Artwork by Michael DiMilo
(Originally published October 20, 2022)
By Geoff Carter
This past weekend my brother and I partook in the old family tradition of going up to the family cottage and taking the pier in. It’s not a huge chore or a particularly difficult one, but there is—for me, at least—a kind of sadness attached to the task. It marks not just the end of summer, but the advent of winter. Some animals will disappear into their dens until spring, others will suffer mightily, and many of the birds will leave for greener pastures until spring. Snow will soon blanket the entire landscape.
The fact that we waited until mid-fall to do this chore, which involves getting into the freezing water—was not because we wanted to extend the summer or have an excuse to go up there one last time. It was a simple case of procrastination. Other stuff got in the way.
It was unseasonably cold this past weekend. When I got up there Friday evening, the temperature was in the low thirties and there was an inch of snow on our back porch. I got everything inside, turned on the heat and the water, started a fire, and had a beer. It’s always pretty quiet up there. Even with the powerboats and jet skis and other noisy toys tearing around in the summertime, it’s fairly peaceful, but in the off-season, the silence is remarkable. You can stand on the porch and hear absolutely nothing. Then, as the wind stirs and leaves rustle—and sometimes fall—it feels as if the forest is whispering to you. I sat in the kitchen for half an hour just listening to the night before putting in the old Lonesome Dove DVD.
Saturday morning dawned cold and rainy and stayed that way pretty much all day. My brother was due to come up in the early afternoon, so I thought I’d run into town to get some supplies. As I pulled out of the driveway, I was struck at how vibrant the changing leaves looked. They were just at—or maybe a little past their peak, but they looked spectacular. Maybe, I remember thinking as I drove along, the gray backdrop of the sky was bringing the colors out more sharply. It seemed plausible. The narrow road into town is flanked by state forest almost the entire way, so I was virtually surrounded along the way by beautiful palettes of crimson, burgundy, vermillion, and even a pinkish yellow sort of maple. In places, the fallen leaves were so thick on the road they seemed like sort of a kaleidoscopic carpet. The parade of autumn colors was everywhere, standing guard far above me, falling and dancing with the wind on the way down, and reaching as deep into the forest as far as I could see.
Part of the road is flanked by yellow-leaved ash trees so tall they formed what seemed like a golden passageway arching over me. As I rounded a corner, I happened to surprise three deer grazing at the side of the road. They bounded away into the woods and then stood there, about ten yards away, staring at me. They’d been eating roadside grass, storing up as much energy as they could before the snow would cover the ground and blanket their food supply. Some wild animals can lose almost thirty percent of their body weight during a cold winter. They have to expend as little energy as possible to survive—which is part of the reason it’s so quiet. In fact, the usually active animals, like the chipmunks, squirrels, and mice were almost nowhere to be seen. Apparently, they were slowing down, too.
After my brother arrived, I donned my waders, got in the water, and we started the process of dismantling the pier. There wasn’t a boat, a person, or even a bird in sight. I spooked a school of minnows as I waded in but that was all the activity I saw. Thin wisps of fog rose over the lake. The sky was a solid slate gray. It began raining and then turned into a wintry mix. This wasn’t winter, not quite yet, but it wasn’t really fall, either. Autumn is a time of harvest, of celebration of summer. This was something else.
The cold, the snow, and the gray foreshadowed the coming winter. The beautiful colors and falling leaves seemed less like autumn and more like memories of autumn, as if they existed in a nexus between true fall and winter. In a strange sort of way, the gray sky seemed reassuring and comfortable, like an old blanket, and the brilliant carpet of leaves felt like some sort of random welcome—an unqualified invitation. The day seemed like a memory of autumn rather than the season itself.
The deer knew the season had very nearly passed. So did the bears, probably enjoying one or two last meals before hunkering down in their dens. I was thinking this might be one of the circadian shifts felt by the forest creatures, the trees, and maybe the land itself. Maybe the weekend was an intersection of the two seasons, the passing of the baton between them.
Winter is the time of sleeping and near-inactivity for most animals, a condition like suspended animation, sort of like a little death. Death will be all too real for some of these creatures, the weak, the slow, or the unlucky. Autumn is the final time they can prepare for the cold, the dark, and the hunger. It is the last celebration—and the last defense against the winter.
That night, my brother and I went out to a nice dinner. I had the prime rib, and he had a very nice shrimp dish. We weren’t worried about storing nuts for the winter, or how to stay warm that night, or storing up fat for the winter (although I got a good start that night). No, we could afford to ignore winter coming. We could afford to ignore Nature’s signs.
I love going up north partly because it’s so beautiful and so rich in life, but I also like to be—I need to be—reminded of how close we are to the natural world. Still. We have snug homes, and full freezers, and fireplaces, and we look up at the sky or the sun or the stars or the water and shrug as if they have nothing to do with us. To forget that is to lose the greatest part of ourselves, the part that is still tethered to the rhythms of our world.
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