Our now annual trip to see the fall foliage in the Adirondacks was, as ever, thrillingly beautiful. But it's also emotionally confusing, jumping forward a few weeks in time to see the seasonal change coming our way, like sneaking a peek at the last pages of a book you're reading.
Arriving, as is our wont, on a weekday, we were delighted to find few other leaf-peepers, but leaf-peepers we were, helicoptering in to the woods just as the leaves turned - which, I started to feel already last year, evinces a kind of cluelessness about the trees we were apparently celebrating. The areas we explored are close to those which a wordsmith near the Wild Center in Tupper Lake praised in last week's Fall Foliage Report:
foliage is expected to be near-peak this weekend in parts of Franklin County, with spotters predicting 75-80% color change .... Look for a bright display of maize, banana, daffodil, clementine, mustard, yam, burnt sienna, ginger, beet, rhubarb, raspberry, paprika and pimento-colored leaves of above average brilliance.
I think we saw leaves in all these colors - but of course we see them because the trees have disinvested in them. Unlike spring flowers, fall colors are a byproduct, an aftereffect. I was casting about for a metaphor. Is it like visiting a town on the day they hang their laundry out? The day after a big parade? An image came to me of an ocean liner, its decks lined with soldiers off to war, waving flags, but is there any correlate to the well-wishers on the dock, praying for their safe return? It started to seem more like we were coming for a comedy when what was playing was a tragdy, a forest-wide act of abandonment, more like when the ancient Japanese placed their old folks in trees and left them to die. I wondered what becomes of worker bees when the queen has no further need for them.
Then we took a walk in a piece of woods that has become a favorite. A mile from the place we usually stay in Blue Mountain Lake, we've seen it in practically every season. (OK, not summer high season!) The light was dim - it had been raining heavily all day - and we walked gingerly with umbrellas, avoiding mud. But the view was stunning. A surprising number of trees still sported green leaves, limned with yellow, and pale oranges wafted high above, but the glory was on the ground before us, the freshest leaf litter in rain-polished scarlets and purples and golds. It felt like walking in a cave full of jewels.
And it came to me that the leaves were as delighted as I was. Waving on the tree, even dancing in the wind as their petiole releases - the things the human leaf-peepers thrill to - weren't the point. Reaching the forest floor, where they would make their final contributions to the forest, that was nirvana. Anthropomorphizing away, I even imagined them happy to be touching other leaves at last, not in competition but in concert.
I was really just applying to leaves what I have learned about the tree trunks and branches - that their participation in the life of the forest doesn't end when they fall, but only changes. (We city slickers get to see this neither for trunks, branches nor leaves, all of which are spirited swiftly away as soon as they fall.) Haskell put it memorably in the chapter of The Songs of Trees dedicated to a green ash which fell in the forest and which he visits over the following year to find an ever changing cast of new characters.
Before its fall, a tree is a being that catalyzes and and regulates conversation in and around its body. Death ends the active management of these connections. ... But a tree never fully controlled these connections; in life, the tree was only one part of its network. Death decenters a tree's life but does not end it. (83-84)
