The Halloween Forest

A week ago my wife, son and I spent the long fall weekend of Oren's kindergarten class at the family cabin in West Yellowstone. We arrived at the tail end of what seemed like an endless summer, hot sunlight pouring smoky orange bars through the lodgepole pine. Then, overnight, a different side of fall emerged. It started with rain and finished with a half inch of snow. I looked out the window Friday morning with relief. The played-out look of another overly long and dry summer had transformed into something darker, deeper. Heavy fog, flooding off the surface of the Madison River, laid a thick layer frost on everything, and the trees were ghosts. The world was taking on new life—or death, as the case may be.

Wandering in the woods after breakfast, Oren and I found a small stick fort someone built next to a slash pile. It went without saying that it was our job, now, to improve it. After an hour or so, I stepped back to admire our work. The walls and roof were more hole than stick, but my activated imagination had no trouble filling in the gaps, seeing the castle in it. I flushed with holiday spirit. How Halloween, I thought. The Blair Witch quality was obvious. Better to credit the Aos Sí, the "hidden people" of the Celts who snuck around and moved things during Halloween's Gaelic predecessor holiday, Samhain. Their presence testifies to the seasonal thinning of boundaries between worlds. What ultimately moved me was more universal than that, though. 

On the cusp of a changing weather pattern, season, or state of matter more generally, new properties emerge. New potential. Those useless-looking branches and stumps that Oren and I used to build our castle were not dead so much as coming back to life, in play and decomposition both. While manipulating them I watched flaky lichens, strings of white mycelium, crumbling ant warrens, and chunks of cubical rot rain down.

It was time to go inside, warm our hands, and most importantly make a costume for trick-or-treating that night. The plan was to drive 40 miles south to Idaho's Harriman State Park, where "Haunts at Harriman" would kick off my favorite holiday season of the year. In the old arts and crafts drawer at the cabin we found a hot glue gun and duct tape and stickers, pipe cleaners and string and pom-poms, scraps of zebra- and leopard-print fabric, watercolors and more; stuff from when Oren's aunts and uncles were kids. But the two of us were at a loss for costume ideas until Jen chimed in. A parrot it is. I cut out the mask, Oren painted and decorated it, and for wings we sandwiched rows of colored feathers between lines of masking tape. Knotted string kept them looped to his fingers. There was nothing remotely scary about it, but like the stick fort I believed it to be Halloween-y in a more important sense: a shoestring operation that brought magic from the mundane.

We went to Harriman early so we could get a good walk in before trick-or-treating. Starting along the banks of the Henry's Fork River, we passed through stands of lodgepole pine, crossed marshy creeks on sturdy bridges, soaked in sun along the east shore of Silver Lake, and eventually circled around to the edge of an expansive meadow near the back of the ranch area. Hiking is not a traditional Halloween activity, but it should be. What a time to experience the forest: the way that melting frost gives body and tone to the exhausted forms of late summer. The woven textures and colors of an herbaceous understory laid down by recent rain and wind. Many autumns, fungi steal the show—that kingdom of life which, for no reason I can see, has never joined the crowded pantheon of Halloween iconography. 

This was not a year for mushrooms, but I happily settled for lichens, plump and vivid as they were with the recent moisture. Especially impressive to me was a Lepraria species—sometimes known as “fluffy dust”—that covered rotting stumps with a pale-green, zombie-skin patina, not unlike the biofilm creeping out of Beetlejuice's hairline and across his temples. Even at the height of the Halloween season it might be wrong to always conjure the morbid from the natural like this. The danger is missing the beauty and importance of the life-death dynamic that is the real cause for celebration. (I mean, I'm still guilty of it, and admit that's half the fun.) The aspen on our walk had already lost their leaves. Their gold was on the ground, spoiling to a fecund black, and seeing the trees so freshly skeletal was a marvel onto itself.

For an early picnic dinner we leaned against a long, low cabin that a sign labelled the sheep barn. We had both sun and shelter from the wind there and felt like we needed both. There were still 10 minutes to spare when we finished, so Oren and I checked out the barn. It was no longer used for sheep but incorporated into the side of a horse corral, and we paused to relish the slightly ominous vibe of the outdoors reclaiming the indoors. The windowpanes were broken. The edges of the walls were tunneled back and forth by ground squirrels. Piles of horse manure took on startling dimensions framed among walls like that. Next door, in front of the hay barn, we lingered among a collection of old farming implements. If this was a slasher film those horse-drawn movers and cultivators and plows would reappear as torture racks. For Oren and I they were puzzles: how did the gears come together? Which rod turned which? What did they do? The feeling of time past—original owners long dead, and a world changing so rapidly so as to make the past appear irrelevant—was the solemnity in the air that went without saying.

It was with some misgivings on my part that 5 o'clock arrived and we started toward the site of the festivities. The setting itself is spectacular: the Railroad Ranch is a small, historic residential area of the park named after E. H. Harriman. He was one of the wealthiest Americans of his time, with much of his money coming from his directorship of the Union Pacific. The Railroad Ranch is laid out like a western movie set with a short lane about two blocks and log structures strung out along each side. How strange, then, to see the place taken over by that most recent fad of Halloween yard decoration, the blow-up inflatable. There were dozens of them, each with its respective extension cord and whirring fan and sometimes a generator thumping alongside; Snoopys and Star Wars, pirate ships and horse-drawn buggies and a shark attack incongruently high-centered on a pumpkin; dozens of seemingly random cultural referents jumbled together.

Even if you think, like I do, that the commodification of Halloween is one huge distraction from what gives the holiday value, it can still make for a rich experience. I like camp: the cheap fabrics, piece-meal costumes and overacted parts of amateur theater. I like grotesque: and I don't just mean celebrity impersonators and the other undead, but clashing colors and garish plastics, the whole green-purple-orange aesthetic. Halloween decorations are huge pieces of plastic junk that succeed by their hideousness. They read like meta-commentary on the category of conspicuous consumption to which they belong. There is something fantastically, mesmerizingly wrong about the process of decay rendered in vinyl; and something almost endearing about the way people pay to cover their homes and businesses in matted nets of fluorescent plastic wool. Some small part of these decorations gesture toward spider webs. What about the greater part of it? Is the consumerist irony meaningful or unwitting?

Generations of talented historians have commented upon the social functions of Halloween, Samhain, Día de Muertos, Otsukimi, and the dozens of other autumnal festivals of life and death. This is the traditional time for harvest and slaughter, hunting and cutting wood, remembering the dead and honoring the saints, and otherwise acknowledging the blessings and curses of mortality. It is much more difficult to say what Halloween means to America today, let alone how much a majority culture even exists from which we can generalize.

I choose to regard Halloween decorations as memento mori. I stick up for them in theory, insofar as the denial of death is our default mode, our time on earth can suffer for it, and these seem to be attempted correctives for it. However successful. When I actually see those decorations in action, I often feel more ambivalent. In the thrall of so much novelty I feel my eyes go glazed and sticky as a caramel apple. I skim the surface of things, growing increasingly hungry and impatient, and, in short, don't reckon with my existential condition by any means. 

At Harriman, my immoderate run on free cider, cocoa, cookies and individually wrapped pieces of candy was no small part of my problem. The sight of children in the store-bought guise of blood-splattered murderers was squirmy: too many horror stories in the news. On only the most recent and local level, a reported bear mauling fatality in nearby Gallatin Canyon was just revealed to not be bear-related at all, but a homicide by “multiple chop wounds,” according to the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office. Meanwhile, in the park, a Minnesota father was in a different kind of race against winter, one well outside the agricultural tradition of the holiday. He was trying to locate and recover his son's body from the slopes of Yellowstone's highest peak before the snows set in.

Our trick-or-treat walk finished at the waiting area for a hay ride up the river. In the bubbling excitement of the moment, a dozen or so of us climbed into a dump trailer, chose straw bale seats and settled in for the ride. Then we started rolling and the energy instantly changed. The previous group of riders had pulled up wearing sunglasses. We were setting off just minutes after the last sun left the meadow and we could see its warmth withdrawing rapidly up the edges of the caldera. The wind felt awfully cold, and for all the Klim snowmobiling jackets present, I think Jen was the only one actually prepared for it. Parents huddled with kids. There was nothing to distract us anymore from Halloween. My Halloween, that is; the spirit of the season that moves me. I saw it in the silence and remoteness of the mountains. I felt it in the briefness of the sun, the weakness of its rays, our vulnerability to the wind, and the coming of the dark.

Jen, Oren and I left the Railroad Ranch in a crowd. Once we passed the turn to the first parking lot, however, we were on our own. A mile of trail remained to where we left the truck at the entrance gate. I was surprised all over again by just how fast the light was deserting us. Already Oren was asking for his headlamp, to which Jen and I had the same response: resist the tunnel vision of its glow. Keep looking around, practice your night vision. The payoff started immediately. Along with the swans and geese and pelicans and ducks in the river, we counted the swimming Vs of three mammals—beaver, it looked like, although there could've been a muskrat or two. A pattern of pale dots on a hillside across the river materialized into the recognizable form of a grazing elk herd. That helped explain the haunting sounds we'd been hearing: in between the crunches of our feet on gravel and trucks grinding down the highway, faint coyote yips mixed with elk bugles. 

The hood of the truck was already glazed with frost and sent my cardboard cup, with its final sip of cider, splashing to the ground as I dug out the keys. On the highway we watched the moon—only one night past the Hunter's Supermoon—birth from the black horizon of the Yellowstone plateau in massive, supernatural orange. Slowly my thoughts returned to the animals we'd seen. At the end of the day nothing's more Halloween than wildlife biology. The transition from natural bounty to grim austerity that's taking place all around us. Had those elk put on enough fat? How deep would the snowpack get? Who would succumb before green up?

The next morning, early and alone, I walked into the trail-less expanses of Yellowstone's Madison Basin. I took pictures of fog and frost that spoke to me of blurred boundaries between life and death, of this reality's proximity to another. I pulled the decomposed skull of a bull elk from a sandy creek bottom by its large rack. I took pictures of lichen. I remembered what I could from a book by Joy Williams that I'd just finished:

" … he conversed with her as it is said animals converse with death, knowing, the way men can't, that death is too big to be buried in the ground, that it prefers to walk and feed among us … it is the knowledge of death which shapes us, which gives us the form by which we shall be known."

My goal was to find a bison carcass that I knew from ski trips in the area two winters earlier. That was a very hard one on ungulates, a very good one for wolves. I'd seen the bison when it was alive—a member of a herd—and I saw it within a week or two of its death, mostly skeletanized and hopping with ravens. It took some searching, but I found it. It still smelled, still had some beetles crawling on it. In the museum of autumn there is one miracle on permanent display: how the inanimate becomes animate, and vice versa.

On my way out, I walked through lodgepole stands regenerating from the '88 fires, that world-famous exemplar of the wisdom of nature's cycles. And I walked through places where that regrowth burned over again, to an unanticipated degree, 34 years later. That was a kind of wake-up call to us in 2016. Even very recent burns weren't the fire buffers we thought them to be. A deeper cycle—promising a deeper disruption—was kicking in. Closer to my home in Livingston, I can point out burns that are almost 20 years old now, phantom forests where you can walk a mile without noticing a single sapling.

The sun was finally out now but the frost wouldn't melt until noon. The conditions felt unfamiliar, even though they were merely seasonal, and I only had to go back a few days to remember the most recent record highs we'd had in the linear trajectory of unprecedented heat that has been going on for years. The greatest lesson of seasonal celebrations is that things come and go but the pattern remains the same. Such consolation seems lacking, now, and it's the arrival of the cold that feels like a return to life.