October is here! Autumn’s first full month—a thirty-one-day span of beauty and undeniable seasonal transition.
This tenth month starts off dressed mostly in hues of chlorophyll green, only to end up stripped and wearing a few final tattered remnants of its annual technicolored show-stopping changing-leaves extravaganza.
By the time October draws to its All Hallow’s Eve finale, this withered, discolored landscape furnishes the perfect spooky stage setting for those costumed legions of pint-sized ghosts, goblins, and assorted ghouls who appear come sundown, to haunt neighborhood sidewalks and streets in hopes of filling their trick-or-treat tote sacks.
Woodlands become piled scrapheaps of brown leaves, while meadows turn tan and ragged.
September was all about squeezing out that final bit of summer’s heat and growth while adding the finishing soupçon drops of golden goodness to the season’s largesse. A touch more sweetness to the fruit. Another bright bloom to dazzle our eyes.
By contrast, October will focus on closing up shop. Ceasing photosynthesis while draining off the masking chlorophyll. Changing the landscape’s dress from monotone greens to a vibrant patchwork robe of scarlet-red and royal-gold, chromium-yellow and homespun-russet, rubiginous-purple, fiery-orange, and a thousand hues in between. Then, towards the month’s tag end, dropping this glitzy leaf cover and opening things up, revealing shape and form as the countryside starts to adopt the sparse, ascetic, minimalist look of coming winter.
Some of the finest days of the entire year lie ahead—especially if, like me, you were no great fan of summer’s oppressive swelter. In my book, October really serves the world up right—lots of sunshine, a riot of color, and air so delicious you can almost become giddy merely breathing it in by the lungful.
I must also admit, from my point of view it doesn’t hurt that our tenth month provides perhaps the best stream smallmouth action of the year. Rivers and creeks are full and clear, daylight is waning, the water cooling. Fish are voraciously feeding in a final fat-adding fling, building up reserves sufficient to carry them through winter.
Moreover, when you hook a bass of any size, the nippy water temps seem to have given them an extra measure of fighting pizzazz—they yank and jump and tailwalk in head-shaking aerial displays guaranteed to set any angler’s heart a’thumping.
Is it any wonder we incorrigible bronzeback addicts fervently wish the month were at least three times as long?
The worst is the painfully real dilemma that comes when you have to decide whether to go fishing or squirrel hunting. I’m especially afflicted because, even though Ohio’s squirrel season begins in September, I happen to believe October is really the premier bushytail-stalking month—my hands-down favorite time, anyway.
Maybe this is because October’s typical crisp, dewy mornings remind me of my first squirrel outings—of sitting on a damp hillside, back against a shagbark hickory, hearing the drip and rustle in the darkened woods as I shivered and waited for that initial ray of light to appear above the top of the eastern hills.
I can’t begin to describe how exciting that was. Watching darkness become dawn. Trying to sit perfectly still. Listening for all I was worth for that breath-quickening unmistakable swoosh from somewhere above my head, of a squirrel crossing from branch-to-limb as it followed along a treetop path.
How can a fellow possibly choose between bass or bushytails?
After years of anguishing and wishy-washy dithering—caught, as the saying goes, between a rock and a hard place—I finally decided I was forcing myself to make an unnecessary decision: It was logistically possible to manage a twofer day—that is, a dawn-to-midmorning squirrel hunt, followed by several hours wading a nearby stream for bass, and—providing I wasn’t completely exhausted—finishing up with a second vespers squirrel round from late-afternoon until sunset.
In my experience, there’s not a better place to practice such dual-dipping outdoor adventures than during an October camping trip in the southeastern hill country…and I’ve subsequently sallied forth and put theory into practice on numerous occasions since.
Of course, you don’t have to be an angler or hunter to delight in October’s colorful spectacle…or reap the bounty of the month’s savory gifts.
Fall color should be at its peak in approximately three weeks. A drive along any rural byway will reward you with a trip through a natural kaleidoscope. Maples and oaks, ash and hickory, pawpaw, willow, walnut, beech, sassafras, buckeye, and all the dozens and dozens of other trees at their polychromatic finest and doing their best to out-dazzle one another.
Meadows will be tawny and brown, still spattered with a few goldenrods and asters, while the prairie’s big bluestem will be the color of old burgundy.
But please, don’t wait for the color peak—start now! Today. Take a country drive or amble along a woodland path. Feel free to gawk at will. Repeat as often as possible, watching the color develop as autumn unfolds, witnessing first-hand as October works its magic.
And be sure to feast more than your eyes!
Bring October onto your table with apples and pears, plums and grapes, persimmons and pawpaws. Don’t forget walnuts, butternuts, beech nuts, and hickory nuts. The astute wild forager who knows his mushrooms might also harvest chanterelles, shaggy manes, puffballs, and sulfurs.
October is like a tonic. A revitalizer for the soul. “I have been younger in October, than in all the months of spring,” mused the poet, W.S. Merwin.
Hooray! October is here! And every day, we’ll be served a plenitude of wonders and delights.
Yup, my health is always better come October!
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
