By Gary Topping–
Any memories I had of my first autumn in Utah—1972—are submerged in my recollection of the horrendous winter that ensued, when temperatures sank to minus fifteen degrees. Long-time Utah residents told me they had never seen weather like that. Over the next few years, though, autumn became my favorite Utah season. Typically, after a short spate of storms in late summer, things clear up, the blistering summer heat drops to something like the mid-seventies, and the leaves turn to iridescent reds and yellows. Eventually the leaves drop and the first snow comes. That late season is called Indian Summer.
We never had such a season on the Oregon coast where I grew up because there were so few deciduous trees. With the exception of the vine maples which turned a livid red, everything else just stayed green. It was a beautiful season, but it offered nothing like the spectacular colors of my adopted state.
Sometimes, though, Utah Indian Summers disappoint. I have no understanding of the botanical or meteorological conditions that govern such things, but once in a while the leaves just turn a drab brownish hue and then drop off with none of the dazzling color displays that we all hope for. As I write on this late October morning, though, the mountains visible from my back yard on either side of Big Cottonwood Canyon are carpeted with seemingly every hue of the rainbow. On the morning walks with my wife around the pond at the Old Mill, we have strolled through forests of sunflowers that now are giving way to acres of rabbitbrush. The colors would be the despair of even a Monet or a Van Gogh.
Today I’m thinking, too, of Indian Summer in another sense, as William Dean Howells used it in his novel of the same title, to mean the autumn of one’s life. Howells’s story recounts the experiences of several wealthy Americans vacationing in Tuscany. One of them, a retired midwestern newspaperman (like Howells himself) has a brief infatuation with a woman barely half his age and has to come to grips with the fact that he has aged beyond the possibility of such dalliances.
One of my favorite historians says that Theodore Roosevelt, at the end of World War I, “suddenly became old,” and that has been something like my experience over the past year. At the time of my eightieth birthday last November, I was already too old and too married to consider the kind of dalliance that Howells’s character indulges. But I still felt vigorous and active and able to do almost everything I had done at a much earlier point in my life. But in January I fell and broke my right femur, necessitating insertion of a titanium rod inside my leg. Just as I was getting over that, I was felled in August with appendicitis which brought me back to the hospital. One of my friends observed that I haven’t done much during 2022 but recover. I’m hoping to get back to living again as I complete my eighty-first trip around the sun, but there is no denying that I have “suddenly become old.”
But Indian Summer is a beautiful season, and I hope that, however long it lasts for me, to enjoy its beauty as much as ever. But I will be doing it at a slower speed.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
