No, it just rained a bit. Atlantic hurricanes rarely cause real problems up here. Occasionally, one will make its way up the coast instead of turning right at Cape Cod and still be strong enough to have a name, but even then we don't usually get anything other than the outer rain bands this far inland.

The one exception I can think of happened way back when I was in middle school. Hurricane Gloria was forecast to track farther north than usual before turning back out to see, to the point where there was talk of it causing serious damage statewide. The governor's office declared a state of emergency, schools and businesses were closed, and everyone was under a stay-at-home order for the duration. People were buying up all the plywood at the local lumber yards (three in town at that point) and nailing it over their windows, the supermarkets (two of them) were cleaned out of everything non-perishable--the whole nine yards. There wasn't panic, but something close to it in some circles, along with a sense of novelty and adventure.

The local radio station still had a DJ then, and he decided he was going to make an occasion out of it and stay on the air through the storm. The cops had other ideas, though, and went and rousted him out of the station. As a protest, he put on Laura Branigan's version of "Gloria", recently a hit single, and left it repeating until he was allowed to return the next day.

In the event, it wasn't anything particularly special. It rained hard and there was a bigger-than-usual amount of wind, some folks lost roof shingles and such, and a few trees blew down, but nobody in this area was hurt. I don't even recall the power going out for any significant length of time. Bangor Hydro had a repair crew headquartered right here in town, with orders to keep the lights on at any cost--Great Northern Paper was not the kind of company that would put up with the local power utility letting life in its company town be disrupted for long.

It didn't occur to me until I started writing this down just how much about the story is gone now, pretty much all thanks to the decline and fall of GNP. Only one of the hardware stores has permanently closed, but another one did away with its lumber yard some time ago. The second supermarket closed a few years ago. The radio station is just an automated relay for some syndicated network feed or other, with a guy who goes in occasionally to record the odd local advertisement (for a little while in the early 2000s, that guy was me). Hell, we don't even have cops of our own any more, we borrow a couple from the next podunk town down the line. Sic transit gloria mundi... as it were.

Anyway, that's the closest brush with a hurricane this area's had in my memory.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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