Dawn broke this morning amid a mix of sun and clouds, enough of the latter to cast much of the land into shadow. It’s my favorite time of year, and the clouds are my favorite manifestation of fall, holding, as they seem to do, all the promise and beauty of the storm.
Alas, it was not to be. The weather forecast still holds true: [mostly] clear skies, no chance of rain whatsoever. Still, while the bank over the eastern peaks has largely disintegrated in the wind, a line of thunderheads continues to build to the west, and those were not part of the forecast, either.
Hope is a stubborn thing.
Meanwhile, the landscape continues to turn, albeit not with the internal fire of a week ago. Last Tuesday’s early snow and subsequent hard freezes have dulled most of the colors now, although we can still expect a remnant luminous glow from those trees that have not yet turned their green robes for the season.
There are more of them than we expected, given the early-summer ravages to the foliage from drought.
Outside the window to the east, I can see the lines of cottonwoods a few parcels over: still green at the lower reaches, most of the rest now a blend of gold and amber. They look remarkably like the stand in the image above, although Wings captured that photo nine years ago, very nearly to the day: October of 2012. It was shot from a vantage point along Highway 64, the main road through town that, on its northern reaches, leads through El Prado and along tribal pastures before making a hard ninety-degree left turn at what’s known locally as “the blinking light” (and the turnoff, to the right, toward our own home on tribal lands). The light hasn’t blinked for years; indeed, for a decade or more now, it’s been rigged with traffic cameras, too. But the intersection is still there, and it marks the point at which what should be northbound Highway 64 magically transmogrifies into [solely State] Highway 522 instead.
This stretch of highway is visible from the post office on its other side, the one where get our own mail. And every once in a while, conditions and light combine just so to induce Wings to take out his camera and capture the view.
It’s a beautiful view at any time of day or season: the mountains in the background, always strong and mostly silent; the sky anything from sunrise to star-filled to swept with stormclouds; the land beneath beautiful even in those bleakest days of early spring when the sun is at once too wan and too bright and all beneath it is gray. But when this stretch of land comes most to life is at this month of the year, when the fire touches the land one last time before the winter.
The photo above was one of those rare days here in October: full dark cloud cover, most often preparatory to a mostly unseasonal storm. Unseasonal, that is, if it’s rain; if it’s the first snow of the year, it’s right on schedule. Last Tuesday was our day this month to look like this, although there was not as gold in the trees yet. That will have changed by now, albeit still with more green , given that it’s a lower elevation, and there are at least a couple of frost and snow lines between here and there.
What else has changed are the trees themselves; the largest of the dead trees was already mostly gone, and this year, someone pulled down most of what remained. The large front stump is still there; an out-of-control ditch fire some years back reignited the growth within it and at its roots. The large dense stand in the back of the image is a little less dense now, too — another collection of casualties of this endless drought and the aridification it has ignited these last few years. Further north of that stand, the four old warriors that once stood sentry, gnarled and gray but no less powerful for that, are all gone now. They took something more than the wood with them when they went, and our small world is emptier for it.
But that is part of the magic of autumn here, where fall is a term of season and leaf and light itself. The colonial world sees this as a time of dying off, but in fact it is a season of creating gifts to fill that space, where what has departed in its time is replaced by the beauty born of the light. And we know, too, that the dying off is not a true death, only our limited understanding of a shift in states of being, as it prepares our world for renewal and rebirth.
And that is, perhaps, the greatest medicine of fall, one of making room, of making space — when the fire touches the land one last time before the winter.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
