Follow the Trees

 

On an unbelievable blue-bird day, we took the free Mercedes shuttle bus up to the sprawling Bonanza open-space to ride some new trails.  How lucky are we, the first world of the first world.  The colors were peeking and popping in the Orange Grove of Aspens and the leaves were flying in the wind like multi-color ticker-tape and landing on the conifers like glowing Christmas bulbs or on the ground like a 1975 shag carpet.   August had been the only wet month in a hot and dry summer with only one soft freeze in July, so the colors were vibrant and on time, but the leaves were brittle and detached easily in the soft, cool breeze.  It was October and we still hadn’t had a deep freeze despite some flurries up high one evening.  We get 60 days frost freeze here, but not consecutive.  The diminishing temperature inversions in the valleys had been notable but not extreme as the humidity hung at normal dry levels.  Smoke filled the sky from late fires, when the wind did not cooperate.  The water year turned out to be below average even with a few stellar, mid-winter, powder months and the soil moisture and the ground water were below normal, but who knows what average or normal is anymore.

Autumn energizes me because it portends change, not the static heat of July or the deep freeze of January.  It does not have the newborn crisp freshness of spring but the fragrant maturity of wisdom, age and experience.  I get out and ride as much as I can on trails carpeted in color and texture.  I know why they call it Fall, since I am looking around so much that I tend to fall more in the autumn.  I take more breaks and more pictures and more friends with me, since most things are better when shared.  I tend to go for quality miles and not so much quantity and choose to go slower, starting high or north in September and finishing lower and further south by the end of October.  Hockey and football are in the air, so It is my favorite time of year.

I visited back-east this fall but it had been a hot and dry summer there and most of the leaves were turning brown and giving up the ghost early.  It can be a tapestry of multicolor, back there, that exceeds our typical colors of green and yellow.  The northeast woods are more diverse and different with thick undergrowth and a large variety of trees that have their own timing and colors in the fall.  The forest and the sky of New England are closer and grey and not the sunny-blue, big-sky, contrast that we have out west.   It certainly is beautiful and historic there, sparsely populated with ancient old growth, compared to our modern quilt of new growth forest with our supplementary succession species on north and south faces.   It is older and wetter in the east and their botanical forests feel more primeval, drippy and spooky although much of it has been used and abused longer than our lands have.  A meadow or pasture can regenerate into a full forest in half a generation and a timber scar can heal right before your very eyes.    

We had ten big old-growth trees behind my house, growing up on Walt Whitman’s Long Island, that we called The Woods, where we played mysteriously and endlessly, waking up one morning to a magical circus set up and disgruntled elephants tied to the trees.  To us it was the end of the world, until we traveled to up-East for ‘leaf peeping’ of the ‘flora and the fauna’ and the real Thoreauvian wilderness.  I graduated next to Lincoln’s Indianna’s colorful, agricultural ‘wilderness’, Michigan the Vermont of the Midwest and Ohio which is like Connecticut.  I never made it down south but imagine Falkner’s Kudzu everywhere.  I finally moved to Wallace Stegner’s wild west where wilderness is classified, and Aspens rule the land as one gigantic organism.  Dropping southwest next to where Cacti are the tree of choice among Woody Guthrie’s diamond deserts, but the interlaced golden riparian Cottonwoods and Willows can astound even Cactus Ed Abbey.  Further, finally to California, brought me to John Muir’s towering Redwoods and girthy Sequoia trees before I descend to the gentrified, sepia-brown, oak arboretums of John Steinbeck’s coastal hills.  The national range of light and color is extraordinarily diverse and our favorite writers’ historical perspectives incredibly varied. 

I’ve traveled to, and lived in, many places but when I come back to Park City, I feel like I have found what I have been looking for, home.  Nothing beats the Pando sized patch of Aspens on Iron Mountain or the Cottonwood/Willow corridor of McLeod Creek, the early Maples below Mayflower or the variety of Oak on the trail we call Little Vermont above old town.   It’s our home court advantage.  It is what we know, it is what we like, it is what we are used to.  It is funny how much time, energy and money we spend going out looking for trees, like we have back home, when they are usually right in front of us.  The famous bumper sticker reads, “Trees are the Answer”, and I agree, but what was the question?

 

Matthew Lindon, ’79, Snyderville,

waterandwhatever@blogspot.com