November in Stone Mountain

 A place will teach you things, if you let it.

• The obvious difference is the temperature. It dropped below freezing several times before Thanksgiving. We’re at latitude 34 degrees north. I’d lived at 29 degrees for decades and wasn’t quite ready for that.

• Being up here on the tundra also means the light is different. It comes in low in the evening, more from the south than from the west. In the days when photographs were taken on film, artists liked low-speed Kodachrome because the colors were deeply saturated. That’s the way the colors are here in the woods at dusk: the yellows in the hickories are so bright you doubt your senses. As the light fades, the hickories disappear first, and then the dark green ivy, which covers most of the tree trunks, blends into the silhouettes of the trees. The last color to go is the lighter green of the pines. Why is that so? It’s got something to do with the wavelength of the natural light, but I haven’t found a good answer. 

• I mentioned, in an earlier note, the difference in the thickness and density of the vegetation. When a breeze blew through the forest, I could hear it. It’s the same when the leaves start falling. They come down so fast at times you can hear it. This is old hat to anyone who knows the Eastern forests. I do not. It’s astonishing to me.

• I watched a maple in a city park turn gold. Three days later the top third of the canopy was gone. A week later the tree was bare. When the leaves start falling, they can go quickly.

• One of the revelations of late autumn is the prominence of beech trees. They are everywhere, scattered throughout the oaks, hickories and pines. The other deciduous trees have lost enough leaves that you can see the beeches, which have held onto their leaves a little longer. You see green, gold and red on the same tree.