OUR VIEW — A defense of cold hands, gas-station coffee, and the democracy of boat ramps. The fishing opener arrives Saturday, and with it, as reliably as the season itself, a small annual chorus of suggestions for improving it.

Someone proposes a pancake feed with a theme. Someone wonders whether the landing might be organized, with numbered slots and a sign-up sheet. Someone, every year, floats the word “festival.” We understand the impulse — it is the same impulse that produces committees, and committees have their place — but we would like to speak, as we do each May, in defense of leaving the opener exactly as cold and plain and unimproved as we found it.

The opener does not need a theme. Its theme is hope, applied at four-thirty in the morning against considerable evidence. It does not need organizing; the boat ramp organizes itself, in a slow and grumbling democracy in which the banker and the farmhand wait in the same dark, for the same water, and no one’s slot is numbered because no one’s standing is higher. There is bad coffee. There are cold hands. There is the particular silence of men who rose too early and will not admit it. This is enough. This has always been enough.

We have nothing against festivals, and we have, in this town, improved a great many things and will improve a great many more. But some things are not problems to be solved; they are rituals to be kept, and the opener is chief among them. Let it be cold. Let it be early. Let the coffee be bad and the line be long and the fish be, as ever, noncommittal. Let the opener be what it is, which is ours.