Fall feels like a small-batch bourbon: fleeting, bittersweet and aromatic. It’s the finest season for lingering on the water before winter arrives on Dec. 21 and shuts the waterways until spring.
This year autumn arrived under a full September moon. I missed a call from fellow writer Tom Neale while I was out on the water, but when I checked his message at the dock I laughed and followed his instruction: a deliberately bad coyote howl toward that big white orb rising into the night. Lotteryville Marina is a place where ordinary people keep ordinary boats — bark if you want, nobody minds.
Tom called it a historic moon, and he was right. NASA noted that Northern autumn began on the night of a full moon for the first time in nearly two decades, calling it a “super harvest moon.” The light from the departing summer sun mixing with the rising autumn moon produces a rare 360-degree twilight glow — a scene deserving of a good howl.
A few days later, early autumn felt more like summer. Inland temperatures climbed into the low 80s, and when the sun broke through the east-moving clouds out on the water it was warm enough to shed a shirt. My fishing partner, nicknamed Codfish, crowed that it was “endless summer” and predicted we’d still be swimming in November — a bold claim that, as the season progressed, would prove optimistic.
We anchored in the lee of a sandy island slowly shifting northeast under the influence of winds, currents and winter storms. It’s a good place to be this time of year, when even the sand seems to migrate. Wind birds bank into the westerly breeze, their plumage changing from white to brown in an instant as they tip like shutters opening and closing. The spartina grass tops burn tawny and red. The wind softens at high tide and stiffens again as the water pours back out.
Anchorage density thinned noticeably over a couple of weeks — from more than a hundred boats on a busy summer weekend to just a few dozen. With cool nights and frost not far off, everyone who stays out is picking the warm, sunny, light-wind days. Even a passing cloud will bring a sudden, sharp chill.
On one afternoon I dropped Codfish at the dock, then picked up my wife, our kids and the dog and headed back out for more hours on the water. You take this last handful of good days while they’re here, or you’ll spend winter wishing you had. I parked the boat on a sandy shelf in shallow water so my son could dive and play safely. I tossed a large white surf clam shell into the clear water; it fluttered down like an oversized petal. My boy dove from the port bow and grabbed it a foot from the bottom, surfacing beaming. The late afternoon light was kind, the moon tide was far out, and the wind had fallen; it was autumn at its best, complete with a black lab and two young water rats exploring the flats.
Three weeks later the water had cooled by about 10 degrees to 54°F — a sharp change even for locals. On a brisk late-October day, as we combed the inshore channels for migrating bass and bluefish, I deadpanned to Codfish about his earlier swimming forecast. He gave me a look and said, “What are you, crazy?” Between that answer and the following gales, another season on the water came to a close.
“My experience with engines is that if you depend on them, they fail you, but if it just doesn’t matter, they serve you.” — Frank Wightman
This piece originally appeared in the December 2010 issue.