| Tamarack |
On the Dacks.....
Alan and I did a leaf peeping trip yesterday to Malone and back, with many side trips along the way.............
Really we were looking for moose, but the only one we saw was on the side of a brick chimney.
Alan did see a White-tail buck near the town of St. Regis that could easily have passed for a moose. He declined to even try to count the tines on its antlers. Wrong side of the car for me, but it takes a biggun to make him exclaim like that. Bet that's a deer not too many people have seen in its lifetime.
The trees in some places were nearly bare, but up around Tupper Lake and points north even the maples were flaunting red locks like a girl with a mirror.
In this autumn season and early in the spring the forest reveals the secrets of its species makeup. The rest of the time you have to look closely to tell the trees apart.
In summer everything is green. The evergreens make themselves known by the darkness of their needles, but everything else looks pretty much the same. In winter greys and browns rule, stark against the snow.
| Beech |
However, now in this time of decline, even the beech trees, which tend to blend, have turned the rich brown of a doe's pelt, only shining as if each Leaf had been polished one-by-one. They stretch pointy fingers toward the road as if waving goodbye to passing humans.
Bright maples look as if someone had taken a carton of construction paper from a kindergarten closet, snipped it into leaf shaped pieces, and tossed them into the sky. You couldn't name all the colors even if you tried.
Yellow poplar and silvery-gold tamarack glow like candles, especially among the dark pine groves they often augment. Yesterday even the lichens shone bright pewter on the banks along the highways, all puffed with the importance of getting pumped for winter.
Oaks are more subtle than the big name trees, but their reds and browns shine like burnished metal. Sometimes each leaf has as many colors as any maple, stippled in bands of red and gold and brown.
It was cloudy and rainy in some spots, but that just made the bright trees pop.
After a few hours of such largess, eyes are nearly sated with it all, until a tree watcher is ready to be home asleep, to dream all night of dazzling colors.
Today a cold harsh rain is falling, and even walking the busy doggies is a misery. So thankful to have memories of yesterday's fire of autumn leaves to warm the corners of my mind and keep the cold at bay.
