Opinion: Summertime makes quick exit along river

Talk about it

Well, that was a change of seasons.

Perhaps it was different where you live, but out along the Missouri River, summer turned to fall sometime between Sunday evening and Monday morning. A sunny, 80-plus degree Sunday afternoon turned into a cloudy, 56-degree Monday morning, with showers to dampen streets and lawns.

I knew it was coming. In these days of The Weather Channel and instant updates from the local meteorologists, it’s impossible not to know what’s supposed to come next in local weather. I’m a Weather Channel junkie, so I’m usually up on the hour-by-hour, the weekend forecast and the 10-day outlook.

They aren’t always right. A couple of weekends ago, the forecast was for winds reaching 25 mph in the Pierre area. Based on that and on the fairly significant breeze that was present by mid-morning that Saturday, we decided against a day on the river. Instead, we caught up on some chores and tasks around the house and yard. It was a good thing to do and a productive time, in the sense that a person who lives in a 100-year-old house must take time regularly to replace, repair and reinstall things that wear out, fall off or simply give up the ghost.

That’s all fine and dandy, but it’s also a Saturday spent somewhere besides on the water in a summer that was woefully short of river time. We were keenly aware of that late in the day when we drove to Cow Creek to listen to our son and his band, Jack Straw. They were playing an outdoor gig at a place that offer a view of the river. The drive to Cow Creek offered even more river views, and the surface of Lake Oahe was as flat as a table top.

Folks who had been in the area most of the day told us the river was like that all afternoon, hardly a breath of wind.

“But it was supposed to be blowing a gale and raising white-caps from here to Pollock,” I sputtered.

The folks who had been in the area most of the day just shrugged. What could they do if someone planned his day around a weather forecast?

Remembering that, I went to bed this past Sunday evening knowing the forecast for Labor Day was chilly, windy and wet but wondering if there was a chance it might be warm, calm and dry. It wasn’t. It was all the weather folks said it would be, maybe even a bit cooler than forecast.

You couldn’t script a more symbolic change of weather to mark the traditional, if not calendar, end of summer than the Sunday-Monday turnaround. We had talked about the coming change on Sunday afternoon during a kayak trip from Oahe Dam down toward the river bridges between Pierre and Fort Pierre.

The trip itself was, in hindsight, a symbolic change of seasons. Six of us, old friends whose relationship always has included huge doses of summertime on the Missouri River, put kayaks in at the marina just below the dam. As I say, we were headed toward the river bridges, where one couple has a home in what I call the canal district. Along the way, we paused for watermelon and licorice, talked idly about family and work and retirement and simply whiled away the afternoon together, as we’ve done for most of 40 years now.

We had to work at it, though. Heading downstream, we had quite a following current but a strong headwind. If we stopped paddling to eat or talk, we went nowhere. We hung in a transition, sort of like the one between summer and fall overnight Sunday. We had the current trying to push us forward and the wind trying to reverse our direction. When we decided we weren’t going to make it to the canals, we turned back. The wind at our backs didn’t overcome the downstream current, and we had to paddle steadily to make headway. Finally, we gave up and beached midway between start and finish. Dick walked to get his pickup.

We may be on the river again this year, but it will no longer be summer.

Terry Woster’s columns are published Wednesdays and Saturdays in The Daily Republic.

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