Oh, the air is still plenty nippy north of Bangor. It's the chilly relationship between the warring parties of the North Woods that's warming up.
In fact, an announcement issued last weekend about a creative land deal near Millinocket sounds like an honest-to-goodness breakthrough in the biblical struggle between recreation, commerce and wilderness preservation in the region.
First, Millinocket Town Manager Eugene Conlogue gives credit to Roxanne Quimby, northern Maine's most notorious preservationist. And Quimby says kind things about Conlogue and the negotiators who represented snowmobilers and hunters, many of whom drive around with "Ban Roxanne" bumper stickers on their cars and pickups.
"They were very nice people," Quimby said this week. "We saw, especially after the first couple meetings, that we had a lot in common."
What they essentially agreed on is that the North Woods are big enough for conservation, recreation and wood production, and that they have to stop fighting over those priorities before the land gets sold and divided so that none of them can happen.
"When a township changes hands four or five times in the last few years, after it hadn't changed hands more than once or twice in the last hundred years, it creates this unpredictable atmosphere," Quimby said. "Change creates strange partnerships."
A year of honest, face-to-face meetings ended with Quimby's purchase of the 8,900-acre Wassataquoik Valley next to Baxter State Park and Katahdin Lake, and an agreement for Quimby to sell land and grant easements for recreation and logging access on 11,583 acres east of the park near Millinocket.
In addition, Quimby agreed to provide access to important snowmobile trails across other land that she owns in the area.
The complex land agreement made news last weekend. But a proud Gov. John Baldacci, whose staff helped seal the deal, is scheduled to announce it personally on Monday at a State House ceremony.
There won't be any historic handshakes a la Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. But that's only because Quimby is at her winter home in Palm Beach, Fla., working on her latest retail venture -- an organic-cotton clothing line for children, called Happy Green Bee. She talked about the thawing relations in Maine during a telephone interview.
Quimby said she simply picked up the phone in October 2006 and called Millinocket Town Hall and the snowmobile and sportsmen's groups. Conlogue and the others agreed to meet.
Quimby has become a favorite villain in rural Maine since 2000, when she began using the fortune she made as co-founder of Burt's Bees to buy and preserve land as nature sanctuaries that are off-limits to ATVs and snowmobiles.
Quimby said she ignores all that. "They just use it to further the controversy rather than find common ground, and of course nothing can be solved that way."
They met regularly for an entire year, airing out conflicting views of the lands and looking for ways to preserve jobs, traditions and wilderness.
Time will tell whether the bumper stickers will get scraped off. But, Quimby said, "I believe we built very strong bridges of trust. Basically, we were looking at not just access across a limited parcel of land, we were looking at the future also."
Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324