These Are Our Summer Nights

By late June the dark nearly gives up entirely. The sun comes down over the fjord around eleven and then seems to think better of it, hanging just above the far hills, delivering a long farewell. There is just a scrap of proper night to speak of, in these next weeks. And Mocca (who is half border collie and half water dog, and therefore twice as unreasonable as either) takes this as a binding contract. If the light doesn't end, why should the swimming?

So we go down to the water after supper, at the hour a sensible dog would be asleep. She knows the route by heart: the winding paths, the gravel, the slick weed-covered stones at the tide line, the last scramble to the shore. Which she takes at a gallop that I gave up trying to match some years ago. By the time I reach the water she is already at the edge, looking back at me with the particular impatience of someone waiting for a slower companion to catch up to the obvious.

She waits for me to produce a stick from one of our hiding places for them. This is not a preference; it is law. I find one and she carries it down to the shore. Then she begins barking like a maniac to encourage me to throw it out into the water.

From the dock I watch as she swims off: a small dark head, a widening wake, moving out across the flat gold water toward the moored boats and the orange buoys and the low sun laid down shining across the whole surface of the fjord. Some evenings I lose her for a moment against the light. And watching her out there I understand that this is very likely the happiest moment of each day for her.

She would stay in all night. I have no doubt of this at all. Left to her own devices she would swim until the sun finally lost its nerve and dipped, and then she would swim on through that, too. So the ending is always mine to impose. I call her, and call her again, and finally walk to the very edge and use the voice that means it. She comes back slowly, reluctantly, and hauls herself up the stones and shakes a shower of water over both of us.

There is something about the long light that makes an evening like this genuinely hard to close. We linger on the dock past any reasonable hour, the two of us, for no better reason than that the sun is still up and it seems rude to go in while it's shining.

These are our summer nights. They don't last, and we both know it well. In a few short weeks the light will begin tipping back toward the dark, earlier each evening, until one day the swimming season simply closes without ceremony and she stands at the water's edge in the cold, looking betrayed.

But for now there is only a marginal night, and endless golden evenings. And a very happy dog who would stay in the fjord forever if the world would let her.