"Summer Days"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Summer Days”

June 19, 2021

 

“In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life,

endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green

branches from the underside, translating them into s new language.”

                                                                                                            E.B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                            Here is New York, 1949

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Written, as White notes in his foreword,

                                                                                                           “…in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell.” 

 

On the eve of the summer solstice, June 21, 2008 Caroline and I, as guests of a friend, attended a black-tie benefit at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, one of the world’s most beautiful museums. At 58.8 degrees north, there were only six hours of night, a strange sensation for someone living in Connecticut, 1300 miles south and 4,000 miles west.

 

Forty-eight years earlier, in the summer of 1960, I had a summer job working with a Canadian mineral exploration company, which was owned by Thayer Lindsley (a friend of my parents) and led by Doug Wilmot, along the South Nahanni River on the border of the Yukon in Canada’s Northwest Territories. We were close to the 61^st Parallel, or about 850 miles north of the U.S.-Canadian border. I recall traipsing up dried-up-river beds, carrying a pick looking for minerals and a rifle, in case of an unfriendly Grizzly. At night, lying in my sleeping bag, I was happy that night creatures had only a few hours to make their rounds. 

 

Two years later, on August 11^th, I was at Fort Dix, beginning eight weeks of basic training. The camp, which no longer functions as an Army training center, sat on 6,500 acres in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Fort Dix had been integrated eleven years earlier. By my day all recruits, regardless of race or class, were treated with equal disrespect – a necessary tactic to mold us into the soldiers we were to become. I was assigned to Company A, of the Third Training Regiment, where we were taught to become “the ultimate weapon” – an optimistic goal for a bunch of Army reservists. That summer we marched along hot, dusty roads; crawled under barbwire with machine guns firing live ammunition over our heads; trained with bayonets (which I prayed I would never have to use); bivouacked in fields and crawled through swamps in night-time maneuvers. In my yearbook there is a photo of me with two friends, Jerry (Girard) Stein and Marcel Shwergold. Cigarettes in hand, we are on a ten-minute break.

 

In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck wrote: “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” An understandable sentiment for a child who grew up in New Hampshire. In her novel To Catch a Mockingbird, with Scout speaking, Harper Lee wrote: “Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat…” Looking back, my hotly anticipated summer days were full: Summer began with a 4^th of July baseball game in Wellesley where my father grew up, and it ended just before Labor Day with a trip to the East River section of Madison, Connecticut, where my mother grew up. In between, we rode horses through the woods and along dirt roads and sometimes competed in local horseshows. We swam in Nubanusit Lake, Willard Pond, Dublin Lake, but most often in Norway Pond, which is in the center of Hancock village, four miles from our home. In the evenings, we caught fireflies, which “never equal stars in size”[1], and inhaled the soft, sweet smells of New Hampshire’s countryside. We picked blackberries on Cobb’s Hill and highbush blueberries in the “next field.” We ate watermelon in the backyard off a table my father had made with wire mesh, so no need to wipe it clean. Going to bed on the sleeping porch, we witnessed eerie shadows cast by trees, as moonlight fell on the Goat Pasture. In his poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm,” Wallace Stevens wrote: “The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”

 

As I grew older, summer jobs consumed much of the daytime – working in gardens, haying, giving riding lessons and working with construction crews. Coming home for summers from boarding school, I felt like Nick Carraway: “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees…I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”[2]  In the evenings, we attended square dances in nearby townhalls and – four times a summer – formal dances at the Dublin Lake Club, with Lester Lanin in attendance, a strange contrast to my mornings working in a hayfield. In my 1947 Ford coupe (owned jointly with my sister), a friend and I would take girls to drive-in movies in Keene.

 

Sunday will be the start of my 81^st summer. Memories run together. In 1995, we left Greenwich for Old Lyme (with a small apartment in New York). Summer weekends were spent sculling the marsh creeks along the Connecticut River’s estuary; swimming, playing “at” golf and tennis and kayaking with grandchildren. We continued to spend August in Rumson, New Jersey where my wife had spent her childhood summers, and I would take the 6:00AM Fast Ferry into New York from the Highlands. June months of twenty-four and twenty-three years ago saw two of our children married, and during the summers of 2000, 2002 and 2008 three of our ten grandchildren were born, including the oldest and the youngest.

 

Looking back on all those summers, I treasure memories of childhood, summer jobs, falling in love, watching our children laugh, play and grow up, and then watch their children do the same. These memories bring wistful smiles on languid summer days when blue skies lure us to the fields and paths that surround where we live. We marvel at the gift nature has wrought – myriad shades of green, and the wildlife that share this precious planet. “Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream.”[3] The days will get shorter as August melds into September. It is preparation for the autumn, which will see much of plant and wildlife take long siestas, storing strength for the long winter and spring’s renewal. In like manner, we store up memories for our fall and winter evenings. But in the meantime, we have the start of summer days.