West End News: January 15

Piano lessons for children and adults are being offered at Birch Grove Community School in Tofte. Community Education is sponsoring the lessons from piano teacher Lavonna Czaplicki.  If you’re interested in arranging lessons, contact Sara Silence from Community Ed at 663-0170, extension 28. As always you can contact WTIP or Birch Grove Community School for more contact info.
 
Birch Grove Community School is also offering enrollment in their excellent Saplings Pre-school Program.  In recent years, research has clearly established that pre-school participants do better in kindergarten and all the way through college. 
 
The Saplings Program is known for its rich program of early learning skills for pre-schoolers and for being a ton of fun. The staff is highly qualified and the activities include a lot of individual attention and hands-on projects. You can access the program according to your own schedule and free transportation may be available.
 
There is much more detail on the web at www.birchgroveschool.com. The phone contact for more information is again Sara Silence at 663-0170.
 
The skating rink at Birch Grove Community Center is up and running. Volunteers have been flooding this week and expect the ice to be in great shape. There are also nice rinks at Bluefin Bay and Surfside Resort in Tofte. All the rinks have new tools that act like small Zambonis, making for extra smooth ice.
 
I attended a meeting in Tofte last week and from where I was sitting I could see the Bluefin ice rink. A teenaged girl arrived at the rink, took off her skate guards and glided out on the ice. I was pleasantly surprised when she started through a routine that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Olympic trials, including toe loops, Salchows, flips and spins. I was all the more impressed because it was about 15 below zero at the time. She did retreat to the guest services building after about 15 minutes, presumably to warm up her toes and fingers.
 
Last week’s cold snap provoked the usual joking comments. My favorite was a Facebook post that said, “the air makes my face hurt.  Why do I live in a place where the air makes my face hurt?”
 
That said, the talk among my fellow old-timers was how much colder it was back in the old days. Not only did we walk three mile to school, uphill both ways through six-foot snowdrifts, but also we had to tolerate temperatures that regularly went south of 40 degrees below zero.
 
Seriously though, I remember multiple occasions in the 1960s when our propane stopped flowing, which only happens when the temperature reaches about 42 below. As recently as February of 1996 we recorded an unofficial 62 below here at Sawbill. 
 
Back in 1979, I went for a night ski up Sawbill Lake when the thermometer stood at 57 below.  I overdressed and had to open my Air Force surplus parka to cool off. When I stopped for a stargazing break, the snaps on the parka would not re-snap.
 
So I guess the consensus among us old-timers is “buck up! Things could be worse.”
 
While on the subject of climate, a group of researchers is working along the North Shore to catalog the changes that are occurring due to climate change and make recommendations on what can be done to accommodate those changes in the future.
 
I recently participated in a focus group where residents up and down the shore were asked to list changes that are already happening due to a warming climate. 
 
The list was surprisingly long, including, among others, changing forest types, low and high water levels, hundred year floods happening every few years, increased snow-making requirements at the ski hill, new designs for highway and storm sewer drainage, longer boating and canoeing seasons, disappearing moose, invasions by raccoons and wood ticks, and the list goes on.
 
Like the frog in the gradually heated pot of water, I hadn’t realized how much has already changed. Unlike the metaphoric frog, we don’t really have the choice of hopping out of our pot, so we better start thinking hard about how we turn down the heat.