ESCAPES

TIME WAS, SUMMER WAS THIS: YOU woke, ate some fresh biscuits with molasses, and walked outside, and the South had laid all the bright wonder and possibility in the dew at your feet. Whether you hunted arrowheads poised on their little pedestals of red dirt after a rain, or kept a wary eye on a copperhead as you stole wild blackberries from the bushes over its lair, or fought a yellowfin tuna to the boat forty miles out in the Gulf, or just stood in a creek gigging frogs and trapping craw-fish, it seemed as if time had been bent and hammered in on itself like so much Damascus steel, so that these easy doings could, theoretically, curl on forever. If you spent your day lollygagging down on the river after some bream, you could always pick the peaches for the cobbler tomorrow.

Summer spreads its big, comic, oddly magnetic lie of languor and immortality pretty much anywhere it lands, but in the South the deception is more convincing because the season is so fecund and splashy—headlong to the hills, headlong to the river and the sea. The question of an end to things doesn’t ever get asked until the cotton comes in.

These days, it’s axiomatic that we have to stage our summer play more along the lines of a jailbreak, because the unfettered liberties of youth are never long with us. A real, grown-up Monday usually waits in ambush on the other side of the fun things, and if you somehow manage to elude that, then Tuesday will be right there nipping at your butt. On the bright side, the South’s natural bounty will support your bid