Autumn’s arrived in Portland, heralded by a dip in temperatures, the return of the rain and low, gray clouds in the morning.
Perhaps it’s the Irish in me but, after a summer of record-breaking heat and smoke, I can’t say I’m unhappy. I’m damp, but not unhappy.
If anything, I feel slightly nostalgic. Changeable, sunny/showery weather reminds me of Ireland, and Irish weather year-round. How many soccer games did we abandon at kids when a deluge erupted halfway through, blown in on blustery westerly winds? In July too.
Ask me in November and I’m sure I’ll give you a different answer, but for now the coming of Autumn has seen me look indoors and inwards, leading me deeper into my reading pile and back to my guitar, and allowing me to enjoy a cup of hot coffee without sweating (it’s the little things).
‘Tis the season – of mists and mellow fruitfulness, and attempting to call the time of year by its American name.
Unlike the unrelenting stacks of leaves blowing into our driveway – despite my occasional efforts to remove them – I’m not sure ‘fall’ will stick.
Because a season of low light, cool evenings, and chilly air presaging the arrival of winter is an ‘autumnal’ one. Full stop (not ‘period’).
The word itself has a long history, stretching back to the 8th century. Its origins are in the Old French ‘autompne’, which crossed with the Latin ‘autumnus’ to create the late Middle English ‘autumn’. From there John Keats and his ilk ran with it.
‘Fall’ is fine, but it just doesn’t have the same historical heft. It’s more of a verb – part of ‘autumn’, but hardly the full experience.
But my annual wrangling with the topic is part of a bigger question. As an immigrant to the U.S., should I drop the old words for the new?
Is it an auto shop or a garage? A line or a queue? Fries or chips? A restroom or a toilet? I could go on.
Should I adapt? Or should I instead adopt some advice. Another Irishman who spent time in America, Oscar Wilde, remarked that, “we have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language”.
Little has changed since Wilde made that comment more than 130 years ago. Some things never change, it seems.
To that end, autumn will always be fall here. Just not to me.
The Gaelic word for the phenomenon, ‘baisteach’, is pretty close to my own reaction when I pull open the curtains on an October morning to be greeted by dripping leaves.
Rain. Vast soggy swathes of my youth were soaked in the stuff. Summers swept away, winters seeping into one single drenched grey mass.
In a part of my brain – call it the Celtic cortex – it never stops pouring down. Showers that struck on holidays in Galway at the age of 12 continue still; the deluge that I swam through the first time I climbed Carauntoohill continues to pour down its sodden flanks.
As an Irishman for me rain is as much a state of mind as a natural phenomenon.
Great Recent Downpours I Have Known: The 72 hour burst that drenched our American visitors on their first trip to Ireland in September 2012; the mist that soaked my wife and I as I proposed under Mweelrea mountain seven months earlier; the torrents of a single night that flooded our block’s garage in October 2011.
Magnificent falls all.
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After a dry (by Irish standards) summer the rain returned to Dublin this week, three days of grey skies and damp air, broken only by dreary deluges and spot flooding.
At least in the west of Ireland they had an unlikely distraction, an apocalyptic ‘black cloud’ attacking gravestones and a church tea room.
Soft day? ‘Travellers surprised by sudden rain’. Utagawa Hiroshige
The only memorable airbourne event I encountered in recent days was a lightning strike over Dublin Bay early on Tuesday morning which – I later discovered – struck an Aer Lingus plane.
Other than that it’s been raincoats, umbrellas and the sodden, sinking feeling that Autumn is here, with winter (read: same rain, just colder) to follow.
This persistent feeling that, regardless of how pleasant it might be today, rain is just around the corner, likely accounts for the outlook of the Irish pessimist class.
The fact that I – figuratively at least – approach many of life’s challenges with an umbrella in one hand and a dripping macintosh in the other is often remarked on by my other half.
Hailing from Southern California, where rain is seen as some quaint Old World folk memory, her usual outlook is a progressive optimism.
Guess whose approach works better?
As I write this it’s…. well, let’s just say that it’s not dry outside. But it will be tomorrow, they say. And there may even be sun, we’re promised, ‘in parts’.
Until then I’ll be – like Christy Moore – cursing this cold blow and the rainy night.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like an exhausted jogger, Dodging dog deposits on Amiens Street.
Percy Shelley didn’t write those last two lines. But his Ode To The West Wind is just about histrionic enough to cover most runners’ reaction to the gusts that blew through Dublin earlier this week.
Which one of us, buffeted with the breeze while dodging the wing mirror of a passing bus, hasn’t lifet out face to the heavens and proclaimed:
Thou dirge of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!
No? Maybe it’s just me.
A summer of relative jogging calm came to a breezy end this week when the arrival of the first winds of Autumn, something I dread.
O uncontrollable!
Hail? Fire? Black rain? I’ll take all of that – anything but wind. And much of my running is done near the coast, meaning I get the full, squally whack of it each morning.
This has transformed the gentle draughts of summer to blustery, gait-wrecking bursts. It’s a breath of Autumn that lingers through winter to Spring. And sometimes beyond.
It chills the bones (and more), adds minutes to my times and, over 10k, helps deliver rain to every last crevice.
But, like Canute manically ranting at the surf, shaking my sweaty fist at the latest passing Atlantic low pressure is pointless.
Shelley, not noted for his jogging prowess, nonetheless has advice.
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O Uncontrollable!
In others words run with the wind.
Who said the Romantics have nothing to teach us in the post-industrial age?
Next week – Wordsworth’s top five stretching tips.
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Postscript: He may not have been a runner but Shelley’s outdoor pursuits, combined with the wind, eventually proved his undoing. Three years after he wrote Ode To The West Wind his sailing boat encountered a storm in the Ligurian Sea, off northern Italy, in July 1822. The poet and two companions were drowned.
