It was cold, but we had been cooped up in the house for two days. So we bundled up and walked along the Yellow River. Most of the leaves in the woods had fallen. You couldn’t see the trail. Everything was covered in a blanket of leaves.
There’s a stand of beech trees on a bluff over the river, and the autumn light seemed to go through the leaves, rather than reflect off them. Beech leaves don’t fall in autumn, but they get thinner as they lose their chlorophyl, becoming almost translucent. Looking up, you could see sunlight more than leaves, but the leaves were green, yellow, gold, tan, brown.
We stopped and stared and lost track of the time.
Nan Shepherd said that people keep going into wild places because they can’t bring back the memories. You go out and see something spectacular. You remember how it made you feel. But you can’t keep the details — the colors, the smells — in memory. So you go out again.
Kim Stafford’s poem “Enough” is the best I’ve found at describing that feeling. Stafford saw a small dun bird running a rapids, “bobbing and trilling.” He could barely believe it:
and I felt — enough, that’s enough this life
has been, coming to this.
I can understand that: not wanting a single thing more, having seen enough for a lifetime. That gratitude is sincere. The fire is cozy. It’s too cold to go out. And yet …
• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, p. 70.
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