Suddenly a couple of weeks ago, in a single evening, the rainy season was behind us and October became fall.
It’s one of the always-surprising phenomena of these Jalisco highlands: the rainy season blooms and booms along, merrily soaking mountainsides into great green pyramids, grander than any the ancient Nahua gods were promised, pouring falls of water down sheer chutes of stone; then suddenly … the texture of the air has changed without warning, the colors up on the green ridges abruptly lighten, pulling yellows, beiges and browns out of nowhere. The very blue of the sky turns a less transparent, bluer, duskier side to us. It’s fall.
The wild hay of the summits surrounding the city and Lake Chapala has already paled and begun to topple with the newly arrived fall breezes. Odors have changed. The stride of country folk has become a bit tighter, a bit brisker. A few children already have the sniffles, and at night the burros and the cattle wander shorter distances from home.
New affinities between nature and the creatures it nurtures have already been made without anyone doing a thing. That’s one of the heartening marvels of seasonal changes: The absence of the interfering human hand.
Varas de San Francisco
Up on the tiny ocean of wild hay behind our home, rainy season flowers are still hanging on: Minute white, four-petaled, yellow-centered acetillas are nestled against flanks of tilting hay, alongside equally small, brilliant, all-yellow tacote blossoms. But the big fall color at our end of Lake Chapala is the booming purple of the Varas de San Francisco.” It’s a husky, stiff-stemmed, scratchy-flowered plant whose tall, brilliant lavender color now is a wonder to see on the gradually browning hills.
All of this seasonal change makes it a good time for treks into the mountains; you get tired before you get boiled out and the slight coolness in the shade of a hunched ridge gives you strength to lengthen your stride and stretch an hour’s walk into something a bit longer, more exploratory. These outings are dense with information and give you a final feeling of the forms the rainy season has sculpted with the rises and falls and flora of the countryside — a sense of space and shape that won’t be available again until next June.
Regal Vixen
It is also now that the couched osote trees of the hillsides at once fragile (with a papery, near-balsa-fibered wood) and hardy (coming back year after year from the slightest rootling or broken branch) are budding and unfolding their snow-white blossoms.
The cool nights and slowed rainfall have already shriveled other wild plants, especially the vines, and the hidden paths of mountain animals are abruptly visible; there’s more activity in such places than we usually imagine. The great horned owl that lives part of each year in a nearby mesquite tree is back and the other morning just before daylight, we saw a pale-tailed vixen trot regally across our road. But the quail have gone. There are more hawks now it seems, two of them taking turns on one of the nearby mesquites to watch for the plump meadow mice that scurry noisily through the stiffening stems of wild hay.
The tremendous, exotic green of the rainy season still makes the slopes and barrancas seem like great, humped sea creatures, blemished now in spots by drying milpas, dying swathes of hay. But the sparse boniness of the dry season isn’t yet here. It’s an admirable in-between-time that makes one want to rush out to see it all just as it all changes, to sweep up in all one’s senses this most prodigious of all events. When nature decides in a single evening to metamorphose herself and mark another notch in the year’s implacable, amazing cycle.