Late fall changes

Two weeks ago, I missed making a post. I was hurrying that weekend to revise the essay I had written in the nature writing workshop I took part in last summer. I was reworking scenes and consulting academic articles on the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. I was reading aloud in a whisper to myself to hear the sounds of the words. I needed to get the essay ready to send to my writing group. I didn’t make it here to post.

So four weeks have gone by since I was last here. The interminable rain of the first part of October gave way to two weeks of sun, and the temperatures fell without the blanket of clouds. We had our first frosts, and the dahlias we grew in pots over the spring and summer finally froze back–this weekend we need to dig the tubers up to overwinter them. We’ve never had dahlias before, so this will be a new thing.

With a month’s worth of photos to choose from this week, I’m enjoying seeing the change with time. Here’s a little tour of this place I live in autumn. I hope you enjoy.

Fall is the time of mushrooms. There are white and brown and red and purple ones. There are little ones, like this first photo, perhaps only an inch tall. My Seek app usually doesn’t give me much help in identifying them–its specialty seems to be flowers–but although I don’t know most of their names, I love the shapes. This little one has these corrugations over the cap, and then the edge is scalloped. Several were growing together in the same patch of grass, shooting up from the mycelium below.

Much more recognizable, this is the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the classic mushroom from the Mario video game franchise. I was reading a bit on its Wikipedia page–they say its common name, refers to an old practice of mixing the mushroom with milk as an insecticide for flies. It’s also, apparently, psychoactive.

This fly agaric was growing along a path up the mountain that I have taken probably ten or twelve times in the last month: I’ve been going for quick 30-minute hikes at the end of my teaching day (or, now that it’s getting darker so early, and after Norway had daylight savings time in late October, I’ve been going on my lunch break), and so I have passed this particular mushroom day after day, and I’ve loved watching its own change too. The photograph above is from October 21. Eight days later, on the 29th, I took this one. The mushroom has shriveled like a windfall apple.

It’s also been the time of changing leaves. Western Norway doesn’t have the range of color of my home, Minnesota, which burns this time of year with bright yellows and oranges and deep reds. Here, it is the birches that are the big showers, which do turn a gorgeous yellow. And in some places, in the evening or the morning light, it is spectacular to see.

At the edge of campus, there is an old house, the erstwhile estate of the landowner Christian Bekker. Bekker bequeathed the land he owned in this valley to the Red Cross in 1980, which is why our school is here. Bekker, who had roots in Germany, planted trees like nothing else in this valley. This… I think it’s a buckeye… it has let go a carpet of beautiful yellow-orange leaves that I’ve been enjoying tromping through on my way to the trailhead.

As the days become shorter and the weather colder, frosts have come first in the mornings, then have kept hold on the land all day. The humidity of this place means that the frost crystals grow and grow. In Minnesota, frost like this is rare. Here, it is the normal order of things.

So winter takes a tentative step in. It freezes the moisture from the air. It shrivels the mushrooms. It gilds the fallen leaves.

This waterfall–I cannot get over looking at this photograph. This too is on the path up the mountain, a bit before the fly agaric. Last week, it had partially frozen. You can still see the falling water, but you can see too the blue of the ice. The photograph looks almost like it has been spliced together from two, but it hasn’t. The sunny places have melted back into autumn. The waterfall lingers on the edge of winter.

Almost at the end of this post–last Tuesday, out exploring with students for our Species Identification activity, we wandered down to the fjord. We pulled out pieces of the ice, which was nearly invisible over the surface of the brackish water. A couple of the students were licking the ice. It was salty, they said.

Near the high point of my hike, I was surprised by a burst of pink. I stooped down. There was my favorite wildflower here–red campion. I almost did not recognize it–the flower was distorted, twisted. I hypothesized that it had been struck with frost. To see it here, in this late season, in this beautiful place, it made me linger for a long minute, just tracing the shape of the petals, the pink-purple color, the browning leaves, the hairs along the stem.

Two ago, the frosts retreated. Rain and cloud returned, and so for a while it is like the winter has disappeared. It will be back, I’m sure, before too long.

Be well. Happy writing. Thanks for stopping by.
Jimmy