Closing time

This season for me begins the fulfillment of a dream: To spend an entire year on a Northwoods lake. Of course, this is now our one and only home, so with luck that year will turn into many. For now we enjoy the magic of peak fall color reflected in water.

Do you live at your lake? Stay for the summer? Visit for the occasional week or weekend? Until this year I had never been here in the north to experience the slow turn toward winter. Right now we’re on the brink. Have you seen your lake this way? We’re torn between carving out a few more fishing days and giving up, pulling in the pier and buttoning the boat up for storage.

Recent evenings it has been mesmerizing to watch a slip bobber float on a gently undulating palette of reflected oranges, yellows and reds. Such evenings now are numbered. Yesterday I took the last dozen minnows, anchored the boat on a favorite reef, and tried once more for the walleyes and smallmouth bass that haunt the rocks. The sky threatened. Wind poked through my fleece jacket. Waves tossed my bobber around. Nothing bit. This could be the time when the fish retreat to the depths and become harder to find. Or a few more warm days could intervene and change the pattern.

Back at the pier, the boat tied off, I sat on our bench and scanned the shore. The trees lining the lake had taken longer to turn than those at the top of our hillside, but now they blazed, especially when for a few interludes the sun pierced the gray sky. Years ago my father, returning from two weeks in Norway, said that so much beauty, seen everywhere, brought a kind of fatigue. I feel that way now, not just viewing fall’s majesty but surrounded by it, immersed in it, splashes of brilliance outside our every window, around every bend in the road, arcing over our narrow private road and the town roads I travel on bicycle. It is fleeting, I know. We are just a few days, or a frigid night, or a strong wind, from lights out, the trees suddenly bare, the ground a colored kaleidoscope for a few days, then brown.

So if you are visiting your lake now, even if you have been through all this before, get out and see it. Autumn is closing down. Winter closing in.