“The autumn wind is a pirate
Blustering in from sea
With a rollicking song he sweeps along
Swaggering boisterously
His face is weather beaten
He wears a hooded sash
With a silver hat about his head
And a bristling black moustache
He growls as he storms the country
A villain big and bold
And the trees all shake and quiver and quake
As he robs them of their gold
The autumn wind is a raider
Pillaging just for fun
He’ll knock you ‘round and upside down
And laugh when he’s conquered and won.”
John Facenda
It’s the time of year when Joe Hoya stops dreaming of vodka watermelons, epic rooftop super-soaker battles and shaving-cream-filled novelty balloons, and finds that his thoughts have turned instead to the mysteriously sensual acts of pumpkin carving and finding someone with whom to cuddle near a fireplace. Or just finding a fireplace. Or just tracking down some phat pumpkins. Check.
Dreams of escaping the increasingly omnipresent threats of hijacked airplanes, anthrax hidden in tangibly tampered tangerines (tersely twisted to terrorize Tom Ridge), that formerly centered around the design and construction of a remote cabin high in the Blue Ridge foothills of West Virginia now look homeward, to Dirty Jersey for half of us, or for the other 45 percent to Massachusetts. That’s Western Mass, in my case.
That’s right you Garrison Keillor fans, it’s autumn! We’re talking football, jack-o-lanterns, turkey (sorry vegans), foliage (foilage?) and dropping bombs on foreign countries, and rather than experience any of this real life for ourselves, we can sit back and watch it on teevee while sipping our essentialicious Coke Mandatory out of that glass Tombs mug which happened to accidentally fall into our bookbag last Friday evening. Not that everybody needs to be out there flying the old F-16, basting a fat bird, tossin’ the pigskin around or carving your pumpkin—no, of course some people ought to remain trapped in Austin Powers’ invisible nutshell: the college kids in a bubble for four years.
Do you care that we’re at war or, like me, did you blow your Saturday getting smashed in the affectionately named Parking Lot T formerly known as our baseball field. Jane and Joe went up the Hill to learn about the world, but all they found was sex and beer—it makes one want to hurl. Sure we all want to escape our tortured world while clinging to our pitiful youth for a few precious years—last Sunday the ICC auditorium was packed like a Village A house party, a standing-room-only crowd watching a quality animated film while people our age on the other side of the world were having bombs dropped on their heads. Apathy didn’t used to be synonymous with college. What happened?
I should be setting down my cold frothy glass of apple cider and replacing it with a plastic drywall pail filled to the brim with wheatpaste, but sadly not too many others would be with me. A terribly hackneyed Dante quotation reads, “The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who in times of conflict, remain neutral.” Yesterday at lunch my friend Paul expressed his unfettered desire to “Show solidarity with the president. To watch and wait.” Let’s try another, Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Autumn is undoubtedly the season for true romantics, intellectuals, adventurers and brigands of the same ilk, and this fall is especially so. The chill wakes you up—opens your eyes and makes you see the world as it really is, free of the mind-numbing, Siren-song heat of summer or blissful perfume of cherry blossom spring. For as the days grow shorter and colder, and the sun shrouds its sharp stabbing brightness in October’s warm, orange glow, and the sky dons a steel-gray countenance that shows its frustration as it can’t decide whether it wants to be warm or cold, our bones realize that winter’s a comin. The long, hard winter of the unknown. Winter means death and hardship and storing up food and putting on new layers to protect ourselves and insulate from the cold. Winter is real, and all of our lives can desperately use a dose of that reality right now.
