Lemon Lyme Summer

The sun rises as a thin band of orange squeezed between twin blue worlds of lake and cloud. The tips of the pines above glow for a moment before the sun slides up and behind the distant clouds.

The sun rises near the center of the bay when we arrive in April, but by the solstice it’s no longer rising over the lake at all, but far to the north, from some spot obscured by trees. There it rises most of the summer, a reminder that the arc of the world is large and never ceasing.

Summer on the shores of Lake Superior is difficult to put in words. The best I can come up with is idyllic. It’s never that hot here. It’s often warmer in Florida in April than it is up here in July. The funny thing is, temperature is always relative, and come July we sometimes sound just like the people I once laughed at, calling a 85 degree day here “hot.”

There is something about summer up here that feels more like the world of my youth than anywhere else we’ve been in the U.S. It’s one of the few places we’ve been where the kids can wander the woods, follow the creeks, ride their bikes around town, make food over a fire, fish, swim, and whatever else they want to do — on their own.

Despite my best determination not to be hurried, May and June were a blur of baseball and juijitsu, acting camp and sailing camp. This year the girls were invited to teach sailing for the younger kids, so that stretched out even longer. When I type it out it doesn’t sound like much. Maybe it isn’t. Busy is like the temperature, relative.

The girls’ birthday marks what I think of the real beginning of summer up here. This is around the time it gets “hot” with days above 80 and the lake water in the shallows of Chequamegon Bay gets into the low 60s, which feels like bathwater after swimming in May and June.

By early August the midday light burns through the evergreens with a kind of sharpness, a sluggish heat hangs in the air, the haze of humidity weighing it down. Ashland, a mere four miles across the bay, gets lost in the watery blur of the horizon. Thankfully the lake is always there, always cool, usually cold, even on the hottest days.

I had a couple big projects to get done this summer, which also made it feel busier than usual. These projects were largely physical, building things. Toward the end of July I found that my joints were hurting more than they should, even with the abuse of lifting heavy sheets of plywood and spending 6 hours a week on the juijistu mats. I would probably never have thought anything of it, except that I mentioned it one day, and my wife pointed out that joint pain is a symptom of Lyme disease, and I’d had a tick in me about two weeks before.

Shortly after that I began to have a host of other issues, all of which pointed to Lyme. Lyme is so common in this area that you can actually get prophylactic antibiotic prescriptions. Well, if you have a savvy doctor anyway.

If you do any research on Lyme you’ll quickly enter a minefield of conflicting information. Luckily for me, a good friend of ours was a nurse in the area, and has had Lyme, so she suggested I go to a Lyme-specific clinic about two hours away. I made an appointment for a week later, but in the mean time, Lyme began to eat away at me. And I mean that literally. You can feel it inside you, in your joints, in your head. The only other thing I’ve ever had that was like was Covid (which was much, much milder, but had the same eerie presence to it). Coincidentally there is some pretty good evidence Lyme is another escaped bioweapon. Make of that what you will.

Whatever its origins, half the problem with Lyme is finding a doctor who understands it. Fortunately I did and I got the prescriptions I needed (antibiotics along with a slew of supplements). If you’ve got Lyme and you’re anywhere near the Tick-Borne Illness Center in Woodruff, Wisconsin, I highly recommend it. Unfortunately you’ll have to pay out of pocket. The tick center does not follow the CDC’s guidelines (which will leave you with Lyme for a lifetime) and therefore most insurance won’t cover it.

I’m still not back to 100 percent. Maybe I never will be. I do feel much better and have been able to get back to juijitsu and physical labor, which I’m thankful for, but my joints continue to hurt and swell up at times.

Toward the end August I was able to get back to work on my projects. Baseball ended, all the camps were over, our lives had settled down again. This year we had a string of warm weeks around then, almost no rain and temps in the low 80s. We spent most of our time in the lake, on the paddle boards, with the occasional break to hike, pick berries, or record it all on paper.

September sees the sunrise inch back out over the lake again. The orange and blue mornings return. Normally it turns cooler in early September, but this year it has not. It’s not hot by any definition, it’s idyllic. The maples and birch are turning colors, the humidity is gone. Fall is in the air.

Autumn is a quality of light, a taste in the air. Something new is added. The world is clearer, the edges sharper, it feels like around the corner, all will be revealed. The earth is brilliantly alive. You can taste it. If I could live in perpetual Autumn I would. For a while at least.