OUR
COMMENTS - APRIL, 1998
Recent comments by the owners have been absent from this web page during the past months due to a number of positive life changes. I retired from my career of 27 years and spent the winter in northern Ontario, Canada as a ski bum, where I worked as an unpaid assistant manager at a cross-country ski resort. My rewards came in the form of great lodging, regular gourmet meals, unlimited skiing on a 120 km tracked system, and the opportunity to work outside in the winter. At the conclusion of that adventure, Ginger and I made the decision to forego her work transfer to Basel, Switzerland or Montreal, Canada, and instead choose to relocate to the state of Maine where we will be only 75 miles from our First Mountain Forest. That decision entails a much quicker move than the other options and requires Ginger's more immediate relocation to Maine. We both expect to be living in Falmouth, Maine after the first week of June.
The winter has likely been hard on the First Mountain Forest, as I have read of widespread damage from the January ice storm that paralyzed Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Quebec. Photographs in the local Berlin, NH newspaper showed extensive damage in the White Mountain National Forest, especially in Randolph just to the west of Shelburne. The Androscoggin River Valley was also subject to severe flooding at the end of March, and the North Road below our forest was closed for some time. I was able to witness the ice damage in coastal Maine during the first week of April, and hope that our mountain forest may have escaped similar damage. Trees along the coast of Maine were most affected where they stood in isolated stands or as landscape trees, and seemed more protected in interior forests. I am hoping that the forest trees of First Mountain supported each other under the ice loads, but believe that the beautiful white birch at the front of the stand may not have prevailed under the burden. Such is nature and white birch owes its existence to disturbance in the first place.
I will be delivering Ginger to Maine to begin her new career in mid April and will then make my first visit to First Mountain this year to assess the ice damage. I will return to Indiana to sell our current home, and will remain there until closing on our Maine house in early June. After setting up our new household in Maine, I'll finally be able to direct my full attention to the First Mountain Forest and begin construction of a small cottage there.
Larry
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