Just a leaf? There’s no such thing

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, October 12, 2007

Many years ago, Sigurd F. Olson wrote an account of a moonlit night in a Boundary Waters campsite. Olson, an early environmentalist and advocate for the BWCA, often wrote movingly of day-to-day experiences on the water and around campsites. Few things that he penned, though, were more striking than his account of that evening.

As the full moon shone down on his tent, Olson watched as a mouse, highlighted in silhouette, scrambled up one pitched canvas side, then slid down the other, scurried around the tent and repeated the process — over and over. The mouse, Olson concluded, was simply enjoying itself in the moon’s light.

I lay in my sleeping bag Saturday evening in the group campground at Maplewood State Park, wakened in the deep night to the sound of something skittering and scratching down the side of my own tent. It was a moonlit night, cool and quiet, perfect for camping, and for a moment I believed that Olson’s magical scene would recreate itself for me.

It didn’t take long before reality returned. Modern nylon tents are too slippery and too steeply pitched for any mouse to climb. And in this case, the skittering sound was just a leaf.

Just a leaf? That is something like saying, “Just a snowflake.”

There is no such thing.

As a light breeze began to filter through the trees, the leaves fell in a gentle rain, pattering onto the tent, skritching down the nylon and piling onto the ground alongside. As enjoyable as the sound of raindrops on a tent may be, this was even better because there was no risk of waking up damp. Although it had rained hard earlier in the week, the leaves were crisp and light as they fell.

In the morning, the campsite had changed. Under each tree surrounding what had a day earlier been a grassy field, there now lay an area rug of leaves, a circle of half-circle of faded orange, yellow and red, shaken from aloft by the evening’s breeze.

As shotguns boomed, heralding the first dawn of the waterfowl season, I stretched and yawned, and bent to pluck from the ground a fallen leaf: A pointy-lobed Maple leaf, its dried out veins bumped from the surface, and the orange fire of fall was already fading to a dusky tone. I picked up another, fallen no doubt from the same tree, and although its colors and shape were similar, they were still as different from the first as one snowflake from another.

It was not cold, but the drying leaves, the slowly lightening sky and the shotguns’ distant thumping said “fall,” like no other sensations.

Although there are many fine parts of our country where cool weather is still a long ways off, where crops still grow green and air conditioners hum, there can be few places worth trading for the golden sights of fall in Otter Tail County.

The cold is coming, the snow and the ice, the slips and falls, the dried-out knuckles and the runny noses. In a few months, we will curse the frost and the dark and long for a hint of green. But now, for a few weeks, we can rejoice in a turn of seasons that is second to none.

Journal publisher Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.