by Peter Mansweat
for Huntsville Item 11/30/12
for Huntsville Item 11/30/12
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| 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.
