The first step in any endeavor will almost always be clumsy.

Confessions of a young newspaper reporter and editor

Fortunately, I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor from the mid 60s to the end of the 70s in Bangor, Maine. And thus, I have at least a decade and half worth of staring at a blank sheet of paper, my fingers hovering over the keys of the ancient manual typewriter atop my desk in the news room.

Doesn’t mean, though, that I begin my first contribution to my own Substack without a few twinges. Damn, I no longer have a proof reader, nor an editor using a prodigious amount of red ink to improve my work.

I was raised in the near western suburbs of Chicago, and committed to a four year enlistment of in the US Air Force, after which I asked to be discharged at Dow AFB in Bangor, Maine.

During the mid 60s I thought of myself as a Mother Jones back to the earth kind of fellow.

Within about six months one of the state editors asked me to do a story about how the winters in the 1800s where far worse than in the mid 1960s. Bangor had just experienced the blizzard of the decade.

Many of our readers wanted to know if the winters in the late 1800s and early 1900s were much more brutal than what they had just experienced.

A few of our readers even thought that people back in the day were trapped in their cabins for six months out of the year!

I can not comment on how dreadful were the winters in the 18th and 19th centuries, but I can accurately report stories related to me by people who lived in rural Maine during the first half of the 20th’s century.

From 1965 to about 1979 I received a crash course in how city mice and country mice are very different critters.

For the urban areas of our country, the first half of the 20th century was a time of massive improvements in roads and bridges, while electricity and natural gas service became nearly universally available.

Because of my job, I often needed to visit isolated regions of Maine during the winter.

Residents of those regions would chuckle when I told them how bad the roads were, which in turn resulted in my learning what caused isolation for them and their ancestors who had settled there.

When they described the winters during the first five or six decades, the amount of snow or the bitter cold were not what led to isolation.

They were isolated because of badly maintained roads and bridges, which meant that for much of the winter their small isolated town often could not get food, coal and other supplies brought in on a regular basis.

The gravel roads were not plowed after a snow storm, but rather were “rolled” by horses or farm tractors pulling heavily weighted barrel-like devices that had an axle which allowed them to be towed.

Then, in the early to mid spring the surface of the roads would begin to dry out while the material below the road surface down to the 6 foot frost line would turn into something akin to quick sand.

Even in the last half of the 20th century, such rural roads were treacherous during the spring thaw.

In the early 70’s, on a beautiful spring day, my managing editor sent me to cover the aftermath of a fire near one of the small towns nestled in the foothills to the west of our Bangor.

I decided to take a shortcut that in the summer, fall and winter had cut my drive time by about 20 minutes. However, I’d never taken the shortcut during “mud season.”

All was going well as my car zipped along the gravel road. I noticed a farmer waving at me from his tractor. I returned a friendly wave, and continued down the road into a small tree shaded valley, at the bottom of which my car’s wheels became buried below the road’s surface.

I had to crawl out the driver’s side window. The door could not be opened.

About 10 minutes later I hear the chug-a-chug of a farm tractor. The friendly farmer was coming down the road.

When he arrived, it quickly became apparent his waving was meant to warn me about what lay ahead.

We needed to shovel muck away from the back of my car in order to reach the tow point under the bumper. I was driving a 1971 Volvo sedan, but was sunk as deep in the mud as this truck.

Obviously, my education as a wannabe country mouse was not yet complete.

Returning to the question, if people living in rural areas were at times “trapped” inside their farmhouses and barns during the first half of the 20th century, it must have been very common for rural folks in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Even in the 1930’s, people living within 15 miles of the second largest city in Maine were “winter-bound” because they lacked the infrastructure that had become common in Boston.

I am now two years away from my eighth decade, and have lived in small towns and cities for the past 65 years. My wife and I now are permanent “snow birds” in rural north central Florida.

There are, however, times when I still need to learn a lesson about being a country mouse.