First frost

It frosted yesterday. Melon leaves are wilted. 

A melon field looks its worst the morning after the first frost.

I always look forward to the first frost. 

By October I am ready for summer's end. It has been over 50 years since I have been in school, but the first cool mornings always signal the same thing to me, the switch from farm to school, from being outside to being inside. I miss the school bells.

I still grow a few melons to eat and give away, but most of my attention has moved to the eight acres of grape vines I planted on the pumice-soil portion of my farm. My 60 acres are a piece of the 180 acres my great-grandfather, a veteran of the Union Army, purchased in 1883. I am installing propane-powered wind machines that stir up the air on mornings when temperatures drop into inconveniently-timed frosts. In the spring frosts might damage new buds, and in fall frosts can damage grapes before they are ready to harvest. Cold air drifts down off the two Table Rocks on its way to the Rogue River and settles on the ground at my farm. My farm is a "cold" one, meaning it gets frosts when other places, alongside slopes where the cold air drifts off, do not.

Cold air is heavier than warm air, so sometimes frosty air is just hugging the ground and warmer air is above it. Those are "inversions." The propellers mix the air and so long as there is warmer air above it the mixed air is above freezing temperature. Sometime it is simply cold, all the way up. Wind machines are an imperfect solution to frost damage.

The first frost is the real two-way-facing symbol in my life, not the Janus that gives the name to January and the new year. The first frost brings me memories of this time, August 1967, a few weeks before I left for college. I earned and saved a Harvard tuition -- $1,760 my freshman year -- by fighting forest fires by day and growing and selling melons to local fruit stands and grocers early mornings and weekends. This is the "before" moment, when it is still summer.

I am on the right. My father is next to me. My brother, David, holds the watermelons. Two cousins visiting from Syracuse, New York, are on the left. 

The "after" moment takes place primarily indoors, in classrooms, libraries, and then, in my adulthood, in offices wearing suits and ties.

In previous decades, October represented something new, open-ended, and generally very good in my mind. I liked being in school and I liked my work as a financial advisor. In my youth, at the time of the photo above, the end of summer meant I was leaving the sweat and physical work of fields and forests and getting getting back to the serious business of promoting social change. My generation was going to change the world and fix everything.

This October is different. It contains an element of dread. My fellow countrymen may well pick Trump to be their leader. Even if they don't, Trump is already claiming the election would be rigged against him, that the media was unfair to him, thus voiding the results, and that voting fraud will have taken place in whatever places he lost. I see no chance that Trump will concede an election defeat. More troubling to me is that I expect that Fox News, Republican officeholders, and a great many of my neighbors will echo Trump. They will claim victory, and stick to the story. It almost worked in 2020.The wrath of GOP voters will descend on anyone who hesitates to agree. Fox lost audience when they reported that Arizona voted for Biden. It won't make that mistake again. Republican officeholders saw what happened to Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the others. Politically, the nation is heading into a storm.

But on the farm, things are quiet. That system is working as it should. The melons are dead. The leaves will start falling off the grapes and the plants will go dormant for a few months. 

It's all okay.

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