Autumnal addiction

I have a confession to make. I am a anthocyanin addict.

Like any addict I can go to great lengths to get my kick. Why, only recently it took me all the way to the northeast of the U.S., but I have spent quite a lot of money on it here at home as well.

It’s a seasonal thing, and this time of year is when my addiction really surfaces. You see, anthocyanin is the agent in some deciduous trees and bushes that turn their foliage a bright red once the temperature drops below a certain level, and I’m a complete sucker for it.

New England

A fix for the aficionado…

Whereas yellow fall colours are simply the result of chlorophyll draining away from the leaf, anthocyanin has to be produced by the tree, and the reason I have to travel to other continents and/or import exotic plants to get my fix is that anthocyanin doesn’t occur naturally in plants in Europe.

The explanation for this is that it’s quite taxing for plants to produce anthocyanin, and that at a time when they would be well adviced to store their energy for the long cold period ahead. So why do these American and Asian trees do it? The answer is to be found 35 million years ago.

After the Appalachian mountains (along with the rest of the North American continent) were torn away from Scandinavia*, the Ice ages affected the evolution of deciduous trees differently. Europe’s mountain chains being mainly west-easterly oriented, they stopped insects from migrating away from the warm south (where they are more abundant), unlike in North America, where mountain chains tend to follow a south-north axis, creating corridors where insects could travel freely.

Trees in North America therefore evolved throughout the years to protect themselves from many of the species that never spread in Europe. Their answer to this challenge? Anthocyanin, a substance that helps ward off insects and protects them against sudden cold spells (which is also happily why red leafs last longer on trees before they fall in the fall).

Japanese acer, chez moi

But can you smoke it…?

So next time you take in the stunning colours of an autumnal garden (be it mine or the entire New England wilderness), you can enjoy your fix – like I do – knowing that it’s an addiction that does both you and the trees a world of good.

 

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*It’s all part of the Greater Swedish Empire, really.

New England, U.S.

Oktober 2015

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Ever since I read Last of the Mohicans as a boy I have wanted to experience New England’s wilderness. This is where Hawkeye Leatherstockings fought the sly fox Magua to the death, and Uncas and Cora Munro were the first believably star-crossed lovers I ever encountered in literature, so this was clearly a happening place, my ten-year-old self reckoned.

Fast forward 25 years and I’m still inspired by literature, only now it’s Bill Bryson and A Walk In the Woods that have me pining for the Appalachian Trail, that runs along the Eastern seaboard for 3,500km from Georgia to Maine. His story about hiking along the AT – and in particular his description of the White mountains in New Hampshire and the 100-mile-wilderness in Maine – was what got me interested in hiking in the first place, so there are several reasons I’m giddy as a schoolboy as my native guide (gotta have a native guide when exploring the unknown) guns the car down Kankamagus Highway into the Pemegawasset Wilderness, where the White Mountains are.

We’ve come not only for to hike, but to leaf peep as well. This is an actual thing, as the autumnal colours of these forests are so spectacular that tourists come to just marvel at the russet reds and fiery oranges of the sugar maples and moosewoods and beeches and birches and rowans and other deciduous trees. Even though I know what to expect I run out of synonyms for “gorgeous” long before we’ve even reached our base camp, a friend’s skiing lodge. The colours are those of a Japanese garden lit up by fire.
There’s a natural order of things, however. Down on the valley floor the deciduous trees reign supreme, but as you set off up the mountain on ever more bouldery paths, conifers begin to appear and grow in number until the leafy trees give up altogether, and you are left with something best described as an army of undead Christmas trees, the tortured, gnarled branches of which reach for you, wanting to snag your clothes. Then these, too, give up the ghost and you enter truly alpine heights, where nothing but bonsai shrubs cling to what little topsoil remains.

Having read Bryson’s accounts I’m a little apprehensive about the difficulty level of some of these trails – New Hampshire styles itself “the Granite State”, and the paths certainly bear witness to this; they are essentially just boulders that you have to hop, skip and clamber over and around, up and down. My faith in my own Pochahontas is absolute however, or rather it was until about an hour or so into the first day’s hiking when she suddenly stopped and swore. I naturally asked what was the matter, and got the undying answer “my foot is stuck underneath my other foot”.*

The undead Christnas trees are closing in...

The undead Christnas trees are closing in…

Yet in spite of this we manage admirably. The first three days follow the same pattern. We set out at ungodly hours (at least jet lag helps you Get Up Very Early), hike from different trailheads up ravines and past waterfalls unto ledges and crests where we eat our packed lunches and marvel at the panoramas unfolding before us.

Visibility is nothing short of incredible; from atop Franconia ridge (which saw us bag three 4,000-footers in an afternoon) and Frankenstein cliffs (sadly not named after the Doctor and his monster but after a local painter) you can see over one hundred miles, and what you see is nature putting on a spectacle to rival any I have ever seen. And in spite of it being peak season we encounter no more than a handful of other hikers every day, one or two birds of prey high in the sky, and the ever present silver grey and red squirrels, whose territorial challenges follow us along the paths.

Make no mistake, however: the wildlife of these deep woods is impressive. Black bears roam the land, as do coyotes, bobcats and possibly even wolves. Less deadly animals abound as well, such as deer, jackrabbits and wild turkeys, which we would see peacefully pecking their way along the roadside. On one hike we set off on a trail that passed several beaver ponds, where moose sometimes come to eat and drink. The guidebook says to listen out for frogs at these ponds, the sounds of which are “remarkably like someone plunking the strings of a banjo”.

"Dadadumdimdum", Frog.

“Dadadumdimdum”, Frog.

We didn’t hear any frogs, but that passage got me thinking about the movie Deliverance, and the decidedly backward (and banjo-plunking) people the city-dwelling protagonists encounter. This place, too, has its share of colourful locals who go by hillbilly names such as Zeke, Cletus and Bubba, and they certainly do live off of tourists, but only strictly financially speaking – cannibalism no longer being in vogue.

Outdoor tourism is huge here all year around, so it’s not surprising that the locals are keen to reap the rewards. For our day of rock climbing we engage a specialist guide named Zebulon Jakub, who takes people rock climbing in summer, ice climbing in winter and kite boarding and para-gliding all year around. He is clearly a latter-day incarnation of Hawkeye. Add to that the fact that he looked like a young Zeb Macahan, and you see how the border between fiction and reality blurs up here.

The climbing itself is brilliant: just hard enough to be a real challenge without completely crushing you. We hike up to Square Ledge, facing Mount Washington, and as the sun climbs in the sky so we climb up the sheer cliff, thirty vertical, vertigo-ous metres straight up to the summit, from which we then rappel down to do other routes, including a chimney-like crack that sported a long dead bird as a special treat near the top. I surprise myself by how strong I feel – clearly all the workouts are starting to pay off – and lunch has rarely tasted as good; adrenaline and vistas make for excellent condiments, it seems.

"Can I have some more view on my sandwich, please?"

“Can I have some more view on my sandwich, please?”

It’s a perfect holiday, in short, if only too short. Luckily, on our last day the weather changes completely, and as we set off for Maine and its lobster shacks and outlet malls, the rain is pouring down, turning bouldery trails into babbling brooks and crests and ledges into slippery death traps, so it seems ordained that this adventure should be at an end. I have ticked off two or three more items on my bucket list in a matter of days – it simply doesn’t get much better than that.

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*Credit where credit is due, however. She personally diverted a hurricane that was threatening to cancel the whole endeavour, sped up the leaf ageing process by sheer willpower, and held torrential downpours at bay that would otherwise have made hiking utterly impossible. On top of that she also introduced me to the marvels of local cuisine, to wit: cider donuts, hoagies, dark chocolate peanut buttercups, pumpkin bread, blueberry syrup and republican pasta(!) – made with no taxes whatsoever.

Massachusetts, U.S.

Massachusetts, day 1

Moving across time zones is a strange experience. You effectively displace yourself so fast as to end up time travelling. This I did yesterday, setting out at ten am from Brussels and landing in Boston at three pm, eleven hours later.

Of course, the price you pay for this sci-fi experience is jet lag. In an attempt to fight it I stayed up until 0430 in the morning my time, which is a decidedly less impressive 2230 local time – as evidenced by the cocktail waitress’s look of disbelief when I was going cross eyed after half a beer – and then slept like a log jam until dawn.

Now, traditionally, Easter is the time when witches are abroad, so where better to spend my first day in Massachusetts than in Salem, scene of the most famous witch trials in history?

I didn’t see any witches (maybe the competitions were held elsewhere?), but the city certainly capitalises on the old madness. Wiccan shops, haunted houses and the like abound, and tourists come from afar to revel in the gruesome history of the place.

Me? I was blown away. Literally. The gale force winds forced me inside at regular intervals, even though the sun did lure me back out, time after time. And I shouldn’t complain – turns out they had seven feet or snow here until only a couple of weeks ago!

Eventually though, my body had had enough. Several hours’ worth of siesta was required to bring me back on my feet just long enough to enjoy my first Maine lobster, but now midnight (the local one) is approaching, and I’m about to leave the state of Massachusetts for the state of unconsciousness once more…
Massachusetts, day 2

The US is a land of extreme contrasts; the unsightly hangar-like superstores along the roads on the one hand, the beautiful New England clapboard houses on the other, the ever-present Dunkin Donuts drivethrus next door to organic eco-eateries/yoga centres, colonial historic sites encroached upon by modern skyscrapers and so on.

Similarly, people are diametrically different; I visited Trinity church in downtown Boston which was packed to the rafters for the Easter sermon, and went outside only to find several women cosplayers climbing on the church building in an attempt to look more like the Assassin’s Creed characters they were dressed up as*.

And yet this is what makes it such a wonderful place, I think. There’s room here for all kinds. So when a bold eagle appears high in the sky above the highway on the way home, it feels symbolically quite fitting.

Land of the free, home of the brave indeed.

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*One creed is as good as the next, I guess…
Massachusetts, day 3

There are places in the world that seem to act as magnets to forces other than normal natural forces (gravity and whatnot). So for instance Jerusalem is a black hole to religions and New York exudes a force field of capital.

In Boston, there is a higher than usual background radiation of learning, and I spent the day trying to expose myself to as much of it as possible (in the vague hope of turning into the intellectual equivalent of the Incredible Hulk). So the morning saw me visiting Walden, the pond in the forest where Henry Thoreau spent two years in splendid isolation contemplating the beauty of nature and a simpler life (except for when he went over to mum’s for pancakes and a change of clothes on Sundays), and in the afternoon I went to Harvard and MIT – not many people have done both, and certainly not in the course of a day, so maybe I was turning into a green intellectual giant after all?

Regardless of colour, it is certainly easy to grow too large here, but in the evening I threw caution to the wind and fulfilled a life-long dream by eating in a Worcester diner, a wonderfully retro institution with table jukeboxes, busty waitresses calling you “honey”, a menu (made) out of Grease and a clientele that between them must have weighed like a whale. My arteries contracted as soon as I stepped inside, and I didn’t give in until I had gulped down a load of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and a wedge of lemon merengue pie (that could have held the door open), the effects of which had me eying the walls for a defilibrator. Bliss!
Massachusetts, days 4 and 5

I’ve spent much of my time here roaming up and down the coast, exploring capes and coves, taking in the quaint little fishing villages and their typical New England architecture.

I freely admit I am in love with the colonial style, which seems to consist of taking Edwardian houses as your starting point and making sure that the architect has the blueprints confused with a recipe for wedding cakes. All of them have an abundance of turrets, pilasters, ornate gables, Roman pillars, covered porches, outside staircases, nooks and crannies, which gives them a stately but very organic look.

The nicest ones are old sea captains’ houses, built by wealthy skippers and traders gone ashore, but not willing to give up the sea – built along the coastline, often right on the water’s edge, with balconies and lookout points where their original owners could spy their ships come in from the Caribbean, where their cargo of slaves had been offloaded, and molasses taken onboard, to be processed to rum in New England and sold on to slave traders back in Africa. (This last detail is oft overlooked by Ralph Lauren and others selling the New England lifestyle for some reason…).

White dominates, but a whole spectrum of muted greys, blues, and beiges exist, mirroring the colour of the weather-beaten landscape and the ever-changing ocean in a way not dissimilar to the buildings in the Dominican Republic, although diametrically opposite its palette.

As always I leave taking something with me. This time, it’s an irrepressible urge to add a covered colonnade to my house…