viz.

Image Credit: Calliope

Growing up in a perpetually foggy area of Northern California, I had a hard time grasping the concept of fall.  The Norman Rockwell calendar on my wall told me that somewhere in America, in a land of white-washed barns and copper-colored trees, people spent the fall raking big crispy leaves into piles as geese flew south overhead.  But in my neck of the woods, Nature told me no such thing.  Where I grew up, the biggest living thing in sight—the redwood tree—remained stubbornly green all year-round.  The transition from summer to fall held very few charms besides the distant promise of Halloween. You knew it had happened when the fog began to drip, and didn’t stop dripping until the following summer. As a kid, I didn’t much like our version of fall.

Rain is no harbinger of fall where I live now, in seasonally-challenged central Texas. Nearly two years of extreme drought have erased many of the small changes in temperature and rainfall that normally distinguish the seasons. Still, something in my bones tells me that fall is near.

How do we mark the passing of the seasons? It’s a simple, but nevertheless perplexing question for those of us who live in warm weather communities all over the United States. The Internet—our modern day almanac—can tell us that the autumnal equinox is just a few weeks away.  But there are other visible signs of the changing time of year written into our culture, customs, and built environments. A coworker tells me he knows it’s fall by watching his sun-worshipping cats. One afternoon he’ll find them napping in an odd place and realize they’ve migrated there over many days to follow the shifting cast of the sun.  Traffic patterns change as the roads accomodate school buses and commuting educators. Then, of course, there are commercial reminders of fall—like the apparently much awaited return of Starbuck's pumpkin spice latte.  This kind of ritual, which seem like it's dictated by an out-of-touch corporate diety, feels awkardly mistimed to those of us who are still in the throes of a heat wave.  Yet lots of businesses are starting to "bundle up." Despite looking ridiculous to perspiring window shoppers, clothing retailers in Austin, TX have begun to set up painfully ironic displays of their fall lines. The heavy woolen coats on the scarecrow forms below, at the recently opened Billy Reid store on West Sixth, scream "It's fall!" as cars whiz by in 100 degree heat.

Image Credit: Calliope

But even the sacred marketing cycle of the clothing industry cannot impose its seasonal logic on the intractable forces of Texas drought and heat, which begs the question: what kind of fall ritual can be unironic here? The answer, for many Texans, is football season. The game gets played in all kinds of weather, hot or cold, and its fans ring in the season every year with acres of barbeque cookouts and tailgates. As I sat in the stadium with thousands of other fans last Saturday, it struck me that in gathering there for the first game of the season we had unintentionally created an apt visual symbol of fall. Each person's burnt orange regalia contributed to a warm golden glow that circled the entire stadium, evoking an image of fall-colored leaves. The rhetoric teacher in me privately remarked the kairos of this event, the uncanny coincidence of visual symbolism with a deep-rooted Texas fall tradition. If only the bellowing young men sitting behind me had sounded more like the rustle of fall leaves.