It started with my need for change. My need to discover. To witness beauty. That meant going outside. And I knew exactly where to go.
I made a lunch and took some snacks, saddled myself in Benny (my trusted VW steed) and drove west.
It was late October and the cold winds hadn’t yet cajoled the colourful leaves off the maples, aspens, birches and oaks. I knew I would witness something remarkable. I was in the north temperate zone of Canada, after all, and this was the height of autumn magic…
Soon, I was driving along one of my favourite country roads, a gently rolling barely paved road through forest and farmland that rose and fell over drumlins and eskers with views that make you sigh. A vibrant carpet of orange-crimson forest and copper-hued fields covered the undulating hills in a patchwork of colour.
I stopped frequently and stepped out into the light rain to take photographs. The air was fresh and clean against my skin as I breathed in the scent of wet vegetation and loam. A light mist washed the distant hills in muted shades of a watercolour painting. The nearby forests were anything but muted. I drove past flaming thickets of red-purple dogwoods and sumacs. Benny took me beneath neon canopies: the brilliant orange and deep reds of sugar and red maples, the lemon yellows and bronzes of aspens, oaks and beeches.
The flaming colours signify approaching death for the leaf. The deeper the colour, the closer to the end.
With less light in fall, the green sugar-making pigment, chlorophyll, starts to break down. Other pigments, previously masked by the chlorophyll are revealed: the red-purples of anthocyaninand the oranges and yellows of carotenoids.As chlorophyll degrades, light striking the leaf may cause injury to its biochemical machinery, particularly the parts that regulate nutrient movement. So, these other pigments help to create a physical light shield and help the leaves efficiently move their nutrients into the twigs for the tree to use later.
As the temperature plummets, the trees build a protective seal between the leaves and their branches, taking in as many nutrients as possible from the sugar-building leaves. Once the leaves are cut off from the fluid in the branches, they separate and drop to the ground, helped by the winds. Even in death, the leaves continue to contribute. On the ground, the fallen leaves decompose and restock the soil with nutrients; they also contribute to the spongy humus layer of the forest floor that absorbs and holds rainfall. Fallen leaves are also food for soil organisms, whose actions in turn keep the forest functional.
As I wove through the deep colours of autumn, I felt humbled by this naked beauty, so simply shown. So ingenuously revealed. How elegantly yet guileless nature went through its stages of individual dying to ensure renewal and growth for the whole.
I returned home, invigorated and humbled by nature’s transient show.
Within weeks, the bright leaves would fall, leaving the trees bare and gray and the ground a thick slippery carpet of brownish gray-black rot. Beauty enfolded, dissected and integrated. Insects, fungi, and bacteria would deliver what the leaves used to be and create something else, a gift to the living forest.
Is that not what death is? The end of something to ensure the beginning of something else?
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
