JOHN PEPIN

“The questions of my childhood weave a web of mystery,” – Steve Walsh and Kerry Livgren

I’m outside today trying to acclimate myself to the warmth and wilds of late September and early October.

It’s certainly autumn. Only a handful of days officially into the season and so many of the leaves across wide swaths of our region are at their peak of seasonal color change.

That transition must be one of nature’s greatest tricks.

I have never grown tired of the grand display. However, I somehow forget from one fall to the next how incredible the colors truly are.

I guess I don’t forget, but my appreciation of the depth and brilliance of the show fades while I have my senses wide open and trained on the magic of the other three seasons of the year.

Even though I’ve experienced the seasonal clock’s rotation through its phases for several decades now, I have maintained a childlike excitement about each change.

I wonder what the coming season might bring, while I hold at least some small resignation for the season that came before and is now fading fast in the rearview mirror.

I think some of the most incredible moments I’ve spent outside have been in the dead silence of an autumn day, at the shore of a mirror-surfaced lake with an early, fresh snowfall partially covering the reds, oranges, yellows and browns of the autumn leaves.

The experience and the beauty of those times is profound.

Silence is something I now appreciate on an increasingly frequent basis.

There are so many things that seem to be way too loud.

I know there are days when I become tired physically just from hearing all the noise I’ve endured during my day.

The more tired I get the louder things seem.

It often gets almost unbearable. I need the silence of sleep to help remedy the situation. I think I might be programmed to seek out silence where and when I can.

Of course, there are sounds that I love and appreciate so much.

However, here in the autumn time, I sometimes feel washed out or as faded as a lilac blossom from last June.

I read recently that some children in Alaska have already gone trick-or-treating to avoid having to wear snowsuits over their Halloween costumes. They call it “Trick or Treat in the Heat.”

The stores have been in good supply of candy for a few weeks now.

Scary decorations, along with cornucopias, corn stalks, gourds and other harvest symbolism have been popping up all over the place.

Many front yards of homes are now displaying various ghosts, goblins, witches and other things that cackle, scream or go bump in the night.

I love Halloween, but I prefer the haunts of the nighttime outdoor world, like the hoots of owls, the wind rifling through the dead and dying leaves and the cold, bone-chilling rains of October.

But I am getting ahead of myself, with at least one day left in the trout fishing season.

It’s shocking how quickly the seasons are passing. It seems like I just bought my fishing license three or four weeks ago, when it’s been that many months.

Today, the weather is warm, and the sun is shining down on my face. It feels great. It makes me wish we could have another two months of this kind of weather.

I always seem to have so much to do, always pushing myself to do the next thing and then the next and the next after that. I really should spend more time just sitting in the sunshine and listening to the wind in the trees.

I seem to get restless too quickly for much of that though. I am usually good to sit in one place for about a half hour before I start to get itching to get up to do something.

Over the past few days, I’ve stood outside in the rain overlooking a tremendous gorge beneath a waterfall. I’ve walked along a dense and green forest trail to a place where the rocks were gouged and carved by centuries of water flow.

I watched the sun go down gradually through my windshield as I drove amid the forests, meadows and rugged lakeshores of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

It was in Michigan where the fall color had advanced its farthest, was most dramatic and awe-inspiring. Some vistas from high hills showed the countryside painted with what looked like an impressionistic brush.

Old railroad tracks, bridges and viaducts help suit the autumn. Most of these things are associated with bygone days when train whistles, loaded boxcars and ore carriers were everyday sights and sounds.

Of course, they can still be seen and experienced today, but so much has been lost from what there used to be. In the little mining town that I grew up in alone, there are whole cityscape features that no longer exist.

Fortunately, a lot of the railroad tracks that have been torn up have been transformed into rail-trails used for recreation.

Farmhouses are another example of this type of feature that works well in an autumn setting, once more prominent and prolific in our society.

Today, in the cities and even in the little towns like mine, there seems to be a gathering claustrophobia. Things seem so much closer and on top of one another.

Whole belief systems, worlds and foundations seem to be colliding and crashing to the ground. The roar is unbelievable. It’s hard to believe.

Sometimes, it seems like it wouldn’t be surprising to see the earth rip open wide and bleed right down to the magma.

Though under great assault herself, Nature is one of the last sanctuaries of peace, reason, meter and measure. Nature still makes sense, while remaining as uncompromising as she ever was.

There are many times when my head aches as badly as my heart when I see the desperate state of the world that we are living in. I stumble into the forests to try to recover, think and rest.

I think everything from my breathing patterns to my sleep, relaxation and alert states have all been altered by the everything, everywhere, all at once of our world.

It seems like we’re all being hunted by something that wants to rip us open from the inside out and spread us over the land like dead leaves.

I sometimes wonder if other cultures and civilizations felt the disarray many of us seem to be feeling simultaneously today.

So, what am I going to do about all of this?

I am going to go for a walk out here in the sunshine and tomorrow, maybe another walk, in a rain shower.

I am going to keep looking for reason and truth in nature, where I think I have the best chance of finding something meaningful.

I want to try to get more things done before it is too late.

I anticipate falling asleep under the billions of stars above on a night when I would be freezing outside if not for my sleeping bag.

I look forward to hearing the autumn rainfall tapping softly against the window, while it is warm indoors and the soup is on the boil.

Most of all, I just want to find a place on a hilltop, where I can rest my back up against the trunk of a tree and take deep breaths, staring out into the wild countryside in front of and below me.

If I am fortunate, I will allow myself to let down my guard long enough to enjoy an hour or two of peaceful and restful sleep.

I’ll then wake up and reach into my shoulder bag for a something to eat, my pen and my notebook. I will try to make sense of the things I am feeling and thinking and doing.

It’s always about the questions for me.

Some things get answered only to be replaced by more questions.

I expect it will remain this way, maybe even after I’m gone.

But I hope that at that point, there will finally be more answers than questions.

I remember having the feeling as a little boy that one day when I am dead, all the answers to the questions I’ve had unanswered throughout my lifetime will be revealed.

If even half of that thought is right, it will be worth it all.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula