wetlands

Autumn leaves or winter’s coming

Living enfolded within nature, I cut my season’s, pizza-like, into manageable, daily, slices of color. A grey day on Wednesday, sunny beige on Thursday, gentle and calming mauve on Friday. Dropping through the branches of the oak tree a sunbeam gently prods Smokey, our garden dragon peering out from his small rock cave. I stopped and gave him a pat on his worn concrete head. While some people seek God in a book or in a building, I believe I’m touched as he touches all his creations: gently prodding us to just hold to our best, to bend when the burden proves heavy, and to renew with each season. 

Looking for variations in light is second nature to me. I seek it in the underbrush and find it unexpectedly in a fern frond lit from below during a sunset. I’ve found sunlight temporarily imprisoned within opalescent beads strung to needles of a white pine after a gentle rain.  I was there when the rising sun turned an ordinary frosted leaf into a blood-red shield for the armory of the wee forest people. Light is a reverse chameleon, changing the environment instead of matching the scenery.

Aspens’ pay their dividends in late September, showering the earth with shimmering golden coins. In the marsh in the elbow of the Fox River,Tamaracks blaze bright yellow-orange candles, flaming against an azure October sky. In autumn, sunlight strengthens on the horizontal and landscapes clash beneath deep blue or rainy day drab and dreary gray.

Reds’ become umber, burgundy, and scarlet. Yellows’ turn to alloys, becoming gold and brass and copper. The colors of a languishing landscape define dimension. It’s like looking through binoculars; one flattened layer succeeds another; they appear lined up like a cardboard diorama with each successive layer growing smaller unto the horizon.

With winter coming, evening tugs down the shortened length of day. Faint glimmers’ of far-off galaxies sparkle, sending pale grey-blue notes to glitter on December’s coming snows. Between areas of light pollution, especially by moonlight, the frosted landscape becomes my grand idea of nature’s dining table. Set for special guests only, silver and edges of cut-crystal will gleam across the candle-lit prairie. I’ll pause and give thanks for the invitation to feast my eyes, while awaiting another year of autumn leaves.

Strange way to boil water or Beauty and the Beast upset Paradise

It appeared as a white plume, a large feather-like trail writing a detour across the distant horizon. I was driving on Highway 23 thinking,  another idiot’s burning leaves on a windy day. Tree branches waved as I passed, hoping the distant smudge would soon disappear. On a good day with no Sheriff’s car parked over a hill, driving time from Montello to Princeton is around 15 minutes.

The smoky sky had changed color and seemed to be bouncing off its source and rolling along the blue ridges like yellow tinged puff-balls by the time I slowed and drove into town. Traffic halted in front of me as a fire truck loaded with hose rolled out and parked across the street. A Jeep towing a 4 man ATV mule pulled out and sped south of town. Volunteer fire fighters started arriving, knitting their cars through stalled traffic like grannies on a mitten making challenge. Along with a couple of other drivers I gunned out ahead of the delay in timing. Not usually curious, just once I let this take me where it might and drove out the same highway.

I though I was getting closer when thicker smoke started flowing across the highway. Surely a sign the source was just around the next corner.  Not true. I started to doubt my original thought that I was looking for a leaf burn gone astray. Miles and time passed, smoke still flowed on currents. This was still growing and I hadn’t found it yet. I drove another twenty minutes before finding  the fire location.

Two more fire trucks passed me and turned down a road that appeared to head to a  park.  I decided it wouldn’t be smart to follow them. Further down, an old beaten road appeared and I took it. That lumpy road seemed to be the area of the fire. Several other cars were already there, sightseers like myself, curious, watchers that had been driving by and couldn’t help pulling in. Children were playing in the field a few hundred feet from the blaze as if it was a family picnic.

This strange, whirling, tornado-like, monster of white was churning through a marsh snacking on tidbits from pine trees and leaving stark black toothpicks standing behind it. Over the years, I’ve kept watch on other grass and forest fires from miles away.  Each spring we burn our backyard prairie. I’m familiar with the smell of  burning grasses, pines, oaks, and prairie flowers. Grass fires burn white, forest fires sooty grey with an odor of dirty, wet chimneys.

Standing today in front of the burning marsh looking at a strange tornado-like beast towering toward the opaque sky, I understood both fear and curiosity fire and storm have on us. The group I mingled with knew the brisk wind was blowing directly at us. Ash from the fire was falling down around us. Had it been a bit of pine needle, sedge, cattail, an abandoned birds nest? The field in front of us had already been entirely shown of its corn crop or we’d have been in immediate danger. It was difficult to leave, strikingly attractive and gut-wrenching repulsiveness fighting an ages old battle to change natural elements. I knew it was best to put a distance between us and a still very greedy blaze.

I’ve spent a lot of time near wetlands and marshes yet it seems strange to watch a blazing marsh. It sounds like an oxymoron.  We’ve actually had very long, dry spells this year and we’ve got a lot of tinder dry ground litter. I regret not knowing this area and I have no idea what existed before the flames tore through it. It certainly had to have been a heated battle between a wetland beauty and the flaming beast.  Beauty certainly  lost this round.

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