Summer blew in overnight.

I lingered at home this morning for a meeting,  and stepped outside with my coffee to get a feel for the day. Tubby little Scherzo and I played for hours yesterday evening, in a steady south-western gentle breeze (8-12 mph, Beaufort force 3). Doesn’t sound like much, but it drives our tender little boat with full sails just right. The wind piped up overnight and is predicted to triple by mid-day with gusts that will reach force 7 (near gale) and thunderstorms this evening. 

Using the Beaufort scale, with its nautical language, is a bit of an affectation (especially in an RJ blog), even among serious sailors, I suspect. My studied observation, from my addiction to sailing videos on YouTube, is that most sailors rely on wind models downloaded from wifi, cell networks, or satellites–and when I contemplate sailing the far horizons of Lake Mendota, I do too. 

But the Beaufort scale teaches one to look and study. It describes wind force in terms of the behavior of smoke and dust and dry leaves, and the way trees bend and break, how flags snap or don’t, and shape of the water itself, its ripples and waves and foam. I am learning to look.

I stepped outside and felt the wind knowing it blew from the south all night. It was warmer than I expected and I could smell the water-laden air, the summer-signature humidity blown up thick into my yard from the warming mid-continent. Yesterday’s morning haze had a yellow cast from Canadian wildfire smoke. Today’s, also muggy and familiar.

So I lay down my marker. Midwest summer began today. We crept up on it, as we do, with Carol and me both tied to academic calendars. My academic year ended a couple of weeks ago and hers ends in a few days. We’ve resumed our weekly trip to the farmers’ market and some of our favorite summer-weekend activities.

Carol is a paddler and last week she took me to her go-to little river south of Madison. It was early-summer perfect. A yellow warbler greeted us at the put-in and birdlife was everywhere. We paddled past a crane nesting on a tiny wet-grass island and under the watch of two perched eagles and we bumped a great blue heron again and again as we approached the landing. The common birds were all there and I’d have a fuller list of the small birds but I found that I can’t manage a kayak in moving water while using binocs, so I prioritized not running into things.

The view is limited from the seat of a kayak. This lovely little river winds through a flood plain of Midwestern forests and forest openings of grass and craggy big bur oaks. You can only see so much, so my mind’s eye supplies the rest, extending those openings to expanses of tallgrass prairie and imaging the game trails branching away into a dark summer forest once you push through the riverside thickets.

Carol signaled for me to be still as I rounded a meander. A doe was drinking, standing in the water by the bank. I feathered my paddle just enough to prevent cart-wheeling in the current as we drifted by–watching each other. She was summer-red, with her dark skin showing through the thin summer pelage at her face. She tensed, but didn’t raise her tail in alarm and didn’t bolt back up the bank and into the brush. Those bottomless dark eyes trained on us. We passed within a couple of yards and the whole day’s trip condensed into a moment.

“Was she pregnant?” Carol asked after we passed. “No” I said as a switch flipped in my brain.

Deer are my academic specialty. I wrote my dissertation on deer. I’ve conducted research on deer for decades, and I even teach a course that uses the conservation issues associated with deer as case study. I’ve given, dozens, maybe hundreds of talks about deer and most of my publications are about deer.

When Carol asked me the question, my mental algorithms went all professorial. Late May is nearly peak seasonal birth-pulse and any doe still pregnant would be obviously bloated with near-term fawn (nearly all does become pregnant each year). She looked summer-trim, her ribs just showing under the thin hair and her longish face indicating maturity. Additional water burden is consistent with lactation needs and any fawns born this time, at this latitude, would be in the hider stage–waiting motionless and concealed in the understory (hence the dappled fawn coat) while the doe foraged for the both of them. 

Deer facts come automatically when I am asked, an integration of things I’ve read and studied and experienced and of similar questions asked over and over. But without the prompt, the algorithm remains dormant. And a different part of me holds the encounter.

Setting aside pretensions of writing creatively, deer are beautiful. Cranes are beautiful. So are green tree frogs and mayflies, and brook trout and literally millions of other creatures. Science helps me understand important bits of the biology, but experience and nearness connect me in ways that are equally important. And in a culture that elevates science (mostly good) and seeks to commodify everything (bad), I think we need to relearn how to look. 

Despite the returning summer-warmth, there is a palpable chill on campus. My networks of academic leaders have been watching for weeks. Research ended and devalued. Science and education attacked. Creation-care mocked and reversed. Ideological litmus tests for language and discourse. International students on edge.

These things make my weekend and end-of-the day forays all the more important to me to recover and recharge the parts of my attention that carry the unhappy realities during the week. I have the privilege to do so, and I hope it isn’t too self-indulgent. I have colleagues who have lost their jobs and others who are enduring weeks of uncertainty about their careers while the legality of the DOGE-bro vandalism is decided by our courts. I wish I knew better how to help.

The western horizon is growing dark and the barometer is dropping. My shirt sticks to my back and the feeling is “close”–to use a term that sounds archaic to my kids when I say it. Deer are hunkering in the thickets. The wind is building.

I am weary of bigger-picture pieties. I am blessed to do good work and support good people who do good work. In some sense that should be enough but quiet little rivers and deer-watching remind me of other realities. Dark horizons are ascendant realities now.

The whole point of watching the wind is to know how to trim your sails but also when to use storm tactics, or seek a safe harbor. All of it to needed to keep navigating forward. It helps to keep reminding myself.