LAMOINE — There are snowmen, and then there are snow giants.
And given the amount of snow that has fallen in Maine in the past month, it seems inevitable that snow giants would appear this winter.
One such behemoth materialized this weekend in the dooryard of a local man who, with his two sons and one of their friends, decided that the enormous mound of plowed snow outside the family’s Route 184 home could serve a better purpose.
So they set to work, carving and shaping and filling in until the mountain of snow took on a familiar wintertime profile, though on a much bigger scale. Now the three-tiered snowman, complete with round saw blades and grinding disks for buttons and eyes and an inverted garbage can for a hat, sits facing the mouth of the driveway, causing double-takes by passers-by who might or might not have seen photos of the giant proliferating across the Internet via social media.
The snowman stands about 15 feet tall and, according to homeowner Sean McLaughlin, is a little wider at the base. It may not rival two more than 100-foot-tall titans that were built 7 and 16 years ago in Bethel, but it quickly is becoming an attraction for winter-weary residents looking for a fun diversion, he said.
“‘I’m so tired of winter, I’m so cold,’” McLaughlin said, sounding a refrain that he said has become fairly common over the past few weeks. “Everyone’s going to like seeing (the snowman).”
The name his sons and friend chose for the hulking figure is, appropriately, “Stormageddon,” he added.
McLaughlin said he’s almost finished building a new home on the site — his old house was destroyed by fire nearly three years ago — and has been using an excavator he bought to help build the new house to clear snow out of the yard. The resulting mound has been growing as one snowstorm after another has blown through Maine over the past month.
On Saturday, he and his two boys — Remmington, 16, and Jasper, 14 — got to work, along with their friend Kaleb Payson. They piled snow on top of the plowed mound, forming the belly layer and then the head on top of that. After a few hours of packing and shaping, he said, they started to dress it up with items from the home building site.
After placing the buttons and eyes, they found a plow truck light to use as a nose and some tree branches they stuck on as arms, Sean McLaughlin said. They even went to Marden’s in Ellsworth and, for a few dollars, bought a long remnant of red fabric to use as a scarf.
It was when the accessories started going on around 3 p.m. Saturday that passers-by started to stop and admire their work, he said. Dozens of people stopped by Saturday and Sunday to gawk at the snowman and to take pictures, which McLaughlin said was fun for him and his boys.
He said that the people who stopped “kind of forgot it was cold and wintry out,” at least for a little while.
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