Brown County Seasons

Brown County

Seasons

~by Mark Blackwell

I reckon that just about everybody has a calendar. And I reckon everybody knows what a calendar is for. It’s for tracking days, weeks, months, and seasons. On a calendar the seasons are delineated by the position of the sun. You have solstices and equinoxes. The solstices are the longest (summer) and the shortest (winter) days of the year. And the equinoxes are the two times a year when days are of an equal length.

It is from the solstices and equinoxes that our four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter, originate. Various weather conditions are connected with the seasons; spring the season that requites our ardent optimism with mud; summer with its heat, humidity and mosquitos. And then you’ve got autumn in Brown County. I can’t think of any drawbacks to it. Those words alone, “autumn in Brown County” constitute a poem. Winter down here can be a time of discontent and in some cases down right regret, usually because you didn’t go ahead and get that extra rick or two of stove wood. In Brown County, Indiana we’ve got all the regular seasons and more .

If you go a few hundred miles south, the four seasons shrink down to just two or three and in the case of Hawaii, they just have one; it’s called Perfect. But here in Brown County, depending on who you’re talkin’ to at the time, there are a dozen or more seasons.

We have to have the big four and then we have what you might consider sub-seasons, like when spring shows up. The first signs of spring in Brown County are sounds. There’s the gurgle of the snowmelt running in the ravines and then there is the slurping sound of sucking mud. Of the two signs of spring the most reliable is mud. In the spring mud is everywhere. It’s muddy in places where you would swear there couldn’t be mud—like your livin’ room rug. I remember not even going outside but turning around to confront a pile of the stuff sittin’ half way between my easy chair and the woodstove. It puzzled the dickens out of me but I finally came to the realization that the mud was following me in from the wood pile.

Other Brown County spring sub-seasons are Morel mushroom season and snake season—they often coincide. Then there is turkey hunting season but it is not as widely celebrated as it once was. Another sign of spring is Motorcycle season. It typically occurs on the first day that the temperature reaches 15 degrees above freezing and the first motorcycle occasionally beats out the first robin.

And then summer arrives with Festival season and the voice of the banjo is heard throughout the county. It seems like half the south and much of the population of the Midwest makes a pilgrimage to the Bill Monroe Music Park. It’s like the county gets a new village. The rest of summer is just “outdoors” season. You know, hiking, camping, canoeing, kayaking, fishing, loafing, and stuff like that.

Next comes Squirrel season accompanied by the sharp bark of .22 caliber rifles and the occasional woof of a .410 shotgun. Here again, is a season that appears to be on the wane. I can’t understand why an activity that gives one a chance to wade through cat briar, commune with dear flies, and get lost in the deep woods is losing popularity. We need hunters, those tree rats aren’t gonna massacre themselves.

Next thing you know Labor Day is a memory, there’s crispness in the air and the first tang of wood smoke is teasing your nose.

Brown County in autumn is so inspiring that Hoagy Carmichael wrote an orchestral piece with that title. Autumn here is not an overwhelming phenomenon like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. Fall, down here, comes and envelopes you. The transformation of the trees draws the hills in a little closer, like a familiar quilt passed down from your grandma. The spicy smell of the leaves mixed with the smoke of a campfire is like the incense of nature’s church in the wildwood.

Fall is also a time of joy and renewal for the artists and crafts folk of the county as well as the shopkeepers in Nashville. It’s a time for folks to come down and revisit familiar places and people, stroll the streets of the village and give an ear (and a buck or two) to the buskers on the corner. And then they maybe have a sit on one of the benches up at the courthouse and take some time to remember. Nashville is a good place to remember things—like the first time you visited Brown County and who you shared that visit with. Or, if it’s late fall and you’re a county native, sittin’ at the courthouse rememberin’ stuff. It’s likely, at some point, that you’ll remember that you didn’t get in near enough firewood to last the winter.

Winter equals chainsaw season and Christmas and if you’re like me, there’s also a late chainsaw season. But enough about winter; fall is the real deal in these parts. To really get Brown County you have to experience the whole autumn enchilada. So, come and see us and if you get here a little late in the season, bring a chainsaw and look me up.