Without the frequent trips to central New York that we’ve been taking over the past two and a half years, J. and I knew we needed to make an effort this fall to get out of the city and experience the beauty of this extraordinary season in the Northeast. Last weekend we drove down into the Adirondacks, where we had a picnic by a remote, rushing stream, visited a friend’s house on a quiet lake, and meandered on the back roads of upstate New York and Quebec where the fall color was at its peak.
Yesterday we took a trip to the Morgan Arboretum (video above), a large managed forest preserve owned and maintained by McGill University on the western part of Montreal island. We hiked five and a half miles of leaf-covered trails through maple, beech, ash and basswood forests, and across the tall, blowing grasses of wide-open fields, returning home happy, tired, and feeling like we had been very far away from our urban existence even though the preserve is only about 20 minutes from home. In both of these places, I took reference pictures that I hope will inspire some artwork later on.
When I was a child, we’d often have snow flurries by late October, and I would have been wearing wool for weeks. Our unseasonably warm weather is clearly a result of climate change, and that distressing thought hasn’t been far from my mind, even as I’ve enjoyed this extended season. In the last few days the weather here finally turned colder. I brought the plants in from the balcony a few days ago, threw out the annuals, and did some severe pruning on almost everything that was coming inside.
Right now it’s sunny, but a fierce wind is beating against my studio windows. The weather is more volatile and violent than I ever remember. It scares me to think about the state of even the best-managed forest, fifty years from now. I feel privileged to have lived most of my life appreciating and being comfortable in nature, and hope I haven’t ever taken it for granted. This was a major factor in my voting, and may be in yours, too, although I have no illusions about either party’s commitment to the level of significant change that’s necessary.
Those of us who care should do everything we can to raise awareness of the natural world. I feel like a relic of some long-lost era, as someone who knows the names of ferns, mosses, flowering plants and trees as well as wild living creatures, who’s comfortable in the woods and mountains, able to walk and sit quietly without disturbing the inhabitants, and knows something about foraging as well as how to grow her own food. Our remoteness from the natural world, and our blithe subjugation and overuse of it, mirrors what we’ve done to indigenous people; if there’s anything that could be called “original sin,” surely this is it.
A recommendation: Erik Rittenberry, who curates the fine Substack blog “Poetic Outlaws”, recently spent a week alone in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I too have spent a lot of time. I think you’ll appreciate his post about wilderness solitude, accompanied by quotes from poets and essayists from Rilke and Hesse to Snyder and Kerouac, and his own gorgeous photographs of the mountains ablaze with autumn color. He writes:
I came to the mountains not merely as an escape but as a pilgrimage of sorts—a communion with nature that helps rid the distractions of daily life. I wanted to be left alone with my thoughts, my breath, and the slow turning of the seasons.
In solitude, you find clarity. In the words of Rollo May: “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
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