We did not have enough of summer this year, and so my wife decided we would pack this last weekend before she and the kids started back to school with everything we had not gotten to do in the last three months.
The weather forecast was not promising. Already there was a hint of fall in the air, and from Saturday night through Monday there was rain forecast. So on Friday afternoon we dragged the tents and sleeping gear down from the attic and set up two tents under the apple tree in the back. When it grew dark I built a fire and we roasted marshmallows and told scary stories.
I couldn’t remember the beginning of the “Who stole my golden arm?” story, so I told them the one about the escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand. Since I had heard it from my cousins when I was very young, I thought it couldn’t be too scary. I didn’t consider that it was terror that had burned it into my memory at an early age. The 12-year- old was unimpressed, but her little sister was as scared as I had been at her age. We broke up the fire and went to bed, but I could hear her in the other tent for a long while, discussing the matter.
Even though the next day was cool and cloudy, I wanted to swim one last time before they closed the municipal pool after Labor Day. I expected the pool would be packed on this last weekend of summer, but except for the lifeguards and one boy doing frog leaps off the diving board, we were the only ones there. All the deck chairs were set out, but there was no one to sit in them. As I swam back and forth across the empty pool, the water began to feel colder and colder, as though it were already winter.
The next morning we got up early and choose a destination for the last day trip of summer. We drove north across the Brush Mountain ridge line into Sugar Valley with its neat farms and the Amish barns with tobacco leaf drying in the doorway. When we visit Sugar Valley for soccer games in the fall, I always feel that it is far away from everything, beautiful and peaceful, but isolated. We continued on, taking back roads north until we reached Wellsboro and the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon.
We hiked the rim of the canyon and looked down at the sliver of a creek cutting its way deeper into the earth. The trail was not difficult, with only a few places where there was a steep drop off. My soon-to-be first grader seemed to find these spots magnetic. No matter how often I told her to stay on the inside of the path, she would choose these places to swerve close to the edge while my heart jumped in my throat. There was no room on the path to hold her hand, so I stayed as close as I could behind her, ready to catch her if she fell. Those are the kind of scary stories parents tell themselves.
After we left the canyon we walked around the downtown of Wellsboro. It was late Sunday afternoon and very quiet. The few open shops were nearly empty and we wandered in and out, past the movie theater and the downtown hotel, the closed stores, the quiet restaurants. Then we drove home in a chilly autumn rain.
As we came up Rt. 26 a few miles from home, we saw a line of Amish buggies approaching us on the narrow highway. Suddenly two of the buggies broke out of the slow-moving line and began to race each other, the horses galloping at top speed. They were almost in our headlights when one driver pulled ahead of the other and both buggies swerved back into their own lane as the horses flashed past.
They were teenage boys I imagine, getting one last taste of summer, drag racing their buggies on a Sunday night in the rain.
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