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.(Autumn leaves to an elementary school student must be something like the mail in December to a postal worker: The leaves just keep falling and falling, and no sooner is the yard clean than a wind in the night blankets the ground with them once again.)Consequently, it’s probably no accident that my wife and I bought a house with few trees when we moved to a village in central Vermont.There are exactly two maple trees in our front yard, and two more on the edge of our driveway.With the exception of a pair of lilacs, all the trees we have planted in the fifteen years we have lived here are evergreens.But I do love the magic of the Vermont foliage.Our house faces Mount Abraham and Mount Ellen, and the color is indeed spectacular.If there hasn’t been an early snow in the higher elevations, closing the gap road through the mountains, the tour buses filled with leaf peepers will drive right past my home.The autumnal exhibit in my village is so extravagant that five Septembers ago Priscilla Presley was here with a forty-person crew and a European advertising agency to film a television commercial for Indian Summer perfume.The European director wanted perfect foliage, and the location scouts chose a dirt road and a strip of woods just south of the town.The crew’s cell phones wouldn’t work in our hills, and they had to depend on the lone rotary phone in the local general store—a situation that probably went from quaint to annoying between days one and four of their visit—but otherwise the shoot was successful.The leaves were particularly brilliant that year.I had lived in Vermont for a decade before I learned from my friend John Elder that my state’s autumn beauty is the inadvertent result of man’s natural rapaciousness.Elder teaches in both the English and environmental studies departments at Middlebury College.The two of us were hiking throughout the Bristol Cliffs Wilderness Area and talking about the book he was then writing about Robert Frost’s appreciation for this section of the state.Although the steep woods were thick and the trees were tall, Elder showed me the places where the woods had been logged a century earlier and the oxen had pulled the fallen timber from the forest.There, on the trunk of an old birch, were the remains of an iron cable.Once that cable would have been attached to the yoke of the oxen, so that if the animals slipped, they wouldn’t tumble down the hill to their deaths.His point? The trees around us were barely eighty years old.Most of Vermont is like that.Despite two rounds of deforestation that laid the state bare, Vermont is now seventy-eight percent forest.Originally, man obliterated much of the forest at the end of the eighteenth century to make potash for gunpowder and soap and to fuel iron forges.Then, once the land was cleared, it was kept free for the merino sheep that energized the economy through the Civil War.Vermont, however, was never great sheep country.In reality, it has never been great farming country.The land is hilly, the soil is rocky, and the climate can be ornery.After the Civil War, both the people and the sheep left, often following the new railroads west, and trees returned to the meadows and pastures—though this time the hardwoods returned in slightly greater numbers.Still, even those trees didn’t last long.The Vermonters who remained carved out a living any way they could, and that often meant logging.Despite the pleas of some of the first conservationists, the hillsides were soon cleared once again.Fortunately for leaf peepers, however, hardwoods like maple grow faster than pine.In torn, muddy ground no longer shielded from the sun by evergreens, the maple seeds took root and the trees quickly flourished.The configuration of the forest changed, with the result that the woods here comprise far more hardwoods and far fewer evergreens than two hundred years ago, and flatlanders have a reason to visit.A dead leaf—even a magnificent specimen from a healthy red maple—is of little value.Preschoolers may trace its iconic fjords and bays and stencil upon its topographic veins; idiosyncratic interior designers may shellac clusters of them onto walls and boxes and place mats.The reality, however, is this: Once a leaf has fallen from a tree, it is well on its way toward decomposition.Either it will become a part of the carpet of humus that covers the forest floor (cuisine at the very bottom of the food chain), or it will be raked (often by an exasperated elementary school student).A leaf, like the rest of us, loses its looks real fast after death.Yet unlike the rest of us—combinations of cells, animals or plants, it doesn’t matter—the leaves that make up the Vermont hillsides die dazzlingly beautiful deaths.That is, in essence, what we are watching when we gaze at the annual autumnal fireworks in the trees: We are watching leaves die.The tree is preparing for winter, and a part of its process is the elimination of all those dainty leaves that are ill-equipped to endure the oncoming cold.The tree does so by slowly producing a layer of cells at the base of the leaf, thereby preventing fluids from reaching it.The leaves, meanwhile, stop producing chlorophyll—the chemical necessary for photosynthesis, the process by which a leaf uses sunlight to generate food.Chlorophyll is also the reason a leaf has such a rich green luster.When the chlorophyll is gone, however, the colors in the other chemicals (which have, of course, been there all along) become visible: the scarlet carotenoids of the maple tree, for example.That beautiful red leaf, in other words, is slowly starving to death.Often, leaf peepers (and the thousands of businesses that depend upon them) worry about the summer weather and what effect it will have on the timing of the color.In reality, weather has little effect: An unusually hot, dry summer might put some stress on the trees and may cause the foliage to peak two or three days earlier than usual; conversely, a cooler summer with plenty of moisture and clouds, like the one we just had, might prolong it an extra half-week.But these swings are marginal: Leaves change because the days are growing shorter, and there is no variability there.Sometimes weather can affect the brilliance of the foliage—a drought can certainly dull the colors, just as sufficient moisture in the soil will enhance them—but again, rainfall is a relatively small factor.The leaves are going to turn, and it will almost always be a remarkable spectacle to watch—especially when it’s part of a massive ribbon of color on a hill, with either a dairy farm or Norman Rockwell–esque village green in the foreground.Douglas Mack, the chef and co-owner of Mary’s at Baldwin Creek, a Bristol bed-and-breakfast with an award-winning restaurant attached, believes that it is exactly this combination of natural beauty and archetypal New England imagery that generates such devotion to the state.“There’s a decided homeyness that comes with crisp autumn air, the changing leaves, and a fire in the fireplace.It’s like coming home,” he says.“Suddenly, your marriage looks wonderful and your kids have turned out OK.That’s really what we’re serving up here.”And that might be exactly why it touches some people more than the view of a garden from an ancient castle keep.The leaves signal the onset of winter and the desire in us all to cocoon in a place that is warm, cozy, and reminiscent of something called home.VERMONT READY TO BE MIREDIN SPRINGTHE ROAD TO the center of Lincoln coils uphill for exactly 3
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