fall (verb) - to move downward, typically rapidly and freely without control, as in, leaves falling from trees, laughter falling from lips, a mountain bike speeding down a trail

I fall in love on a regular basis. 

Now let me explain that. I’m not talking about romantic love here (although Eric is constantly doing things to make me trip head over heels for him). What I mean is that my heart seems to be perpetually open to the world around me, and it’s always getting caught on different places or experiences or people. Take last weekend, for example, when Eric and I ran away to Vermont together. We camped at the base of Burke Mountian and spent the days biking across green fields and through orange hills, along silver-brown creeks, and under an autumnal rainbow of red and gold and orange leaves.

I fell in love with this place. The Kingdom, they call it.

looking out from "heaven's bench".

It’s not as if I’ve never lived through a beautiful autumn before (I think I've even posted about it once already.) But spring doesn’t lose any of its allure because of the many poems that have been written about it, so I guess the same goes for me writing a second post about fall. Besides: fall in the mountains of the northeast is not something I’ve never truly done before. Yes, I was here last year, and even took some trips into Vermont. But my heart didn’t catch then, because I didn’t get the chance to get to know it. I wasn’t winding through it along the elbows and knees of these slouched, dreaming mountains.

 There’s something about watching a molten sunset through the bones of baring tree branches. Leaves turn sharp and black, sketched in a sharp contrast to the sky that glows even after the sun has fallen behind the mountains. The purple of evening settles over the woods like a fog, and when you scoot closer to your campfire, it’s because you can see your breath in front of you, and your skin prickles with cold. Sleeping is hard, bundled in a little tent under a heavy mound of blankets, but the pale yellow morning makes up for it: that lovely, fallish smell alone is enough to make your heart beat hard and send your mind into full, reeling awareness. Hot cocoa with breakfast may seem silly in the real world, but here, nestled in the crook of the mountains, it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted. And that’s just evening and morning.

The town of Burke is small, but I think it must double in size on weekends from spring to fall. When we drove down from our campsite in the morning, it was already crawling with bikers in baggies and jerseys. A helmet and a Camelback are natural accessories, and you get used to the sight of mountain bikes with forks that cost as much as your entire bike. It’s less crowded on the trails, but at some of the more popular sections, you can hear the whoops of people ahead of you as they fly around banked turns and over jumps.

I’ve wished I had a GoPro several times, but never felt like I was quite enough of a badass to warrant spending money on one. I would have loved to have one for these trails, though, and not just to record me riding a double black diamond trail without falling off my bike (yes, I TOTALLY did that!). But no: I would have loved one to capture the gorgeousness of the ride.

When we rode through the trees, it was a close-up picture of a fall anywhere, and my soul thrilled to it: the brilliant colors, the crackling smells, the blur of tiny sounds. But it was when we zoomed out, and the trails took us along the shoulders of the mountains, that a strand of my heart slipped out and caught.

The mountains of the east are gentle. Their peaks don’t pierce the clouds, driving snow out of the sky like the western mountains do. They don’t force awe out of your lungs with a sharp gasp, and they don’t make a bold, rocky slash across an entire continent.

Instead, they ripple out softly, bluer and more indistinct the closer they get to the horizon. They draw your breath out gently, curving your lips into an awed smile. The trees that grow on their rounded peaks and sides turn them bronze in the waning season, and the clouds that float unhindered above them cast darker shadows into their folds and creases.

If you could see this and smell this and hear this and feel this, your soul would breathe out a wordless prayer like mine did. Your heart would plant itself in the curving soil of this place like mine did. You would laugh too, like I did, because there is no other way to make yourself a part of these mountains, this season, than with your own expression of joyous giving.