Illustration by George Bates

When I was a kid, there was only one real tourist season in Maine: the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But in recent years the tourists have been reappearing a month or so later, as leaf-peepers. In October, their cars (most seem to be Volvos) fill the back roads between Kittery and Fort Kent, moving slowly, weaving back and forth across the center line as the drivers gawk out their windows, looking for that leaf-peeper El Dorado known as “peak color.” You also see their cars in New Hampshire, parked bumper to bumper along the breakdown lane as the owners train their Nikons down the gorges and ravines and frantically burn film, as well as farther west, in Vermont, where there’s a cider stand around every bend and folks from Wisconsin hobnob with folks from Illinois about where the color is best (they agree that it’s always north of where they are). But by late October—as the leaves start to dull and the trees show their branches (leaf-peepers don’t come for branches) they’ve gone home to eat their Thanksgiving dinners and Think Snow, as their bumper stickers say, only to return after New Year’s Day, no longer summer people or leaf-peepers but ski bums, with roof racks mounted on their all-wheel drives.

Between the leaf-peepers’ going and the skiers’ coming, there is a hiatus which has taken me fifty years to appreciate. The weather is quiet. The back roads empty out, and the vehicles are different: they are pulp trucks, panel trucks, pick-’em-ups (usually jammed with wide-bodied fellows in orange down vests), and old cancerous Buicks. In the general stores of towns like Lovell and Sanborton, the talk relaxes, becomes less stagey. One hears less “ayuh” and “Coss we will.”

The season tilts. Everything creaks. One can hear it—the sound is the bony skitter of small animals moving through the trees, doing the last of their pre-winter shopping. In these weeks, the woods give up their secrets. A squirrel moves with indiscreet fanfare through the fallen leaves, and you can also see it; there is no concealing greenery except for austere pines and spruces. It’s possible that you’ll spot a deer (or a moose) moving among the freshly opened lanes of the forest: before the first real snowfall, they’re stuffed full with all the forage they can gobble, and look like a child’s drawing, their squarish bodies somehow unlikely above their long, spindly legs.

Our house in western Maine juts out of a steep slope above a long finger of lake that in the summer we never see (there are winks of blue amid the trees in the late afternoon) and which late in the winter we see only as a flat, uninteresting expanse of snow. But in December the lake is suddenly there, all of it, a flinty arrowhead under what is usually a sunless gray sky. With no dazzle to distract the eye, one sees the water in a single, effortless north-south sweep. There is a grimness to this sort of landscape, but also a thin-lips-and-no-makeup beauty. After the leaves fall, geography tells its tale with great simplicity. The drifts of fallen leaves can’t obscure the thinness of the soil: rocks break free everywhere, and hillsides become graveyards full of tumbled, unlettered tombstones. In the occasional sunlight, almost all shadows fall straight.

Romantics compare the cycle of the seasons to the cycle of human life, a comparison I have never really trusted. And yet now, at the age of fifty-one, I find something in it, after all. Sooner or later, life takes in its breath, pauses, and then tilts toward winter. I sense that tilt approaching. When the idea threatens to become oppressive, I think of the woods in New England tilting into winter—how you can see the whole expanse of the lake, not just the occasional wink through the trees, and hear every movement on the land that slopes down to the water. You can hear every living thing, no matter how cunning, before snow comes to muffle the world. ♦