JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

I don’t like hot weather and can’t stand high humidity, but even so, this day — this last day of summer — is always difficult for me.

The calendar says summer goes on until Sept. 21, but the reality is it ends today. Yesterday or day before I saw a few leaves coming down. That says it all: It’s about over.

This morning, we turned the air conditioning on. By late this afternoon, if the weather forecast is correct, we’ll be able to turn it off, open the windows and let the north wind cool the house.

But today’s north wind — assuming it arrives as scheduled — won’t be an aberrational respite, like the occasional north breezes of July and August. For me, that north wind will bring a sweeping finality to summer, as well as a wistful feeling of loss and transition.

I have experienced that feeling about Labor Day more acutely since a Labor Day-weekend trip to Truman Lake many years ago. It was hot that weekend, and we and another couple and our children and a couple of theirs were camping out.

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One of my foremost memories is that a young couple, maybe newlyweds, were at the adjacent camp site, with their big RV taking up much of the site. They weren’t particularly friendly — just gave us an occasional nod — and didn’t show their faces much. After being outside for a few minutes, they would retreat to the comfort of their version of the great indoors. It was clear to all of us on our steamy camp site that this couple was there for carnal rather than aquatic activities.

But we had our own situation to deal with. My friend, also named Jim, had hauled his speedboat to the lake, but it hadn’t been on the water in years, and we didn’t know what to expect. As a back-up of sorts, I had brought my 14-foot fishing boat, equipped with a powerful 5.5 horsepower motor I had inherited many years earlier from my father.

On Saturday or Sunday of that weekend, our group, which included our two children and a couple of theirs, went down to the marina and put Jim’s boat in the water. The rest of us piled into the boat from the dock, and, as best I recall, Jim got the motor to a sputtering and spewing start, and the boat lurched slowly away from the dock area.

We hadn’t even cleared the no-wake zone, however, before the engine conked out. With his stepson Gabe at the wheel of the boat, Jim went to the back of the boat and started fiddling with the motor. He would bark out orders to Gabe, telling him when to push the ignition button and when to back off. The shouting got testy at times, as the frustration built.

Meanwhile, the rest of us just sat there — sweating, sloop shouldered and silent — realizing this probably wasn’t going to be much of an outing.

After a long battle, Jim gave up, and we either paddled back to the dock or had another boater pull us back by rope. We piled out of the boat at the same place we had left an hour earlier, when our spirits were high and we had visions of the wind blowing our hair and cooling our faces as the boat skimmed over the water…Later I told Patty we must have collectively looked like the Clampett family as we sat forlornly on that boat, bobbing gently up and down in the wake of the cove.

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The next 24 hours or so were entirely unmemorable, and on Labor Day Jim and his family gathered their things and departed fairly early. Patty and I had driven separately, as I recall, because we were hosting a party back home that night and she wanted to get back to prepare. I told her I would be home in a few hours but wanted to go out and do some fishing in my boat.

It was a great feeling when the motor fired right up and I moved out into the body of the lake. Propelled by 5.5 horsepower, I didn’t go very far or very fast, but at least I could glide along and feel that breeze I had been anticipating in a much bigger way.

The sun was out. Lots of boats were on the water. I fished for a few hours — don’t remember catching anything — and as the afternoon wore on clouds began to roll in, the wind picked up and the temperature began to fall.

I was reluctant to leave, partly because I knew this was probably the only boating and fishing I was going to get in possibly for the rest of the year. Late in the afternoon, though, a decided chill set in, and I headed for the marina. A lot of other boaters had the same idea. In the cove, a slew of boats was idling, each boater waiting to approach the dock and get his boat on the trailer and get out of there.

Operating on my own, I had to first tie the boat to the dock; retrieve the car and trailer from the parking lot; back the trailer into the water; then get back in the boat and drive it onto the partially submerged trailer. By the time I did that, I was one of the very last boats in the area. After pulling the boat from the water, I stopped a short distance up the ramp to get my fishing tackle and other items out of the boat.

It was starting to get dark. The wind was blowing, and it was chilly. I looked around and saw the cove was clear of boats and only one or two other stragglers were in the ramp area. As I tossed my gear into the trunk, a feeling of emptiness set in. Summer was over. Really over. And I was going to be late for the party.