Editors note: While he was standing on the steeple of the First Parish Church on Feb. 3 and 4, Assistant Pastor Eric Smith recorded some of his thoughts about his experience for the American Journal. The following are excerpts from Smith’s recordings.

5 p.m.

It’s five o’clock here on the steeple at First Parish Church in Gorham. We’re almost done with the first quarter of our around-the clock food drive. The rain has finally stopped. It’s the first time I’ve dared take the recorder out. I went through three raincoats in the first four hours in the driving rain.

The wind was not too bad, although there were several gusts of wind that certainly got my attention and the steeple was moving around just a little bit which I’m fairly used to. Although a few of the reporters that were inside talking to me out the window were not quite so prepared for the steeple to be moving that much, but I feel pretty secure up here.

I can see now about as far as I could when it was raining which is just to the first big hill line around to the east into Portland. Can’t see Portland yet although that would be nice if that cleared up a bit. The sun has definitely gone down. We’ve put our auxiliary lights up, some down below for where our volunteers are collecting and some up here on our sign and on the clock face where I am standing.

Our junior pilgrim fellowship, which is our middle school youth group, as well as quite a few of our younger Sunday school children have been here for an hour or more with signs. A lot of them are on the sidewalks down below and some are across the street waving and calling to cars as people drive by asking them to bring food for the food drive. I’ve been told that we’re up to about 600 pounds of food and several hundred dollars so far in donations. That’s good for the first quarter – which is generally fairly slow compared to what happens in the evening. We should bring in quite a bit more per hour at this point.

As I’m speaking, a few more people are walking in with bags of food. We did have to replace our signs about an hour ago.

12:30 a.m.

Fog has rolled back in again. It’s moved in and out several times. Sometimes it’s as clear as day and sometimes you can barely see across the street.

It’s quieted down after a fairly steady evening of both the youth groups being here and having lots of noise and lots of people dropping off food, which has been great to see. But for the last hour or so the only ones on the streets of Gorham are the USM students making their way to their places.

I can watch the fog blowing by with the spotlight up here and see all the individual water droplets. It’s kind of fun to watch but is a little dizzying as well.

It seems like everyone has bundled up for the night and the youth group has been tucked in. So, I’m about to head inside the clock to catch a couple hours of sleep if I can, and come back out when it will be a little less damp outside.