Full summer in the bog means reeds up to my shoulders and I walking through secret passages under the open sky, seeing the hound only in moving reeds and occasionally the white tip of his tail. This summer, this very dry summer, this dry summer without beavers to keep up the level of the water, going where I otherwise only tread mid-winter when the bog is frozen stiff and in a blanket of snow.

These are adventures of the explorer kind, but on an acre or three previously unseen in this season – with me thrashing blindly but trying to pick a trail in a maze of sudden smallish streams, scanning for a hint of where it is the beaver dam offers passage—only to find time and again that I might as well wade across for the reeds have made a deal with the universe in the night and harvested plenty of water from the sodden summer air—all of which ends up on me and in my boots. Even swimming doesn’t wet you quite as thoroughly as this automatic-car-wash-by-grass.

So many years after my last academic one, and I am still feeling the endless promise of summer. It simmers in the still heat on the bog, slithers in foggy cool mornings, opens into the cool relief of the woods on days where the humidity doesn’t soar. In the seventies, it animated films about teenagers in the fifties and sixties: the open topped car, the girls and boys, the promise of getting to first base and maybe yes maybe a little bit more.

One thing those films took for granted was gorgeous weather – sunshine as predictable as the blonde girl’s nastiness and the dark-haired one’s sudden flowering into a bombshell. But in the sodden cool climes I grew up in, the hope of summer was heat and the beach more than the borrowing of Dad’s car. The car and the girls and the boys and the adventure of roaming don’t happen when it’s sixty and raining, wind blowing sand across your bow as you struggle your way to the bus stop. And even more than thirty years after my last iffy Dutch summer and in the midst of a drought, I am still feeling the promise of May when it may all still happen.

There were two of them – two magical summers when day after day, night after night, it was warm, breezy, beachy. Two summers when reality was suspended in Holland. When we danced the night away at seaside bars every weekend night to a soundtrack of funk, punk, disco, and rock: grooving, hopping, going out of our gourds with ourselves. “Do a little dance, make a little love.” Two summers when bioluminescent plankton bloomed diamonds into the sea you sought by a campfire on the beach, as surely as love bloomed in many places on that new nude beach when the fires finally burned low. These were the years with the pill and before AIDs. I am not that good at memories, but the summers of ’75 and ’76 are indelibly etched in my Id somewhere. They ignited a hunger for tasting the marrow of life*, a longing that can never be stilled as we move on with the mundane housekeeping chores of life.

One of my friends, I used to call him the timekeeper, remembered every detail of every summer, counted the years by them, and always knew in which summer what happened, whether the promise was met, how much of it wasn’t, and how it changed things forever more. As we later talked it turned out that it was all intensely meaningful in a way that I, who breezed across the tops of the waves in those years in a cloud of alcohol, parties and boyfriends and sometimes a girlfriend, I had never really noticed.

Peter is now dying. He is the first among us who is going to go after a full life. Others have gone before him, Hugo who committed suicide before he was twenty, Harry felled by a heart attack in his late thirties. They were the outliers whose deaths confirmed that the rest of us were all still full of piss and vinegar. But Peter is going after a life lived – a life lived often in great desperation, never fulfilling those summers of which he remembered every detail, never living up to the promise of being a great musician, poet, writer, thinker, after a life instead of being increasingly powerless in the face of his drinking. And as the rest of us try to keep our inner Mick Jagger somewhat alive amid mini-strokes, high blood pressure meds, and other increasingly annoying ailments, he has to decide when the end is going to come, when he can’t bear his own decrepitude and pain, whether he wants to live another day.

I don’t know whether I will see him again. I don’t know whether, if he is still alive when I get there in September, he will want to see me. We hadn’t been talking much, things had happened. What do you say to a person who has failed to shuck that magic, failed to accept his own ordinariness and settle for taking happiness and achievement in small sips, in the morning woods in advance of going to work in an office? I never knew what to say to his poetic longing soul, anything that might not showcase my utterly pedestrian earthiness. I do know that I have no idea how one might decide that today things are so bad that irreversibly the end has to come, and I hope his thinking and despair have prepared him for it.

Which makes me wonder about those summers of ’75 and ’76. Were they as magical as we all remember, or was it just a generation feeling the strong vigor of our eighteen years? Were we simply coming alive, splashing in the sea with our first love, diamond droplets falling off our arms, not realizing this was not the promise, this was it? You should be so lucky that your first summers turn out to be movie-perfect. What will you ever do to live up to that?

Here’s a little plug for the best album ever recorded. Released March of 1975:
The Original Soundtrack

* yup – stolen: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” H.D. Thoreau, Walden
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Have a gander at the images. click on one and you get the album. If your connection is like mine, it may take a moment to load.