FALL COLORS, EMILY DICKINSON, ROBERT FROST, THOMAS WOLFE, SIGURD OLSON, TELLURIDE, DALLAS DIVIDE, SNEFFLES RANGE

Birdman was hunting Blue Grouse, with Roncen, a former Green Beret Captain in the US Special Forces in Vietnam.  The fall colors were on fire, with groves of aspen trees in blazing yellow and reds.  Hastings Mesa, near Telluride Colorado,  where the original True Grit movie was filmed with John Wayne, often turned into a blazing red display of Aspen trees. Birdman, Roncen, and Rascal, the Black Labrador dog, walked up to a grove of gambles oak, two grouse flushed.  Roncen swung his shotgun into the birds at a lightning speed, and dropped both.  Never had Birdman seen such quick and accurate shooting with a shotgun.  The fact that the former Green Beret was still alive after years in the war, was a testament to survival, luck, and the sadness of the loss of so many young soldiers who were not there to enjoy the bright golden spectacle of the fall.  Roncen got to see the blazing reds, orange of the oak, and golden aspens, all across the Sneffles mountain range, above the Marie Scott ranch, so brilliantly captured in the original True Grit movie. "Too much of a good thing is not enough", Mae West.  People from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho travel to the Dallas Divide pass near Telluride to witness one of the most amazing fall displays of aspens in the western US.  The aspens run across the Sneffles mountain range for 10 miles, with jagged snow covered peaks above, and dark timber as a picture frame to outline the brilliance of the yellow, which looks like it is on fire, when the sunlight hits it just right. Fall is a truly special season.  Robert Frost, poet, "O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow's wind, fit be wild, Should waste them all.  The crows above the forest call;  Tomorrow they may form and go.  O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow.  Make the day seem to us less brief.  Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know.  Release one leaf at break of day; at noon release another leaf."  Many people get very sad when fall ends with the big empty brown of the barren trees.  Frost had a poem for that as well:  "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."  Life does go on after the fall, there will be another one, even though life is waiting for the energy of the snow. Thomas Wolfe in "Look Homeward, Angel:  "And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept down from the Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping leaves, and making, in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in great trees."  Up in the north country of Minnesota and Ontario, the Boundary Waters, there is a fall brilliance of color as well, that corresponds with the migration of ducks and geese.  Sigurd Olson, canoed and wrote about this country in books and taught at the University of Wisconsin.  He was an ecologist a long time ago.  "The Singing Wilderness":  "We brought the maples into the yard so that we could enjoy for a few short days in the fall the brilliant reds and yellows of their coloring, so they could remind us of the flaming pageantry of the entire North whenever we looked their way, the poetry of shorelines and protected bays, the magic of seeing a lone and vivid splash of red against a whole hillside of somber green."  If you live on the front range of Colorado, from Colorado Springs to Denver, there is another color display.  Wood Avenue in Colorado Springs has a New England type display of brilliant reds, purples and yellow, along its heavily tree-lined boulevard.  Birch, maple, poplars, cottonwoods and aspens, are thick and brilliant in front of the elegant homes, built by the mining boom.  In Denver, along UniversityAvenue, and Bonnie Brae Street, there is a jungle of birch, maples, and oaks, that remind one of New England or Minnesota.  Emily Dickinson, "I had a crimson robin, Who sang full many a day, But when the woods were painted, He too did fly away.  The morns are meeker than they were, The nuts are getting brown; The berry's cheek is plumper, the rose is out of town.  The maple wears a gayer scarf, The field a scarlet gown." How lucky and magical it is to be alive this fall.  Poem for Maya Rose, and Cody, the children.  Emily Dickinson: "As children caper when they wake, Merry that it is morn, My flowers from a hundred cribs, Will peep, and prance again."