We're only days away from the official start of summer. With summer comes a lot; days in the sun, fishing, hiking, tending the grill, or just sitting in a lounge chair with an ice-cold beverage. How we observe summer varies a lot in different parts of the country; when I was a kid, while my counterparts in California were hanging out on golden-sand beaches, my buddies and I were swimming in the muddy Mississippi, which often resulted in us coming out of the water wearing a pound or two of black mud.
Still, it's summer, and there are plenty of long, glorious summer days ahead - and summer nights, too, unless you're here in the Great Land, where we don't really have nights in the summer. But summer nights can be as wonderful as the days, and when I was a kid, back in Allamakee County, Iowa, I prized summer nights every bit as much as the days.
My old partner-in-mischief Jon insisted (and still does) that the fishing was better at night. So we spent a lot of time wandering from creek to creek, in the pitch-dark, through the woods. Moving from creek to creek, say from Bear Creek to Waterloo Creek, meant climbing a hill, walking across "up top," which usually meant walking through a pasture or a cornfield, then descending into the next valley.
I might point out that walking through a pasture in the dark presents certain difficulties, as it's harder to see the things that cattle generally litter pastures with.
Even so, it was the things we would hear and see along the way that made those summer nights so great. As evening began to turn to night, the wild turkeys would fly up to roost. On my parents' land, that meant the huge white oaks on the top of the hill. A wild turkey flying in heavy timber sounds like a cross between a bass drum and a plane crash. Once they were settled, they would chat with drowsy clucks for a while before going to sleep.
In spring, on the edges of meadows and pastures, the woodcock - my grandfather called the timberdoodles - would start their mating dances. The males would issue their repeated "peent" calls, then fly off into an ascending spiral, where you could just hear their twittering call coming from a darkening sky.
When the woodcocks were winding down, the whippoorwills would start up. Whippoorwills are insect-eaters, belonging to the order Caprimulgidae, or the nightjars. They are cousins to the nighthawks so common in the eastern United States, as well as to the Chuck-Wills-Widow of the South. Settled in the litter of a forest floor, even in daylight, they are almost invisible. Their calls at night can go on and on; my father and I once stopped counting one whippoorwill's calls when he hit a hundred without stopping.Also through the night were the Barred Owls, whose eight-note hoots were broken up by bouts of spine-tingling barks, gibbers, and wails that could have come directly out of an old Hammer films horror movie. When one of these birds suddenly encounters another, some truly horrifying sounds ensue, with their threats ringing back and forth in the treetops. I can't think of anything that will make a 12-year-old boy, laden with fishing tackle, take to his heels any more than one of these fights.
And maybe that's the thing about summer nights. In so many ways, the summer nights were times for adventure in a way the days weren't. When we got a little older, of course, my buddies and I started having notions about different kinds of adventures in those long summer nights, but that's a story for another time.My experiences weren't unique to northeast Iowa; any kid in the upper Midwest may have had similar adventures. There have been others; I remember a night in a tent in Colorado's Routt National Forest, when my wife and I laid awake listening to a cow elk calling, her calf calling back, and the two sounds getting closer and closer on the mountainside above our camp until they finally merged, and silence resumed. You could almost hear the elk calf calling, "Mama! Mama?" The cow would reply, "It's OK, I'm coming." I'm anthropomorphizing, of course, but that's still what it sounded like.
Winters can be great, too, days and nights. Up here in Alaska, in winter, we actually have nights; in fact, the night in an Alaskan winter takes a big chunk out of the day. But it's the nights here when we hear our local wolf pack howling back in the bush, and now and then see the darkened silhouette of our local Great Grey Owl passing overhead.
See Also: Deep Freeze: Most of the US Needs to Prepare Itself As Polar Vortex 2.0 Comes to Town
On the Brighter Side: A Magnificent Natural Spectacle to Be Widely Visible Thursday Night
Even so. There's nothing like a summer night.
As you already know, if you've been reading these virtual pages for long, a lot is going on in the United States and the rest of this poor, troubled world. But summer's coming. Take some time to enjoy it; the days and, yes, the nights. Make the most of this time of year, because winter will be back soon enough.
