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"Autumn this year is gonna break my heart, the leaves start falling and the feeling starts," - Steve Forbert
The rain seemed undecided, not sure whether it felt like delivering itself to the earth below or not. Maybe the rain has lazy days too?
Nothing more than a faint mist was falling now.
The ground was slowly becoming wet, but not to any real degree - not to any extent that would really help the thirsty land and water bodies recover from what has been weeks now of persistent dry conditions.
If the rain waited much longer to decide what it was going to do, the heat and humidity would seize the moment to assert themselves - withering further the plants and trees whose leaves have been gradually shriveling their way from green to dried brown.
I had been feeling decidedly indifferent myself, but I knew that like the rivers and the creeks and the gasping dirt, I could sure use some rain, even a couple of days straight of it.
There's a tiny pond I know, just off the edge of a dirt road, that has always been a place adorned around its rim with the green of reeds and other water-loving plants.
It's nothing much to speak of, just a reliable drink of water for the deer and other creatures of the woods really, maybe a couple feet of depth at most, and only a handful of feet long and across.
For the first time, yesterday, the pond was dried up all the way. In the remaining dirt, bathtub-like rings of chalky whitish-gray had marked the receding water levels until there was nothing left at all.
Three or four dying lily pads lay spread out like dead octopi over the bottom of the pond. Parts of the plants had already turned brown and started to decompose.
The animals would have to find some other place to drink.
Maybe the river?
It was lower than usual, with those same summer yellow and green grasses grown and waving back and forth under the water. I know rivers have lazy days.
If I was in my boyhood now, I'd probably pick up a couple of rocks from the dirt and skip them downstream or toss a stick into the water to watch it float away.
Instead, I'm just leaning against a guardrail watching the water.
This river looks the same way it did when I was a kid. It had the wavy underwater grass then too, the clear water and the silt-covered bottom.
Around its edges, grew Canada goldenrod and common tansy, both yellow-flowered plants, the latter considered a noxious weed.
What's changed here is there is no old railroad bridge over the stream, built from creosote-soaked timbers with steel rails laid over the top. Walking across, us kids could see down to the water below.
It was a little scary, but only at first.
My brother and I and a few of the neighborhood confederates are also missing from this scene. Me and Jimmy were the fishermen in the pack. The rest were bike riders and the unidentified, moving from scene to scene with nothing grounding them.
I think all those childhood days just rolled themselves up in one big circus rug and rolled out of our lives back about 1973.
That's a long time ago gone.
I got to thinking that maybe there's a little bit more rain on my face now, but then just as suddenly, it stopped altogether. The blue-black clouds are still up there looking like they could drop a downpour at any moment.
But they don't - they just roll on by.
It isn't too long and the sun comes showing its big raisin-loving face out from behind the last in the line of big clouds drifting over me and away.
The sun is bright, hot and burning. It only takes a few minutes to dry up the remaining traces of the rain that had fallen.
I walk to a place where I can sit under the shade of one of the big maples. It's probably 10 degrees cooler here than it is in the direct sunshine.
The grass is dried here and has turned yellow-white with the lack of moisture.
Many of the wide-leafed bracken ferns that cover the understory here have also rusted brown and nodded their heads, taking their last bows for the summer season.
In their prime, just weeks ago, they provided shade for wild blueberries to grow underneath them and places for ground-nesting birds, like hermit thrushes, to raise their young.
Now, so many of the summer birds have already flown away, headed to their winter havens so distant from this rugged and desperate land.
A lot of the maples have already begun showing their autumn leaves turning toward festive fall reds, yellows, oranges and browns.
I'm feeling that withered autumn feeling myself already, though it seems premature. However, I think my seasonal clock is broken.
I lost track of time somewhere around the first week of July. Since that time, the days have blown past me so fast, I missed all kinds of activities and opportunities.
If this life is all an illusion or taking place in parallel fashion in another universe, as some suggest. I hope that in that other reality or simulation or whatever it would be that I am fishing and rambling and out in the woods every single day.
I hope I've built a log cabin along a river somewhere. Nothing anyone would consider stately or extravagant, but someplace to stand my fishing pole up in the corner, turn on the radio to listen to a ball game or hear the wind and the water singing to me from outside my window screen.
I'd have a wooden bench where I could sit to watch the river pass by me, and a porch where I could lie down to watch the stars at night.
I keep walking, out of the shade and back into the sunshine and the warmth of the day. Damn, it's hot.
Somewhere, there's a gentle rain falling, soothing the land and the waters. Maybe just a few miles away, maybe a whole time zone of traveling.
Wherever it is, it's not here - at least not today.
Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan's world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.