Season of the soul

Autumn

A season of change to be savored rather than survived; a ginkgo truth awaiting the word; a now-you-see-it moment in the passing of yet another year

Story by Seth Terrell Photos by David Moore

On the last day of the world, I would plant a tree. – W.S. Merwin

I.

Seasons are not years. And the most hopeful and wisest among us measure time by them. Seasons are temporary phases, holdovers. They are liminal spaces wherein something shall come and something else shall come to pass. They are modest and forgiving intervals in which life’s newest lessons are ripe on the vine and the old heartbreaks have grown brittle; any moment now they break away and dwindle down to a soil ready to reclaim them, a ground ready to refine them.

We do not bow down to seasons in the same way we are often marked and weighed down by years. After all, seasons are meant to be experienced rather than survived, savored rather than endured.

Autumn is nature’s sleight of hand, the now-you-see-it to winter’s now-youdon’t. Our eyes fix on the vibrant colors of hickories and maples, the sorrel and yellow, russet and burnt orange, then it goes, the earth creeping into deeper sleep. Autumn is a mindset. Autumn is the memory of what was. It is the soul’s season.

Find your footing somewhere on the back side of Sand Mountain or Georgia Mountain or Brindley or Wyeth. Cast your gaze like a well-spun fishing line, out over the waters of this slinking stretch of Tennessee River. Shape the clouds into poems. Count the stubborn pines as they, in autumn, hold to their green like the last colors on earth.

Remember the ancients. Know your people, know yourself – know yourself. Taste the world as it was, as it is – the persimmon barely ripe, the cider beginning to sweeten, deeper south in the county, the golden hayfields and the tides of burnished corn, their

Seen from the bridge on Martling Road, Scarham Creek runs through autumn-tinged woods on its rocky course down Sand Mountain.

tassels waving like a million tiny flags of surrender, reaching for all we cannot see. Tell yourself it is good. Make a promise. Speak a name. Say a prayer. Cry and laugh. Dream.

II. When I was younger and restless and a bit wild, I went looking for autumn in the backcountry of southwest Virginia. Seven hours from home and fresh out of

college, the world was bigger than I had imagined it, stoic and eminent.

Spring had been unkind, cruel even, as T. S. Eliot once supposed it. A mass shooting had occurred in April at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia where I worked and lived. There was so much to process there, so much to grieve. I had stood hand in hand with college students reckoning with the tragedies and unanswered questions. I’d done my best to comfort the hurting as I dealt with my own pain.

Exhausted and overwhelmed, I went out one pale October afternoon with a half tank of gas and Gillian Welch playing on my car stereo. Following one country road that lead to the next, through the gorgeous hollers of the upper Blue Ridge, the long draws of wilderness that stretched toward the Shenandoah Valley. It would become a refuge of sorts with all its holy colors and natural incense, a deep-earth balm for my wounds.

My wife and I would meander those back roads for gentle thrills, a sort of extended honeymoon where each car drive was a lesson in learning about each other. The perfect date when there was little money in our pockets for much else. But on this day in October, I was determined to mark my own trail, to complete the circle from Blacksburg, through Falls Ridge and along the Catawba Road, hoping to somehow arrive again at my front door.

I remember the pastures in that back country and Galloway cattle standing slanted on the sloping ridges. Just east of Pembroke I stopped and took a walk to Cascade Falls through a trail nestled in a tunnel of cedars and sourwood trees, a place that wasn’t mine but a place that spoke of renewal nevertheless. The sudden waters of Little Stony Creek rushing down, cleansing, murmuring. A man can be forgiven for attempting to translate such sublime language.

On Pandapa’s Pond Road, I remember a young bear clinging up high to the trunk of a poplar tree. I could feel his angst, wanting to lower himself and soon find winter solace deep in the woods. I remember the way October held me like a time-worn mother. I thought of my own mother. I thought of the mothers of the young victims at Virginia Tech.

I detoured again, finding myself pulling over to walk a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Atop Dragon’s Tooth and McAfee Knob, autumn was swirling in every direction. The balds and rock faces and empty hollers told of a time when the earth was young. A time of regeneration and hope.

When I finally left the woods and vistas, I eased my car back on the road. A quarter tank now and nothing but stretches of more and more wilderness, autumn in its abundance, autumn in its glory, autumn in its sorrows.

The Gillian Welch album had played through twice – lyrics and old-time melodies ringing with ballads of mules and star-crossed lovers, waysides back in time and Camptown blues. Music has always been my steady companion, the mystic manual guiding me through my solitude. The songs were on their third cycle through as the gas hand crept toward E.

I’ve always been of the praying sort. Yet I’ve prided myself on not “over-using” prayer on such miracles as getting back home on gas fumes. The engine started to sputter as I descended a long hill toward Newport.

Ipulled over to the side of the road with nothing but a 10-dollar bill in my

As seen through a telephoto lens, changing fall encases this view of the Tennessee River and distant Painted Bluff from Gary and Dee Brown’s property on Georgia Mountain. Part of Guntersville Dam is visible to the far right.

pocket and the quiet hardwoods looming over me. I held the hardest memories in my hands. I wondered what I was and what I was becoming. I thought of Sand Mountain and my fat Appaloosa horse there on my parents’ farm.

I imagined my father, 450 miles away in High Point, Alabama scattering sweet feed in a trough for the horses. I imagined the sweetgum stand behind the barn. I could see the maroon leaves turning brown in the crisp southern wind. I could smell the dried manure and dust of the barn floor. Sometimes homesickness is simply the imagination in overdrive. Heartache and heart warmth are often too akin to distinguish.

With no traffic coming my way from either direction, I stood outside my car for a long time. There was no rain either, only trembling orange sunlight bleeding through the surrounding foliage and igniting the mountains in hues I had no name for. I pushed my car into the roadway and taxied down the rest of the hill longing for something more than a gas station, more than getting back home.

I was tired and hungry, restless and a bit teary-eyed. I was not asking for a miracle, I was only wanting to know that somehow the arc of the universe is bent toward goodness. I didn’t close my eyes, but the last tenth of a mile felt like a dreamful blur. I had no plan, no thought beyond the present moment.

Looking back, maybe it was a Zen state, a mundane self-inflicted predicament that was growing into something profound. A lesson there I still can’t quite put to words. Then it appeared at the bottom of the hill. An old-timey service station with squat little gas pumps, a rough-trod gravel parking lot. I rolled within five feet of the nearest pump and pushed my car forward, shaking my head and letting a deep buried laugh spill through my lips.

Inside this place a weary traveler could find nearly anything he wanted – fishing bait, quarts of oil, fried bologna, glass-bottled Dr. Peppers. It was a backwoods El Dorado and I was a fragile conquistador unworthy of the sweetness of the moment. On the walls were mounted animal heads of what I knew were the trophies of hunts and adventures far more exciting than my current one – bears and bobcats and foxes.

The old familiar tingling bell on the door announced my entry, the smell of fried chicken and a nod from the man behind the counter as I popped the top on my glass bottle Dr. Pepper. I paid him the $10 for gas and the drink; I would have paid a thousand.

I was an outsider, though my Alabama drawl wasn’t too foreign from the local Appalachian twang, and the few older men around the station didn’t have much to say to me. I inquired about directions back to Blacksburg – though in many ways I didn’t want to return. Their answer came with no road names, only cardinal directions, hints on how to divine my course by the lay of the land and the position of the sun. The only landmarks were mountains and meager bodies of water.

The man behind the counter pointed out the service station window, out there to where the hollers gave way to more fields and more timber where hickory leaves were falling like souls shaking free in the crisp, late afternoon sun. In a couple of months, cold weather would come and with it, snow drifts of nearly four feet. My wife and I would then explore the quiet

Foster Landing Road on Georgia Mountain peters out to a gravel trace lined with kaleidoscopic colors of fall. In terms of trees and colors, writer Seth Terrell calls autumn the “now-you-see-it” season preceding winter’s “now-you-don’t.”

winter world like two children who’d stumbled into some fantasy realm.

In time the community of Blacksburg would begin the healing process, people would find themselves being more kind to each other as the next spring would unfold and time marched on. But for now there was still a touch of warmth as autumn washed over the countryside. I resigned to let it take me wherever it so wished.

“You’ll eventually find it,” the man told me. And I believed his every word.

III.

Years later in Nashville, I was sitting in a graduate class with my most beloved professor, Victor Judge. It was a creative writing class that was fused into a theology course.

We students were tasked with writing about our own stories, creatively reflecting on the moments that made us who we were. To set the mood and wet our creative whistles, he recited the poem “The Consent” by Howard Nemerov.

I was still restless, will perhaps always be restless. By the next fall, I would be a father of my first baby girl. I would have a little piece of Sand Mountain to call my own and a few head of longhorn cattle whose burnt orange hides would shine in the radiance of October.

I would write and I would pray, I would go home to Marshall County to see what home had in store for me.

I would write.

Outside our classroom window, the famous giant white oaks of Vanderbilt’s campus were yielding to fall, growing heavy with leaves of umber. But through Professor Judge’s words, it was the whimsical ginkgo that spoke the best truths of autumn, of life entire. I can still hear them:

Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? And if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time, If a star at any time may tell us: Now.