JACKMAN, Maine — Sunrise was still two hours away when Thad Lacasse steered his Dodge Durango through the early-morning darkness and into the empty parking lot of the Forest Hills Consolidated School.
It was barely 4 a.m., but already the school’s jovial third-year principal had been up for hours — texting with his superintendent, driving the town’s rural roads, and poring over a winter weather report so daunting that it had him considering what, in this nails-tough town of around 700, amounted to the unthinkable.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” Lacasse said, as he unlocked the door to the school and made his way down a dark hallway toward the front office. “Today is the day we might break The Streak.” This was no small matter. “The Streak,” as it’s known here, had long been a part of the civic identity.
For at least five years, the school had not been canceled because of snow.
Not on Nov. 28, 2018, when this tiny town in northwestern Maine was hit with 12 inches.
Not on March 15, 2017, when 13 inches was dumped on the community.
And not earlier this month, when some 14 inches blanketed the town over a two-day stretch.
For the school’s 150 students, Lacasse liked to joke, a snow day was like a mythical creature: “They know it exists, but they’ve never actually seen it.”
But then came Thursday, and an impending storm that, by all accounts, was shaping up to be a doozy.
Up to 12 inches of snow was expected over the course of the day. The National Weather Service had issued a winter storm warning for the area, cautioning against travel and warning of 40 mile-an-hour winds. It was the type of storm that the Boston area has thus far escaped in what has been a mild Massachusetts winter.
Worse, the meat of the storm was predicted to hit Jackman between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., with as much as 3 inches of accumulation per hour — meaning that while getting students to school wouldn’t be a problem, getting them home would be another matter entirely.
As he fell into his desk chair, cup of coffee in hand, Lacasse wore the tortured expression of a man with no good options.
Already, the school’s plow guy — Eric Hall — was clamoring for a cancellation, worried he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the expected snowfall. The boys basketball coach — whose team would be playing in Maine’s state title game on Saturday and was counting on Thursday as a practice day — had made it abundantly clear, on the other hand, that he would very much like school to go on as planned.
Even at home, Lacasse hadn’t been able to escape the lobbying. “I got a lot of laundry to catch up on,” his wife, who teaches kindergarten at Forest Hills, had mentioned the day before. “Tomorrow would be a great day to do it.”
But there was also a reputation to uphold.
Nestled just 16 miles from the Canadian border, Jackman boasts an abundance of snowmobile trails, roadside motels, and self-reliance. It is a town of logging and ice fishing, a place where camouflage is all but woven into the civic DNA. (“How can a man who can hit a deer at 200 yards keep missing the toilet?” reads one wall decoration at the local gas station.)
“I used to love ‘Northern Exposure,’ ” said Rae Fournier-Wren, a long-term substitute at Forest Hills who used to teach in the Bangor area. “And this is it. To a ‘t.’ ”
Still, the town’s isolation — the closest Walmart, residents like to point out, is 72 miles away — has forged a certain resolve among residents.
Other towns might shut down at the threat of a few inches of snow; in Jackman, where the snow never seems to stop, they simply pull on their boots and go about their business.
“Even when we go to the dentist in Skowhegan [70 miles south], people who live five minutes down the road will have canceled, and we show up like it’s nothing,” said Stephanie Desjardins, who works at the nearby Moose River Lumber Co. and has three sons who attend Forest Hills.
Now, in his office, Lacasse turned on WABI Channel 5 news in Bangor and listened as a weatherman offered his latest predictions.
On a nearby wall clock, the minutes ticked by.
From his desk, Lacasse fired off text messages. He checked in with the town’s two bus drivers. He read and reread the local forecast, searching for some indication that it was possible to keep The Streak alive.
In the end, though, it never came.
At 5:30, with a look resembling resignation, Lacasse phoned his assistant, Steffanie Begin, and asked her to send a message out over the school’s automated phone system, alerting parents that school would be canceled.
For a few moments, there was surprised silence on the other end of the line.
“OK,” she said finally.
From there, it was a matter of logistics. He called the school cook — who also happens to be his aunt — and told her she could go back to bed. He called the bus driver from down in The Forks, where a handful of students are bused from each morning. He logged on to the WABI website, navigated over to the school closures page, and, for the first time ever, clicked “Closed.”
“I’m already anticipating the Facebook messages from my fellow administrators from across the state,” he said, smiling as he gathered his things and headed back to his SUV.
By 7 a.m. Thursday, the roads would be covered. By noon, falling snow would be whipping so hard and thick you couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of you. And by 5 p.m., it would still be falling in thick, wet flakes, burying parked vehicles and quickly erasing the work of anyone who’d made the mistake of trying to get their shoveling done early.
By the next day, however — despite continued snowfall and temperatures that had dipped into the midteens — Forest Hills would be once again humming.
Students and staff arrived, by bus, by snowmobile, and, in at least one case, by utility terrain vehicle, laughing and gossiping as they streamed through the school’s front entrance, snow caked to their jackets and backpacks.
It was Friday morning, and a new streak had begun.
Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan.arnett@globe.com.