“A dangerous business…”
Ah, fall! Finally, Maryland has stepped out of snake-terrarium-mode. The goldenrod is blooming, the sumac on the side of the highways is turning bright red, I saw an oak the other day that looked for all the world like it had been dipped in blood, and I have tickets to the Renaissance Festival! Autumn is nigh!
I love fall. Which is basically a cliché at this point: Girls love fall. Iliza Schlesinger has an entire bit on it. And if you’re a girl who reads fantasy books and is, like, a little too into fairy tales? Loving fall is a basic requirement of the job description. Well, dear reader, I’m a total cliché in this regard! Now, this the part where I should say that fall and I go way back. Like, so far back you can’t even wrap your head around it, even if you’re older than me. I should trot out some heartwarming stories about my foundational memories of apple picking adventures under the high autumn sky, of hearing strange calls from the bottom of the garden as the veil wore thinner and thinner, of mountains of leaves, of worlds of color. Yes, how fall was always my one true love, and I, its chosen handmaiden. Selected specially by the harvest spirit herself, before I could even speak, to be an embodiment of her windy glory!
But I can’t. I’m from Hawaii, remember? We have a lot of cool things, and a crazy variety of landscapes, but we don’t have fall. We have two seasons, dry and wet, and only a very few trees drop their leaves. I saw my first fall when I was 17, the year I moved to Pennsylvania for school. I had only been there a few months, and I was super homesick, but when fall came I was just beside myself. It was everything I dreamed of and more! It was beautiful! I learned about scarves! I discovered the glories of cute boots! I went to my first ren faire! And the apples! And pumpkin spice everything suddenly made a lot more sense! I picked up leaves and brought them into my bedroom to lay out on my dresser, I asked a lot of questions, and I can only imagine I was deeply annoying to my new friends who were from places like New York and Massachusetts, for whom this particular fall was not particularly special.
What can I say? When it comes to fall, I have the zeal of the convert. Like, I miss Hawaii, but you know what I missed when I was living on Maui? Fall. But there was nothing for it! I’d just have to drive up to Kula, sit under that one tulip poplar in the botanical garden, and pretend! Of course, when I was done pretending, I was also very happy to go down to the south shore and engage in Hawaii’s own special autumnal pastime: looking for humpback whales as the sun goes down. Which is awesome, especially if you have some spam musubi. (And if you’re wondering what I miss about Hawaiian fall when I’m on the mainland, it’s the whales. If only the Patapsco got whales in autumn. Sigh, always missing something…)
But let’s back up a bit, because I skipped something very important: while I never jumped into a pile of leaves, and I was never chosen to be the harvest queen and paraded around the village Giselle-style, I do have some foundational experiences of fall from when I was young: Behold!
If you click on that link, you’re gonna find Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, first of the DragonLance novels, complete with the Matt Stawicki art my copy has on the cover. (It’s not the original art, that’s Larry Elmore, but I was reading these in about 1999, and I’m very attached to the Stawicki cover.) This is my foundational experience of fall, and I have my best friend—we will call her Kith—to thank for it. A (perfectly balanced) party of adventurers meets in the tree house village of Solace as the leaves (and the world!) are changing. The air is chilly, but the fire inside the Inn of the Last Home is warm. The world is darkening and the quest beckons. Yes!
Kith and I were obsessed—with DragonLance in general—but especially with Dragons of Autumn Twilight. We drew pictures, we built our own fan website, we made Otik’s spiced potatoes using literally every spice in Kith’s mom’s spice cabinet, we listened to Lake of Tears, we designed costumes for our favorite characters (Laurana for me, Raistlin for Kith.) I even wrote fan poetry and sent it into the official fan website where it was published. (Now that I think about it, I guess those were technically my first publications?) I developed a serious crush on Tanis (obviously,) and I realized—to my unspeakable delight—that autumnal colors are especially flattering on me! Kith and I obsessed over bolts of velvet at the fabric store, and I dreamed of buying this one golden eye shadow at the WalMart. A few years later, as high schoolers, we even adapted the whole of Dragons of Autumn Twilight into a script and got through an entire table read by press ganging our theater friends into participation.
Speaking of high school, this is where my other foundational experience of fall comes in: 9th grade is when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time, where the adventure—of course—begins in autumn. (Which—of course—is why DragonLance begins its adventure in the same season.) Again, the air is crisp, the world is darkening and the road of destiny stretches out before you. And also, Rivendell in autumn!! And this is where my other best friend—we will call her Pip— enters the picture. We made costumes! We did photo shoots! We made crafts! We sang hobbit songs in hobbit costumes! (I’m Merry, Pip is Pippin... obviously) We had (and still have) inside jokes from the extended version of the films’ appendices. (You have partridge? Bring the partridge!) Again, obsessed. And by the way, Pip is a wonderful artist, and if you’ve ever thought to yourself “Man, I love Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ but wouldn’t it just be so much better if it had more Lord of the Rings in it!?” Here you go!)
I cannot overstate the importance of these things: DragonLance, LOTR, and such good friends to nerd out over them with. I had never seen fall, not so much as a single changed leaf, but by way of my favorite fantasy novels and the friendships they facilitated, I loved it. Fall was clearly where all high fantasy adventures happened! Fall was where you met elves! This feeling was made even stronger by the fact that, for all intents and purposes, the idea of fall was a fantasy setting to me! I mean, the trees slowly taking on the colors of fire as the days get darker and colder? Come on! Is that awesome world building or what?! And while I love Hawaii, as you can probably imagine given everything I just told you, I didn’t always feel like I fit in while I was growing up, and this fantasy of fall provided a welcome escape from the real world where PE somehow always happened at high noon and middle schoolers were mean. And so it was that I began perfecting the art of wearing too much velvet for how hot it was outside. Because when it’s never fall, you might as well pretend it always is.
All of this is to say, central Pennsylvania had a lot to live up to. Luckily, central PA has beautiful fall colors. And I was sure the sycamores—with their mottled silvery-white bark and their leaves the size of dinner plates—must be what mallorn trees looked like. And for the first time ever, I wasn’t sweating through my velvet. (Though I also learned that velvet was no more fashionable in 2004 central PA than it was is 2004 Hawaii, but whatever, velvet4lyfe!) I’ve always struggled with the cold in winter, but fall? No notes. I love it. And every time it comes around, I’m transported to Solace, to Rivendell, and reminded of the dreams little teenage me cherished and tended like the fire at the Inn of the Last Home.
But the roots of this love are quite literally a fantasy, and fantasy will always form its foundations. In no way is it built on concrete lived experience. It is the opposite: The result of extensive and prolonged romanticization. This got me thinking, and this is the question I pose to you: My foundational experiences of fall are less concrete, but are they less lived? And even if they are, is it a problem? Does it matter? Are the concrete and externally observable the only things that count? I was not born to autumn, but does that make my love less real?
I’d argue no. Different maybe, but not lesser. Of course, concrete lived experience matters, but the only concrete lived experiences I have that were not preceded by some sort of imaginative engagement—with some amount of fantasy—were the ones I had no choice in. Essentially my demographic information, random stuff that has happened to me, and facts related to my family and place of origin.
What about the things I chose? Dancer, book collector, friend, wife, writer, history lover, hiker, person who wears velvet and cute fall boots. All of those things—even the boots—were preceded by a fantasy, an imaginative engagement with what could be. I do not know what a new book has to tell me before I’ve read it, I do not know what any individual hike has in store for me before I’ve taken it, and friends are strangers first, as are husbands. At the moment I bought them, I didn’t know how my cutest little green boots were going to fit once they’d been broken in. I had no idea what fallen leaves smelled like when I was setting pictures of autumnal forests as the wallpaper on a very clunky desktop in 1999.
I don’t think we should disparage the romance of what one does not yet have, what one does not yet know. There is only one thing of which we can be certain: Those who never wonder what lies beyond their door will never arrive anywhere at all. Imagination opens the door. But, first steps are more than a little scary; none of us can know a path before we walk it. As Bilbo says, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
A dangerous business indeed. The door is open, and we want to take those first steps! Imagination might open the door, but it’s fantasy that makes us bold enough to take the first step, the second, the third, the fourth, until the momentum of living sweeps us up. For me, that first step was moving 5,000 miles away from home to pursue ballet more seriously at 17. I did that in the fall of 2004. And honestly, without Dragons of Autumn Twilight, without The Fellowship of the Ring, without Kith, without Pip, without my sense that fall is when adventures begin—without fantasy—I don’t think I would have been brave enough to do it. And indeed, I had no idea what I was getting into, and I could not have imagined where I would be swept off to. But swept I was, and swept I am. And here again, the winds of autumn are stirring. They call me to set foot upon new roads. And I wonder, where will they take me this time?
The photo featured with this month’s post was taken by Johannes Plenio, via Upsplash, and it is exactly the kind of thing I was setting as my desktop wallpaper in 1998.
The image linked to the ballet Giselle is a still from The Royal Ballet’s 2014 production starring Natalia Osipova as Giselle and Carlos Acosta as her lover, Albrecht.
