{"id":1223,"date":"2022-09-26T18:45:11","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T02:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/?p=1223"},"modified":"2022-09-26T18:47:43","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T02:47:43","slug":"fifty-shades-of-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/?p=1223","title":{"rendered":"Fifty shades of fall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was a teenager in the 1970\u2019s, I worked summers at the Triple A travel agency in Richmond, Virginia. I was reminded of this experience by a recent conversation regarding fall foliage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my day, long before the advent of the internet, before Google Maps Lady was even a glint in a rich man\u2019s eye, there were TripTiks. TripTiks were my job. When someone wanted to take a road trip, they would come to my counter and tell me or one of the others where they wanted to start, where they wanted to end up, and what they wanted to see in between. I would then go to an enormous wall that contained many pigeonholes, each housing multiple copies of a certain strip of American highway. I would select all the applicable strips, bind them together, and trace the ongoing route with green highlighter. Thus, the traveler would have a handy booklet to flip through, with exits, road numbers and points of interest clearly marked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A very popular request among these customers was a trip along the eastern seaboard in September or October, for the express purpose of seeing the famous fall colors of the Eastern hardwood forests. These colors were and are justifiably famous, spanning almost the entire visible light spectrum and many shades in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently I spent a month of late-summer-early-fall in the western Interior of Alaska, and I heard someone mention the boring monochrome of the Alaska fall colors. So, I looked a little more closely. Now, I grant you, in my beautiful, beloved Southeast the forests are a practical sort, being almost entirely evergreen, and apparently choose to waste no energy on baroque finery. But what about their northern cousins, the taiga forests of the Interior? Maybe they like to show off just a bit?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, it is true that the fall colors in even this part of Alaska are more muted than you\u2019d find back East. But if you take a closer look, you will see the unchanging dark green of the spruce mingled with every imaginable shade of yellow to gold to reddish gold, what with the aspens, birches, poplars, and willows. Add to that a scarlet splash here and there of highbush cranberry leaves, and you have a subtle beauty that just might get under your skin and stay there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You be the judge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a teenager in the 1970\u2019s, I worked summers at the Triple A travel agency in Richmond, Virginia. I was reminded of this experience by a recent conversation regarding fall foliage. In my day, long before the advent of the internet, before Google Maps Lady was even a glint in a rich man\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[488,491,490,489],"class_list":["post-1223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-as-an-alaskan-educator-and-citizen","tag-fall-foliage","tag-interior-alaska","tag-rain-forest","tag-taiga"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1223"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1236,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1223\/revisions\/1236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}