Autumn

Yesterday was warm. 70 degrees in the middle of November. But it wasn’t sunny, didn’t see the sun all day. The mist that had settled overnight hung around all day long. The game reserve, a mile down the road has been closed since October 15th. There is, however a 2 mile or so loop that is open all year. The road leads to the headquarters building, which is also used as a deer check station, and a sign-in, sign-out spot for those who are “lucky” enough to get to hunt on the closed reserve. Don’t make any sense to me, but I ain’t the one in charge. Anyways, yesterday afternoon, I decided to go idle around the loop, for lack of anything better to do. I have learned to keep the digital cam whenever “Shifty” and I go roaming. “Shifty” is my name for my 1986 Toyota 4Runner, the successor to “Dyna”, my Buick who did not know that she was not a 4 wheel drive or john boat. We traded an old dump truck for a tractor, and traded the tractor for Shifty. But enough of my long and varied vehicular history. I idled down the gravel road and passed not one single vehicle. The road passes first through wide open fields that are bordered by distant treelines. Gates block access to the other parts of the reserve (at least in broad daylight, and to the type of folks who stop at red lights when there ain’t even another car in sight).Locked gates and fences are merely suggestions, or challenges even, to another type of folk. But I digress once more. The gravel road eventually comes to a 90 degree left turn, and here begins the better scenery, in my opinion anyways. On both sides, the edges of the road drop off into sloughs filled with cypress and soon to be home to more ducks and Canada and snow geese than I care to count. The migrators are beginning to show up and you can see and hear em coming in all day long. I shut Shifty off and took some pics on both sides of the road. They are not your typical autumn leaves type shots, but it’s what passes for fall foliage here in the river bottoms.