My 1970 Winter and the L. L. Bean Story

Posted on January 6, 2020 by jane

By 1982 I had established myself as a bird carver living on the Maine Mid Coast in the Rockland area, and as years went on I won such notoriety as Best In World Interpretive Bird Carving with the Ward Foundation in Maryland and had begun to show work at various museums.

During that year of 1982 I also had a long display of my bird carving work at the “Old” L. L. Bean Store at the second level of the old wooden staircase, behind a glass window display area.

However, this story occurred in the wild and fierce winter of 1970, one of the biggest snow years in Maine’s recorded weather history.

My wife and I were in our early twenties and one year prior had built a geodesic dome two and one half miles into the woods on a closed road, deep in the interiors of Warren, Maine. We had parents still alive in the Boston area and we would hitch hike there every six weeks or so to visit. It was then, and still is, about a four hour drive and to hitch hike it could take many hours of road standing and thumbs out! It amazed us though that at times we made the trip with various drivers in 4.5 hours, that was a treat!

On one of these visits we headed back to Maine and had done pretty well until it started to snow. And it snowed BIG and it was a severe Nor’easter blowing hard into our faces as we headed north. We got dropped off at Freeport by a driver and we knew that L. L. Bean would be opened all night and we made our way there to get warmed and have a cup of coffee before heading back to the highway and in hopes of someone being on the road at this time of night, which was in the later hours of the evening, like maybe 9-10 pm to venture a guess.

At the store, we realized that we had a very intense night ahead of us and we were cold….freezing cold!!! So, not having any money, we were just a couple of long haired hippies, living off the land, I took it upon myself to help myself to two sets of mittens, scarves and hats, placing them into my backpack…then we left the store!

We did get picked up by a generous man driving a big freight truck. It was slow going, but he was able to take us to the road that led into the land that we owned and where our dome was located. We still had that 2.5 mile walk into our dome and it was snowing and had accumulated to about 2 feet by the time we headed into the woods. There was also the intense winds that were whirling snow upon us and blinding us so that we could barely see and it was by now after midnight. It was rather scary!

We had gotten just over half way there when my wife so dear, just fell into a snow bank and said she just had to sleep for a bit. I knew we could not survive that, so I half carried her staggering the next hour which it took us to walk what should have been no more than 15 minutes to our shelter. Of course it was super cold in the dome where no wood fire had been for several days. I managed to get a fire going and we hunkered down into quilt after quilt and made it through the night, at home, in our dome, safe and sound. That spring, we saw where dear had eaten bark off trees some 20 feet up, that is how much snow we got in that winter of 1970!

Yes, I did steal those garments from L. L. Bean, but doing so might have saved our lives that night. So, finally, now, in 2019 I am personally thanking L. L. Bean for that gift, on that night so fierce!

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