010: Leaf Peeping

On apple picking, the Upper Valley, Noel Perrin, Galway Kinnell, Bill McKibben, Charlotte McConaghy & loving your neighbor

The personal is political

—Carol Hanisch

The first time I saw Vermont in peak foliage was in fall 1989. I was sitting with three other Dartmouth undergraduates in the backseat of what can only be described as a jalopy, coming home from Valley Bible Church in White River Junction. We had just got on northbound I-91 and were speeding toward that vertiginously high overpass over the White River, and at that moment I looked out the window.

I had never seen anything like it. An unfathomable riot of red, yellow, orange, and green against a high, blue sky. A hillside so alive with shades and hues that I had a moment of mild synaesthesia—it came at me like music.

Why do the trees look like that? I inquired

Haven’t you ever seen peak foliage? said the driver

No, sir, I had not.

I come from desert country where there are three and a half colors during the warm season: the faded blues of the sky and the mountains at a distance, the dusty browns of hundreds of miles of hay and sagebrush, and the da…