Camp Nebagamon

By Joe Crain

After the rough, lion-y finish to March, we here in the far Northwoods of Wisconsin pinned our hopes on April. After all, when you live this far north you know that although the calendar may say that spring starts on the 20^th, here March is realistically still a winter month. It’s typically not until around the middle of April that the ice goes off the lake; a few days before or after Tax Day is usually a safe guess for the annual Ice Breaker contest. And it is true that by the last week of March the snow is usually in such a state of decay that it is rare I haven’t put the skinny skis away by then, but we usually have at least some snow left. Here on the shores of Lake Nebagamon spring is normally an April thing. It is not at all unusual for the early emerging plants, like the crocus and daffodils, to not only sprout through the last of the snow but for their spring proclaiming blossoms to get snowed on once or twice. This year, after experiencing 60-degree days several times in March, and not only having all of the winter’s snow melted but also the ice off the lake right at the start of April, we started to think that maybe the calendar was right about the start of spring falling in the third week of March. Sure, we had a rough patch of weather at the end of March, but could we possibly have a normal spring that started in late March and then gradually warmed up throughout the month of April? Well the warning signs of what was to come started the first six days of April in a sort of unusual way: absurdly warm weather all week long. April 1^st was around average with 41 degrees, but it warmed through the week to a balmy 73 on April 4^th, 30 degrees above average. That was the day we saw the last of the lake ice melt off. The next day we hit a high of 81, 40 degrees above average! Finally on April 6^th things started to turn closer to a normal April, but still 20 degrees above the average at 64 degrees.

These awesome sunny days had us cockily out and about in our t-shirts and even short pants. I kept having to pinch myself, 81 degrees in the first week of April? This must be some sort of prolonged utopian dream I was experiencing. But no, I was awake; others assured me that they too were experiencing these strange days of summer-like weather in, yes, the first week of April. I started to tell myself and anyone around me who was still able to listen while in their state of weather bliss torpor, “don’t be fooled and go putting your long pants in storage just yet, it’s still April, you just never know with April in the northland.” Well of course this absurd parody could not last long and sure enough on the 7^th, reality once again took over. We found or selves shivering in our short pants and T-shirts as the temps dropped back to the normal range for the second week of April and the sun disappeared behind a thick gray mass of clouds.

By the 13^th we hadn’t reached an average high temperature or not seen the sun in six days, and two inches of mixed precipitation fell during that week. All of the fooled northlanders who would in a normal April be ecstatic that the weather had finally consistently hit into the mid- and upper-40s were instead grumbling about how “cold” it was. The utopic weather scales had not yet fallen from the poor townspeople’s eyes, still tipsy from the brief but hypnotic taste of summer temperatures in the 1^st week of April. Normal April temperatures were now a frigid scourge that left them glum and grumpy rather than delighted that spring was finally on the way.

Weirdly amused that the daffodils got snowed on about 10 times this April, it’s Caretaker Joe At Camp.