Autumn Song

An autumn song is being sung up north this day near Grand Traverse Bay on a Sunday afternoon, where a chill October wind stirs through big pines, ending the cool calm of a sunny morning because it's after two. It's seldom sunny after two. The winds increase. Soon clouds race nastily across the marshy low hills. Bears awake in woods several miles northeast of town. Jackets feel good now; in the woods hunters zip them up to their chins before crunching on through the underbrush once they're well off the road.

Deer are yet unseen; it's too early to skitter to streams. Light slants low, gold-grey. Flaming leaves of that morning now turn a brittle brown and release their last grips on twigs, diving to their deaths together onto drifting heaps of their former colleagues' corpses. Cold bugs hungrily await the latest windfall below.

Pheasants hide motionless, embarrassed by their brilliant plumage, wishing to molt and avoid the hunters' eager eyes, but it's no use and they know it. Distant waving high marsh grass compels. It will only get worse if they wait. In a brace they flutter aloft. One will fall to cracking thunder from no cloud, thoroughly surprised, feeling last a spaniel's moist mouth lightly bite her flat bones and her neck flop oddly down as blurry reeds bounce by, then blackness. His eye is on the sparrow, but someone else's was on me, she keens unheard. Perhaps the bear's large head will get the dog, if there's any justice worth dying for.

In the cabins sticks ignite to dry the log rooms against the creeping chill as steaks are started. Sofas sag as suddenly sleepy football fans snooze, their flickering screens still shading tribal strategies by the number. Enough will watch without them as the warmth of the fire takes hold.

In the town of plaid wool shirts and small glass panes to the southwest, cold showers drip from exposed copper plumbing. Nothing fancy here, just what works. You can see what holds things up: the rough beams, the bare rafters, the loft floorboards. No need for paint, only shellac and varnish. Wood is wood. Pine is pine. No fancy seamless drywall or mauve borders here. And no standard sizes either; you cut what you need and keep your coffee in plain tins marked "coffee." The foot-tall blue enameled kettle always steams on the stove from before sunup to sundown, and the boots and gloves dry out bent and brittle nearby.

Dry is what you must keep here, not clean. Dirt insulates, but wet rots, cakes, and kills. Oily smoke swirls from high-fat cooking and coats and seals the cracks the putty misses. Oozy sap from drying logs is your friend from now to spring. Too much cleanliness could kill you when it freezes, as it will tonight. It's time to forget haircuts and shaving except for a trim on the holidays. Grow hair, as much as you can, and thrive through the winter. A dirty, bushy beard will help keep your neck warm when you sleep near the wall, against the thickest woman you can find.

The power line will snap five times before Christmas on average, and the phone line threaded through glass insulators along the fencepost tops will break at least once from its own violent icecoat--and it's only October!

It doesn't matter. No need to talk as long as the woodpile's high, the matches stay dry, and you keep a handful of shells nearby for the occasional bobcat on the rear porch roof, even in town--if town you can call it.

Town is where you can smell another chimney over the rise, even though you can't see it, and find your neighbor's road in twenty minutes or less--not exactly New York, not out here. Town is where your collie won't die from porcupine quills shot through his nose and eyes into his brain unless you let him run loose all night. Town is where you sink a mailbox post at the main road around the lake and nail a sign to it with your woodburned name.

In town you can find a plastic-framed, fading picture of an Erie train hung on a wall above the coffee tavern counter, and buy sugar and salt in bulk, and hard horhound candy out of big glass jars, and lately even watch a satellite bigscreen TV in the back bar, or go inside the only church in fifty miles whether you're a catholic or not. People still use black wax shoe polish in town, once a week on Saturday night, last thing before they turn in, from late June through early October.

Once in a while a car comes through from the outside world, usually somebody lost on a fall foliage tour who decided to get off the highway. The local pickup drivers laugh as these cars spatter up and ruin their shocks on local oil-and-gravel, rutted streets and shake up map-scanning tourists looking for a Holiday Inn after four o'clock on Sunday afternoons like this one.

Now a mud-spattered, light blue Ford carrying a goateed, middle-aged man and a younger blond woman passes by the coffee tavern slowly, headed north, and curves in to ask Mackey at the Sinclair which way to Charlevoix--probably another literature professor looking for the Hemingway house. Mackey gestures over his shoulder and tops off their tank, and the Ford lumbers up the 88 toward Eastport. Locals looking out the coffee tavern window bet they'll settle for the Motel 6 there. It's getting late.

There's no twilight up here in autumn. It's day, then it's night and pitch black. As the threatening winds of afternoon calm, loons cry long. A final vee of Canadian geese honk high overhead. Before six, coons chatter as they start their Sunday night garbage prowl of the local cans under night's cover. On such a night as this they may have to compete with a bear or two. It's time to throw out the coffee and let the dog into the back porch where his hairy rug bed awaits, and to put the night log on the crackling fire till morning.