It's the month when the summer nights have a consistent, delicious crispness to them unknown at any other time of the year. It's when the corn is sweet, the plums are purple and pungent, the baseball pennant races are mature, the ocean temperatures are warm. It is the very best month of the year. And we have ruined it. (click below to read more)
Not so long ago—well within the memory of half the American population—August was the vacation month. It was a time, much anticipated and much appreciated, of leisure, languor, lassitude and lingering at the beach well into suppertime. Unlike July, it had no holiday disruption, no grocery-store rush, no rituals, no reason to hurry, except maybe to get to the ice-cream stand before closing time, and even that was flexible, depending upon the length of the line. Hardly anyone got married, and no one went to class. Congress barely met, and then it departed for most of the month, a great relief to them and an even bigger one for the nation. It was an idyll of idleness, a time of pure ease—and now it's gone.
We've made August a horror of back-to-school and blinding activity, a time when offices are open late and summer camps close early.
August it is now no more special than June (part work and school, part holiday season), without Flag Day or Bunker Hill Day, or a sunburned version of March, without much threat of snow. What we've done to August has made it the cruelest month: infuriating work and inescapable school obligations amid intoxicating weather.
Summer is a lot shorter than it used to be. I began college classes on Sept. 25, 1972. This year freshmen at Rice University reported to campus 43 days earlier than that—on Aug. 12. (Average Houston humidity on that date: 95%.) Classes at the University of Missouri begin Aug. 20. (Average temperature for that period in Columbia, Mo.: 87 degrees)
But that's nothing. For generations American children began their school years on the Wednesday after Labor Day, which meant that in some years the first school bell might ring as late as Sept. 9. This year public schools in Shelby County, Tenn., opened five weeks earlier than that, on Aug. 5. (Average daily high temperature in Memphis that date: 91 degrees.)
These calendar changes have a cascading effect. College students return to campus in mid-August, abandoning their positions as life guards and camp counselors. Without students to sit atop the pool towers or to supervise lakeside camp bunks, pools restrict their hours and camps wrap up early. Sleep-away camps used to end routinely around Aug. 24. Now the standard closing date is around Aug. 12.
Schedule change is the vacation equivalent of climate change. Just as the seashore and marine nature are vulnerable to changes because of global warming, seashore vacations are being transformed because of the shift in the nature of August. You used to have to wait until after Labor Day to find a spot on the sand at high tide at Ogunquit Beach in Maine, where the sand all but disappears twice a day. Now the last week of August will do. (New students are expected on the Colby and Bowdoin campuses on Aug. 27. High tide that day is 4:50 p.m.)
I'm not the only one worried about this. A University of Minnesota Tourism Center study found that family trips of at least two nights fell by 50% in August or September in years in which schools opened before Labor Day.
"August has become less of a vacation month,'' says Elton Mykerezi, associate professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. "Reliable data show early school starts ranging into August do cause a drop in travel. But the bigger news is that all of summer travel—not just August travel—drops by 30% when school starts early. There are vacations that never occur as a result of August school openings."
There's one other thing. Out where I live, in southwestern Pennsylvania, August is absolutely the best month for peaches. It's when it's dry enough for the sugar to be concentrated and for the trademark sweetness of the Pennsylvania peach to reach its dreamy height. Those peaches come in on a virtual flood of fruit; walk into one of those orchards out in Independence Township, northwest of Pittsburgh, in a year in which there hasn't been a spring frost and you'll think the August air has a peach perfume.
It's time to reclaim August for the purposes for which it was intended, beyond wiping the peach juice from your cheeks by the lakeside: to tramp in the hills before Labor Day, to enjoy a lobster roll by the shore when the evenings are cool, to walk through a beach town with an ice-cream cone as the skies go gray with night in the last few breaths of summer.
August is America at its best. Let's take it back.
—Mr. Shribman is the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press.
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