Autumn
is a short season here, and, in a place already rich
in light and temperature dependent “now or never” opportunities, fall
welcomes seasonal activities that we enjoy only this time of year.
View of home from the kayak |
Moose
hunting season is in late August through early September. Each
evening, my husband walked around our property blowing into a horn
that is supposed to offer sexy “come hither” appeal to a bull
moose. Each morning, he hiked a short distance out into the woods,
to sit on a fallen birch tree adjacent to a meadow with lots of tasty
vegetation that moose had clearly chomped off during the summer and
more recently, too. Since we intended to leave in mid-October, I'm
not sure what he would have done had a bull moose crossed his path.
Maybe he didn't know either. But as it happened, none did. The
mornings passed quietly as he sat there with a book, a thermos, and a
still rifle.
I'm not
a hunter myself, but, (except in cases of subsistence need), the
silence and solitude, the scents of the woods, the intentional,
highly attentive awareness are satisfactions of their own for most
hunters I know. I imagine that most people wouldn't discover this if
someone said, “go out and sit in the woods and be quiet!” But I
wonder if this visceral pleasure is the real reason that Cabellas
does such a booming business. Although normally a highly active and
interactive person, Bryan loves this autumn “now or never” gift
of quiet. I wish something similar and repeatable for my busy,
social, electronically connected city friends. He sits quietly
every morning, feeling the soft breezes and light rain, watching
small woodland creatures that scamper along the downed tree, not
noticing him until the last moment and then retreating in a sinuous
turn or brave leap. By returning to the same spot each day for four
or five mornings and lingering there, he really notices the woods in
ways we don't when we pass through – the foliage that died back as
the night time temperature dropped, the increasing expanse of sky as
the leaves fall, the footprints and scat on the narrow path. I
believe that these experiences deliver deep pleasures. He sleeps
better. He's calm. And surely he gains knowledge each year
important to when we will spend all fall and winter here, and will
rely on the tasty moose burgers, steaks, and stew meat that feed so
many grateful families through the long winter.
True to
the fireweed warning, snow fell in the mountains opposite us on Sept
12 – and not just a dusting, either. It remained, soft and white,
gathering depth with subsequent precipitation, and creeping
incrementally down the mountain toward the treeline. Sept 23 we
awoke to a white yard, and although it didn't last past noon, this
early snow urged us to get to our fall chores. It was time to mulch
the gardens, harvest the potatoes and remaining vegetables, move
additional wood to the back porch, and install tall marking stakes by
the burn barrels, fuel depot, fire pit and other sites we would want
to find under the mid winter snows after returning from a trip
Outside. We filled our 8 - 8 gallon water jugs, four with potable and
four with non-potable water for a head start in winter,
since otherwise we rely on slowly melting and boiling pots of snow which
markedly delay the availability of usable H2O.
Between
Sept 23 and Oct 9 we enjoyed two hard freezes. The first caused all
the alder leaves to drop in one fell swoop, so, for the first time
since June, we could see much farther through the woods, to lovely
orange sunrises and purple sunsets. I look forward to this moment!
During the summer, with its 20 hours of daylight, sunrise and sunset
occur too early and late respectively for me to see them very often,
so it is a welcome treat to see those purple mountains in the
evening. With the waning sun, I start to use the propane light to
see when I cook breakfast and dinner, something I haven't needed for
the past five months. The light changes, like weather variations,
make it easy to appreciate each day for what it has to offer, and to
realize that it may, and probably will, be different tomorrow.
As the
evening temperatures drop below 32 F, the dew on our cold hardy
vegetables freeze, catching the morning light and reflecting it like
prisms. The large, flat cabbage leaves are lacy with frost. How
lovely! To us, the second hard freeze means that it is time to
harvest the cranberries! Yea! To tell you the truth, what grows in
the woods of NW US and Canada isn't really a true cranberry like
those that grow in bogs in Maine, but the fruit smells and tastes
like cranberries so that's what we all call it. It is high in
vitamin C and three times higher in anti-oxidants than blueberries
(which we harvest earlier in the year). Our cranberries grow as high
bush and low bush varieties and perhaps obviously, the high bush
variety is easier to harvest. The berries dangle in groups of three
to five from nearly invisible, slim threads hanging several inches
below graceful branches, on bushes 3-6 feet high. In an autumnal deciduous forest, so
many bushes and trees have shed their leaves that the bright red high
bush cranberries appear to hang mid-air, as though by magic. I like
to clip the bunches with small garden pruners because I can keep my
gloves on, but my husband just pulls them gently with his fingers.
We crunch over frozen ferns, laid low by frost weight, and maneuver
carefully around spiky devil's club prongs near the cranberries. We
fill big buckets with as many berries as we wish until we get cold
from being under-dressed for this first blast of cold. We figure that
the competition for these berries is not birds – most have flown
south by now- but bears, doing their final “bulk up” before
hibernating. We can harvest any berries that the bears haven't
enjoyed the night before.
At
home, we put the fruit in the freezer to harden, which makes them
both easier to clean and sweeter. A day or so later, we pull stems
and bits of chaff off some of the tart, frozen fruit and boil it in
water with lots of sugar, strain the cooled liquid through cheese
cloth to remove the pit in each berry and enjoy the flavor. The resulting
juice is thick, almost like a nectar. I adore it. We drink it plain
or mix it with orange juice, incorporate it into a vinaigrette, mix
with apples in a cobbler, anything we wish! I haven't made jelly
yet, but surely will. This fall, my husband actually added the
cranberry nectar to his home brewed beer. The natural (and added)
sugar actually started the beer to ferment all over again, but the
yeast ate the sugar and the result was tarter than he liked. Next
year, he may just add some of the juice to a poured glass of beer and
see if that last minute addition works better, or add the berries at
the beginning of the fermenting process instead of at the end. Stay
tuned.
We flew
away by float plane on October 9, rising up above the bare deciduous
trees. In our absence, winter fell fast at our home. Within twenty
days, our only neighbor wrote to say that the lake had swiftly hardened to 6-7 inches of glare ice (with
no snow). Winter had arrived.
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