This Fall

Most of the leaves are off there trees, the drifts are accumulating, the views are opening, I can see several other ridges now, the antics of the crows. Breezy evening and dead leaves rattle against the house. Rain forecast and I need to be at the museum tomorrow, so I park at the bottom and hike in. Puddles are disguised as hard surfaces covered with leaves, and I make several mistakes. Summer temps, today, 78 degrees, but with the trees stripped and the wind, you know it's fall. There's a turn-out, above the lake, on Mackletree, where the creek flows into ponded water. I often stop there, it's a lovely spot, and in the up-slope opposite it's easy to follow the succession of trees. Most oak forest are beech climax, things usually burn before then, but given a few hundred years without interference, any given oak forest would be a magnificent beech park. Beech trees are odd in that they hold there leaves, often through the winter, and I can't imagine what the advantage is in that. So that, in a typical winter, when everything else is bare, dead brown leaves still wave from the beech. The nuts are large enough that the succession must be at the whim of squirrels, or chipmunks, or something large enough to carry them. Times I feel like an idiot, every year, some particular things come up and I realize I don't know anything about them. Does the new leaf, in the spring, push the old leaf off? I won't speculate on that, but I will say that what happens in the Beech Climax sequence, is that the oaks canopy, the under-story dies out from lack of light, some critter buries some nuts; eventually an old oak falls, lightning or root-rot, and there are a couple of small beech saplings on deck, ready to go. I cut a very small sapling beech recently, 12 inches tall. If I read the rings correctly, it was 10 years old. Talk about waiting for a chance. Three or four of them will shoot up in a clearing, and they canopy quickly, shade out any competition; they're beautiful trees, I love them. So one of the reasons that I stop at that turn-out, is to look at the trees, and try and figure out what's going on. I don't research this, I just watch. An interesting bifurcation there, because I often do want to know, find the fact and file it, but sometimes I enjoy idle speculation. I've walked in the woods most of my life, and there are vague patterns there that I want to understand. But I want the understanding to come from experience, not from something I've read. I want too much, which is my want. An alpha beech emerges, shades out the others, establishes a realm; we've seen this before, if you follow history. I wouldn't want to profile here. We all know who we're talking about. He who needs no name. Or was that 'she', whatever.