For Those with Colorless Autumns

      When I talk to my East Coast friends, from Boston to Atlanta, they lament the lack of color in their trees this autumn. To boost their spirits, I offer this essay, written one year when the Siskiyous, too, suffered autumn browns.

      What happened to the autumn color? Where are the golden yellows and the flaming oranges, the scarlets and the vermilions? Who dulled the brilliance? Who rubbed the blush from the complexions of the trees? Who sucked the energy away? Who gave us achromatism, pallor, wanness in our autumn this year?

     Brown, brown, brown – everywhere it's brown. On a road I drive frequently, a long row of incense cedars, interspersed tree by tree with broad-leaf maples, is usually an autumn checkerboard of green and yellow. This year the maples between the cedars are lifeless brown. Yellow turned buff, red turned russet scarlet turned chestnut. Far from being vibrant and exciting, the woods have become dull: spiritless, wearisome, prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, drab, and monotonous. The woods this year are brown.

      Is this lack of color a depiction of weather past? Or a prediction of weather to come? Does it mean we had a hot summer? A dry year? A late fall? Or does it mean it will be an early winter? A dry winter? A hard winter? It must mean something. What kind of energy is sucking at the roots of the trees, drawing their color right out of their skins?

      Things are bad if I had rather look at my calendar picture than at the mountains themselves. How can I accept brown? Well, first I should stop pining for gold. Once I stopped looking for Renoir, I found Rembrandt. In a reversal of art history, we have gone from large areas of pulsating color to a soft, retreating chiaroscuro. Brown is not just brown. If it were, the Mona Lisa and The Night Watch would be dull pictures: prosaic, lackluster, humdrum, and monotonous.

      Brown is a vast spectrum of variations. Brown in one tree is Sudan brown, in another Arabian brown, in another Vassar tan, a real term for a real color, a trim derived, in reality, from Vassar College, but my dictionary doesn't say whether it originated from the color of the New England trees around Vassar College or from the tan the girls returned to school with after their Christmas vacations in Florida. Some trees are chestnut brown, some pearl-brown, some sand brown. Some are somber umber; others burnt Sienna, Sienna brown, or Sienna drab. Are the trees this autumn Sienna drab? It's a real color, a "light grayish brown to reddish brown that is duller than sandstone and paler than wood rose." Sandstone? Wood rose? What beautiful colors! Some trees seep with sepia: "a dark grayish yellowish brown that is stronger and slightly yellower than seal and stronger and slightly yellower and lighter than otter." Seal and otter, too? Other trees are only ocher, "a moderate orange that is yellower and deeper than honeydew, yellower and darker than Persian orange, and duller than mikado orange." Honeydew? Persian orange? Midado orange? All that in the autumn woods? Wood rose, seal, otter, honeydew, mikado? How could I ever have thought this a dull autumn?

(This essay is found in my book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue: Essays about Living with Nature in the Siskiyou Mountains.)