Fall Time in the Mountains

By: Erik Rittenberry

Photo: Erik Rittenberry

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

― Albert Camus

In recent years, each autumn, I have fled the static, sun-scorched flatlands of Florida for the mountains—from the hazy Smokies to the towering Rockies to the golden hues and quaint townships of New England.

I’m from Florida — a swampy, mosquito-infested playground where the seasons slide by unnoticed. So when October's chill whispers in some faraway mountain air, I heed the call. I hunger for the blaze of fall colors and campfires, the rustle of dried corn husks, and the distant call of migrating geese—a shift in the scenery to stir the blood.

To get out there and roam and wander where the air is crisp and filled with the fragrance of woodsmoke and apple cider, where the forests are entirely transformed into cathedrals of magnificent color, where the slow dance of leaves drift and twirl in the harvested fields.

In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

Today, I’d like to share some of my photography with you—a visual autumn journey through my lens. I hope you enjoy it.

"To be something that does not feel the weight of the rain outside, or the pain of inner emptiness … To wander with no soul, no thoughts, just pure impersonal sensation, along winding mountain roads, through valleys hidden amongst steep hills, distant, absorbed, ill-fated … To lose oneself in landscapes like paintings. To be nothing in distance and in colors…"

-- Fernando Pessoa

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

—George Eliot

“And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower 
of all my days...”

― Dylan Thomas

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

― Wallace Stevens

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”

― L. M. Montgomery

"It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
       O may my heart's truth
           Still be sung
      On this high hill in a year's turning."

-- Dylan Thomas

The bus roared on. 
I was going home in October. 
Everybody goes home 
in October.

—Jack Kerouac

“All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken."

— Thomas Wolfe

“Wild is the music of the autumnal winds amongst the faded woods.”

—William Wordsworth

“My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.”

—Robert Frost

"There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name."

-- Carman Bliss

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn — that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”

— Jane Austen

“Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we'll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we're apt to forget when we look around us in spring or summer.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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