Ten O'Clock and Still Light Out

Around the third week of June, somebody at the table will look up from a patio drink, notice it's ten o'clock and the sky is still the colour of weak lemonade, and say, with genuine surprise, "Huh. It's ten." Someone says it every year. It's tradition now, like the Stompede or complaining about the Stompede traffic.

This is the thing about summer here. It isn't long. It's wide. The days stretch so far past reasonable that you can work a full shift, cut the grass, drive to Saskatoon Island, and still get home before the light gives out. Six weeks of that and you start to understand why people stay through February.

Start with the Stompede, because the calendar does. Evergreen Park in early June, chuckwagons kicking up dust, a grandstand full of people who were in parkas a month ago and are now visibly sunburned. You can be a rodeo person or not. It doesn't matter. Go once for the wagons. The sound of four outfits hitting the turn together is worth the parking, and I say that as someone who has strong feelings about the parking.

Then there are the smaller rodeos and fairs scattered through the towns around the city, the kind with a beer gardens, a midway that looks assembled from three other midways, and a pie table that sells out early. These are better than the big show, if I'm honest. Fewer people, closer to the chutes, and you will run into your dentist.

Muskoseepi Park is the city's best idea, and most of us use it badly. We drive past it. Walk Bear Creek from end to end on a weekday evening instead, when the trail has cleared out and the light goes sideways through the poplars. Rent a paddleboat on the reservoir if you've never done it. Nobody looks dignified in a paddleboat. That's the point.

For patios, I'll leave names out of it, since the best one is whichever has a seat in the sun at six o'clock and the worst is whichever faces the parking lot. Patio season here runs on optimism. The heaters come out in May, again in August, and once memorably in July. Bring a jacket. You won't need it until you suddenly do.

The real summer, though, is twenty minutes out of town in every direction. Saskatoon Island Provincial Park, where the berries the city is named after grow wild and the trumpeter swans go about their business without caring who's watching. The Kleskun Hills, a small patch of badlands that makes no geographic sense and is all the better for it. The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum out by Wembley, which is worth it even without children, maybe especially without them. And Dunvegan, where the Peace River runs wide and brown under the bridge, and the old mission sits on the flats as if nobody told it a century went by.

A few honest notes. The mosquitoes after a wet June are a weather system of their own. Some summers the smoke comes in and the sun turns into a red coin for a week. And August, which visitors assume is peak, often has a cool edge to it by the last week, the first hint that the whole bright business is winding down.

None of that is a reason to stay inside. It's a reason to go now. Sunset in late June comes after ten-thirty. The light hangs on for an hour after that.