Door to Nature

Photo by Roy Lukes.

How we long for the clear, crisp, starlit nights of October, so diamond-like that even the Milky Way, our galaxy home, shines brightly and can balance the stars of this month’s daylight hours including the asters, Starflowers, American Tamarack, Witch Hazel and apples.

Stars in apples? By all means slice though your next apple the “classic way” which, according to Robert Frost, is crossways rather than from top to bottom. Slicing an apple through its classic middle will reveal a beautiful, hidden, five-pointed-star seed-chamber. Indeed, an apple is the blue ribbon five-star fruit of October’s Door County!

William Bliss Carman, in his A Vagabond Song, wrote, “The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry of bugles going by.” How fortunate we are to be living in a relatively narrow band in the Northern Hemisphere where the autumn color of especially the deciduous trees is so dazzling. Now is the time one should spend at least some of your waking hours, if at all possible, in the great outdoors come rain or come shine.

I recall one of my idols, John Muir, writing something to the effect that, for him, going out was in reality like coming in. The outdoors was his real home, his first love. I can easily imagine how he must have adored October during his boyhood north of Madison.

Photo by Roy Lukes.

Not many October Sunday afternoons went by while growing up in Kewaunee in the 1930s and ‘40s that my dad, two older brothers, Ivan and Leo, and I didn’t take to the woods in search of Honey Cap Mushrooms. Even though I can’t recall dad bringing to our attention the awesome color changes of the trees, the American Beeches, Sugar Maples, Northern Red Oaks, Paper Birches and others, surely we must have been literally surrounded by color as our mushroom searching took us into some beautiful climax northern hardwoods. Those forests also contained many large Eastern Hemlock trees which, being evergreens, added greatly to the overall color panorama.

I prefer that there not be a hard killing frost until well into October for the simple reason that this diminishes the brightest fall colors of the deciduous trees. However, when that first evidence of Jack Frost does appear on many outdoor plants and other various features we then look forward to quite a few genuine Indian Summer days to follow, those periods of above-freezing-temperature days following below-freezing nights. At least that’s how we have determined Indian summers in our own past.

Come mild October days one can still find some active orb-weaving spiders. Now is the time to photograph their back-lighted dew-laden webs in the calm early morning hours. Look closely at each spherical “jeweled” drop of water to see how it acts like a ground convex lens. The landscape ahead of you will be perfectly inverted in each drop of dew on the web. These sky-blue days will find the air occasionally laced with gossamer – those fine strands of silk which will be ballooning baby spiders (spiderlings) through the crisp fall air to new homes sometimes miles away.

Hardly a year of my classroom teaching went by without doing something special with the colored leaves of October. A simple but effective activity the students always enjoyed involved pressing colored leaves of various plants for a few days between pages of weighted newspapers or old magazines, followed by carefully sealing them between poster board and clear adhesive shelf contact paper. One used to be able to purchase it in 18-inch rolls. Surprisingly the colors of many of those leaves remained in good condition for many days, or even years.

Photo by Roy Lukes.

It was while I was courting Charlotte during the autumn of 1971 that I usually would include some little hint of nature in my letters to her in Milwaukee. On one occasion, October 3, 1971, I sent her a small 3”x5” colored leaf specimen pressed between white poster board and the adhesive paper. It includes the leaves of a Starflower and has written on the back a short verse I wrote: “Starflowers, Green, yellow and tan, Stars of the Boreal Forest, Earth beacons in the hazy twilight.” Char saved it and returned it to me after we were married and it’s helped decorate my desk ever since, as colorful today as the day I sent it 37 years ago!

Several of the smallest of native wild plants produce some of my favorite color changes each fall. One is the Twinflower, frequently found growing in the company of lovely carpets of silvery-gray Reindeer Moss Lichens along the edges of cool conifer woods. Another somewhat larger plant produces the most strikingly intense phosphorescent-like yellow imaginable, the Wild Sarsaparilla. I often pointed out these green foot-tall plants to summer hikers with me at the Ridges and always welcomed the visitors back to see in reality how many hundreds decorated the trails in later fall. It was in October that their blazing yellows set them apart from all surrounding vegetation.

One observer of people concluded that only the slow hikers, the “lazy loiterers,” see, for they alone see who see with their minds. I hope you will be able to thoroughly enjoy this month at a delightfully slow pace – outdoors – when October’s brilliant colors mingle in the autumn blaze!