Living in the path of a hurricane, even as far north as the Maine coast, made for some tense past few days.

From midweek on, we watched with mounting dread as the weather forecasts showed Hurricane Lee’s projected pathway congealing in a route that would bring the eye of the storm directly over Eastport rather than curving away from landfall. Expected sustained wind levels rose from 25 to 35 miles an hour, which litter the town with roof shingles in a typical nor’easter, to a stressful 50 and then, ugh, 70 with gusts even higher.

A day of 70 likely would have ripped much of our roofing away – we’re actually moving ahead with replacing that in a remodeling in a few weeks, now that we have a contractor lined up.

Projected rainfall also kept rising, from the 4½ inches with the slower winds.

The other concern was a power outage, a common problem here. The question was how long. Would everything in the freezer be lost? My wife even planned for three days of cold meals. Smart woman.

Friday was gorgeous, without an inkling of what was ahead. We had a flurry of securing anything outside that might take flight in the wind, including the charcoal grill and the outdoor chairs. Removed the plastic covering over the woodpile. Wrapped the mattresses, books, and fabrics upstairs in black plastic, should the roof start leaking. We were especially worried about a patch over a former chimney that was removed when we bought this place three years.

Then we gleaned all the nearly ripe tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers from the garden, assuming that high winds would break the vines. A tall tree on one neighbor’s side of the property line has been a worry – the top is quite exposed and includes a widow-maker branch that’s been dangling ominously the entire time we’ve been here, despite other large branches that have come down.

We parked our cars along the street rather than closer, just in case.

An additional concern was the possibility of ocean surge at high tide, flooding the causeway that’s our only route on or off the island.

Yes, as our acting city manager reminded the world, Eastport’s an island city in the bay.

We did think of earlier times when these things struck without warning, sometimes wiping out entire fishing fleets and their crews, and leaving villages of widows and orphans in their wake.

Quite simply, we remembered to be grateful the kind of forecasting we too easily take for granted.

At this point in the cycle, though, there wasn’t much more we could really do. Even fleeing would be difficult. So we’d hunker down and hope for the best.

~*~

Friday afternoon’s newest forecasts did hold a hint of relief. After drastically rising in the previous 24 hours, in what should have been growing accuracy, the winds and rains were actually being scaled back, though not universally, as the projected path was revised further east. Still, we were warned that this was a very broad storm – the size of Montana, as we heard.

~*~

The air had clouded by late afternoon, and, as I washed dishes, I saw a police car parked in the driveway of an elderly, reclusive, and very hard-of-hearing woman on that side of our house. We assumed it was a welfare check, she rarely answered the door, and the young officer was obviously very perplexed – and determined – in conducting his mission. He tried all the doors, returned to the car to make calls, and then tried the doors and peering through windows again.

I went about some other tasks before returning to the window to see the police car still there and then, through the apple trees, a hand in blue latex that connected to another man, or at least a black suit. Then I saw a second black suit guiding the rolling table and wrapped bundle toward the back of their black SUV.

This wasn’t entirely unexpected, but the timing on the verge of the storm remains uncanny.

~*~

Saturday dawned with heavy rains and winds, but still manageable. We had our early steaming coffee, checked the forecast and saw that Lee was now expected to land over neighboring Nova Scotia rather than our end of Maine and then travel up the far coast of Fundy Bay rather than our side. But as I was about to pull two slices of bread into the toaster, the kitchen power kicked out. We assumed it was the toaster overloading the circuit again but then heard the growling chorus of generators around the neighborhood kick in.

No, the power was out, much earlier than we expected. It was only 7:15 and we were far from the worst conditions ahead.

The ground was saturated, meaning trees were more likely to be uprooted, but this was still unnerving. The longer hours without a working sump pump or the freezer functioning were the prime concerns.

We did get a cell phone text saying that the winds and rain were keeping the utility crews from using their bucket trucks. Oh, joy. That on top of an earlier one saying they didn’t expect power to be restored until Tuesday. We hoped they’d do better, since the entire city was down.

We hunkered down into Plan B, which included a lot of reading, even a little journaling on my part. If I really got bored, I could start packing for my travel the next weekend. My wife was probably relieved there wouldn’t be the usual Saturday afternoon opera broadcast. We would live.

But it was a very dark, gloomy, day.

The inability to be online or use our laptops left us squirrelly. I wasn’t surprised. But without power, our desktop weather screen was blank, leaving us ignorant of the latest wind or rain levels on our deck.

Fortunately, the temperature was still in the low 60s, so we weren’t freezing. Still, it would have been nice to have that woodburning stove we’ve finally ordered, along with the new insulated metal chimney to be installed in a few weeks. Here, we thought we were making progress. And I do find watching the flames mesmerizing.

If it were only the Internet being out, we might still watch a DVD together, but scratch that.

At least we enjoyed cold but braised pork chops and cold mashed potatoes for an early dinner.

Outside, the driving rain outside flew horizontally, and from the upstairs windows I viewed the channel between us and Campobello Island was whitecaps racing southward. The island really does shelter us from the heavy surf elsewhere. One gull that foolishly rose up to fly was sent spinning sideways.

Periodically, the rain or perhaps fog obliterated any sight of the Canadian island or the channel itself, a situation that continued through much of the day.

The stop sign on our street corner was fluttering wildly, as it’s prone to do in heavy wind. The big tree was bending heavily, but in that neighbor’s direction.

By midafternoon, when I was dreading the worst, however, things let up. There were actually a few people walking along the street, something that would have been impossible in the heavier winds. A few cars passed, too, though the question of where they were headed remained a mystery.

Was this the calm eye of the storm? A false lull? Even more surprising, we got a postal delivery, earlier than usual, at that, and the rain let up entirely, at least briefly.

Around dusk, the light in our HP printer flickered on, a harbinger of power restoration, even before the other lights came on. Could it be? Only 6:15?

Nothing in the freezer had thawed. We had four to six inches of water in the cellar, but that would be going down rather than rising, as long as the power held. I stepped outside and saw that the roofing, including the patch, had held. The top of the tree was still in place, though there were some big limbs in the said neighbor’s yard.

We were back to a mostly normal Saturday night at home.

~*~

Sunday arrived as sunny, cloudless blue, perfectly comfortable.

The ground was littered in fallen apples, wet leaves, and twigs everywhere. The apples, I’m told, will soon ferment, scenting the air and luring deer and birds that, no kidding, delight in being intoxicated. We’ll see.

We did learn that what had hit us was a post-tropical cyclone, now that Lee had been downgraded. A gust of 83 mph was recorded at a weather station just six miles from us. That blast had come unimpeded straight down Passamaquoddy Bay.

The eye of the storm had passed 50 miles to our east, making a huge difference in the impact, even though we were still in the thick of the action.

We did realize the listing of the peak number of customers without power was misleading. They should be called “accounts,” as in households and businesses, rather than customers. Think of three people or more in a median household. In sprawling Washington, population 30,000 or so, for one utility to say that 10,000 customers were affected really means that the entire area, about the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, was cut off. The county’s biggest city and some towns to the north were also out but part of an electric coop reporting separately.

We do sympathize with our neighbors in Nova Scotia to our east. We’re separated by Fundy Bay, about 80 miles wide here, but share a kinship. The province has been heavily hit by drought and forest fires this year, as well as last year’s Hurricane Fiona.