As I begin this column, I am sitting in the middle of the Ozark National Forest, surrounded by red, gold, yellow, and green foliage blending into a wind-aided kaleidoscope. It is hard to capture the emotions that are running through me, but that is the purpose of writing this.

I love fall. It is, and has been for years, my favorite season. There is intense energy all about as animals and humans prepare for winter. At home, in the Deep South, we don’t get as much of the feel I am now experiencing as the chill of a first frost swirls around me. I think it is primeval in all of us, the feeling that we must hunt, gather, and harvest to be ready for the onslaught of winter. We must survive.

I miss a true fall. In our semi-tropical clime, we don’t experience fall in it’s proper time frame of October and November. While living in Alaska, we didn’t either. There, fall begins in August (that’s just wrong) and the leaves are changed and gone by October as the first snow falls.

Fall in Alabama is equally brief and out of sequence. The leaves are falling from the oaks and pecan trees in my yard, but the only color is brown and all I can do with them is rake or blow them off the yard and driveway. There are a few maples about, but they haven’t changed color yet, and probably won’t until late November or December, and that’s winter. See - out of sequence.

To experience fall in its proper order, we planned a book tour into Arkansas and Missouri for the first two weeks of November. We allowed plenty of time to drive the back roads through the Ouachita and Ozark Mountains, and it was well worth the effort. What splendor!

The reports said this was not a peak year, yet I can’t imagine it being better than this, but the experience was not all peaceful beauty.

Driving twisting back-roads is challenging enough without distractions. With the Admiral’s near continuous exclamations of, “Oh look,” done at a volume that not only snaps me out of my color enjoying reverie, but makes me jump and twist the wheel to avoid whatever, and then punctuated with a finger or, worse yet, a camera thrust in my face, the driving requires a skill level that few in NASCAR achieve.

“Stop that!” I exclaim, not to be outdone.

“But I don’t want you to miss the colors!”

“You would rather I miss the curve? There are colors out your side you know?” This brought on a silence and her near constant holding of the camera in front of her face. I attempted to break through, “Are you taking pictures of every tree you see?”

“No.”

“Well, what are you doing?”

“I see things you don’t see.”

“Oh, so your right-brain is bigger than my right-brain?”

The response was a fierce glare. “You should stop now,” she replied through clinched teeth.

Thus, I am sitting in a campsite writing these notes and marveling at the wonders of fall. There are worse things than hunger or cold. If I am not careful, I will not survive this winter.

David Wilson Atwood is a local freelance writer whose human-interest columns offer a unique perspective. He may be e-mailed at david@starchasers.us.