These days are burnt sienna days.

It’s the hue that splotches the hills in the last withering of fall, the time right on the edge of november. The time just before memory turns into a stillness of sleeping, a stillness of trees, wordless, opening their branches to the graying skies like they are offering up some kind of great kyrie eleison.

Back a few weeks ago when the colors were in full dazzle, the highways were jammed with the usual migration of metropolitan gawkers come up to see the glory of the alleghenies (with a fair share of locals, too, i might add). And, i have to admit, that i junketed right along with the pack, seized by the glow and blaze. The final piquant unleashing of pigments sequestered in the summer, shades of yellow and orange wrecklessly exposed. And residue sugars transformed at first frost into red, magenta, and wine. There is nothing quite like it. Maybe vermont. But i think that the vermont experience could be a little overblown. I lived there for a year or two while i was treading water in medical school, and the colors didn’t improve the experience that much.

But for some reason, what always seems to work its way into the deepest reaches of my middle aged senses is this final earthy ash of color flecking the hollows. Weak little flickerings, like the gas being turned off. The detonation that once ignited shad and dogwoods and flowering judas and spring beauties, and then kindled dormant buds into a green effusion, now fluttering weakly. Being snuffed out. Sinking into the well of passing seasons, running out of energy and time.

I feel the pull of this ending in myself. On the margins at first, somewhere off the wide berm to the pulsing interstate of my life, the driven monday morning influences which bear down on me, the coffee and windows tom wolfe bumper to bumper culture i have merged into. But then slowly i give way. The locus of my consciousness begins to drift helplessly towards this death settling down on the alleghenies, and i befriend it.

My backpack and sleeping bag are retrieved from a basement storage shelf after i temporarily put them out of service for the august and september dog days. And when i’m not backpacking, i linger on some long day hikes. More often than not, i end up along monroe run in maryland’s savage river state forest.

The weather is now more conducive to walking here. It’s not so damn sticky out. In these cooler, drier days, my body heat stays in better balance as the miles slide by. My feet cut through the ragged surf of leaves, and i secrete a nice thin layer of sweat under my two shirts. Every now and then a shiver of winter blows through the trees and impales my face. Vagrant leaves swirl around in the gusty drafts and bunch up in the eddies. I will fall into a restful kind of hibernal sleep if i camp overnight. I will slip into quiet.

Birds, except for a scattering of winter residents -- blue jays, ravens, juncos, ravens, cardinals, some finches, nuthatches, chickadees, and titmice -- have all have headed to flyways going south. The sound vacuum they leave behind is everywhere. The end of season fluty trill of periodical cicadas echoing all over the woods has ceased, too. And with that, everything that buzzes, bites, stings, and crawls goes into diapause. The period in the life cycle of insects when everything is put on hold in order to conserve what small residue of energy that might be left over. They’re cheaters. They get around the winter as pupae, or as eggs insulated in various clever ways against the cold, and in some instances as adults, reclused in the ground, under the leaves, under bark, in dead logs, replacing their body fluids with glycol - biological antifreeze which inhibits cells from freezing up.

Absent too, from this forest is the steady indignant staccato clicking of chipmunks, always flagging their irritation with two legged intruders. True hibernators, they languish. Spirit themselves away somewhere in the twists and turns of their underground tunnel systems and won’t bother with anything again until spring.

Life suspending, going into repose, going into reflection, folding in on itself. For the shawnee who once inhabited these parts, the coming of long starry nights and the story telling time of year. Give me these days when the woods is emptying of itself like a zen prayer.

My total surrender to the autumnal turning and the musty leaf tainted air is not a moribund obsession with decay and skeletal landscapes. It is more an act, i think, of affirmation. Something beyond the boundaries of my everyday habit and thought. Or i should say, something that perhaps stretches habits and thoughts beyond themselves just when i had gotten comfortably set in my ways. It’s as though these diminishing leaf colors, beating helplessly in the gathering northwesterly winds, are drawing me into a kind of internodal awareness, a boundary consciousness. The zone between the rising and falling of an energy which we all, in our most native lives, ride like the ebb and flow of an immense cosmic ocean. A tide my juices have run with longer than remembering. It’s futile to resist.

But we’re all out of sync. Think about it: in autumn, schools open their doors up again, vacationers are back and try to mobilize themselves to begin the work year, organizations get on full tilt with their annual agendas, wall street and the whole economic edifice is preparing to fusillade the public with christmas, pared-down-to-bare essentials summer church services have stepped up again to the regular frenetic ritual, football and basketball seasons are launched. And congress begins another irresolute session.

Our culture is hyping itself just when, if we were true to our innermost signals and the transfiguring landscape around us, we should be hunkering down. In fact, it seems to me that ever since the days when the industrial revolution began to work its effect on the everyday motion of life, we have developed a real disastrous penchant for swimming against the climatic currents in which our biology is engulfed.

I halt for few long seconds when all this hits me. Just what in hell has been going on with us?

Monroe run has a much different story to tell. And when i am in this winter longing forest, the stark contrast between the timing of lowered productivity periods in the natural world and the agenda we have constructed for ourselves becomes almost absurdly obvious.

I think that this knowing is part of an even more epic wisdom – to be absorbed by wandering around in these featureless woods this time of year. Nameless, bone deep. A kind of three dimensional intelligence, maybe with a preternatural add on, that could never in a thousand years be gotten from the reductionist modes of a classroom or, even more to the point, from staring into the analgesic haze of a computer monitor or a tv screen. But this landscape, shorn of its leaves and congealing its sap, is a vast geography of intimations, the thin topmost layer of imperishable seasons of seminal knowledge.

My own short tenancy is whispered here. It is a mystery i can accept a little better in this place. There are other phases, other regions. I am somehow larger than i have known. I recall my first faith of the forest and friendship, the kindling times of connectedness, of learning to give of myself. And in the same short breath of thought, i am conscious of living, or just being, more simply – as though life mattered. Careful of the portion i take, returning what i am graced with. Really, the only way to be.

One revelation seems to segue to another stalking after this cold stream, all hooked together, each discovery pregnant with the next. All this in a place becoming so barren.

In a short while, the sun drops below the ridge top, leaving the hollow a long brumal shadow, the trees little by little morphing into indistinct ghosts. I head out.

But about a quarter mile before i reach the end of the trail, i am blind sided by a little flare on the edge of the path. It turns out to be a solitary red maple leaf turned now into an exotically mottled mix of yellow and red pigments. It seems to be burning from within its own substance. It possesses me. I pick it up to look more closely. It is a strange leaf. A fragile thing, but of great power.

Then of a sudden i know what it is that is emerging from the leaf’s rorschach, from this whole eight mile walk: it is the dancing shiva, the annihilator of the world illusion, the fire of destruction and creation in endless, ourobial circling. Yes.

Now i think i’m ready to lie down in the slosh of leaves, the scattering embers of summer, heap them all up on top of me like i used to do when i was little, and overwinter.

And wake again a yearling.

Jack slocomb is bemused about the intricacies of nascence and nature in the wild areas around cumberland, maryland.