PENOBSCOT BAY — The record in Maine was apparently a wind chill factor of -43F in 1971, in Portland (at least since 1948). We almost broke that Friday night, Feb. 3, 2023, when the wind chill bottomed out at -38F in the Midcoast. The polar vortex that dumped the Arctic blast here came with a week’s warning. Still, the gusts of wind, sometimes at 50 mph or more, sounded, “like my roof was blowing off,” said one local, who has seen 70-plus winters come and go in the Midcoast. 

It was not your everyday conventional wind. Not a hurricane out of the southeast. Not a blizzard out of the northeast. Not a friendly steady breeze from the southwest.

These gusts, from the west and directly from the Arctic via the Great Lakes, were ferocious, and shook the houses, while the cold air made the wood beams pop and bang. One person reported a glass window shattered in her home, as ice built between two panes of glass and burst them.

“After sifting through our old paper book records, a -43 degree wind chill from 1971 appears to be the record to beat in Portland, at least since 1948,” wrote the National Weather Service in Gray, in a Friday evening forecast.

It was the kind of cold that could be deadly for anyone outside and unprepared.

By Saturday morning, as temperatures were climbing from -21F to -11F, residents were urging their car engines to turn over and get moving. Slowly, we visited stores — to pick up more bird seed for the achingly cold birds, or groceries, or to just drive down by the harbors to watch the sea smoke spiral upward from the ocean, itself a warmer basin than the air.

There was a sense of relief by noon, when temperatures climbed to 0F. This was normal frigid cold, something we knew how to handle.

“We did it,” was the general feeling. “We came through it.”