Listing Autumn by Peter Mansweat

by Peter Mansweat
for Huntsville Item 11/30/12

Peter Mansweat at Lake Oolooteka
Photo by Casey Roon de Pacheco

October is usually dry and occasionally crisp.  This year it was both and our reward has been (and still is) good fall color.  Notwithstanding our common regard for rugged individualism, no one is going to mistake East Texas for Vermont, and that’s a good thing.  As Vermont and other places of rich fall foliage, autumn has metastasized into a growth industry, economically important, touted by Chambers of Commerce and Tourism Boards, a yearly, measurable monied ritual with its own trackable economic indicators and 30 minute updateable county specific peak-color indicators available for uploading to navigation systems – time specific, crowded, jammed-up, immediate, a sort of Nature’s Black Friday Extravaganza.

From Asheville to Bangor, there are roads that, on certain weekends, are so thick with traffic the exhaust fumes all but obliterate the foliage.  I’m all for equal opportunity leaf-peeping, but being trapped on a 3 mph, two lane mountain  blacktop behind a smoking diesel SUV and in front of an aging Winnebago with screeching brakes tends to diminish one’s appreciation of Nature’s Autumnal Wonder.

Even for those lucky enough to find relative solitude, there’s something unnerving about 1000 miles of sheer, intense autumn foliage.  How much awe, after all, are we able to take?  One October, years ago, I awoke in the Cumberland Gap after an overnight snowfall, and ­­­­spent that morning walking in woods full of fall foliage above and white snow below.  By noon, my eyeballs had completely rebelled, I couldn’t distinguish a single tree in an overwhelming forest of color, I fell victim to sensory overload, and found myself fumbling in my jacket pocket for my Ray-Bans.

In East Texas, in Huntsville, and on the grounds of the SHMM, we have a kinder, gentler fall, and though it will never compare in majesty or grandeur with that of northern latitudes, it does have its compensations.

1.       Fall here is economical.  Every day I live without my A/C compressor humming is like a salary bonus.  Lows of 48, highs of 80 is windows-open weather.  The air in my home is fresh and free.

2.       Fall here is graceful and subtle.  It creeps up on us, (on little cat feet?), and comes to us out of the corner of our eyes.  It is full of yellows- and the yellows themselves are full of different yellows – the yellow of pecan, of hackberry, of redbud and hickory, or golden-eye, maximillian sunflower and copper-canyon daisy, all variations of the same theme, yet each distinctive to itself.

3.       Fall here calls, at least temporarily, a truce to tree prejudice.  We all have our tree prejudices.  Haters of the sweetgum and the tallow must recognize at least for a few weeks, the glory of their yellow-orange-red foliage, a  tripartite of the color wheel often co-existing on a single tree, or even better, on different leaves of a single branch. Those who disdain the yaupon grudgingly admit the cheerfulness of their high orange-to-red berries, and even I, vowed enemy of the flowering ligustrum must admire their fat cluster of grape-like berries, that serve at least one good purpose – ripening over winter to feed the frenzied flocks of wandering cedar waxwings, as delightful a thing to watch as there is in the natural world. 

4.        Fall here is a celebration of the individual.  What we lack in forest of maple or aspen, we make up in color from reliable old friends.  The ring of cypress around the duck pond this year, on their way from green to bronze, stopped to linger for about a week at what can only be called gold.  There has been a marked,  and gratifying increase of visitors at the pond in the last few weeks, quiet couples and young families basking in the glow of the slanting, late afternoon sun that, every day turns this part of the park the color of a shiny new penny.

There are a dozen or more Shumard oaks in Huntsville that I know of that are, right now, shimmering with orange and red, and another dozen on the verge of turning, and scores of old crepe myrtles, a tree unknown to Yankees, whose chief glory is vibrant summer bloom, but whose fall foliage in certain years – and this is one – is intense and vibrant as any northern maple.  Three blocks from my house there is an old crepe myrtle planted in front of a youngish sycamore, the crepe red and glossy and out-splayed, the sycamore bronze and stately, rounded and self-contained.  They are a lovely pain, and every morning my wife and I, grouchy, grumbly, on the way to another work day, pay them homage with a nod and a grateful smile.

5.       Fall here is still going on.  The great deciduous forests of the north and east are leafless now, “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang”.  We still have the leaves, and a good many of the birds.  And we will have, for at least a while longer.  Visitors to the Woodland Home grounds are still picking pecans, and Santa will have visited this weekend beneath a proud memorial shumard oak that hasn’t even full turned yet.

So, if you were planning that leaf-peeping trip to Vermont this year, but couldn’t quite make it, don’t despair.   Take a drive, instead, around the area, the county, the city, and finish it off with a stroll through the grounds of the SHMM, open every day, free of charge, dawn to dusk.  You can still catch a little of fall, if you hurry, and after that, of course, spring can’t be far behind.