The Dec. 3 winter storm pummeled southern Maine.
    Gov. John Baldacci sent 14,000 Maine state government workers home early, more than 1,400 homes lost power, numerous traffic accidents were reported throughout Maine and an accident in Saco cost one man his life. Winter gifted us a sucker-punch with a horse-shoe in the glove.
    Monday morning I stood at the doorway of my Limington home, watching the silent storm clean the yard while I transferred my coffee cup from hand to hand. Between my toes I felt the breeze sliding under the door. In those moments before the caffeine kicked in I was caught in a dreamy reverie and I realized something about myself; I am utterly enthused by disaster, no matter the scale.
    The Ice Storm of 1998 was awesome for me in my own little world. I was the kid with the sled, tearing down Route 117. It brought my family closer together as we ate my mom’s homemade basil-pesto sauce over spaghetti, all cooked on our wood stove. I was hooked to the unfolding drama on the radio. Closures were my sitcoms; trees crashing on power lines were my season finale episodes. My father taught me how to play WCSH6’s Storm Center theme song on a guitar.
    When I was even younger I went to summer camp at the Vaughn Island 4-H camp off of the coast of Cape Porpoise. We had to evacuate one year because of heavy rains; hurricane Bob or Dale or Tom or something was riding in.
    I remember enthusiastically wading across the armpit-high waterway with my bags over my head, choking as the swelling surface of the water lapped over me. Drama was unfolding before our very eyes and as a young boy I loved it. I went back to the island to help other campers with their things.
    My friends and I took a road trip to Biloxi, Miss. following Hurricane Katrina -- to help an organization called Hands On America with cleanup. What I saw there encompassed one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. The disaster was impossible to exaggerate; cars were on top of battered homes, neighborhoods were leveled and everywhere I looked I saw craggy trees packed with everything from television sets to furniture, like bizzaro Christmas trees.
    People wore hazardous material suits, FEMA trailers riddled the landscape and everywhere you could taste the danger, the disaster, the emergency in the air. I am not making light of this horribly tragic event – the inertia of that disaster still being felt today – only highlighting the feeling I got when I was there. It is my belief that there is something about extreme conditions and disasters that speak to a part in all human beings. They bring us out of the mundane.
    So as I was driving to work on Monday, my Volvo twisting uncontrollably at times, my heart was racing with excitement. Really, the storm only meant that I was probably going to end up late for work, but to me there was a world of possibility in front of me. Someone could have slid off the road and would need help, a car could have been stuck and need pushing; I let the storm be an opportunity for adventure, for action.
    When I worked with the Buxton Recreation Department as a camp counselor I saw this phenomenon successfully put to the test. The kids loved to play hide and seek so we would turn out the lights in the gym and let them scatter. As soon as the dark enfolded them the campers would scream and scream and scream with pure excitement. What they were in fact doing was reacting naturally to a bit of danger; an unprecedented bit of confusion and disaster peeping into their young lives. Their reactions sum up my feelings, that there is magnetism between us and the horrible and the unprecedented.
    The house I grew up in is old. [So old that when a wind blows, papers from my desk alight and drift away from me.] When a storm hits we always lose power and my mom breaks out the candles. Our family becomes an isolated unit; disaster survivors, champions of a post-apocolyptic world, kings of the new world; you get the picture.
    It is fun to cope with a dangerous and changing world, I think this is one reason I will live in Maine all my life. When I was at college at the University of Vermont I had a friend from California and I would rag on him constantly for coming from the sunny, good-vibe capital of the United States. I told him I was tougher because I had braved the northern winter in Maine, where we kill what we eat and we don’t take guff from anyone. Little did I know that his people were brave in their own right, having to contend with forest fires and the like.
    The moral of the story? All human beings deal with hardships and disaster in their own way. I am just either lucky or stupid enough to become invigorated by impending doom.