Shelter Island Reporter column: Tree conversations

After spending the 1970s in Vermont, I became something of a connoisseur of fall foliage. Unless you lived in a city, which I didn’t, you were surrounded by hills and fields and smallish to actual mountains crawling with millions of trees aching to do their seasonal thing.

There are many variables that contribute to the outburst of color that brings thousands of leaf peepers to the state. But back in my day, Columbus Day weekend was the default peak time for the official observance for out-of-state visitors.

The inns and restaurants would swell with patrons, and the highways and byways were noticeably jammed with cars carrying peepers with outstretched arms pointing to particularly vivid swaths of countryside.

If you lived in the state year-round, you came to realize that there was a sequence that the trees followed. There was the gradual presence of color and then a sudden quickening. And then one awoke on a particular day that was the most perfect foliage day of the year (in your particular neighborhood).

On that day, I remember pulling off the road, on my way to work, simply to drink in the glorious extravaganza of leaves, knowing that the day after it would not be as spectacular. Pretty good, but not as mind-blowing as the day before.

Of course I took photos. During a trip to Florida with an old girlfriend, we scooted over to Nassau where I bought a Pentax 35 millimeter SLR, my first decent camera.

Back in those days, the photography magazines urged you to shoot slide film rather than print film, and sure enough I soon amassed a ton of slides of all sorts of Vermontiana, including a zillion foliage shots.

I imagined that I had a knack for photography and for a time I seriously considered going to a photography school in Santa Barbara, Calif. I wound up newspapering instead, where my dutiful Pentax shot myriad city councilmen, burning houses, flooded streets, jazz festivals and, one memorable time, a dead body floating in a nearby Montpelier river with my mother observing the moment. (A long, not particularly, gripping story.)

Once I sorrowfully left the state to pursue the rest of my life, my many carousels of slides followed me wherever I wound up, including Shelter Island. Once I had become a sort-of family man, I shifted to a small handy Olympus camera and back to prints.

I haven’t unearthed the slide carousels for years, and truth to tell, I’m not exactly positive where they lie. Assuming they’re in the garage, I fear they have deteriorated over many winters.

In the city, we recently booked a trip up the Hudson River, billed as a fall foliage excursion, to Cold Spring. We had taken it before and knew full well that the leaves would be nothing compared to the color riot that takes place in Vermont.

And we were right. Despite the magnificence of the Jersey Palisades, these leaves wouldn’t be allowed to cross the Vermont state line.

There are scientists and novelists who say that trees talk to one another. Even as a little kid, lying on my back in the front yard in suburban St. Louis, I had the same thought. The row of maples marking our property line seemed to be working as a team when it came time to unleash their comparatively modest fall leaf declarations.

But when I became wholly familiar with the wonders of the Vermont apex foliage moment, it was clear to me the trees were talking up a storm, the reds jabbering to the yellows, the browns chatting up the goldens.

I wish I could eavesdrop on that torrent of conversation.