Ohio Is For Lovers

Fall is the best time for a wedding no matter what the sportswriters tell you

About ten thousand years ago, in what we now call southern Ohio, a massive glacier began retreating northward. The torrential glacial runoff carved deep tunnels through the soft middle layer of the land. When the tops of these tunnels collapsed, the area became one of sandstone canyons and caves, an otherwise flat state giving way to honeycombed ravines, ledges, cliffs.

Today this region is known as Hocking Hills. Over the weekend I had a chance to hike and camp there, in those sunlit canyons made all the more stunning by the dazzling, changing colors of the leaves.

Autumn surprises and delights me every year, somehow. I never get tired of the feeling of waking up on the first morning when the air feels cold on your nose and you realize another summer has come and gone. It was especially true for me this year, as I am experiencing my first real fall in a while. The northwest is so evergreen that my last decade of autumns has been marked by lowering skies and spooky fogs, but with little in the way of the light show in the trees that I grew up with. But now I’m back in the midwest and I have been rendered almost stupid by the chilly sunny days here, and the consequent transformation of the foliage. On campus the honey locusts are dripping with gold. The pin oaks and maples are turning bloodred, mostly from west to east. (Is that a concrete phenomenon or just a coincidence? No idea.) My senses are ablaze, in keeping with the scenery.

I had cause to be in Ohio for the second time in three weeks, seeing all that foliage, because of college friends getting married. Fall is full of weddings for good reason, I think. Something about the crisp air and the bright palette of the leaves lends itself to closeness, intimacy, warmth. It’s the right weather for close talking, loudly and emotionally and maybe not so clearly, the way people do when they’ve been drinking for the right reasons.

At each of these weddings it had been between four and ten years since I had seen most of the people I knew there. And when it’s been a while since you’ve seen a whole group of friends—god, how was the end of college already a decade ago?—you’re struck by the differences as much as anything: some people are heavier or skinnier, some are drinking too much or not at all, some are more reserved and some have lost the burden of their unnecessary inhibitions. But under the tasteful twinkling lights, at the champagne bar or dessert table, lingering at the edges of the dance floor, it all seems okay somehow, and if you run out of things to talk about you can fall back on smiling, knowing it feels good to be together again even if you’ve been absent too long.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. Not the end of everything but the end of everything that we might recognize. The whales and the hummingbirds. Human society, trash collection, running water. Reliable seasons. I am not so much a catastrophist as I am a realist—do you see anything getting better anywhere, anytime soon?—but wedding days and nights always pull me out of any kind of despair or distress and renew my sense of love for the world, and the hope that the future might hold some promise. (A vain hope, perhaps, but still a hope worth having.) As a result I have stopped caring that I cry at every wedding I attend regardless of the quality or content of the speeches, vows, toasts. Without fail I am going to fall apart in my seat and give myself over to the beauty of it all for as long as I can. After all it’s only love that makes the world worth saving, or mourning, in the end.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.