Sounds of silence

Posted by Mark Chapman on June 27th, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Ah, sum­mer.

Here that sound? What? You hear noth­ing? Exactly. It’s the sound of summer.

Walk, don’t run. What’s your hurry? The livin’ is easy. Fish are jumpin’, and the pick­erel weed is high (well, until the county mower swings by, anyway).

Noth­ing much hap­pen­ing here. The Sara­sota police and fire dis­patch log has gone quiet. Well, not quiet, exactly. If you live in North Port or Sara­sota, or even Venice, Nokomis or Osprey, there’s still plenty of action.

Engle­wood? Not so much.

In fact, as we drib­ble into the rainy sea­son, fire calls begin to catch up to police calls, what with light­ning strikes ignit­ing the dry brush.

Arrests are way down in both coun­ties. In metro areas, hot town, sum­mer in the city usu­ally means more vio­lence, crime spikes. Here? It’s just too hot, man. And too laid back.

County gov­ern­ment takes a break this week. To be hon­est, county gov­ern­ment has been run­ning at half speed for weeks. This week, though, com­mis­sion­ers  in both coun­ties have declared their inde­pen­dence and will not be hold­ing meet­ings. That goes for most other gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies here.

That’s the beauty of local gov­ern­ment. You can take a break and not hurt mil­lions of peo­ple through inac­tion. If, say, the Sen­ate Major­ity Leader in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., decides vaca­tion and cam­paign time is more impor­tant than a jobs bill and an unem­ploy­ment and COBRA exten­sion, well, so be it. It’s sum­mer­time. Let’s go fishing.

It’s been years since I lived in a sum­mer resort area — well, OK, I was within spit­ting dis­tance of the Jer­sey Shore last sum­mer, but that was more last resort than sum­mer resort — but I still have this nag­ging feel­ing that sum­mer is sup­posed to be the busy sea­son. Liv­ing on Cape Cod for 40-plus years does that to a per­son, espe­cially when 12 of those years included dri­ving off and onto the Cape through a world-class bot­tle­neck every day.

But here, sum­mer means less traf­fic, less crime and eas­ier access to restau­rants. It means beach time, pool time and going-out-to-the-club time.

In fact, despite the loss of snow­bird dol­lars, sum­mer is my favorite time of the year in Engle­wood. Every­one gets to recharge their bat­ter­ies, recon­nect with friends and once again become the kind of close-knit com­mu­nity that makes it such a spe­cial place.

You can comment on this story below.

If you want to link to this post from your site, use this trackback link.

One response to “Sounds of silence”

1. RogerJ

   6 / 28 / 2010
   11:35 am

   Good write up…

   …wel­come to Engle­wood. Chill!

Leave a reply:

You must be logged in to post a comment.