On a cloudless day, the summer sort that make even the most ornery people feel like considering a smile, there is little reason to walk onto a pier and romanticize those boards. Piers played a central and starring role in my childhood. The impact of that fondness finds me when I’m sitting on a beach somewhere warm, feeling the sand and for a while enjoying it before wishing I had something sturdy and wooden to stand on, to lie on, to jump from. When sitting on a sandy towel, when spitting sand out of my mouth, when scratching it out of my hair and when plucking it from my eyes, I simply long for the cleanliness of a wooden white pier.
That pier went in the icy cold water late this year, later than we would have preferred it too. It was April, or May, and for some in was June. Installing a pier in June is to take a season that only feels eternal to those without piers and make it even shorter. Proper piers find their water in April, and by the end of May when the first foot traffic arrives, the gleaming white has erased any sins from the prior year. This glistening white won’t last long, as boaters will boat and swimmers will swim, little children will curl their toes around the outside edge of that end stringer and they’ll make their first jump. Then they’ll clasp their hands over their heads and bend towards the water in an attempt at their first dive. And your Aunt Edna is going to pull that metal footed chair just a little closer so she can hear your conversation just a little better. The scratch she leaves will linger until the following April, or May. Or June.
Friends will visit, and like many boating friends they will pull up to the pier aggressively and with a might bow thump the pier will shake. Crayfish will shoot from their rocky homes inside those wooden cribs, and bass will dart to avoid the danger. The bow will mostly catch the sturdy plastic bumper, but enough boat will catch enough pier to flake off a tight grained chunk of Douglas Fir. That fir will splash to the water, where it will float and bob and push from shore to shore until the sharp lines have worn smooth. Then someone will find it the next fall, rubbed smooth and paintless, and they’ll put it on the coffee table next to a stack of books that no one reads in a jar of similar finds.
Families will convene, children will splash, boats will come and then boats will go. As sure as the sun rises every morning, the view from that lakefront window will frame that pier with the same unwavering style. But soon enough that pier will be dismembered, board by board, a routine that the pier man knows well but one that is rarely witnessed in person by those pier owners. First, the boats will leave, then the canopies will be pulled from their frame, wrapped tightly and driven back to be stored in Jimmy’s shop. The canopy frame, some wood and some metal, will be hoisted from the uprights and set on the lawn, followed by the pier planks and the stringers and then the horses. The tremendous structure that hosted so many fun days of summer will now be arranged on a lakeside lawn, still in full view of those front facing windows, but now lacking any appeal, either visual or utilitarian.
These piers separate us here. They make us different. There are piers elsewhere, sure. There are metal piers with old car tires hanging from those thin metal posts, with wooden or metal or plastic walkways as narrow as a bedroom hall in an hold cottage. These piers will be cranked from the water now, or they have been cranked a while ago, likely on a sunny October, or September afternoon, at a time when the homeowner had a friend up to help. These piers will be pulled from their shallow homes, weeds still clinging to their uprights. These piers are nothing like our piers. In fact, these piers shouldn’t be called piers at all. They should be called docks, because in the way that we cannot call ponds lakes we cannot call docks piers.
There are other piers too- big, giant, immovable ones. The sorts that stick out into salty water or inland oceans. These are piers that stand high above the water, so high above that to dive from one into the water may take a moment or two to first gather courage. These are piers that hold big boats, yachts. These are piers with heavy planks, or poured concrete walkways that float on giant rollers to allow for the mood of the tide. These are piers that men cast large fishing lures from, or these are piers that others dangle cut up fish or squid or shrimp from, hoping something large and toothy will be hungry and near. These are piers that serve purposes, but they are more of a necessary structure to perform heavy duty moorings than they are whimsical structures that capture our summer splashing.
Our piers are nothing like those piers, and this is just one of the many things that makes us different in a way that should be spelled b-e-t-t-e-r. In November, with snow approaching and winter narrowing its focus, we can now look to these once majestic, shining piers and find them in haphazard piles on front lawns. We can see these piers now and ignore them. Or, we can choose to remember all the great things that happened on those piers over the past seven months. Once we’re done remembering, we can shift to forecasting, and think of how wonderful it’ll feel to put our bare feet on that warm white pier again. Patience, that’s the thing we need now.