Mad Mountain Goat on the Big Rock Candy Montain

Slippery slope I climbed to get to the median strip near a turn lane.

Here in wintery Maine, it's normal to teeter on a four-foot-tall ridge of plowed-up snow while waiting for the METRO bus. I've gotten better with each winter here, as each is always an -- ahem -- opportunity to gain practical experience. If I'm careful, I can safely clamber up to the top of the ridge, and then stay there. The first thing I learned, when I moved to Maine, was to wear waterproof shoes with rugged ridged soles.You wear sneakers or dress shoes here in the winter, you die.

So I'm good until the bus pulls up, and then I have to somehow maneuver myself from the spiny ridge of the mini glacier down to street level. No amount of experience or practice helps with that part of the process. 

From the window of a passing car, the A-shaped snow slope doesn't look like a big deal. But when one is right there, there's no escaping the observation that the mini mountain range is not just deep snow to punch through in boots or good shoes and wool socks. It's actually a hard awkward hump of icy snow deceptively layered with a foot of fluffy snow. Up close, the downslope to the roadway is intimidating. 

On the sidewalk side, the snow is pretty and clean and fluffy. Mini snowblowers that look like riding lawnmowers, go along the sidewalks, and they scoop up the snow and then snort it out of a vent pipe which piles it up neatly along the edge of the sidewalk. 

On the street side, the dark gray-and-black side snow is mixed with gravel and sand and clumps of salt and ice balls and stiffened dirty mittens and small pieces of rusty tailpipe. This is all frozen together with a shiny slippery glaze of road salt brine. It's hard as stone, and no amount of kicking or stomping will make the slightest dent in the surface.

On a trip on the other side of the Casco Bay Bridge, in Portland proper, I was poised at the top of one of these snow-ice hills. Careful scanning showed me that the only potential foothold, near the bottom of the slope, was an enormous bootprint. It was much too large to be human. But then it couldn't have been made by Bigfoot because big furry creatures don't wear soled footwear. But if sasquatches did wear boots, this particular humanoid would have been wearing galoshes two sizes two big for its paws. The crater of a bootprint was certainly large enough for me to get my own Doc Marten shoe into, but then, while traveling down on a slippery slope, could I get my shoe back up out of there? Hmm.

There was no give to the edges of this deep crater, frozen like plaster or stone now, after having been stomped down while the snow mix was still new and soft. Above the bootprint, halfway up the slope, was a sort of ledge, only about three inches wide and perhaps ten inches long. Not as long as my shoe, for sure. 

This sort-of ledge, shallow and uneven, had a chunk of snow lying on it. I carefully leaned forward a bit and kicked the snow chunk away with the toe of my shoe. Then I tried to talk myself into the idea that I could wedge the side of my right shoe into the inadequate dent above the semi-ledge. If I aligned my right shoe just right, maybe I could drop my left foot into the big huge frozen footprint crater. Then what would happen? I knew what would happen. My mind filled with images of myself, three weeks into the future, at a physical-therapy clinc, using my just-surgically-rebuilt knee to pedal an exercise bike.

Okay, no. Time for another approach to getting down to street level so I could get onto the METRO bus. I clambered back down the fluffy clean slushy snow of the sidewalk side of the four-foot-ice hill. I had to get off the sidewalk as soon as possible as it was coated with a layer of water on top of clear ice. I picked my way along the surface of death till I came to a driveway where I could move over into the road. 

It says something when one is safer sharing the asphalt with rapidly-moving traffic than if one is using the theoretically-cleared pedestrian walkway. As I walked, I kept close to the curb and chanted my usual walking-in-the-road mantra, which goes "Don't hit me with your car, I'm sosmeone's mother, don't hit me with your car." I got through this chant about six or seven times and then i was at the bus stop sign.

The metal pole which held the sign was buried in dirty snow. The heap of snow and ice chunks formed a pyramid all around the sign so there was no spot anyone would stand at the bus stop unless one had a person-sized gyroscope they could fit into, or maybe stilts with plumber's helpers at the ends. I looked around for a place that I could stand near enough to the sign to be recognized as someone who wanted to ride the Forest Avenue METRO bus while also remaining far enough back from the street that I wouldn't be wiped out by a heating-oil tanker truck.

[Happily for you,Rreader, this is where the notes for this blog post end. I never got revved up into full rant mode. I remember that the bus finally came and the driver yelled at me for standing in the wrong place. Then when i got on the bus, we had an argument so unpleasant that I ended up writing a scathing letter to the METRO office. I did that instead of finishing this harrowing tale. Better to tell the bus people what the issues were than to yammer on at length here. I can see from where I started this Blogger entry that I made the notes for this post almost exactly a year ago. I can report -- based on bus trips taken last Wednesday and Thursday -- that the struggle to get from the bus stop to the actual door of the bus is exactly the same as it was twelve months ago. However, was taking local buses here in South Portland. I had much more friendly and helpful drivers this time, so score one for the South Portland Bus Service vs. the Portland METRO.]