An autumn walk eases the fear for a little while

The Boston Herald

October 17, 2001

The world goes on without us. In the mountains, where my friend Anne lives, there is the certitude of this. The mountains surround and sustain her. She sees them wherever she goes, in front of her, in her rear view mirror, solid, permanent. She derives peace from them. And a quiet strength.

She moved to Lancaster, N.H., which is above Franconia Notch, after her daughter, Amy, died. I never quite understood why she moved. The symphony is here in Boston - and she had season tickets - as are all the art museums she loves and Japanese restaurants, and most of her relatives and friends. But the mountains beckoned.

She didn't move north right away. She and her husband stayed where they were for a few years and continued to do what they had always done, until the pull of the mountains grew stronger than the tug of their roots, until they realized that the outdoors is infinitely bigger than the indoors, sometimes even bigger than grief. Now Anne is a grief counselor in her little town, which seems to have way too much sadness for a little town in the middle of nowhere. But life is life everywhere. People get sick. They have breakdowns. They have accidents. Their marriages fall apart. They fight. Their kids act out. The mountains don't take away any of this. But they do put life in perspective.

Oceans do this, too. It's why we flock to them. By the sea, care is soothed. The tide comes in. The tide goes out, eternity the drumbeat in the rhythm of life. And we seek the eternal, the promise of tomorrow, we find it in nature, in the mountains that surround us, and in the oceans that surround them, in the sky above and in the ground below. In day following night. And summer following spring.

These natural, predictable and eternal happenings mean far more now than they ever meant before, because all the things that man has built, all the institutions we've absentmindedly relied on, we now see crumbling around us. The world man created is upside down. Nothing is as it was. But outside, in nature, in the world that was created for us, everything remains the same. That sameness soothes. Like tradition, it's a comfort.

The leaves are perfect now, this week, this day, just as they are supposed to be - red and maroon and orange and gold. When the wind gusts, the sky fills with them and the sun lights them and the shadows highlight them and it's hard not to be awed by them, even after a lifetime of seeing the same October show. It's the sameness that is fall's draw and drawback. "It's autumn," we can say. "Isn't it amazing?" Or: "It's autumn. So what?" We can see or not see. We have a choice.

I choose to put down the newspapers and shut off the television and tune out that world and go out into the other world, where beauty thrives in spite of us. Soft and sunny or wet and chilly, it doesn't matter. The smell and crunch and look of the leaves, balm on a good day, are an antidote to despair on these bad days. Whatever is coming will come. There's nothing we can do that we're not already doing. Worry and fear are useless. Kicking the leaves and watching them fall may not erase the worry and fear. But a walk on an autumn day, like the sight of a mountain and the smell of the ocean, will ease the fear and dull the worry, for at least a little while.