One month ago today we are on a Lake Huron beach, suntanning. This is a different Great Lake suntanning session than the previously-mentioned one, the one on Lake Erie over Labor Day weekend. Lake Erie is nice. Lake Huron is kind of nicer. The two suntanning sessions are basically the same except that on Lake Huron we sit facing facing west instead of south (thus getting a more even afternoon tan), and we are there a little longer, and also there are sandwiches. The sandwiches are homemade and fresh and accompany us in a small cooler. We wolf them down mere moments after sitting down on our beach towels, which are bath towels. At the Lake Erie beach we feel keenly the absence of sandwiches. It is a mistake we will not make again. Cold sandwiches on the beach are the best. Lake Huron is also bluer of sky and water than Erie, and louder of surf — a pleasant lacustrine low roar keeping aural pace with the more upper-register low roar of beachgoers’ voices. A lulling white noise conducive to reading and sunning. It seems a world away from the green-grey and waveless Lake Huron we stare into two springs ago. This beach is one of several beaches in Pinery Provincial Park. Cape Coddish long-grassed sand dunes wall off the beachfront from Pinery’s namesake forests. The name Huron, as in both the Great Lake and the Iroquois peoples formerly living near it, derives from a French word meaning rough hair of the head, presumably from seventeenth-century French explorers’ and fur-traders’ insulting description of the tribespeople they met. We chase our sandwiches with cans of Coke that despite the cooler’s coolness have been long approaching lukewarmth and emerge from the cooler exuding beaded films of condensatory science. It has been about a three-hour drive west across southern Ontario to Pinery. Ever look at a map of Ontario? It is staggeringly immense, most of it uninhabited. Southern Ontario is like a tiny appendage of Ontario’s total Ontariority and this tiny appendage still takes three hours to drive across, Lake to Lake, unless of course you’re a road-trip spoilsport and you take the multilane arterial highways instead of the scenic rural roads. We vegetate in the Lake Huron sun until evening and then hit Grand Bend for a sunset dinner out and then drive a multilane arterial highway home in the dark, chewing coffee beans with chocolate chips and screaming along with ghastly Beatles tribute-band tracks to keep from nodding off. Below: That day’s Great Lake late-summer sundown.