OUTDOORS COLUMN: Time For The Season Of Colors

BY GEORGE GRANT
Outdoors Columnist
Fall is the season of color.

The crops have been harvested; ripened fruits have been plucked from the trees; their readiness for gathering into a hoard against the lean time, the time of long shadows starkly
cast by a faraway sun on frost and snow, betokened by their color. For us these are the colors of parting, of patience. We know that spring will come.

The trees are briefly donning a robe of brilliance before casting it into the cold, swirling winds and beginning a naked winter’s sleep. Now the colors of life lived in the air bespeak fulfillment, cessation and a patient wait for renewal.

Fall is also a season of color for trout but their brilliance is a token of promise, not fulfillment.

In the fall you can lift a trout from the gray water swirling over dark stones and see brightness, a clarity that was not there in summer.

In sun-rich days the muted shades and spots along their flanks gave them invisibility, a dappled, broken form that fit so perfectly within the flowing shadows of their world that it passed unnoticed.

That was as it should be to both their predators and their prey. Spring and summer are the seasons that trout have their harvest, the time when they gather what they can from passing currents. Unsighted as predator, unseen as prey they seize the strength that sustains their generations in a cycle profound, immutable, decreed by all the ages passed.

All that has passed though, does not decree a moment in the future. The best that trout can do is to follow a narrow path traced by the drives and instincts twisted into the knot of
their genes. They cannot imagine so they cannot hope. They are promised nothing and yet they give their all in this the season of colors.

Now they will spend the strength so carefully gathered when the sun was close to earth. They must be seen by others of their kind. They must make themselves known to the ones that can complete what they have hoarded within their cold flesh throughout the long bright days. They don a robe of rich colors.

They will seek others that bear their bright colors. They will search out the places where they may leave the soft, sheltered orbs of fertile eggs caged in a matrix of water smoothed pebbles.

Bright leaves can whisper around our boots as we follow a path through the trees. This is the time when we can watch the world drift into the darkness without fear. We have made our harvest. We know what will come. We can imagine. We can hope.

We can draw a bright fish out of fall currents. We can see their brilliance. We can turn them softly back into the currents. The bright colors are our hope.