MISQUAH — With the opener filling the public landing before dawn Saturday, the Sheriff’s northern substation issued its annual and largely unheeded request that residents test their boat-trailer lights before joining the slow procession to the water — a request prompted, Deputy Vang said, by “the usual two or three trailers running dark down County 6 with a line of trucks behind them and nobody able to tell whether they’re turning or just thinking about it.”

The trailer-light problem is seasonal and, by long observation, incurable. Boats and trailers sit through a northern winter; the wiring corrodes, the bulbs give out, and the connection that worked perfectly in October “discovers in May that it has retired,” as Vang put it. The result, each opener, is a stretch of pre-dawn road on which brake lights are more a matter of faith than of fact.

No collisions were reported this year, though one trailer was pulled over near the landing after its left signal was observed to be “more of a suggestion,” and its owner advised, not for the first time, to carry a spare bulb. “He knew,” Vang said. “They always know. The bulb’s been out since Mother’s Day. The opener just makes it everybody’s problem at once.”

The substation’s standing advice remains what it is every May: check the lights in the driveway, in daylight, before the coffee, when there is still time to do something about it. The advice is printed, mailed, and announced annually, and works, Vang allowed, “about as well as telling the lake to slow down, which is to say it makes us feel better and changes nothing.”