The sobering splendors of autumn

Down in the country, birds are on the move. There's an awesome seriousness about their autumn maneuvers.

I've been spending much of my spare time in the southern Minnesota farm country for many years. One of its charms is a changelessness in many essential things, like the scene described in this essay, slightly adapted from one I first published nearly three decades ago:

One afternoon several weeks ago, swirling black storm clouds of birds circled off and on all day above rolling fields of high, dry, brittle corn. Below, making the most of fine fall weather, a convoy of combines rumbled, slicing like battleships through a golden brown sea, cutting wakes of neat machine edges amid the shaggy, tasseled waves.

It's autumn. Time is growing short.

In cities and suburbs, the flamboyant, bittersweet beauty of fall has been vivid in trees ablaze with color, more recently revealing the intricate anatomy of bare branches — like so many gray, skeletal hands raised to the sky in prayer. We've felt the chill breath of winter on the evening breeze, mourned the ever-lengthening nights and delighted in a kind of fragile, day-long twilight as the sun skims ever lower across the southern sky.

Awash in this loveliness, we ready ourselves for winter with busy rituals — hoisting storm windows, raking leaves, searching for sweaters and warm socks happily misplaced just months ago.

But out in the countryside, the funeral rites for the warmer months take on a more extravagant scale and urgency.

The cycle of seasons is an indispensable comfort to the ever-uncomfortable human soul. Troubled, contradictory creatures, we hunger simultaneously for two conflicting conditions — novelty and stability. The seasons uncannily give us both. Spring and autumn, summer and winter — each imposes its dazzling transformation on our world and our lives. Yet none arrives as a stranger. Each new season is familiar, dependable, reassuring even as it turns daily life upside down.

Somehow, there's even reassurance in autumn's reminder that time is growing short. But there's something else in it, too.

In farm country, as autumn unfolds, cattle abandon the shadowy, low-lying pastures where they grazed lazily through sweltering July afternoons. One spots them in autumn mostly on higher, grassier meadows, bathed in rosy October sunlight, framed by the browning fields and blazing hilltop woodlands.

It is the second summer for more than a few of the cows on the hillside. On the farm I visit, as I understand it, depending on market conditions and other mysteries of agribusiness, the brief, uncomplicated life of beef cattle goes something like this: Born one spring, they graze through their first summer, feed on hay and corn through a winter, and graze again through a second summer. After that ... well, seldom do they see a third winter.

One hopes the grass tastes sweet.

On that afternoon a couple weeks ago, while pondering such everyday splendors and tragedies of the fall, I became aware of unusual wind gusts roaring among the stand of trees that surround the farmyard where I was standing.

Whoosh ... whoosh ... whoosh ... whoosh. Odd, brief, low frequency gusts — and then came the cries of the birds, as if carried in on the wind.

Deafening and frantic, a chaos of bird calls was instantly all around, filling the whole space like an odor. Then it stopped, dead silent, and the strange wind from thousands of beating wings returned ... whoosh ... whoosh.

I walked farther from the house and saw them — good sized, oily-black birds (I'd call them grackles, but I'm no bird buff). They covered every branch of the trees, numberless as the leaves. Each time the crazed cacophony of cries fell silent the birds would begin to circle through the windbreak.

Around and around the farmyard they would fly, gaining speed with each revolution, like a living airborne carousel. For what purpose they circled so urgently, I don't know. By what wizardry they avoided collisions with one another and the tree branches I can't guess.

Nor can I begin to estimate the number of birds in that flock. Suffice it to say that the effect was both intoxicating and a little frightening — rather as a storm is both riveting and fearsome in its mindless, indifferent, impossible power.

And then, in an instant, they were gone with one final whoosh — maybe 15 minutes after they'd come. No sooner had they vanished than I began to doubt the reality of the experience. Had it been as many as it seemed?

I rushed up a nearby hill in hopes of spotting the great flock from a distance. But the sky was empty.

All through that afternoon I watched distant flocks dancing above the fields — wondering how large and loud and raucous and wondrous those flocks might turn out to be if they paused to gather strength in your back yard.

I may never see a distant flock of birds again without wondering. Not in autumn, anyhow.

I am long since well embarked on the second summer of life, if not the third. For all in similar circumstances, fall's eternal rituals — whether enacted by homeowners, birds, farmers or cattle — are not only a kind of comfort but a word of advice carried in on the wind.

Eat well; keep moving; get your work done. Time is growing short.