As Seasons Turn End Over End

Fall is California’s forgotten season, and also my favorite. They make movies about endless summers. Winter is famous largely for its absence, a fact rubbed in the national nose each January with the obligatory blimp shots of a sun-drenched Rose Bowl. Spring, here as everywhere, is met with a jailbreak of poets, all bursting to celebrate the bowers of flowers that bloom in the sun, and so forth.

Autumn slips past almost unnoticed, in part because it can feel so much like a mere extension of summer--hot, dry, hazy. This weekend marks the autumn equinox, the official end of summer and start of fall. The transition, I don’t doubt, will be marked as an irrelevant technicality to those headed for the beach.

To enjoy early autumn in California, it is necessary, first of all, to acknowledge it. The change of season is easy to ignore. The signs are so subtle. The sun seems to lose a few kilowatts of power. The oppressive, white sky of summer begins to blue up a tiny bit. In the early morning, a car hood now might carry a trace of dew. The Thompson grapes stocked in supermarkets finally have begun to taste like they should, sweet and ripe. And the Bermuda grass smells different, smells--from a schoolboy’s perspective--of football practice, in particular of that preseason regimen of torture known as two-a-days.

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I came to love this time of year as a kid in Fresno. The best case for autumn back then was simply that it was not summer or winter. Summer in the San Joaquin Valley meant an onslaught of 100-degree days. The sun came up too early, and too hot. The weeds grew too fast. Summer meant crawling around in the scratchy dust of an almond harvest or pushing around grain in a feed mill. These jobs maybe were great for keeping a kid out of trouble. More than anything, though, they muted any complaints about returning to school in September.

Winter, conversely, brought a variety of weather--fog, fog and fog, broken intermittently by rain. As for spring, it was terrific--until the fruit trees began to pollinate, the winds kicked up and the allergies kicked in. No, the roots of my raisin’, as Merle Haggard almost put it, run straight to fall.

In an agricultural region, late September and not Jan. 1 marks the end of one year and the beginning of the next. The raisins at last are dried and harvested, the peach and apricot trees picked clean. The migrant workers have left the vines, except for the so-called gunnysackers who come later to scavenge the undersized rejects. It is a season of relief, a time to regroup.

About the only crop grown in the town where I now live is new houses. This fact has not dampened my seasonal enthusiasm. I actually like the smell of steer manure on scalped lawns, perhaps the signature odor of the California suburban autumn. I like to watch the children marching back to school, also freshly regrouped and full of hope. This, vows my third-grader, will be the year she masters monkey bars and cursive. This, vows my preschooler, will be the year of self-tied shoes and two-wheelers.

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Tourists thin ranks in the fall. This allows Californians themselves to sample such attractions as Disneyland and Yosemite, without fear of being stampeded by strollers or flattened by a bus. In the desert, it’s still too hot for the snowbirds. They are off in the northeast corner of the country, watching the leaves turn color.

Up in San Francisco, the outward migration of tourists is something of an inside joke. Summer is San Francisco’s winter, something the travel agents often forget to tell their clients. The poor things can be seen June through August, shivering in their Bermuda shorts, waiting for a cable car. Only after they depart in September does the weather turn warm and spectacular, and it typically stays that way all fall.

In Southern California, the seasonal change is less pronounced. Some Los Angeles friends say a reliable sign of fall is the reappearance of Halloween candy displays in supermarkets. Others know it as the season when the mail-order catalogs feature fashion models dressed in coats and boots, ensembles that seem hopelessly unmatched to the broiling weather.

Mainly though, it’s the light. I remember sitting in a Pasadena backyard once, watching the sun drop with a friend from out of town. It was fall, and the sky was thick with haze and smog. Through this filter, the sun threw great streaks of red, orange and pale yellow across the sky. “Beautiful,” my visitor remarked, awe-struck. The leaves may not turn colors much in the California autumn, but the changes in the inversion layer can be spectacular.