Late summer stirs urge to stay in Maine forever

Even though I anticipate it all year, late summer always surprises me.

You can see it coming by mid-July. Patches of meadow grass redden and brown. Goldenrod sends up the first ranks of its empire. Dusty-pink steeplebush blossoms poke from bushes, and purple loosestrife and Queen Anne’s lace come up in droves. Fireweed. Except for a few days of rain and the odd thunderstorm, the air keeps a sultry, summer-colored haze into August. Then, about the time the dragonflies have cleared the yard of bugs and my wife has unpacked her grade books to get ready for school, it comes all at once, like the wallop of God.

Suddenly the air is fantastically clear and cool. The green of the woods blackens, as if night was unfolding in the trees and bringing every needle into relief. The distance over the hills from Dixmont to the western mountains looks measurable not just in miles, but in age. This place is ancient. You can almost see through the undershadow into the past. Who prowled these woods, and where, and for how long, before Europeans came and cut the firs?

The corn has peaked, but it’s not that, and it’s not that the apples are soon to be ripe. But it’s the air itself, the northwest wind sweeping out the shed and drying firewood, as if a great door opened and pine and juniper scents have saturated the atmosphere. This whole corner of creation feels clean.

It started early this year. On my trip to Quebec in mid-August I saw fields of wall-to-wall goldenrod, and clots of orange and red leaves huddled in maples near Jackman. But those were signs of fall – premature, and not what I’m talking about.

At the moment of late summer, winter is not yet closing in. Frost has not perched itself in the garden, and the geese don’t yet have the urge to fly off in the majestic chevrons that ripple your blood. The wind is cool but doesn’t bite. The sun is not yet traitor-cold; it angles in just below July-height and heats the air. There’s no temptation yet to lock yourself in against winter and wait for spring.

Instead, this is what spring promised all along. What’s here is now fully alive. The air is transparent. It magnifies the black-green mountains one range beyond another. Sunlight grapples with shadow patches on steel-blue lakes. Hay rolls diminish into the distance in fields. Everything is deep. It’s exactly what maturity looks like before decline.

The most gorgeous weather on Earth is revealed here in late August. It’s as if a living being had descended, for just a month or so, and put the final polish on everything. You could stay in Maine forever.