October’s sinister breath exudes an eerie odor of melancholy. It burrows into and meshes with the spirit. When I lift my nose, close my eyes, and inhale, a restless beast stirs within with a soft growl. I can feel its stealthy pacing, its claws testing its cage, its snarls at being confined. It is I and I am trapped. I become a blind frog swimming in muck, searching for a lily pad.
A foggy desperation for escape swirls through my mind, but escape from what? Life? Location? The self-imposed restraints of marriage, career, morals and peers? Escape to a freedom I’ve chased for a lifetime and never caught? Plans for action, like little B movies, swim up from some dark storage place in my psyche. Reruns from the previous fall. I visualize packing a bag, boarding a plane to escape a diaphanous despair from nowhere. But run from whom and what?
I wonder if the little, clawing beastie injected by autumn’s needle is what invades perfectly content birds and triggers their compulsory migrations. Genetically they have no choice. I think I do. Maybe not. Wondering is part of the problem.
I remember, as a boy, gazing at the graceful shifting vees of wild geese shuffling for position as they floated south over Kansas, forcing an imbedded song in my brain to the surface every fall: “I want to go where the wild goose goes.” Where do they go? I never found out. I only saw them disappear into time’s river of oblivion. There were parents to obey, school to attend, chores to do.
But, as a boy, I could work off the tug of the beastie by tearing down the block on my Batmobile scooter or becoming Tarzan and climbing a tree. Tarzan had no demons to exorcise.
As a young man I had new restraints, more school, a job to support a wife, a career to build, debts and desires to fulfill. I again and again had to ignore the fall call of the wild geese.
The autumns of middle age tried to drag me from pursuit of retirement funds, finishing a mortgage, paying alimony and adjusting my life to a new woman. I couldn’t walk away. Like the birds, I had no reasonable choice. Ah, reason, the siren of discontent.
Do my genes remember shuffling apelike and naked across a prairie in the fall when a breeze turned the noses of my tribe skyward, filled the elders with dread, and sent us scrambling south? I hope that’s it. I like the drama of that explanation.
Or maybe the beastie is merely the result of a of some childhood trauma that hibernated into the black hole of unrecoverable memories. Whatever. I can do without it. It hits me like a ball in the gut. To ease the depression, I think of going fishing, hunting, walking. The arthritis in my old hip says, “Forget that.” I’ll drive somewhere, that’s it. Where? With the price of gas and my declining eyesight? Forget that too. Get drunk? Not worth the headache. Go woman hunting? I have one—the maximum allowed in this society. Mores, rules and demands again snap onto my tail in the trap. I can only squeal and wiggle.
Fall will end. The compulsion and depression will end. It always does. But the hell of it is, fall will return. Unless . . . could it be that fall is a symbol of death, a reminder that someday I will go where the wild geese go—to oblivion?
