High summer is coming upon us, that free and easy time when you've worn flip-flops for so long that the whole concept of felt-insulated pac boots seems ludicrous.
High summer is raspberries and the first of the green beans and fireweed along the roads. It's someone playing guitar on the Lakewalk and baby grouse flushing along the Superior Hiking Trail.
In a land defined by its winters, high summer is that time when you actually begin believing that this good fortune could last. We get deluded into thinking we deserve to live in this timeless way, idly chatting with friends in the bleachers at Little League games, leaping off docks for late-evening swims or having dinner on decks overlooking the Lakewalk.
But temptation lurks in a life this easy, and it preys most heavily on adolescents. This was the time of summer when, as a kid, my buddies and I would get hold of a magnifying glass. Outside, with the high-summer sun lasering through it, a magnifying glass was a powerful tool. This is how we discovered fire. We magnified pieces of Kleenex and paper and leaves, watching our little rings of fire consume cellulose.
Cool.
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In college, when my brother and I did all the greens-keeping at a small-town golf course, my brother's mind began to wander one day while mowing greens. I noticed a circle of dead grass about a foot in diameter on No. 4 green one day. I asked Jim about it.
"Yeah," he said sheepishly. "One day I peed there just to see what it would do to the grass."
High summer. Boredom. Curiosity.
When our daughter was in high school, she and a friend would get bored about this time of the summer despite having summer jobs. So, to shake off their malaise, they would take a rubber rat down to Canal Park and place it on the sidewalk near those fountains where the water spurts out the mouths of sturgeons. Then they'd sit back on a bench to watch unsuspecting tourists leap away in fear.
I don't think they ran that by Visit Duluth.
When we weren't putting up hay for farmers during high summer, my buddy Steve Lukert and I would take his .22-caliber rifle and hunt bullfrogs around farm ponds. Bullfrogs have decent drumsticks, and Steve's mom would always deep-fry them for us, so it wasn't like we were just doing idle slaughter. Still, two teenage boys with a rifle and time on their hands is never a great combination.
I remember Steve finishing off a wounded bullfrog, right at our feet, on a wide mud flat one day. The shock created by the power of that bullet entering the mud was astounding. It seemed like mud rained down on us for 30 seconds. That was before the days of gun safety, where you learn not to do such stupid things.
But it was high summer. We needed frogs. We had a gun.
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High summer is upon us again.
Phyllis and I still have that rubber rat. Maybe we'll head down to Canal Park this evening.
Sam Cook is a Duluth News Tribune columnist and outdoors writer. Reach him at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com . Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/samcookoutdoors .
