An Autumnal Adventure: Foliage in Vermont

Nothing quite compares to the feeling of walking over the ground strewn with apples. The sound of apples crushing underneath your feet as you walk up to a tree and start pulling off one Red Delicious after another, a red ladder (probably planted there by the orchard owner to make it look more quaint) leaning against an apple tree, lugging half a bushel of apples back to the car.

It's something of a rite of fall. The foliage takes a turn through a magnificent spectrum of red and orange and green. The apples ripen. Students go to Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts to look at the leaves.

This Saturday and Sunday probably will be one of the best foliage viewing weekends of the fall. Although the leaves began turning earlier this year than usual, expert foliage sighters claim that a good foliage expedition can still be found in southern Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.

The three of us were driving along Route 30 outside of Brattleboro, Vermont on our way to Newfane, reputedly the most New Englandy of the small towns scattered along the foliage route. But by that time, one of my roommates needed a sugar fix.

She came out of the store laden with butterscotch candies, gum, Vermont maple candy and other goodies. At a later stop, she walked out of a donut store loaded down with a dozen chocolate and cinnamon donut holes, apple muffins and assorted regular donuts. On our last stop before the final dash to Cambridge, she stopped at a grocery store and bought more gum and some M&M's.

By that time, I had hardly any room for my feet, amid the bags of candy and sugar.

At our first stop, my other roommate, a 19 year old, needed to flex her newfound, Vermont sanctioned legality by buying some beer. She walked up to the cashier and set down the beer. He rang up the bill and didn't even look like he wanted to card her. So she looked at him, then asked, "Don't you want to see my I.D.?" He said yes, took the driver's license from her, didn't look at it and handed it back to her.

Later, back in Massachusetts, she bought beer with her fake I.D., which says she's 27 years old. The cashier had asked that time.

Along Route 30, we found a covered bridge built in 1878 across the Connecticut River that runs near Brattleboro. Standing 20 ft. above the river, it looked rickety and narrow. On the other end, two narrow roads branched off, and we had to make a U-turn on the narrow road to get back. It was the first, but not the last, traffic jam that we managed to create during the trip.

Later, in South Newfane, we found another covered bridge and created another traffic jam. This 116-year-old bridge looked more dangerous than the first--single lane, crossing over a stream, unpainted, tiny amounts of autumn light filtering through the small openings in the side of the bridge. South Newfane seemed like the perfect setting for a bridge like this. Not a single house looked younger than 100 years old. Almost everything was painted white or red. An old mill stood by the side of the stream. It was a five minute drive off Route 30, along a winding road through the forest. The town had one road running through it, and the traffic stopped when we stopped.

The drive to Vermont seemed longer than it really was, perhaps because we really didn't know where we were going. The tourism board gave complex direction: Route 30, Route 11, Route 73, Route 75, Route 119. Endless routes.

Stop at this small city, find a winding, narrow road to a quaint town, drive across the covered bridge, turn around, find more foliage. There are apple picking orchards in West Brattleboro, in Bellow's Fall, in Grafton. That's what the tourism board told us, but by the time we got to Vermont, it was difficult to decipher my handwriting and keep my eye on the road at the same time. And the phone number for Francis Miller Orchards was busy when we called.

So we headed in the general direction of West Brattleboro and, miraculously, found the orchard.

It was already late, and it was cold. That night it snowed in some portions of Vermont. But we had to pick apples. So we hopped out of the car at the sight of the first apple-laden trees, and one of my roommates started plucking everything in sight.

She climbed up the ladder, but it wasn't sturdy enough. (Further proof that it really was put there for quaintness). She pulled branches down to snag the best apples. She picked them off the ground. She tossed them at the two of us who weren't quite as interested in apples as she. But we caught them and added them to the bulging paper sack we had picked up from the owner of the orchard.

Finally, we managed to tear her away from the apples to search for foliage.

Every autumn, the hills of Vermont turn into earth-toned peacocks, sporting a spectacular array of red, yellow and orange leaves. From afar, the hills look dappled, warm with a brown and purple and reddish hue. The closer you get, the more you see the outbursts of color.

But the autumnal display is more than nature's way of attracting tourists to Vermont. As the earth begins to tilt away from the sun after the autumnal equinox, the sunlight reaching New England takes on an intense quality. During this time, the trees begin to prepare for the Northeastern winter.

The intensity of the fall's light begins to bleach out the chlorophyll--the chemical that turns leaves green--and unmasks a companion chemical contained in every leaf. That companion chemical, carotene, is what turns carrots orange and leaves yellow, according to John W. Einset, an associate professor of biology who works at the Arnold Arboretum. The yellow trees that dominate Vermont's fall landscape are ashes, sassafrases (members of the laurel family), hickories and maples. But, for the most part, you see the distinctive maple scattered all over Vermont.

The red trees are the product of a more complex chemical reaction. Bright days and cool evening create the perfect environemnt for the production of anthocyanin, a chemical relative of benzene and phenol. The bleached chlorophyll clears the way for the purple, red, pink and bluish variations of anthocyanin. For example, the Tupelo tree, found all over Martha's Vinyard, turns fire engine red according to Einset.

All this pigment activity is merely a symptom of what Einset calls a "fluctuation of metabolism" it the trees. "By fall, the metabolism essentially stops and reassimilation of nutrients into the tree begins," Einset says. The leaves begin breaking down, and the nutrients contained in them are absorbed into the bark of the tree. So, the leave fall off and shrivel to crispy, brown leaf corpses. And all over Vermont, people begin burning pile of dead leaves in their front and back yards.

Eventually, sometime during the journey to Vermont, the smell of a leaf fire will reach you.

People always talk about a riot of autumna color. It seems a little more subdued in Vermont Occassional trees splash their color. And one tree stands out on a road through a Vermon town--bright orange next to a plain white house.