Rivers in Leaves

 

I took this picture yesterday in the early afternoon.  Both then and today, the river remains clear as crystal.  Looking down from the bridge, I see leaves moving, although for these two days, no maple among them.  As if someone was dropping oak leaves upstream, one lonely specimen after another flowed along.  Most rode the current a foot or so below the surface, some parallel to the bottom, other at right angles, and still others describing a slow spiral which, from time to time, brought them to the surface and then pulled them down again before disappearing.  Although a few maples in the village retain their leaves, it is mostly the oaks which persist in keeping them.  

Michael Snyder, a Vermont forester, tells us that oaks may keep their leaves longer because they discourage moose and deer from eating shoots in the spring.  Last year's leaves, not very tasty, I suppose, get in the way of succulent new growth.  Another theory is that oaks and their cousins, the beeches, are simply a little lower on the evolutionary ladder, a link between the more ancient evergreens and the radically deciduous.  In a few million years, they may get to be as grown up as a maple, cheerfully dropping their foliage just in time for whatever generation of leaf peepers may still be on this Earth.

Today in the late morning, before the sun broke through to create a mild and welcoming November afternoon, I took the picture above.  I noticed a different leaf shape on the Ottauquechee, something like a spearhead, very yellow.  They mostly rode the surface.  I don't know leaves as well as I would like.  They could have been from elms, which I would like to believe are making a comeback in Vermont.

In the flow of the river, each leaf carries, as its veins, that riverine, dendritic pattern, echoing, as it flows, the watershed which gave it life.