Hours of Daylight – 13:17
September arrives and like a switch being thrown somewhere the temp drops twenty degrees. It’ll probably rebound, but there’s no denying that fall will be coming on soon.

Last year for The Anniversary i returned to New York City and spent the time from the impact of the first plane until the fall of tower #2 out on the Hudson in a goofy double kayak with, of all people, an NPR reporter.

I never heard myself on the radio, but a guy i knew back in High School emailed me saying he’d heard me. Whatever.

This year i no longer feel the need to be back home for the second anniversary. I’ve seen the pit. I’ve seen the tears of people who were there. I ridiculed the hideous gawking tourists. Again, whatever.

It doesn’t change the fact I was not there when it happened. It’s not like i think i could have done anything useful had i been there. But i’ll never lose the feeling that a dear friend was hurt while i was off doing something else. I guess it’s sort of like the feeling a sports fan might have if they were looking the other way when their team made the one big play that won the championship. Watching or not watching makes no real difference, but the feeling is there nonetheless. Sure that friend has forgiven me, but it will never go away; the feeling that i somehow failed the only place i can honestly call home will always be with me.

This year i’ll take a different tack. This year Annette and i will try to be as far from Ground Zero as we can be while remaining in the US. By geographic means that would suggest Alaska, but we’re not going to be in Alaska. We plan to be camping on the southern shore of Lake Superior at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

We’ve never been there before. Pictured Rocks represents another notch on the Lake Superior belt. Our loose goal of camping our way around the Big Lake will get advanced one more little bit.

For anybody who has not yet tried it let me assure you that camping anywhere on the shore of Lake Superior can qualify for “far away” status. I might be imagining it, but there is an inherint wildness about the lakeshore. So, this year, rather than floating offshore a few hundred yards from Ground Zero we’ll be off with our VW Westy and kayaks…. pretending to be the only two humans left on earth, living in a place where violence on the scale of war and massive acts of terrorism does not exist.