October could wait until I got home

October could wait until I got home

“Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.” —American journalist and writer Hal Borland (1900-1978)

There comes a point every year when the calendar and I begin having a lively disagreement.

The calendar says it’s October.

I say this seems unlikely.

Wasn’t it just Memorial Day?

Didn’t we just get the patio furniture out, fire up the grill and start complaining that it was too hot?

Apparently not.

I was reminded of this while out on my e-bike the other day.

It was one of those early October afternoons that hadn’t quite surrendered to autumn. The temperature was in the low 70s. The sun was out. The breeze was pleasant. If you ignored the calendar, you could almost convince yourself summer had negotiated an extension.

Then I looked at the trees.

A little yellow here.

A little orange there.

A few dabs of red over yonder.

Nothing dramatic yet. No great explosion of autumn color. Just a few leaves quietly changing sides.

Traitors.

I like fall. Really, I do.

Outside of an overdose of everything pumpkin spice, fall has a lot going for it. Football. Baseball playoffs and the World Series. Chili. Apple orchards. Crisp mornings. Pumpkin-shaped peanut butter cups. The first comfortably worn sweatshirt after months of short sleeves. Trees putting on one last spectacular show before spending five months looking like sticks.

In Wisconsin, autumn comes with its own particular rituals.

Peak color is discussed as though tracking the migration of an endangered species.

“It’s about 40 percent up north.”

“Really? I heard 60 percent.”

“My cousin says they’re already past peak near Minocqua.”

Soon, somebody produces a map.

Still, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with fall.

Spring is anticipation.

Summer is possibility.

Fall is a beautiful warning.

That’s what I was thinking as I pedaled along, although “pedaled” may be overstating my contribution to the enterprise.

I ride an e-bike.

I still pedal. I would like this entered into the record.

But in the interest of full disclosure, the bicycle also sports a small electric motor that has a considerably more enthusiastic attitude toward going uphill than I do.

At 61, I have concluded this is not cheating.

It is technology being properly respectful of its elders.

The wonderful thing about a bicycle, electric or otherwise, is that it moves at approximately the right speed for noticing things.

A car is designed to get you somewhere.

A bicycle lets you discover where you already are.

You notice the smell of leaves. The temperature changes when you ride beneath a canopy of trees. You hear birds you wouldn’t hear through a windshield. You notice somebody walking a dog, another cyclist coming the other way, a patch of wildflowers hanging on for a few more days, a snake sunning on the bike path.

And on this particular ride, I noticed October sneaking in around the edges.

That’s the strange thing about seasons.

They don’t really arrive on the dates printed on calendars.

Nobody marks an X on Sept. 22 and suddenly the trees turn orange, red and yellow and everyone begins drinking apple cider.

The seasons seep into one another.

Summer hangs around for a while, increasingly aware that it has overstayed its reservation.

The nights get cooler.

The sun rises later, rides lower in the sky, and disappears noticeably earlier.

One tree changes.

Then another.

Eventually you look around and realize the season has changed while you weren’t paying attention.

Life has a habit of doing that, too.

When you’re young, a summer seems enormous.

The summer between fourth and fifth grade may have lasted approximately 11 years.

There were bicycles and baseball games and trading cards and swimming pools and snails in the creek and pitchers of lemonade and absolutely no reason to know what day it was.

Now Memorial Day and Labor Day seem separated by about three weekends and a utility bill.

I don’t remember authorizing this.

Maybe that’s why I felt slightly wistful on the bike.

It wasn’t sadness exactly.

It was the realization that another summer had quietly packed up while I was still making plans for it.

There were things I did.

Places I went.

Baseball games. Road trips. Concerts. Bike rides. Visits to the ice cream shop. Evenings when the sun stayed up late and so did I.

There were things I intended to do and never got around to.

There always are.

Maybe that’s what seasons are for.

They put boundaries around our lives.

Without winter, perhaps we’d never appreciate that first 60-degree March afternoon when half of Wisconsin emerges from its houses wearing shorts despite snow still piled beside the driveway.

Without fall, maybe we wouldn’t notice summer exiting stage right.

And without summer leaving, maybe we wouldn’t occasionally stop and ask whether we made enough of it while it was here.

I kept riding.

The bike tires hummed quietly beneath me. The trail rolled ahead. The trees were still mostly green.

Mostly.

There was enough color around the edges to know what’s coming.

Soon there will be more orange and yellow and red. Then the leaves will come down. The world will turn brown. The skies will go steely gray. Somebody will mention wind chills. The first snowflake will appear in a forecast, and every grocery store will mysteriously run short of milk, bread and Twinkies.

But not yet.

It was 72 degrees.

The sun was shining.

I was on my bike.

And for another afternoon, at least, summer hadn’t entirely left.

So I kept pedaling.

October could wait until I got home.

Vilas County News-Review freelance columnist Eric A. Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.