OUR VIEW — The official calendar lists certain holidays; the town quietly keeps a different list. Now that the opener has come and gone, we wish to argue for its recognition as the most civic day Misquah observes.

Consider what the opener does that the official holidays only claim to. It empties the town and fills the lake. It puts the whole community out of doors and on the water at the same cold hour, joined in a common and faintly ridiculous purpose. It is observed by nearly everyone and dodged by almost no one, and it is marked not by a parade to be watched but by a thing to be done, which is the higher form. If a civic holiday is a day on which a community remembers that it is one, the opener qualifies, and the line at the landing is its ceremony.

It has the other marks, too. It has its rituals — the emergency sandwich, the pre-dawn breakfast, the annual lie about the size of last year’s fish. It has its elders, holding court at the cleaning station, and its young, dragged from bed to learn the thing they will one day drag their own children to learn. It has its liturgy of complaint about the weather and its sacrament of bad coffee. What it lacks is only official standing — and official standing, we gently note, is the easiest thing in the world to confer and the least important to possess.

We do not propose closing the bank; the bank, on opener morning, closes itself, there being no one to staff it and no one to visit. We propose only that we call the day what it plainly is: the morning this town most fully assembles, on the water it shares, in the cold it complains of together. That is a civic holiday. The fish, as always, are incidental.