What is wrong with you people? If you click over to this page of the website you are viewing at this very moment, you’ll find that “Summer” was ranked as the best season in which to enjoy the Chippewa Valley. By you.

Are you insane? Summer is, at best, the second best season in which to enjoy this fine chunk of Wisconsin. I don’t care how much you love waterskiing, fishing, baseball games, windsurfing, tornado-chasing, drive-in movies, or two-on-two Top Gun-style beach volleyball. Summer is hot and sticky and itchy and full of insects that give you diseases like Lyme Disease and, um ... Malaria Disease.

I’m not even going to broach the oft-ridiculed subject of Wisconsin’s phenomenal summer humidity, because such rants are far too obvious. And as we all know, Mike Paulus does not make obvious observations.¹

Something’s seriously wrong when a large group of Midwesterners openly claim to like summer better than, oh, I don’t know, what about autumn? The sweet spot between summer and winter, a magical time when there’s the least amount of weather-related annoyances to complain about. Summer? The “best” season? The mind boggles.

Fall is the best around, and nothing’s gonna ever keep it down. Not even if summer teamed up with both spring and winter to form some sort of unstoppable, mutant super-season where you could go downhill skiing past clumps of tulips onto a huge ramp that sends you cannonballing into the soothing waters of Lake Wissota. Even then, autumn would find a way to defeat the evil Frankenseason (probably with a well-placed series of neck punches).

I’m tired of people singing the praises of summer and all it has to offer. It’s totally overrated. Case in point: tubing on the river.

• ¹Mike Paulus-penned references to Wisconsin’s humidity in Volume One Magazine alone: 1,014.

    I’m so sick of hearing about how hugely popular river tubing has become around the Chippewa Valley. It’s not like someone just invented a new, cutting edge water sport or something.² It’s ... floating. That particular summer activity was taken to the next level decades ago when some drunk idiot decided to mount an inner tube, tether it to the back of his Bassmaster 3000 aluminum fishing boat, and tell his Uncle Randy to gun it. Simply floating while getting horribly sunburnt and horribly rejected by female acquaintances seems like a colossal step backwards.

And another thing. What’s up with all the bacteria level alerts at our local swimming holes? Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the alerts because I don’t like wading in bacteria any more than the next guy, but the sheer quantity of this past summer’s bacteria alertness was off the charts. The safety of our local beaches seemed to depend on which way the (oppressively humid³) wind was blowing. Back in July, you could poke your head out a window and actually hear the alternating cries of swimsuit-clad Chippewa Valley children as they cheered and booed on an hourly basis. And yet, you claim that summer is “number one.”

That kind of crap never happens in autumn because no one’s swimming. We’re too busy having an absolute blast while chugging apple cider and Octoberfest beer on hay rides through picturesque (and possibly haunted) countrysides. We’re wearing attractive mid-weight jackets and kick-ass boots. We’re sucking in lung-full after lung-full of invigoratingly cool air. We’re living the good life.

Now, I know a lot of you didn’t vote for summer in Volume One’s annual reader poll, and many of you people stepped in line behind the cool, crisp awesomeness that is fall. Together, we will be Autumn’s Army, with legion after legion of snazzy-scarf wearing, earth-toned orchard-lovers. And I will be your captain. The Chippewa Valley shall thunder with our voices as we take to the golden-hued treetops and roar of fall’s numerous virtues! We will educate the sunscreen-slathered masses.

And in 2011, we will place the crown of “Best Season” upon the only one that truly deserves it.

• ²Unlike me – last summer, I invented The River Tubin’ Crossbow Sharp Shootin’ Biathlon.
  ³Make that 1,015 humidity references.