It’s a sodden September Sunday afternoon along Lake Michigan and the sky casts its great and impassive face in funereal hues of pallid pewter. No one would walk the woods in this rain. No one’s ever in these woods anyway. I could never figure that out: We live in the grasp of this tentacular metropolitan area with nine million people and yet few of us are so starved of wild things that we seek refuge in these preserves.
I dawdled down into a floodplain in the middle of an autumn splashed forest. The maples and oaks, the cottonwoods and elms, fired so brilliant that they reflected off my dark blue windbreaker.
The sun had stayed off the job for three days, moonlighting I suppose. A mortar sky blotted out its gold. But down here, in the flat expanse of remnant forest in northeast Illinois, the conflagration of sinful orange and furnace red made its own sunlight. I could’ve sworn I felt heat from those dying leaves, immolating themselves in a selfless frenzy of color that would nourish the next season. A mindless altruism falls from trees, from acorns grown in largest number when the oaks, under stress, devote precious resources to the next generation.
The fresh litter formed a dry carpet to insulate my shoes against the muddy banks. Below the banks, floodplains seemed like tidewater flats for the transgressing river. I sometimes wander here to dredge my unstill river of thought and let it flow.
I found an outcropping above the spot where the river folded itself into a U-shaped meander, and watched the leaves, mostly oak and maple, conveyed gently down the main channel. The sides of the channel stayed free of litter. The copper foliage floated down the middle of an arboreal highway, toward the Mississippi. I slid down into the floodplain and wandered deeper toward a mucky intersection where a backwater that drained the floodplain fed the river. Sycamore, slippery elm and shagbark hickory leaves from the backchannel eased like molasses into the main current. They inched into the river itself, waiting patiently, it seemed, for their ride on the main wave train, a slow merge lane for expressway traffic. But eventually, they make it into the express lane, where they race along at three or so miles an hour. The pace made me dizzy.
Sometimes a strong breeze descended from the emptying canopy, and auburn, fingered flakes snowed into the water. The slight wind that riffled the backwater pushed back dozens of leaves, erasing their hard-earned progress toward the main tow of the river. Not one of the leaves had any choice about where it fell.
Some of the leaves flowing out from the backwater snagged onto the log of a black ash that flanked one end of the backflow. Dozens of leaves clogged in the logjam. The spikes of the flowing maple and elm leaves and the thumbs of the oak leaves meshed like gears into their counterparts in the leaf jam, and some pivoted like pinwheels and danced their way out into the freedom of the main channel. Others mired in the backwater and blackened to tannins. No thing seemed able to affect its own fate. Not even the river, defined and slowed by the leaf litter around which it flowed, seemed in control.
Each thing – each leaf and stem and twig – danced with another, each sculptor kneaded in turn by its statue. But each eachness, every everyness, this thisness and that thatness, was powerless to affect its own destiny, its pace, or the company which it would keep along the way. The tapestry made sense as a whole. Some leaves would decay here in the blackwater river and re-circulate their minerals, maybe nourishing the cottonwood that stood so tall on the far bank, which slurped up the tea through its roots. Other leaves would end up farther down before bunching up onto a lens, and some may even find their way to the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Up close, each drama seemed purposeless and its players powerless to affect their fates. So many dramas laid themselves open to a naked watch, that they were, as individual journeys, incalculable. But on the whole, they made sense as a story that swirled and shifted. Maybe coming to a conclusion. Maybe not. The parts we play. The littleness of each story. But without the parts, there could be no history. Each leaf may not see its part or know its end, but the very cosmos depends upon its being.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within