I cannot claim to have been that way for very long. In fact, it is only this past week that I have finally allowed myself to breathe a long sigh of relief. You see, for most of the last three months or so I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to the weather, the water conditions and the air. It has seemed to me that things were just altogether too summery and too good to be true.
For much of the last decade, we have become accustomed to an abrupt and early end to our partaking of the many wonderful joys of summer. Years of drought have taken their toll on the landscape and on our collective psyches.
Anglers have come to expect the waters in rivers and streams to drop and warm to the point that fishing or not fishing becomes an ethical question, and restrictions on when and where fishing is allowed will become mandatory.
At summer cabins and church camps and public beaches on western Montana lakes, visitors have noted the tepid bathtub feel of the lake water as the unrelenting heat takes its toll.
Thousands of townspeople, and country people, too, have fled their homes to the still-cool moving water, for nothing more than to feel something cool and clean on their bare feet as they try to mitigate the effects of the soulless heat.
By late July in these last years, our skies have been dulled and then blackened by the smoke of fires that have surrounded us and have now become part of the local landscape and lore.
People from elsewhere who have experienced this part of the world during recent summers, commenting on weather in Montana, have come to refer to this place as one that becomes inhospitable by the time August rolls around.
“August is usually pretty miserable for you folks, isn’t it?” I have been asked.
“There’s not much fishing, once summer gets going,” another has observed to me.
“How can you stand the air?” comes the question from a friend who visited here one especially unpleasant August day a couple of years ago.
And so on.
The thing is, of course, that we have come to expect it to be that way. And yes, we know that things are going to continue to change, but for this year, at least, I think we can celebrate one great big wonderful summer when things seemed to be just right from the start.
Rivers ran high and bank-full the entire month of June and beyond, just like the good old days. Snow lingered in the high country. The Smith River remained floatable well into July for the first time in years. No heat wave arrived to bring us to our knees in early July. Trout did not have to endure the stress of water levels dropping, channels drying up or water temperatures soaring. We did not have to spend weeks breathing gritty, smoky air and smelling it on our clothes and in our homes.
Instead, we have enjoyed day after day, week after week, and now nearly three months of sparkling summer weather.
On many more than one occasion, a chat with friends has gotten around to the whole business of how this summer has been going, and we have invariably smiled and shaken our heads in mild disbelief about the wonder of such a simple gift.
We remember years for different things, natural and unnatural, that occurred. We remember the summer of the Yellowstone fires, the Bitterroot fires and the Jocko divide fire. We remember the summer when all the rivers were closed to fishing for what seemed like endless weeks and weeks. We remember the summer of the extreme heat.
And I am thinking that, in years to come, we may look back upon the summer of 2008, now slipping out of our grasp, as that amazing beautiful summer.
I know I will.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net.
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