It was my idea of heaven: seven straight hours in the October woods with nothing but a stick, a bottle of water, and the collected poems of A.E. Housman. Take a look at the tree in this photograph, so imposing, such a powerful presence looming over Nichol Road at Raccoon Creek. I went more than a mile out of my way just to see this grand old tree in its autumn glory.
It was a hot Indian summer day in Pennsylvania, nothing less than glorious, with blue skies and fall colors at their peak of brightness. I'd hoped to make it down the the Laurel Highlands, but for a variety of reasons ended up staying closer to home. And yet, I was not disappointed.
Funny how quickly it all becomes commonplace, the lovely colors, the cooler air, the rich smells of the decaying leaves on the forest floor. You begin to hurry past all of it, then it's gone. Like all things, the glorious day lives out its little span of beauty and boredom. It grows old. Its charms wear off. Then it passes.
Or at least it usually does. Ah, but the wonder of it all never grew old to me yesterday. I truly believe that I savored nearly every last second of the long woodland day. I went hiking into the Pioneer backcountry campground from the parking lot an hour away. I was testing out the trek, thinking I might want to do it as an overnight with a few friends in November. Very doable.
Even an overly-familiar place gives itself to you anew when you visit in a different season. Old well-known trails seemed completely fresh in the hues of October.
Why can't we store these times away in amber like insects? Isn't that exactly what I'm trying to do by keeping a blog that nobody reads but me? I'm trying to preserve all my travels so that I can flip back through them on those grim occasions when life traps me beneath fluorescent lights. Just look at this sugar maple!
Over the summer, on the porch of that big old wooden hotel at Chautauqua, I read an outstanding book about the afterlife. I know what you're thinking. But it wasn't some pious, superstitious feel-good drivel like "Heaven Is for Real." It was an academic work written by a skeptical New Testament scholar who specializes in studies of the historical Jesus. (He believes that Jesus was a failed millenarian prophet who expected to usher in the end of time.)
The book looks at a wide array of beliefs about the afterlife found in many different cultures, both ancient and modern. One thing he discovered is that the saying, "My life flashed before my eyes" is based in an actual phenomenon that is well-documented in the moments of death. The meaningful events of people's lives really do come flooding back to them like an intimate movie just as the brain is closing up shop. When people have near-death experiences, there really is a moment of utter release when all the significant moments and encounters of our lives recur to us almost simultaneously, but with a reliving of all the emotions and almost total understanding of feelings that, at the time, may have confounded us.
Call it the final judgment. It's as if we get a life review just at the end, a closing argument, a bird's eye view in perfect perspective. This phenomenon has been attested in many different times and places.
Of course, it's too bad we can't have perfect perspective on our lives before we die. But days like this one in the autumn woods help me to gain some semblance of it.
I'm beginning to believe that all "country" is Trump Country. All cities are Clinton territory. The suburbs are a mix. But it is alarming to get just outside town and see all the widespread support for this self-serving demagogue, Donald Trump. He's the brick that rural America is throwing through the window of the economic establishment--the very one that has impoverished them. I get that. It's just so unsettling to see so many hundreds of Trump signs out there amid the October splendor. "Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile," as the old hymn says.
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