Life May Be Short, But Summer Is Shorter

By Sutton R. Stokes, 9-29-08

	Caption: It's always thrilling when the trees out by the gas station start changing colors.

Just before Labor Day, Amy and I finally got around to partaking in the local custom of floating down the Blackfoot River on truck inner tubes. The float took longer than we’d planned, which would have been fine except that it made us late for our own barbecue, scheduled for 5 p.m. that afternoon.

At 5:45, as we rattled at high speed along the gravel road that serves the put-ins north of Johnsrud Park, returning the other drivers to their cars, I felt frustrated partly at the river conditions that had slowed us down but mostly at myself for trying to pack more into the day than could reasonably fit. I felt stupid for having overlooked the obvious: I am not the center of the universe, and nature will not be contained in the little squares of a day planner.

Still, there is something about the end of summer that can trigger a desperation to fit it all in. Who doesn’t start out at the beginning of summer dreaming of all the things he is going to do this year, and who ever ticks off every item on the list?

This problem becomes more pronounced as we age, not just because we get busier with each passing year but also because summer — the season of freedom when we are young — becomes associated with youth as we grow older. The unarticulated item casting its shadow over the rest of the list is something like “get a stronger grip on life as it speeds ever faster past.”

Easier said than done, of course.

This was the summer when I was going to work my way down the Bitterroot Range with a day hike up a new canyon each week. I bought $300 worth of equipment for the purpose, but, as it turned out, I made only one such outing. I did however climb to the “L” on Mt. Jumbo (the “M” on Mt. Sentinel having long since fallen to my mountaineering prowess), though it’s doubtful I needed to bring along my whole survival kit.

This was also the summer when I was going to start gardening on my own. For a little while I carried a picture of myself as a gardener in my head — sun hat on, passing hot Saturday afternoons with my hands in the dirt, plucking dead leaves and tidying up around my crops.

It was a nice picture, but it never finished developing. Suddenly it was too late even for cheater tomato plants, and then one week the grass got away from me and I stopped cutting it altogether. It grew knee high and went to seed, then parched and turned yellow from lack of water. Some evenings I would sit on the back porch drinking a beer and gazing over the tall stalks as they danced in the breeze. If I squinted, the yard looked a little like a field of wheat, which turned out to be as close as I got to agriculture this summer.

Oh, well. Fall is more my season anyway. The cool nights and brisk mornings stir my blood and snap me out of summer’s torpor. Perhaps the turning of this season triggers primal urges, some lizard part of my brain waking to remind me that I don’t have much longer to finish preparing for winter. (The lizard is of course very disappointed in how our harvest looks this year.)

Or perhaps it is just my early conditioning by the academic calendar to think of the fall as a time of renewal. I’ve been out of school for many years now, but all I have to do is open the windows at night to the crickets’ song and I can smell the new notebooks, hear the crack of a pencil box opening for the first time, and feel the stiff, scratchy jeans saved for the first day of school. As the leaves change color and the nights grow longer, I feel ready for new undertakings and possibilities.

So it’s nice to finally live in a place where summer doesn’t overstay its welcome. Back in Baltimore, what should be the dog days of August have a way of hanging on well into September, and one is lucky if there is by Halloween night the slightest touch of crispness in the air. The old folks tell of years when there was snow by Thanksgiving, but hardly anyone believes them anymore.

Here in Missoula, though, summer is out the door right on time, like a television show cancelled before it jumps the shark. Two days before the equinox, a cold wind brought down a few bushels of yellow leaves from the white basswood in the park across the street from our house, and — as I drove across the Madison Street bridge later in the week — I noticed that the Bitterroots were already putting on their winter coats of snow. The trick-or-treat candy aisles have sprouted in the supermarkets, and most nights there is the faintest hint of gun oil on the breeze.

As for summer, we should probably just put it out of our minds. There’s always next year, if we’re lucky.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.