The End of Summer
By John Luthens
It ended with my nephews jumping from the end of a dock into Pewaukee Lake. It was nine in the morning, with sun sparkling onto the green water and cotton ball clouds rolling lazily above. My brother and I stood laughing, and indeed it was the two of us who had put the idea in the kids’ heads in the first place.
On the surface it didn’t seem unusual-just another summer morning. But it was the end of summer, the end of my brother’s family vacation, and no one had swimming trunks on-just traveling clothes.
My sister-in-law was not happy with the impulsive morning dip, because they were slated to start the drive back to their home in Colorado in about five minutes. The family had come to visit their old home-state, staying on the lake in a rented house, with family and friends pouring in non-stop. It was a good vacation, but school starts in Colorado next week. It was time to get back to reality, and she wasn’t pleased about starting the school season with a good dose of Pewaukee Lake hanging in the car for about 1000 miles.
A beat-up fishing rod with an oversized-bobber lay in the dock weeds as a reminder of a well-spent week, the bobber lazily twirling as my nephews jumped. It was one last chance to let the boys hang onto summer, and to tell the world that they were just not quite ready to come back. We withstood the withering gaze of my sister-in-law, and if my wife reads this column, then I’m in for a tongue-lashing myself.
My brother and I really couldn’t help it, because after all, we did the same kind of impulsive, endless summer swim ourselves some twenty years ago, before work, family, and life in general came along and happened to us. We just did it on a grander scale.
I’d finished four years of college; still some credits shy of a journalism major, while my brother was working into his third year of an architectural degree. We both worked summer jobs in Milwaukee to stockpile money for the upcoming school year.
I think I’d been reading too many crazy-idea books, like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, so I’ll take the credit-or the blame, if you will. I convinced my brother that it would be a good idea to skip the upcoming semester and set out traveling the country for a few months.
I could write, he could draw; but instead of doing it in the classroom, we’d do it wherever the road happened to take us. We had our tuition money, we were still young. School and life be damned. So we bartered an old, green 1972 Chevy Nova off of a north-country farmer, and that is precisely what we set out to do.
We left Milwaukee and higher education behind, with the Nova’s back seat full of camping gear and its trunk full of nonperishable staples consisting of a whole lot of Spaghettios. There was fishing gear too, because if worse came to worse, we figured we could live off the fat of the land.
I also threw in my .177 caliber target air pistol, with a mounted 3x scope. It was a crack-shot gun for squirrels at up to 50 yards. I could fill up a crock pot full of delicious meat in no time flat in the northern oak woods. Granted, we weren’t planning on heading north. We were heading for the Appalachian Mountains.
I wasn’t sure about game laws in any other state but Wisconsin, but we were planning for worst case survival scenarios, and at any rate we figured the long barreled gun with mounted scope looked intimidating enough to scare off any bandits we might encounter along the way. My brother and I might have had some college education under our belts, but that didn’t mean we were all that smart about some things.
A week into the trip found us in the West Virginia Mountain Highlands. The leaves were turning color, and it got well below freezing at night. Old farmsteads and campsites appeared, tucked in the mist covered hills. We hiked long mountain trails, crossing fallen logs over steep ravines and basking in our new found freedom.
I kept a detailed journal of our travels, and my brother drew some fine sketches in his notepad. I can still go back today and read the exact point that it started raining and sleeting, and the point vividly jumps out of my journal that it didn’t stop for three days.
The Nova made the East Coast in record time, and we dried our gear for a night in a small motel outside Atlantic City. It was extravagant money, considering we were getting quite adept at rolling into a likely camping spot at dusk, throwing up our tent, and escaping in the pre-dawn hours before anyone could come around looking for a fee to collect.
Camping our way down the Eastern Seaboard, we hiked out onto remote peninsulas, packing in our own water and living in the dunes by the ocean. When the moon came out at night, it washed the whole sea grass desert in white, and we’d sit on the dunes and watch dolphins leaping in the ocean.
On a bay-washed stretch in North Carolina, we bought cheap wire crab pots and tried our hand at crab fishing, using cut pieces of squid for bait. We managed to entice one crab, but honestly, I’ve caught bigger crayfish in the local pond.
That was also the night we took a road trip and raided a woodlot for dead fire wood. There was no driftwood in sight on our beach, so we did what we had to do. Some neighboring campers traded us a nice meal of linguini and clam sauce for a share of our ill-begotten wood.
We tried our hand at surf fishing too; but with our light Wisconsin tackle rigs, it was hard getting the cut bait out into the surf. I ended up swimming the bait out into the ocean. We were fishing at night in shark waters. Like I said, we weren’t all that smart for college-educated boys.
Keeping up on academic learning, we visited the Wright Brother’s Kitty Hawk, Civil War battlefields, and any other points of history we encountered along the way that didn’t charge an admission.
One bright fall afternoon, we discovered the largest radio satellite observatory in the country. The radio dishes were hundreds of feet in diameter, sitting atop the crest of Appalachian mountain and shooting their pulsar-detecting waves into space. We wandered beneath the dishes, looking at the pinnacles of space technology pointed towards the cosmos, with green valleys and rolling wooded hills surrounding us for miles.
The park rangers called us Yankees in Georgia, and we hopped our way from a black water Cyprus swamp camp that hung heavy with Spanish moss, and had an old Southern Plantation as a backdrop, and headed down into the middle of the Florida Keys.
My journal slowly degenerated into a manifesto, filling up with the wonders of the country, along with philosophy on the state of the land and environment. There are winding poems in there too, and when I read some of the entries today, I come away with the impression that I was either a genius or a deranged gypsy.
I could fill a book with the people we met in the Florida Keys alone. After days spent snorkeling on the reef, diving down in the channels to inspect lobster traps, and to wonder if the fishermen might miss a few lobsters if we raided one, we sat around a campfire by the reef-protected water at night and talked to other wanderers-some of them sane, and some of them a little questionable. My brother and I could pass no judgment. We were starting to look a little questionable ourselves.
Finally, somewhere on the gulf coast, in a bayou outside of New Orleans, we ran out of ambition for the road. We’d spent the day making shell necklaces on the beach, but unless we could sell them to the winter tourists, we had to call a halt to our journey because we’d run through our school money too. Our endless summer was over. We reluctantly hit Milwaukee from New Orleans in one non-stop shot.
The end of summer came anyway. We just delayed it a little longer. We had to go back to school eventually. We had to go back to life eventually.
My brother got a taste for the mountains, taking his sketch pad and his hiking boots to Boulder, Colorado. He’s got a great job and a wonderful family there. He loves the mountains.
Myself, I don’t believe I’ll ever leave Wisconsin. I’ve seen the road. I learned things out there that school couldn’t teach me. There are enough paths in this state to keep me happily occupied for a lifetime.
But usually, somewhere round about the start of the school year, I take out my old journal and remember how it once was when summer never ended.
I wonder what happened to that old green Nova. I wonder if I might borrow the kid’s school money and find another one like it. It was a heck of a good camping car.