James Taylor sang it more than fifty years ago in a Badger favorite song, Walking Man, and every September in the Blue Ridge the line still lands. It’s not yet the full riot of October in our mountains but just the first quiet Labor Day color shift in the highest elevations.
Green still holds the ridges and mist still pools in the hollows, but the mountain ash has already put on its red berries, the white flowers are fading at the edges, and the light has a lower, honeyed slant that tells you a season is about to turn its face.
The featured image was captured along the Blue Ridge Parkway as the holiday was letting go. Layers of mountains receding into haze. A broken limb reaching across the frame like a question. Berries burning against the last of the summer green. While It is not peak color, it is the coming of autumn – the moment Taylor meant when he wrote that the goose has gone to fly and that ones like Badger should not let the yearning for the change in seasons pass him by.
Badger can relate to the man who keeps walking as the mountains keep turning. For a few minutes in the Craggies, I stood still long enough to once again capture a special transitional moment.
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