Around the Fire // A series on ritual, transition, and belonging

The Sound of August

August has a sound, and it’s crickets.

Not the daytime noise of high summer, the lawnmowers and the sprinklers and the kids who haven’t run out of summer yet. The night sound. You notice it most at the ramp after last light, loading the boat in the dark, rods broken down and dripping. The whole riverbank going at once, steady and unhurried, the sound of a season that knows it’s almost over and is in no rush about it.

That’s the thing about August. It’s the last slow month. September is coming with everything it brings, the school year, the practices, the calendar that suddenly has something in every square. But it isn’t here yet. August is the deep breath before all of that. The last stretch where an evening can still be unplanned.

The fishing matches the mood. Low, clear water, and smallmouth that have seen it all by now. You can’t force them in August. You lengthen your leader, slow everything down, and put the fly where it needs to be without any hurry. It’s fishing that asks you to match the pace of the month. Early morning before the heat, or the last hour of light, which is the better of the two. The day settles. The bugs come up. A fish takes on a long slow swing and you feel it more than you see it.

And the light is going. Not gone, but going. You can feel August losing a few minutes a day, the evenings folding in a little earlier each time. There’s an urgency under the calm, the quiet knowledge that these long unhurried evenings are numbered, and you should take the ones you can.

Which is why we still go. The kids have practices starting, the summer is winding itself down, but there’s an hour of river light left after dinner and we take it while it’s there. Drifting the last of the light with them, the crickets starting up along the bank, everyone a little tired, no one in a hurry to point the boat back toward the ramp. The light going orange and then gray.

I don’t try to hold onto those evenings the way I used to. You can’t. August teaches you that better than any month. It hands you something good and reminds you at the same time that it’s ending, and somehow that makes it better, not worse. The sweetness is in knowing it won’t last.

Soon enough it will be dark by the time we’re off the water. Then dark before we’d even get there. The crickets will thin out and go quiet, and the calendar will fill, and we’ll be into the run of the fall.

But not yet. For another week or two, it’s still August, and the banks are still singing when we load the boat in the dark.

~ John