All of us in our fashion rush to lay in the things we need before winter descends. The woodcutter’s saw screams in the quiet forest, as she piles the rounds that will warm her family. The black bear roots for the last frost-shriveled berries.
Nothing gold can stay, as Frost wrote.Įven in the lovely moments, a franticness belies the season here, the underlying rhythm of life in hard places. The soft ovation of the cottonwoods sends another round of leaves adrift on the water. October’s yellow afternoons smell of winter at the edges. I live in the lap of tall peaks in Washington’s North Cascades, where the turn from summer to fall always mixes beauty with melancholy. It is autumn again in the mountains of the West, and what is not gracefully dying is desperate to live. Big trout lunge after it, detonating the quiet. I tie on an October caddis and skate the fly over the water in the blue morning. This makes them reckless, and the fishing is good in the squinting hours around sunrise. The trout feel the change and are voracious. So they eat the stubble without pause, fattening up for the hungry months ahead.Īt the river, the water is skinny but runs cold again with the return of freezing nights.
Soon, hunting season’s first shot will scatter them to higher country, where winds shake the aspens’ first golden coins to the ground. At dawn the deer are as thick as cattle in the valley bottom, feeding on what remains after summer’s final haying.
