winter (spring to the rest of the world) would be an understatement. The station would limit the mountaintop broadcast to just a moment or two since they were never quite sure what these hermits would say to the outside world. When we lived there they had one particularly goofy meteorologist who looked like an escapee that had flown over the Cuckoo’s Nest one too many times. He would end each broadcast with a smile of gap-toothed prominence that made us all work hard to never miss a might.
Today has been a wild day here on this hilltop in Escondido. After about eight weeks of beautifully clear and sunny weather (an unusually long stretch for November and December), the heavens gave us payback today. I have had bad weather days up here that have included a hailstorm and even a wet snowstorm once (I have the pictures of snow on the cacti to prove it), but I have never had a quarantine day when I had nothing to do (we cancelled all onsite work for the day based on the forecast) but sit on the sofa and look out in all directions as the weather came in and went out. Looking at the several radar apps I have, I could see that this storm was coming at us in waves. Right now I can see a clearing ocean, a misting set of mountains, a dark an ominous storm cloud overhead and then, to the East more of the same sort of layering and microclimates. It is fascinating to have a front row seat to the weather like this and it makes me feel like I am in a weather station. I just saw George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky that chronicles one man’s lonely vigil in an arctic weather station where he is communicating with a returning spaceship warning them of Earth’s apocalyptic end due to some undeclared combination of climate change and radioactivity. Clooney is uncharacteristically unkempt and playing the role of the mad hermit scientist, which is what I feel like as I sit here literally watching the weather systems roll in and out.
The good news is that I have more or less made it through the lonely day and haven’t felt the need to inject heroin into my eyeballs, and the even better news is that the rest of the week looks to be a return to beautiful Southern California weather. That means that the deck work and Bison Boulder work can continue on its seemingly never-ending march forward. Add to that the return of the roofing people to deal with yet-again dining room leaks. I may have to rethink my strategy of hiring the best specialty contractors to do important work like roof replacement and paying a premium while self-contracting frivolous work like deck replacement, where at least I know that the work is being done absolutely correctly and to the highest standards.
In the meantime, here I sit at Weather Station Echo Charlie Alpha, ready for whatever the heavens throw at me. Did you know that the Alpha/Bravo/Charlie naming convention comes from the U.S. Weather Service, who set up weather stations in a 21 square mile grid with each grid coordinate lettered accordingly? That’s right, here I am at the center of the Northern Escondido Grid in California (ECA) ready in my quarantine for whatever imaginative undertaking I can muster. This is where I give the audience my wide, gap-toothed, crazy-dude grin.