I’ve reached my usual worn-out point in the helter-skelter of summer. My internal battery is flashing “LOW-replace soon.” When guests at Camp Van Vac kindly ask the perfunctory “How are you?”, I’m inclined to respond, “It’s August, but I’ll be fine.”

So, I’m particularly grateful when a little guest-resorter interaction gets me grinning. An energetic middle-aged guy guest made my day on Monday. He found a set of car keys with a fob that said “rental Kia” on it, and came into the office to try to locate the owner. Now, I’m a bit of a registration Nazi and insist that guests sign in legibly with their address. Zip code, too. So when they leave that drawer full of underwear and electronics behind in the cabin (this happens more often than one would think) I don’t have to dig into the computer to find their mailing address.

I’m persistent, also, about getting the car color, make and license plate, the latter of which, folks usually have to go out and look at the car to get. (Didn’t we always used to remember our license plates? Well, no more.) My persistence results from having car alarms go off in the middle of the night, headlights left on and, sadly, last summer a falling tree that took out two guest cars. At times like that, it’s handy to be able to track the auto owners down to their cabins.

At any rate, we scoured the registration list for Kias and found two. The helpful guy volunteered to go to both cabins in search of the owner. Alas, neither one had lost their keys. So, we left them in the lost-and-found spot in the office. The next day a woman came in. She saw the keys and her face lit up. “There they are!” I told her about the nice guy. He happened to be standing in the office, too.

“Funny,” I said, with only a slight tone of admonishment. “I don’t think you signed in your Kia on the registration sheet.”

“Sure I did.” She pointed to the line with her name on it. “Oh, no,” she said. “I registered the black Jeep that’s sitting at home in my garage in Baltimore.”

I guess I’m not the only one whose mental batteries are running a little low in August.

However, the Ely Field Naturalist listserve folks proved quick on the uptake in a recent email interchange.

Person 1: (With photo of lumpy, dark brown scat with a wrist watch along-side for size comparison) “Seen on portage near Alice Lake. Small in circumference, lots of berries in there.”

Person 2: Fox. But how did it pass the watch?

Person 3: Maybe he just took the time.

Enough drollery. On to irony, or maybe just grumbling. Why do some of the nicest people leave the messiest cabins? Last week some truly delightful guests left a cabin that made the cleaning crew cringe. Peanut butter smeared throughout the silver in the tray. Every dish and pan greasy and put back on the shelf. An over-supply of firewood that took up a third of the living room and left wood chips scattered throughout. Yet, they had brought a monarch butterfly caterpillar up north with them, worried about finding enough milkweed for it to eat, and watched it metamorphose into a little green chrysalis, dangling from the cabin ceiling. When they left the chaotic cabin on Saturday morning they set a note on the dining room table, carefully chronicling for the next cabin residents what to expect when the butterfly emerged from the pupa and would need to be ushered outside.

I’m not sure how to be a kind host, and yet set a standard in how folks should leave their cabins. I’ve heard that hospitality is making your guests feel at home even when you wish they were.

To an overwhelming degree, I enjoy Camp’s guests. When a motor conked out on one of our boats halfway across the lake last week, another boat full of campers towed them back to the dock. They leave charming advice in the cabin journals for the next folks to come along, like this encouragement to contribute: “No need to be profound, poetic, eloquent, lyrical, etc. (though if that’s your bent, go for it!)”

And, with journal entries that appreciate all that the northwoods, friendly Elyites, the lakes, loons and night sky have to offer, they encourage me and the work crew to make it through August. I’d bet that our resorts, campsites, outfitters and guides hear sentiments similar to the one from last Labor Day weekend that reads:

“Caught a few smallmouth bass off the dock. Saw a fox on the in-road on Friday on my way back from Shagawa and was lucky to see a marten between here and the office on the high path on Saturday morning. Most of the time was spent doing nothing…relaxing. Hours reading, sitting on the step in a camp chair listening to nature and sounds from Camp. A person doesn’t get enough time to be close to nature and the earth during everyday life.”

In these dog days of August we’re reminded that this season offers joys that our visitors treasure, that please and comfort us, blow fresh energy into us and will soon carry us forth into autumn, and then into winter.