Autumn

Every year for the past couple of years, when September rolls around we start getting ready to hit the road, packing away the paddle boards, washing the bus, and burning through the last of the firewood. Sometime around the middle of the month we say goodbye to friends and head for the plains.

The drive out of the trees always feels good to me, the long vistas of the midwest are like drawing a breath after being under water. It’s some small recapitulation of humanity’s movement out of the forest, on to the prairie. As William Least Heat Moon points out in PrairyErth, it was leaving the trees that made us human. In some way we are all children of the prairie and plain.

This year we did none of those things. This year we stayed put. We stayed in the trees. Evolutionary recapitulation be damned. We watched the chlorophyll fade from the world, leaving behind impossibly yellow birch and iridescent orange sugar maples, brilliant against the unchanging pines overhead, swirling colors of leaves littering the green carpet of moss below, until the forest in the morning was like walking inside a stained glass window.

This year we left the paddle boards out and enjoyed one of the warmest, driest autumns anyone in these parts can remember. It wasn’t until early October that the evenings took on a chill enough to keep us on the shoreline, and the mornings turned a softer purple as the sun swung south.

The familiar turned foreign. Gaps in understand were filled in. Paths we’ve walked daily became new and golden.

When I was younger, living in southern California, I had to go and find Autumn. I would try every year to make the long drive up 395 to the Sierra foothills, where a smattering of aspens and cottonwood trees that grow in the washes would turn various shades of amber and apricot.

There are no mountains like that here, but this area beats the Sierra foothills for fall colors, and that’s part of why we’re here — to see new things. We move around to explore the world, discovering what we do not know and getting to know it in some fashion. This manifests in all sorts of things, from the mundane (I can give you street by street directions around a surprising number of places) to the more profound experiences and friendships we’ve formed around the world.

Sometimes it also means not moving. There are certain things that must be experienced first hand. Can you really know Georgia if you haven’t spent a summer there without air conditioning? Can you really know Charleston if you haven’t been there for a hurricane? Can you really know New England without passing a fall? Can you really know northern Wisconsin without spending the winter?

You cannot.

You also cannot pass a northern Wisconsin winter in an RV. Or at least it isn’t much fun. I know someone who did it and he suggested we rent a cabin. So we did. Like most in the area, the campground where we spend our summers closes October 15 (which last year saw the first snow storm, this year it was 55 and sunny).

This year we said goodbye to our fellow travelers and friends, and drove the bus over to the cabin, unloaded the very least amount of stuff we could, and moved it to the storage area where it will spend the winter.

Not much changed really. We’re still in the woods. We still have to fill propane. We still have to dump the holding tank system. There’s a few extra feet of counter space, a bedroom with a door, just one though, the other is a loft, open to the rest of the house, not unlike the back of the bus. We’re on a property that’s roughly the size of Memorial Park. The paths have changed, but they look much the same. The trees look about the same and the sunrise hasn’t changed much either.

We’ll be here until the campground opens again next spring. We’ll be here watching the world change, waiting on the snow, and getting to know a northern Wisconsin winter.