The Leaves Turn, and So Does the Wheel

I spent the autumn of 1996 on the central coast of California where there was no discernible fall foliage. Many of the trees and shrubs were evergreen, and the leaves on the deciduous plants simply turned brown and fell off. I was surprised at my own disappointment. Since I had been old enough to remember I had lived in the northeastern United States where the combination of shortening days and cool nights produces some of the most stunning fall colors on the globe.

I had taken the autumn show for granted in the sense that I of course expected to happen each year and to be able to compare notes with friends and strangers about how this particular year rated compared to others. People treat it almost like a sports team. “Yeah, the reds are as bright this year as they were last year because, you know, it was a bit more overcast in the early part of September.” “Remember the year we had that drought in August and the leaves started to turn in September instead of waiting for October?”

Many of my academic friends were from the Northeast and Midwest, and most of them were completely enthralled by the climate of the Central Coast, with its nearly cloudless, humidity-free days where the temperature rarely reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the heat of the summer and rarely got below 40 in the depths of winter. The one time of the year that these transplants actually admitted that there was a flaw in the perfection of the California climate was in the fall when the confessed to missing the oranges, reds, purples, and yellows of the trees in October. This moment of melancholy would quickly be followed by an assertion that if one drove across the valley and up into the Sierras, the aspens were simply gorgeous. (This was also the solution to missing snow at Christmas.)

It was perhaps after I moved back to central New York after my year in California that I started to look at winter trees differently. For one thing I realized that if the lose their leaves at the beginning of November and don't get them back until the middle of May, then the leaves are actually on the trees for only half the year. I had never realized that I had been looking at leafless trees for half of my life. That was the other thing that suddenly amazed me: the massive scale and inscrutable architecture of bare limbed trees. Like the proverbial alien seeing them for the first time, I was struck by the bizarre nature of these monumental cellulose and lignin structures bursting out of the ground and thrusting 80 to 100 feet up in the air. And doing so in great thickets that covered a good deal of the landscape.

The loss of the leaves in the fall and the eruption new ones out of the branches in the spring is a flagrant example of the cyclical pattern of Nature and its inexorable energy. Pagan religions that worship Nature and gods that personify natural phenomena are all about this demonstration of combined periodicity and infinity, something that is constantly changing, but everlasting. It is a very reassuring thing of which to be conscious. You can see that here is something enormously vital and very much larger in every way than your self. To realize that you are actually part of it and that this vitality actually flows through your veins and is, when it comes right down to it, your strength, your life and your hope, well that's transcendent (and what Emerson was trying to get at without deserting Christianity, which may be why he's so difficult to read.)

So I was glad to get out of California, where I could not even tell what time of year it was by looking around me. When the fall foliage arrives it is like the tolling of the bell in the church not made with hands. You know where you are in this cycle and you know that it will keep spinning, with you for now, but some day without you.