Play Makers: Summer Memories

Something terrible is happening to me.

I’m not sure why, but it is, and it’s scaring me.

I think it must have to do with the change of season, the end of summer, the goodbye to the midnight sun.

It happens every year around this time. The mid-August to late-September funk, I guess.

Call it what you want: it is an annual occurrence, and despite its consistency each year, it does not get any easier.

Sigh.

No more weekend music festivals in sleepy little northern towns.

No more accented baristas.

No more Germans… period.

No more midnight soccer games or people running down Lewes Boulevard on Tuesday evening.

No more hitchhikers standing atop Two Mile Hill, their thumbs outstretched as they hold a cardboard sign that reads “Dawson City” or “Anchorage.”

No more lunchtime music in the park downtown.

No more six-hour weekend road trips to Alaska to bike 30 kilometres with seven other friends.

No more six-hour weekend road trips to Alaska to drink beer with a bunch of Yukoners on a gravel fairground.

No more tourists in matching tracksuits asking what part of Alaska they’re in.

No more tourists lining up outside restaurants on Second Avenue.

No more transients from Ontario and Vancouver and Halifax and Quebec.

No more summer loving having a blast!

No more canoers and kayakers paddling madly to Dawson.

No more skateboarders, longboarders or skiers on wheels.

No more fishing for dinner.

No more Thursday markets or saxophone player on Main.

No more follies being frantic for tourists aplenty.

No more slo-pitch debauchery.

No more anxious hikes where you sing loudly to scare off mother bear and her cubs.

No more, no more summer.

Yes, I miss all of the above. I miss it a lot.

But these days, with morning frost lurking ever so close and nightfall growing longer and longer by the minute, there is one summer thing I find myself thinking of more than all of the above.

What I have been longing for the most as of late is the RV, the motorhome, the Winnebago.

Specifically, the ones with the Texas license plates and the SUVs in tow that conveniently come equipped with fold-out camping chairs perfect for asphalt BBQs.

It seems they have become something I associate with a Yukon summer.

And now, as the RV lots and the Walmart parking lots rapidly become more and more barren, I know now it is only a matter of time before the snow blankets the mountains, the dust falls from the ice scraper and winter settles in.

Thankfully I’ll always have the memories of those magical oversize machines on wheels. See you next May.

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