Summer is here, and it hurts to look

One of the big stories from this past week is that I got in the whitewater boat for the first time since last fall.  In last weekend's post I mentioned that heavy rain had brought the Wolf River up to stout levels, and though it dropped a little bit in the first half of this past week, on Thursday morning we had one of the more intense thunderstorms I can ever remember, with at least an inch of rain falling in the space of an hour or 90 minutes.  Knowing that the Wolf would have plenty of water, I loaded up the whitewater boat and drove out to the Walnut Grove Road access.  The sun was out by the time I was in the boat, and I spent a nice hour messing around in the swift Class I water and getting used to something heavier and slower but more suitable for whitewater than my surfski.

Our planet reached its summer solstice on Friday, and so summer has now begun in the astronomical sense.  And after a nice long run of pleasant springlike temperatures, hot weather has arrived to go along with it.  Daytime temperatures are rising into the mid 90s Fahrenheit, with heat indices in the triple digits.

When paddling down on the riverfront, I'm fully exposed to the sun.  Whatever breeze there is on hot summer days usually comes from the south, bringing that warm humid air from the Gulf of Mexico.  When I'm paddling southward the breeze gives me a bit of relief, but when I head north, such as from the mouth of the harbor back to the dock, the heat can be most oppressive, and sometimes the stinging in my eyes is unbearable without a breeze to evaporate the sweat from my face.

That was definitely the case yesterday.  Once I was out of the harbor and paddling up the Mississippi, the stinging in my eyes got so bad that numerous times I had to stop paddling and use my hat to mop my face.  I couldn't seem to get rid of the discomfort, even once I was paddling back downstream into the wind.  Back in the harbor I did some remount practice to cool off and rinse the sweat off my entire head.  Once I was back on the dock I took my first hose bath of 2025, and I finally rid myself of the stinging.  I didn't stop sweating, though: by the time I'd walked up the ramp to the parking lot my shirt was soaking wet.

This morning I spent another hour in the boat on the Mississippi, and while it was just as hot out there, I didn't get any bad stinging in my eyes until end of the hour, during the last few hundred meters back to the dock.

Hot summers are certainly nothing new in the Mid South.  It's time to take a deep breath and immerse myself for the next couple of months.

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