On the last day at Leen’s, low-lying clouds beat out the sun. A welcome chill rustled through the trees, kicking up the baby whitecaps on West Grand Lake, daring us bait fishermen and women to troll. Unlike the anonymous haters on social media, who troll in the name of a different kind of mean-spirited sport, trolling from a canoe can deliver glories from 100 feet under – the fresh lake salmon. The fight is a sight as they leap above the surface, hook in mouth, jumping into the air as they’re reeled in, as if to warn you they could still escape. Most at Camp Kotok depart on Sunday, pulled back into their offices for this or that obligation. The solitude left in the wake of their mass departure delivers both melancholy and peace. As for those of us who linger into Monday, we are gifted one last day and night that harkens back to the early years. There’s no shouting over one another in the lodge over dinner, no formal filmed debate and no ego-energized Texas Hold’em into the night. We are the privileged few, the serene stragglers, the immediate extended family.
What does not go quietly into the Sunday as our brothers and sisters depart is dissent. This is, after all, a grouping of economists and investors, all of whom are armed to defend their stances and books to the death. The model-driven dismal scientists battle the data agnostic. Yours truly, of course, occupies the latter cohort. To that end, Friday’s docket provided a treasure trove of releases to objectively analyze into the eighth week before the U.S. elections.