I couldn’t wait to get to Maryland.

They were predicting a snowstorm and I figured the comedy would be immense. They would get 5 inches and the entire region would slip and slide to a terrified halt. Overwhelmed city crews would frantically try to clear the streets by throwing fists full of salt at them. Governors would implore their residents to remain very quiet and still in hopes that the snow would go away on its own. Stranded mothers would stand on front steps, clutching their children and weeping openly.

“Why?” they would shriek into a cold, white sky. “Why didn’t I buy a shovel when they sold them that one week at World Over Imports?”

The one man in all of the mid-Atlantic who owns a snowblower would be set upon by marauding bands of insurance-salesmen-turned-thugs desperate to get their Priuses out of their driveways. But even with the coveted machine at their disposal, they would be unable to figure out the technology.

“Blast it, Royston! Clearly this machine runs on some form of plasma not of this world! We will never get it started in time to save our herb gardens!”

And then I would appear, all dashing in my Wolverine boots, Goretex gloves and black knit cap.

“Stand back!” I would tell them. “I’m from Maine. Why, we once had a storm in which 2 feet of snow fell in the form of one giant snowflake!”

And I would teach the sobbing people in their loafers and immaculately creased slacks the very basics of winter survival.

“No, Carlton! The blade of the shovel does not eat and swallow the snow. You have to pick it up and throw it. Stanley! Put away those tax forms and help us push this hybrid out of the street.”

I would be hailed as a God, like the dude who first showed primitive man how fire could be used to cook food or light off fireworks. I could even imagine the headline:

STUNNINGLY HANDSOME MAINE MAN SAVES NEAR SOUTH! PARADE PLANNED IN NEWLY ESTABLISHED LAFLAMMEOPOLIS

But it didn’t happen that way.

The area around Annapolis, in which I was a guest, got walloped by nearly 30 inches of snow. It was a storm that just kept coming and coming in a way that made you suspect it might be biblical. And at the start of it, there were people clogging the stores, sure. They bought water and batteries and candles, just like we do up here.

Yet, they were no more or less panicked than we get here in the North — where it’s SUPPOSED to snow for two days straight — before every storm.

“Drive safe,” a fellow said to me at a Best Buy roughly two hours into the storm.

“Enjoy the snow,” said a man who served me coffee.

No one was sobbing and suggesting the end was near.

And then it came, great big curtains of snow that turned the world white and filled the streets. It came with whistling winds and bitter cold. In the light of morning, the landscape was filled with it, but the snow was still coming.

They are not as fast with the plows down in that place between North and South, it’s true. In the morning, three of us were out with shovels, trying to clear not only the driveway but the dead-end street on which we were trapped. If you live off a main road in the Mid-Atlantic, brother, you have a better chance of spotting a pterodactyl than a snowplow.

And yet, that was not the end of it. As my wife, my sister-in-law and I tried to dig out the equivalent of the Panama Canal, we were joined by others. A man who lived across the street came out with his two kids and one shovel. A husband and wife mortician team who live next door (you think I’m making that up, don’t you?) got into the shoveling party.

In one afternoon in a suburb of Annapolis, I did more shoveling than I have over an entire lifetime in Maine. And when we were done, three houses were reconnected to a passable main road. All along that road, others were devising ways out of the cold, white quagmire.

Closer to the city, people were out in pickup trucks, delivering kids to hills on which to slide. Teenagers were obnoxious on four-wheelers at the side of roads with banks the size of small mountains. I saw one dude out there on a tractor.

A Safeway tried to open for business, but its roof collapsed. Down the street, a store called Wawa (which I will forever remember like a lover met on a cold night in a strange town) was going full bore. They served up food and gave away free coffee. Not one person inside the store bitched or moaned about the storm. None was curled into a fetal position and I wasn’t asked to teach survivors the nuances of using an ice scraper.

And so ended my quest to have LaFlammeopolis added to the map. The people of the Mid-Atlantic know how to survive a storm.

I’m not saying Mainers don’t possess the rugged individualism we were once famous for. I’m only saying it’s no longer a monopoly.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can praise his snowstorm acumen at [email protected].