Not a Night to be Out

This post is part of a series contributed by Coastal Rivers Trustee Barnaby Porter. Read the previous post here.

The night after the river froze, it snowed all the next day and never let up, even as darkness fell. It blew hard too, 40 miles-an-hour, piling the snow in the long drifts and sculpting it into hollows around buildings.

At Crow Point, where the wind moans upriver and down all winter long without end, the ground under the pines is swept clean with each storm, leaving the rust-colored carpet of needles and frosty hummocks bare to the hard facts, frozen and numb. In the lee of virtually every tree, however, lies a twenty-foot-long ridge of snow like a white shadow that tapers to nothing downwind. It is a winterscape peculiar to the place, dramatic in its own right and clear testimony to the way the elements work.

It was a day for holing up. Main Street was the way I like it, filled up with snow and only storm-lovers shuffling about, unlimited parking space for those with the right tires and the peaceful atmosphere of a town resigned to the unavoidable truth of a slow business day.

The snow and the wind howled all through the afternoon and into the evening hours. Because of the difficulties in getting about, the populace seemed determined to wait it out. Commerce shut down and the stores closed early. Meetings, classes and all social events were canceled. With the storm apparently gathering itself for a second full night, the countryside braced for whatever was to come.

It certainly was not a night for casual outings – ten to fifteen minutes simply to warm a vehicle and to clear the frost and ice from inside and outside the windshield. Three or four degrees was all it was, not brutal, but combining with the storm, “not a fit night out for man nor beast.” No one needed an excuse to hunker down and stay put by the fire.

On the waterfront, Schooner Landing, restaurant & bar, huddled on its forest of pilings held fast in the ice, the swirls of snow whipping about its rooftops unseen an unthought-of as they trailed downriver into the darkness, the place locked up, closed this night. Inside, a dim amber light fed quietly in the emptiness.

Some say it was an arsonist’s match that got Schooner Landing going. Who knows? Anyway, it did indeed burn, and it was a fire worthy of that howling winter night, a night no one had planned to be out and about.

By the time I got there, the parking lot by the town landing was full of cars and pickup trucks, mostly of the four-wheel-drive variety, and the vehicles were full of people scratching at the frost on their windows. All motors were left running, and most of the occupants stayed inside with their heaters on. An unabashed gawker, I weaved my way to the front ranks through a low cloud of exhaust vapors. There in the night blizzard stood the burning building, a terrible and beautiful sight, the unexpected details of which made sense when I saw them. The spotlights from six towns worth of fire trucks played on the scene. Huge, billowing, orange flames leapt upward through the curtains of heavy, horizontally blowing snow, and hissing jets of water from the fire hoses shot in great arcs, up and over and into the night. Windows popped, ceilings fell, and the letters of the “Schooner Landing” sign on the gable end toward us were gradually seared and scorched by the heat and licking flames until they at last spelled “defeated.” The whole raging scene was lit in a giant dome of firelight against the flying snow.

I sat and watched for an hour . . . and more. It saddened me to see the fireball billowing into the same dining room where I had enjoyed many meals with friends, to see the heavy smoke spewing from the same kitchen where my son had worked at his first summer job, washing dishes, to see perhaps the most prime piece of real estate at the head of the river as it was utterly consumed by the random terror of the flames.

I thought some too of the effect on the unseen. What of the millions of tiny lives that lingered down under, under the wharf, under the ice below – the barnacles on pilings, the mussels, and on the littered mud bottom, the myriads of worms and mud shrimp, the hermit crabs? How would this change things for them? Would the noxious poisons from this conflagration reach into their world?

Just then a pigeon, like the proverbial bat out of hell, flapped in terrified confusion out from its roost under the wharf. Then another and another. Smoke, flames, streaming jets of water, spinning red lights, spotlights, headlights, rumbling trucks, shouting men, blasting snow and wind and only four degrees of temperature. Theirs was a desperate plight.

And the men working at this blaze, who would otherwise have been drowsing at home this night; they were having their difficulties too. A drenched pair of firefighters struggled with a hose coupling; ice was forming on everything around them, including themselves, and they were freezing right to their bones. When they were momentarily interrupted by coffee-bearing women from the cafe across the street, the story goes, they shouted, “Good god! Yes! Throw it on us! ”

It was not a good night to be out, but it happened that way. The next morning was bright and clear. The storm had passed. The building on the wharf, what was left, sagged under the weight of tons of cindered grey ice, the charred remains literally a carbon copy of that stormy night. And down below, the forest of old pilings was multiplied by an infinity of icicles.

Editor’s note: The fire at Schooner Landing took place on February 1, 1993.

Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. Barnaby currently serves on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees. For more about Barnaby, click here.

Photo courtesy of Lincoln County News.