SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ROUYN-NORANDA AND LEWISTON – There’s a lot to be said for heaters, particularly those that work efficiently.

Most people think about heaters on a bus as often as Americans think about curling as a sport. But heaters were certainly on my mind as I rode a bus bound for remote locations in Canada last weekend.

There are 642 scantily traveled miles of road between Lewiston and Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and for several miles between Montreal and Val d’Or there is nothing.

If a tree fell, there would be no sound, save for the the soft “poof” when it hits one of the endless snowdrifts that line the road. There are rumors that ground does exist under the snowpack in the Abitibi-Temiscamingue region, but no one has been able to confirm such allegations for several years.

From the Canadian border, just after the Maineiacs stopped for lunch, until the team first stepped off the bus in Rouyn-Noranda, the temperature in the bus started to dip. Of course, we figured, it was getting colder as we headed north. Players huddled up with fleece blankets in their seats, trying to catch some sleep or watch a movie on a television in the bus, but no one thought much of it. It was just a cold evening.

Once in Rouyn-Noranda for the first of three nights, the air outside felt more like you were breathing solid ice. A weatherman on a television inside the lukewarm hotel room was talking about temperatures hitting -40 on the Celsius scale.

Now, with the conventional mathematical formula, you multiply the Celsius temperature by 1.8 (nine over five) and add 32 to find the temperature on the Fahrenheit scale. At negative 40 degrees Celsius, the temperature on the Fahrenheit scale is exactly the same, 40 degrees below zero.

Yikes!

Anyway, the next day and for three more days of relatively local travel, the heating in the bus wasn’t as noticeable because we were only on the bus an hour or so at a time.

On Sunday that changed.

Whether it was the antifreeze, heating system, or just hockey gods determined to ruin a winning streak, the ride to Gatineau, just steps from Ottawa, was brutal. Players didn’t dare to remove their team-issue parkas, and many of them bundled up fleece blankets, too.

After Sunday’s game, the bus was still running in the parking lot, and so were fans But it seemed as though ice water was running through the engine instead of gas. For the better part of six hours between Gatineau and St. Johnsbury, Vt., there was a scene aboard the bus no one should ever have to encounter.

Players, nearly 20 of them, crowded into the first five rows of the passenger bus after figuring out that the window defog from the front was reaching four to five rows back. All of them huddled together, all clad in gloves, wool hats, parkas and fleece blankets. In the back of the bus, which was about 10 degrees colder than the front (the front was a balmy 25 degrees or so), the coaching staff huddled in their blankets and overcoats.

Head coach Mario Durocher looked like a papoose bundled on his mother’s back for the long migration with a black fleece blanket pulled at times up to his chin and at others over his head, a bright red wool cap and a fully-buttoned parka.

Finally, the mad rush began. At St. Johnsbury, the bus pulled off the highway and parked next to a replacement. Players left the icebox and almost dove in the direction of the new, heated bus. After boarding, players started dropping like flies into dreamland, one even calling out “shotgun on the floor,” to reserve a coveted floor space to sleep on.

Two-and-a-half hours later, the buses pulled into the parking lot at the Central Maine Civic Center. The heating ducts in the icebox never did kick in, and the temperature in a vacant, dark civic center was tropical, but nothing beat the feeling of a warm bed.

The moral of this story, if there is one to find: Always wear tukes and parkas on a bus trip to Canada, and always bring an extra blanket. You never know when your bus is going to become the next addition to a frozen landscape that wouldn’t know what grass was if it sprouted on a hockey rink.

Justin Pelletier is a staff writer who can be reached at jpelletier@sunjournal.com

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