A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident  

While driving home from the city last week, I noticed that the recent thaw allowed a rare winter landscape in colors other than white. The mountains glowed with rich browns, bright yellows and deep greens. They were repeated in my part of the forest, especially when the sun was out and the grasses and long-fallen leaves were painted with cadmium and Naples yellow. 

The colors surprised me. I had assumed a winter landscape in the Poconos that was not white would be drab and lifeless. When the sky is cloudy, as it is so often, it appears exactly that. When the same bright sun that melted the snow stays long enough to shine on the colors of the dormant landscape, the result can be as beautiful as the brightness of spring or the vivid array of the fall. 

If spring is dominated by colors of budding plants and fall by their demise, then the winter landscape is dominated by the earth. Plants have receded, allowing the deeper ochre, umber, sienna, Payne’s gray and almost black to have their moments among the rocks.  

An earth color or tone is sometimes described as any color with some brown in it. Many earth tones are named for animals, like fox, lion or buckskin. “Taupe” is French for mole. The sap greens and viridian of the pines show the mature needles at the end of life, rather than the lighter, brighter hues of new growth. 

I was beginning to enjoy this rare palette when the next snow arrived and again white covered everything, a more natural order for this place and season. By the time we see the earth’s surface again, it is likely to be during a false spring in a disappointing and annoying March, or when again we discover that, much as we love spring, baseball in April is a trial. 

Then new buds will be visible, daffodils more than a dream. Planting will demand its annual urgency. The earth colors will recede like grandparents at a graduation party, the foundation of all the activity, their work complete.