Our wild palette of reds, purples, golds, oranges, and yellows infused with a backdrop of green is the result of the physical and metaphysical interplay of time and space. Geography mixes with topography, elevation, weather, and the shorter days of the fall season to wash across a unique ratio of deciduous trees to conifers that dates all the way back to the ancient glaciers that were once here.

The lush dark green backdrop to the changing of the leaves in New England is provided by the evergreens—those conifers—which include spruce, fir, and pine. The color comes from deciduous trees like oak and ash, which are found as far south as Virginia, and the hardwoods including sugar maple, yellow birch, and American beech, which are found only in the north. Each year, bands and pockets of these leafy trees form a moving Persian carpet rippling across the rugged, uneven topography of northern New England, changing every day and at every hour of the day for three short weeks.

“Senescence”—the term given to the changing colors of the leaves—is not what it appears: Leaves do not actually “turn” colors. In fact, the bright pigments are already hidden beneath the green. Shorter days and diminishing sunlight signal deciduous trees to slow down and eventually halt the production of chlorophyll. With the falloff in green chlorophyll, three pigments emerge—xanthophyll, reflecting yellow light; carotene, reflecting orange with some red and yellow light; and anthocyanin, reflecting red to purple.

With its flush of anthocyanins, the sugar maple is the star of the show—responsible for most of the cherry red and purple hues that spice up the northern forest palette. To give some idea of how “special” a New England fall is, in terms of color, while just 10 percent of tree species in the temperate zone produce anthocyanins, 70 percent of New England hardwoods produce anthocyanins. They only appear in late fall—just as the chlorophyll drops to 50 percent or below.

The poetic aspects of fall have led people to think that trees are “dying” when the leaves change colors. Senescence is not a passive aging that leads only to death; it is actually a sign of life—only living trees can transform green leaves to a dynamic wash of color. The precise color depends not only on the chlorophyll, but also on the complexion of metal ions and other hard-to-predict factors.

Topography and weather also contribute to the wild performance of color, as New England is a virtual internet of winding back roads that curve around lakes, streams, rivers, and up and down foothills and mountains in such a way that the landscape literally confronts the viewer at every turn.

Simultaneously, changes in elevation also result in a constantly changing palette. A cold night may happen in one mountain town early one year and late the next—or occur for one week in the mountains and not for several weeks in the valleys. The spatial and temporal variability make the color displays unpredictable from year to year, so there is always a bit of adventure in determining the best places and times to seek optimal viewing as the colors move across the landscape.

Fall colors in Stowe, Vermont. Photo courtesy of Flicker.

The most famous leaf peeping route in all of northern New England forms a loop that weaves in and out of the White Mountain National Forest, home to 100 mountains, 48 of them more than 4,000 feet high, including 6,288-foot Mount Washington—the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River. Some of the most dramatic views by far are from the Mount Washington Auto Road.

As you ascend Mount Washington, the Auto Road pulls off a unique trick: With each elevation of 1,000 feet, you are actually climbing north 250 miles in latitude, making the eight-mile road similar to a trip 1,500 miles north in latitude. Deciduous trees give way to conifers that give way to a virgin forest, home to miniature bonsai-type krummholz trees, bent by the continuous wind for hundreds of years. Driving from the base to the summit takes you, climate-wise, from New Hampshire to the Arctic Circle, and you’ll find an ancient alpine tundra up there.

Archeologically speaking, Mount Washington was at one time a massive ocean floor. Millions of years ago, tectonic plates slid under one another, moving and folding the sea floor into vast wrinkles of folding rock that you can see today all the way up the Auto Road.

Ultimately, what creates leaf season is the nearly 5 million acres of forest that make up 89 percent of New Hampshire’s total terrain—the state is the most forested in the contiguous United States.

Since 2010, the Forest Society has been actively engaged in defending New Hampshire’s scenic landscape—and its own conserved lands—from a 192-mile transmission line proposal known as Northern Pass, proposed by mega-utilities Hydro-Quebec and Eversource, a project designed to run transmissions lines on more than 1,000 towers well above tree line from the Canadian border in Pittsburg through the White Mountains to Franklin, Concord, and ending in Deerfield.

The impact of the Northern Pass is less about the number of acres that would be clear-cut than it is about far broader scenic impacts across miles and acres of cumulative wetlands and privately owned land.

Fall in New Hampshire is my favorite time of year. It is a time of chasing illusions as each year leaf peepers “weigh in” on comparing “this year” to “last year.” But surmising about whether an early spring or a wet spring or that sudden frost influenced the yellows or the reds, the oranges or the purples is part of the nostalgia of autumn in New England.

Fall is our most sentimental season because Nature talks to us so openly—in wind, in color, and in the wash of rain or snow that one day takes it all away. Fall is about the death of leaves, but it is also about the real mortality of us all, the irrevocable fact that the one thing we cannot change is change itself—and nowhere is change so consistently visible than three weeks every autumn in New England. It is the glory before the barrenness of winter, the shout before the silence of hibernation. It is timeless because it marks time so clearly.

More than any other, fall is a season of saints and poets. Emily, in Thornton Wilder’s timeless play “Our Town,” set in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners, asks the stage manager: “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?” He sighs: “No. Saints and poets—maybe. They do some.”

The leaves, like the saints and poets, remind us to look, to notice, to embrace the passage of time like the wind, to acknowledge it and celebrate it and be grateful—just for noticing—for finding the Zen of the present moment without concern for the past or fear of the future.

The tapestry of color says, “Now.”

The post What Leaf Peeping in New England Taught Me About the Meaning of Autumn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fall foliage and hurricane season go hand in hand in New England. But what few people realize is that the spectacular blazing colors from our hardwood forests are the result of the great hurricane of 1938, which brought 100 mph winds inland to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine 79 years ago on September 21.

The storm that came to be known as “Thirty-Eight” (the system of naming hurricanes didn’t begin until 1953) was the first Category 2 hurricane to reach Vermont and New Hampshire, and it came without warning. Thirty-Eight made landfall on Long Island, crossed the Long Island Sound into Connecticut and Rhode Island, and raced through Massachusetts and Vermont. It had been at least a generation since any hurricane had hit the region, even the coast.

Because of the lack of warning, or preparedness, more than 600 people died, most of them from the storm surge that swept beachfront houses into the sea. Floods and high winds—the fiercest wind was measured near Boston at 186 miles per hour—destroyed roads, bridges, houses, barns, and railroad tracks.

Inland, these winds uprooted nearly 1,000 square miles of forest, ripping holes in the tree canopy ranging from the size of a city yard to as large as 90 acres. And in doing so, the hurricane created a new forest across much of New England.

Most of the people who lived through the hurricane are gone, but I have been fortunate to hear the stories of many of them. One dramatic story came from Fred Hunt, at the time a 14-year-old boy playing hooky in the woods in Rindge, New Hampshire. Late in the day, a huge pine—more than 100 feet tall—was uprooted and landed five steps behind him, its trunk parallel to the ground. Thinking quickly, he scrambled into the space beneath the trunk of the fallen pine and stayed there for 10 minutes while the winds howled mercilessly and blew down every other tree in the forest. When there were no more trees left standing, Fred scrambled through the tangle of downed trees the last half-mile to home.

The white pine that served as Fred’s refuge happened to be growing in that spot because of the history of the area’s land, which was typical of much of rural New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers cleared most of the original forest to grow crops and raise livestock. With the advance of the Industrial Revolution, these farmers left to work in the mills. Starting in 1860, the cleared fields reverted to forests. In New England, there’s no need to replant trees because they happily grow on their own. One of the most prolific colonizers of farm fields is white pine.

So when Thirty-Eight raged through, forests covered 80 percent of the land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much of that forest was white pine. Before the storm, many rural families saw their woodlots as living bank accounts, where a few trees could be cut and sold when they needed money. Ninety percent of the trees that were blown down were white pine.

With the disaster, the federal government saw a need to get involved. The Great Depression had not yet ended, and in the forested areas of New England the New Deal make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were well-established. Fearing the kind of fires seen in the West each summer, the U.S. Forest Service directed the WPA and CCC to strip the downed trees of their branches, twigs, and needles to reduce the fire danger. Simultaneously it created the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration to purchase logs from the blowdown. Five times the annual harvest of trees had been blown down in a five-hour period, creating a huge glut of wood. NETSA created a market for the logs and purchased nearly half of the salvageable timber, providing some income to the 30,000 families that otherwise would have lost their woodland bank accounts.

And so, New England’s largest hurricane was followed by its largest logging job, and this one-two punch brought about the forest that we see today. When the towering canopy of white pine blew down, what was left were the seedlings and saplings of deciduous hardwood trees. If they hadn’t been blown down in 1938, those pines might still be there, holding the ground until they died from wind, disease, or logging. Instead, the mix of maple, birch, and oak that relished the new sunlight (having been released from the shade of the pines) grew vigorously. This new forest closely approximates the species mix of the original forest that had greeted the settlers, and its vibrant display of turning leaves attracts leaf peepers from around the globe.

Not all of New England experienced Thirty-Eight the same way. In Vermont, for example, farming had continued well into the 1930s, so only half of the state was covered in forests. So hurricane damage appeared mostly in woodlots on top of ridges and in the sugar maple orchards that produced the springtime crop of maple syrup. Maple syrup was a hugely important crop in Vermont, because dairy farmers used the income from syrup to pay a year’s wages for hired help. With so many sugar orchards laying in ruins, many Vermont farmers had no choice but to get out of farming. The regrowth of the forest began in Vermont 80 years later than in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the process was different because Vermont’s soils are better than those of its neighbors. Vermont’s forest cover has now reached 80 percent, and the vast majority of it is the mix of northern hardwoods—maple, beech, and birch—that makes the hills come alive in the fall.

When I last spoke to Fred Hunt, just months before he died at 87, he said, “I’ve always been a white pine man.” He told me that after graduating with a degree in forestry from the University of New Hampshire, he ran a logging business for 10 years, specializing in thinning pine plantations. He then earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts studying white pine and its effect on the water supply. Along the way, his master’s thesis served as the first management plan for the 58,000-acre forest surrounding Quabbin Reservoir, which provides the drinking water for Boston and 40 other nearby towns. He then taught forest management and managed a large forest deep in the Adirondacks for 10 years before he decided at the age of 54 to make his final career change, moving back to Reading, Vermont and tending his own forest.

Hunt spent a lifetime working to grow superior white pine because it provided a good living and because he loved the practice of forestry. But it’s possible that his lifelong affinity for white pine could have little to do with money or forestry. It could have more to do with an event when he was 14 years old. On that day, as New England’s most destructive hurricane passed through, a white pine saved his life.

The post The 1938 Hurricane That Revived New England’s Fall Colors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

staring
up at

a map of
my own

mind the
elm tree’s

black
branches—

nothing
left to

catch
the wind.

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