Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Contrary to the expectations generated by the manner of its commencement, Humptulips County has experienced a fickle autumn. We enjoyed an Indian Summer until the day everything turned on a dime and winter abruptly appeared well ahead of schedule. This seasonal turnabout left us with many trees with plenty of leaves still attached – strange fruits frozen in place and unable to fall. And when the leaves froze in place, their coloring, whatever it may have been at the moment of seasonal transition, remained frozen as well.
We are left with an autumnal anomaly: many trees full of green and brown leaves, all of which are dead but apparently glued in place and seemingly coated with some sort of maritime preservative paint. As this autumn never hit its full stride because the weather was so warm for so long and the cold days and colder nights were not allowed to creep in with the stealth they usually employ, many leaves never turned color at all and those that did achieved only anemic hues. Nature’s palette this year proved muted and mellow, as if to remind us by means of vibrancy’s absence to stay cool in the face of adversity.
By contrast, there are an equal number of trees which have shed all of their leaves and are now standing tall and bare in hopeful expectation of a blanketing of snow. These trees appear to be the conservative traditionalists, undertaking the usual path which trees take in November in hope that the weather will hold true to form and they will be called upon to add their usual grace notes of skeletal abstraction to a wintry world.
However, those still festooned with leaves (albeit dead ones with no sense of self) seem to prefer the road the poet did take – the one less traveled by. What might be down that road remains to be seen, but only if those rains left to this well-advanced November lack sufficient force to finally strip these radicals bare and force them into traditionalism. But if their struggle to maintain their radical ways proves successful, perhaps they, too, will produce something as substantial as the poet did when he first undertook that same turning.
