Autumnal Transitions
Shortly after the house show across the street ends - sometime around four or five in the morning - I roll out of bed and grab my camera. I head straight west on the M43 through blueberry patches and corn fields and inky pre-dawn darkness. It’s early, even for Artie; I hear him sigh heavily from the back seat.
The surf is loud even from the sandy parking lot. Following the path to the beach, it doesn’t take long to see why.
There’s a thunderstorm brewing over the lake. Orange, voltaic bolts of plasma rip across the early morning darkness and their thunder occasionally echoes across the waves. The sheer velocity of their deafening roar startles me.
As a native Chicagoan, I had made the mistake of thinking the sun would rise over the lake. Instead the pinkish dawn shoved its luminescent fingers into the clouds and tore them apart from the other side of the sky.
Newborn light revealed autumn-tinged trees bleeding their crimson leaves onto the landscape. Fall comes all at once, sweeping away summer’s sweaty evenings and replacing them with the smell of rain and fetid decay.
Storms brew and desiccate blighted leaves, revealing a tree bare to its bark. Loud and quiet at the same time, these transitions leave ephemeral rot across their landscape. Pieces of the whole slowly curl and fade off the branch.
When barren those last leaves have left the limb, everything is exposed.
It’s vulnerable and messy and the leaf litter begins to pile up.
Eventually, though, that litter begins to break down. Fungal hyphae wriggle their tendrils through the foliole, decomposing in tandem with the worms and the rain.
At last that detritus begins to turn its lecherous rot into the humic compounds responsible for the health of the tree and the forest writ large.
What’s left on top of the Earth is washed out to the lake by the spring rains.
Once the leaves are out there, sloshing in that massive loch, they’re hoover'd up into the sky above the lake eventually.
They turn into storm clouds launching fluorescent bolts across the horizon, which strip the boughs of their cover again - until they dissolve anew into the natatory ether.
Member discussion