The homestead on Homan’s Pond Road is a white-clapboard Cape Cod that has been in the same family since 1903. The pond that gave the road its name — and the Homan family its claim to town fame — is visible from the kitchen window, a flat sheet of gray-white ice that stretches twelve acres to the tree line.
Amos Homan, 68, has lived his entire life within sight of that surface. It has made him, by a wide margin, the most successful Ice-Out predictor in Willow Creek history.
“I’ve won four times,” Homan says, pouring a cup of coffee at his kitchen table. “1996, 2002, 2011, 2018. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that nobody else has won more than twice, and most people have never won at all.”
The secret, if it can be called a secret, is a notoriously elaborate system involving three instruments and one incorporeal source: a wall thermometer, a barometer, a daily wind log — and what Homan calls “the feel in my knees.”
“The knees are the hardest part to calibrate,” he says, straight-faced. “They’re accurate within about a three-day window, but they don’t work at all in dry weather. It’s a humidity thing.”
Homan began entering the Ice-Out in 1977, the same year he married his late wife, Eleanor. He won his first title in 1996, a victory he describes as “beginner’s luck that I’ve been trying to replicate ever since.” The second came after he started keeping a daily log of overnight low temperatures and wind direction, a practice he has maintained for more than three decades.
“I’ve got thirty-four years of data in those notebooks,” he says. “Temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure, ice conditions on the day of the break. I could probably publish a paper, if I felt like fighting with the academic peer-review process.”
He has been featured in two Bangor Daily News articles about the Ice-Out, and local residents occasionally stop him at the general store to ask for his prediction for the current year. He does not give it.
“The moment I tell someone, I’ve jinxed it,” he says. “I’ve explained this to the entire town for twenty years. They still ask. I still don’t tell them.”
This year, Homan says his knees are telling him something unusual. “Later than most people think. That’s all I’ll say. Well — that and the fact that I’ve got a shot at number five. And nobody’s ever done that.”