autumn hunting
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Today is the equinox: equal hours of day and night. The days change fast now. The difference in light between yesterday and today and today and tomorrow is the greatest it will be until spring. We’re in free fall towards the darkest day of the year. It’s windy outside as I write this, slightly chilly. The leaves scratch the ground, collect in corners, make warm the space between us. I love it.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
I drove to Guanella and Kenosha passes yesterday, hunting a golden tree, or a stand of them, to sit under and listen to the breezy afternoon light. (Also, of course, to take pictures.) It turns out I was a little early—most of the aspens around those passes are still green-ish. At any rate, I found no irresistibly magical niches, no obviously staged pieces of light, color, smell, and texture—too perfect to be real—as you sometimes can in the high country. Probably, I was in my car too much.
Always the altitude snob, I drove back up to Guanella pass—eleven thousand something feet—and walked around until the stars came out.
Autumn above the tree line is subtle. Still there, though.
I remember driving over Tioga Pass in Yosemite, the last fall I lived in California, for the express purpose of hunting autumn. Thousands of feet below the summit of the Sierras, near Mono Lake, a couple of cottonwoods next to a gas station had turned yellow. They made me horribly homesick. I stared for a few minutes. I adore the Bay Area, but after eight years there I was desperate for a real fall. Now I have them, though they’re still subtle compared to the east coast. Mostly they’re lost in all the work and busy-ness. But then, that’s my fault.
Another quote, from the Vinotok festival (which sounds way more fun and meaningful than, say, Denver’s Oktoberfest):
Oats and corn, oats and corn, all that dies will be reborn
Vine and grain, vine and grain, all that falls shall rise again
We’ll bottom out sometime in late December and start a slow acceleration towards the spring equinox. Then the sun will race higher every day until June, and begin to fail in the late heat of summer, and then again the color, and the cold, and the dark.
Seriously though? I can’t freaking believe it’s already almost October.