I`ve heard people say summer colds are the worst. Until lately I had no basis to agree or haggle, but I do now. Five days of headache, fever, and barky cough were enough evidence and sway my vote well to the side of ruling against summer colds as anything entertaining. Unless you`re on the reel-them-in end of the relief and remedy folk, offering so many cold, flu, and allergy fixes, the ordinary person can only stand there bewildered by so many choices. Drowsy and non-drowsy:  do I want to sleep or stay awake while feeling like crud? Do I want to go after one symptom in a targeted strike or nuke every symptom in sight like spiders caught in a fireball?

Having to make these decisions when not feeling chipper has all the charm of another disease atop the cold. I do as you and most of us do. I don’t really decide and make an assortment of drug producers happy by buying an assortment in pill, capsule, and liquid form. In my condition, I don’t feel like partying, so loss of the so-called beer money is little sacrifice.

In the comfort and leisure of home, I can get out the monocular magnifier for a stab at reading the tiny writing where WARNING is writ large but the details are in a mini script suited to fairy eyes. Bifocals plus a magnifying glass convince me to avoid this medicine during pregnancy, if diabetic, or advised to do so by my doctor, who has yet to go shopping with me.
I don’t like colds or the way we treat them, but I soldiered on as best I could, doing a lot of dozing off (apparently I avoided non-drowsy). In one of those states of nap-sleep broken by wake-up sneezes or barking, I was aware of a distant thundery noise distinct enough to register through the medicine fog of antihistamine boat head. There’s the full width of a house followed by a quarter miles of tree cover before I reach the highway where the nearest rumble strip makes its peace-destroying racket.

Maybe it’s my weakened condition, but I blame the tourists because it’s none of us locals picked up a habit of falling asleep on the way home to Iowa with boat trailer in tow and coolers full of their Canadian catch. Driving 61, I’m too alert for deer to think of sleep, so it has to be the tourist-visitor-guests who have caused this rumble strip visitation to wail woe and ill in the deep of night. Imagine what it would have been like with my window open. The banshee rumble is surely enough to break the peace of the best nighttime remedy made for an all-night rest.

It has to be all the outsiders bringing in their bugs from elsewhere and their wandering driving habits that bring us summer colds and caused the installation of rumble strips down the highway. Used to be the summer influx was easily avoided if you stayed out of town and did your grocery shopping first thing in the AM. But by a little here and there, the visitor impact has crept out to become one weekend festival event after the other, and make gas prices high enough to make an Arab sheik do a happy dance while his burka-covered wife looks on in presumed obedient approval.

 If visitors to the area bring us bugs, caused rumble strips, and make prices soar, it’s a wonder why we are nice and build eateries and lodgings for them, when incarceration and a proper flogging would be more appropriate, don’t you think? Of course, we locals can carry on about our pristine environment and high-and-mighty views, but when you scrape off the rhetoric, you see we’re in it for the money, which we prove by turning our paradise into a flow of festivals coming as neat and orderly as beads on a rosary.

But summer isn’t tourist bugs and rumble strips. Summer is decent weather, which finally got here and has not hung around several weeks running to make up in dryness what it exceeded in wetness during July. I could complain, but as a canoe guide decades ago I found grumbling about weather did no good or actually made things seem worse. It is what it is, so live with it. No god by any name will do weather magic one way this day or that because we beg, so get used to the idea that the only control possible is getting a grip on your own attitude. Gee Hoover or Al Hah have no part in it. It’s in your court to make the best or least of what comes your way.

I was reminded of my own advice a day before the summer cold pulled me down when a woman took the time to thank me for my old canoeing book, which she said was her family’s guide when they first started camping. I confess in my youth to occasional good intentions and charitable impulses. I’ve tried since to reform and make up for this—then someone comes along to remind me.

The reminder is awkward because I miss the canoeing and guiding I once did and have found it easier not to think about or remember it. In ways my first book, “The Spirit of Canoe Camping,” was a much the result of love and passion as a child. I think of the first book as a child of dream as opposed to a progeny of seed. In conception it was simple. I wanted to keep the style and content to a basic level.

The elements of good canoe camping are nothing special. You try to move and work efficiently while eating well for energy and staying dry and getting in your required sleep. It is simple. As with many things, keeping it simple is the tricky part. Before you know it, we add in complications and complaints according to the unpredictable patterns of our internal weather.