Autumn Colors

A point in the year passes when the outdoor report no longer mentions the fall color encouraging the tourist to visit the north woods.

The index here is fashion-show colors, Crayola box colors, those lit-fuse colors of October, not November colors. Myself, I like November colors as when the cornfield goes the color of the summer child’s hair, when leaves turn the color of coagulant blood, the color of jam in jars. When the woods go from electric colors to non-electric, decidedly unplugged, trees bare, poised and elemental.

To like it when autumn is graven and pale and sometime well-after the visitation is the by-product of a farm childhood; summer as one hateful, itchy, endless chore followed by another. Hay chaff followed by wheat chaff, neither as bad as rye chaff, if oat dust was the worst of all. And then came potatoes, corn silage, corn picking each with their dusts and bushels and scoop shovels, each able to kill a kid outright unless they learn to take a deep breath and keep shoveling.

Not that any of this ceases, but the summer did finally succumb when Jack Frost whopped it hard on the backside of the skull. As a child I was eager for the deathblow, hoping summer to die so the chore cycle might slow to a more humane pace. Why farmkids didn’t quit, run away or unionize I never quite understood, instead to be bought off with easy bribes of three squares a day and a BB gun. If also a pup tent for Saturday night, and an irrigation pit with no swimming suit required, not to neglect an early share of the tractor driving. Most of us gave up any appeal for better conditions and the rest, they died out there somewhere between the cow lane and the back forty. Buried alongside the dog and the cat that the milk truck ran over, though it was unusual for a cat to get such a formal burial. The manure spreader ordinarily did a nice job of it and with more spectacle when the corpse got caught up in the beaters to gain escape velocity and fly off into low earth orbit. As some of us know, it wasn’t John Glenn who was first but a manure spreader cat. This just another bribe, your chance to haul out the manure on a day with the wind on your back side and the discharge mass arching in a desultory halo that included the kid. Waiting for the dead cat on the load to reach the beaters we didn’t even notice the insult. Such the wages of being a farmkid in the first place.

Then the long somber hue of autumn arrived and saved us, the fields quit, the mower and baler were parked, the potatoes cellared. We who were yet alive had the earth’s surrender, a delicious interspace of few chores, minor chores, the wood pile, the corn crib, the sawmill, easy stuff by comparison. I was a child in the time before the polyester insulated mitten was invented. Everything we wore started out both wet and cold, there was no cure except wool liners and they were wet. The business then was to heat up the inside of a wet mitten using your own body temperature which sounds vaguely self-destructive, but it worked out alright.

So I have come to love the untouristable version of autumn, browns, somber yellows, coagulate reds, colors you won’t find in a crayon box. Colors not in fashion catalogs nor do they sell cars in these colors though old cars might eventually get there. But a modern bow hunter knows these colors and probably has a cosmetic kit to match this woods. I have occasionally thought it might be a good thing to paint my tractors, my combine, my trucks the same color as a detailed bow-hunter, to render them invisible against the autumn. Wondered if highways, buildings, semis and Toyotas might be painted the same, and for a little while the brute mass of us disappear. Vanquished, and utterly gone. Same for Wal-Mart, same for Menards, to disappear for a week or a month. Strangers coming to our midst could hear and touch us but we wouldn’t be there except in diffuse un-focusable patterns, not a tractor, not a combine, not a shopping mall in sight. Only autumn.