Finding color on a dreary day
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- October 21, 2009
- 725
I couldn’t have agreed more.
The weather of this October day had been downright ugly, making the work seem like a drudgery. I needed a break.
For me, that meant getting in my car and driving my township roads, a necessary and normally pleasant responsibility for this township trustee. I have my usual route along the 15 miles for which I am responsible.
The landscapes are pretty and refreshing, even on such a drizzly late afternoon. Of course, I am supposed to be checking for potholes and clogged ditches, not absorbing the ever-changing but always beautiful vistas.
Thanks to the effects of the Wisconsin glacier, the topography changes significantly on my purposeful road trip. The powerful glacier leveled the hills, while the runoff from its melt created the valleys.
It is especially hard for me to concentrate on my official duties this time of year. With the leaves changing, the views of the hills and dales I traverse only improve, even on a gray day.
At times I feel like I am in a national park, the beauty is that intense. Despite the lack of sunshine, I encountered splashes of colors around every curve, and in our township, there are a lot of them. The roads wind along unnamed creeks, wiggle through narrow hollows, and crawl up and down steep slopes.
Jockey Joe Road is a prime example. Keep in mind that such names are purely colloquial. Our county uses the less logical numbering system instead of the monikers the locals have used for generations.
How it came to be named this is beside the point. It’s the scenery that counts. This little township road runs north to south for three lovely miles between two county highways.
In all that space, there is only one crossroad. It is there that you can see far to the west, even beyond the state-owned marshland where American eagles nest and beaver thrive.
Continue north, and the skinny road drops precipitously with deep ditches on both sides. Well-kept homesteads and cottage industries dot the way and hug the roadsides.
In the ravine, second growth trees overhang the right of way, forming a shaded tunnel in the summertime. Now, a color wheel of leaves litters the path, yellow hickory, orange sugar maple and crimson dogwood among them.
Just past the one-room school, dismissed for the day, the road straightens and lessens its incline. Unharvested farm fields replace the hardwoods. The ground simply has been too wet even for horse drawn equipment.
But there was color there as well. A craggy black walnut had shed its leaves altogether, leaving the tent caterpillars’ off-white habitats exposed. The tree’s fallen fruit have stained the road dark, if only temporarily.
Later, on a dead-end road where a small stream ran through a still green pasture, a chestnut mare grazed near a maple that had dropped a third of its golden load. No doubt the faded red barn beyond the farmstead’s rickety wooden bridge paid little heed.
But I did. I saw the clump of burning bushes on the other side of the road, too, their outer fuchsia leaves lording it over the internal ones still emerald as spring.
As I pulled in the drive towards dusk, somehow the sugar maple in our own backyard appeared warmer in color. The day didn’t seem so long or hard after all.
Contact Bruce Stambaugh at brucestambaugh@gmail.com.