The First Cool Morning on the Water

The water knows before the calendar does.

There is a morning in September you cannot mark in advance, when you walk down to the water before the sun is fully up and something has changed. It is small. If you did not spend time on the water you might miss it. But if you do, you feel it right away, in the first breath you take standing on the dock. The air has an edge it did not have a week ago. The mugginess that sat on everything all summer, that wrapped around you the second you stepped outside, has thinned overnight into something cleaner and cooler and a little sharp.

Summer has turned. Not gone. Turned.

All summer the surface lay flat and heavy under the heat haze, warm as bathwater, the mornings already sticky by seven. Then one day in September you come down and a low mist lies over the water, where the cool air has met water still holding its summer warmth. It curls and drifts and burns off as the sun climbs. You see it only on these particular mornings, at this particular turn of the year. It is one of the surest signs a coastal Southerner has that the season is changing under our feet.

The light is different too. In high summer the sun comes up hard and white and means business by mid-morning. The September sun comes up at a lower angle, gold instead of white, and lays a long soft light across the water that photographers would kill for and that most people sleep right through. Everything looks kinder in it. The docks, the boats at their moorings, the birds working the shallows, all of it lit gentle and low.

The birds tell you, if you watch them. Things are on the move. The summer’s easy rhythm is breaking into a different, more urgent one as the fish begin to think about where they are going and the birds begin to follow. A coast in September is a coast getting ready, though for what exactly it never quite says.

This is not really about one cool morning.

Down here we do not get the hard, dramatic fall they get up in the mountains. Our seasons are gentler and slower and easier to miss. We do not turn scarlet and gold and drop our leaves in a grand show. What we get instead is this: a series of small, quiet signs, mostly out on the water, mostly early, that only the people paying attention ever catch. The first cool morning. The first low mist. The first gold light coming in at a new angle. The first time you reach for a light jacket to run the boat out and are glad you did.

I love the summer on the water. I would not trade a July evening on the Gulf for much of anything. But the truth is that this turning morning in September might be my favorite morning of the whole year. There is a freshness to it, a page turning, a feeling that the water and the sky got together overnight and decided to start something new, and let you in on it early, before the rest of the world is awake.

If you can get down to the water on one of these September mornings, do it. Go early, before the sun is up. Stand on the dock, take a long breath, and pay attention to what it tastes like. You will know the morning I mean the second it comes. And you will understand, without anybody telling you, that the best season on the Southern coast has quietly, mistily, begun.

The South, shared.