I love mist. I love the scent of earth folded in on itself and dreaming under a blanket of leaf fall. I love the layers of green and gold and grey that is autumn on the edge of Puget Sound, the slish of water running up the beach, the crows and the gulls croaking and crying back and forth between land and sea.
I went to the park yesterday. The salmon aren’t running yet. The chipmunks are all asleep. The kids are back in school. It was as empty as the end of the world. Full of promises.
At the entrance to the park is a chemical toilet. (A big truck comes by every couple of days and picks it up and puts a new fresh one in its place. Pretty astonishing.) It’s owned and maintained by a company called Emerald Sanitary*. The first time I saw the sign on the side I misread it: Emerald Sanity. I had a vision of sad or insane people going into the box, a green light pouring from the ceiling fixture, and them leaving the box with their minds quiet and smooth. Emerald Sanity.
That’s what the park does for me. It turns all the noise off. Smoothes the furrows in my face. Slows the beat of my heart. I can recommend it.
* Seattle is sometimes known as the Emerald City. When it was first founded, it was called the Queen City, but the civic dignitaries worried people would associate the city with, well, queens. The park system, alas, has now changed to United Site Services, not nearly as evocative as Emerald Sanitary.
Nicola Griffith 
We don’t have the Honey Bucket brand of portable toilet here in Canada, so we were a little amazed and delighted by the name when we first encountered it in Seattle.The park sounds lovely. You’ve helped me decide that I am walking Vancouver’s seawall today.
Emerald Sanity indeed. Would that it were so. I rejoice this time of year for the reasons you just mentioned,and I am especially thankful this year for the beautiful colors of the leaves. I heard it opined that this is a particularly good year when rain and temperature combined to give us the most beautiful leaves.
Glad you made it to the park. Good idea.What happens when the salmon run?
This indeed is my very favorite spin around the sun. Fall always brings a sense of anticipation in me that I know must link to some otherly world in my primal memories. I become more creative,mellow,more at ease with life as I watch the leaves spiral down from the trees that borders my fenceline. My back cottonwood gets “noisy” as the leaves brush against one another. I know soon they will be gone from the branches leaving the squirrel nest fully exposed.I have a Chinese Tallow that will turn the most glorious shades of yellow,orange and then crimson. When the leaves fall they create a beautiful tapestry.Its my time to start clearing flowerbeds of fading annuals and put bulbs in the ground for spring. I guess, in a way, fall it is “my” Emerald Sanity. :)We have a state park,Lost Maples, not too far from where I live. There is a pocket of Maples laid down in the middle of the Hill Country that should have never been there as they are not native to Texas. There is a web site for a “peak color watch”. The beautiful change of color is now occurring thanks to some recent cooler weather. Its a nice drive and day adventure away from home.
alyx, I hope you enjoy your walk. There’s just nothing like the wild tang of autumnal shore.chadao, they’re certainly brilliant around here–purer colours than usualjennifer, well, ultimately they die… But first of all, when we sit on the bench overlooking the sea we see more gulls, sometimes eagles, sometimes sea lions–they’re hanging out at the mini-estuary where the creek pours into the sea i.e. where the sea-going salmon (3 or 4 different kinds, though mostly chum) start fighting their way back inland. Then along the creek we see the occasional salmon flapping and humping and jerking its way upstream. This builds to hundreds by late next month. And the smell of the dead ones (the racoons and coyotes eat a lot of them, but there always comes a point where they just can’t keep up) gets nasty. Volunteers hang coloured streamers–orange, red, yellow, white–for where the various kinds of salmon have deposited their eggs. Every year these streamers creep just a little closer to the stream branch that runs in our ravine. In about a thousand years, when it rains heavily and Nickel Crick forms in our back garden (which it did for the first time last year), they’ll run there, too.linda, it’s something most people don’t notice, the seasonal sound change in the trees. I love listening to them. In summer, I spent a lot of time on the deck with a notepad, ostensibly thinking about Hild, but really trying to describe to myself the different sounds of the broad leaf maple, the curly willow, the larch, the douglas fir, the dogwood…
It’s crisp here too. The air held a taste of snow for a few of days and then last night it finally fell in big chunky swirls, streaming across orange street lights. I tucked myself in my window chair and watched. And of course the whole trick where the remaining leaves on a tree in front of my window turn completely red happened while I was asleep. For once, foxes have stopped fighting in the back gardens. They must have growled themselves hoarse in the past few weeks while the weather was getting gradually colder. They reminded me of every single Japanese tale of witch-foxes I ever came across. Fantastic creatures. Very fierce. Lovely turn of seasons.
Outdoors heals. I strolled up a local peak last Saturday and met a bunch of elk trotting through downed aspen leaves. Just what I needed… I wanted to tell you, Nicola, that a friend of mine, walking across the state on the Arizona Trail this fall, spent a night on the way through Flagstaff and took Ammonite with her down the trail. She’s approaching Tucson, now, and called me to say HOW MUCH she enjoyed reading it. “Just perfect” for her musing and travelling and stopping to visit dear souls along the way, she said. She’d read some nights in her tent and tear the pages off to leave them with caches, saving weight as she goes.jean r
It was an excellent walk; I almost jammed, for fear it was going to pour, but I’m glad I didn’t. False Creek was glass-smooth, the air was clean and cool, and I got to watch a seagull fighting to hang on to a massive and very flat fish it had caught.
<>nicola,<> your Emerald box scene sounds like something out of Aeon Flux. I’m glad you went to the park and basked in Sanity. The weather is already too cold for me here, but it’s comforting to know you find it so enjoyable. I’ll think of you and try to smile the next time I feel like swearing at the mist and the chill and the rain. <>alyx,<> it’s been a month since I last walked around the seawall/Stanley Park. I used to live in False Creek, but now I’m up around Main. Seagulls are so entertaining. Maybe I’ll go for a walk tomorrow or Friday after I’m done with midterm stuff.
Ahh, I miss that side of the continent. Thank you for the memories…and the new images behind my eyelids.Here in Maine, I got lucky enough to buy a house with 7 acres on the edge of a small town (850 people). I’ve re-acquainted myself with the details of every season and its change.Like Linda, I can hear the leaves get noisy and the squirrels get quiet. Entire turkey families begin to wander with their littles through our garden. I notice which songbirds are replaced by others each season.The wind changes in scent and the clouds become darker, wispier and they race toward the shore as though they were anxious to see the end of land. Interesting, really. The sky and its inhabitants become noisier while we on the ground are muted. Muffled. Waiting.
I was at the park again this morning. It was lovely. Get out there, people, smell the trees!