Sam Venable has been on staff at the Knoxville News-Sentinel since 1970, as outdoors editor until 1985 and as a humor columnist since then. He is the author of 10 books, including “Mountain Hands: A Portrait of Southern Appalachia” and “Someday I May Find Honest Work.”
Poets may wax eloquent about rare days in June all they wish. Same for songwriters who coin silly verse praising those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. More power to them. But if I could capture a single moment of the year, seal it in a bottle and dispense it when my senses begged for seasonal relief, I’d make my selection on some still, somber day in mid-November.
In the highlands of eastern Tennessee, this is a quiet, regal time, gently aged to perfection. Here is a soul-soothing wedge that arrives after the riot of October color subsides, yet well before the onslaught of shameless merchandising turns December into bedlam. November is as comforting to the psyche as a second helping of pumpkin pie is to the belly. Its weather is the same as Goldilocks discovered with Baby Bear’s porridge: not too cold, not too hot, juuust right.
OK, so maybe April runs a close second, especially if we have endured a drizzly, bone-chilling March that clings to the woodlands like pine tar. Barely in the nick of time, April will come wafting in on southerly breezes, bathing the landscape in sunshine and dotting the forests with dogwood, trillium and bloodroot in full flower.
But let us not think of spring at this moment. Let us savor every second of the final days in autumn.
Perhaps November wouldn’t be so attractive if I were forced to spend Thanksgiving weekend inching along some distant interstate or standing in lines at crowded airports. Such are the delights of being a native in November. Travelers must come to you.
Perhaps, too, I wouldn’t love this month so much if I didn’t fish. In my corner of southern Appalachia, November is when smallmouth bass retreat from summer depths and hungrily prowl the shallows of mountain reservoirs. You won’t find many fly fishers tossing large popping bugs from a bass boat in November, but those who do know a secret I probably shouldn’t be revealing.
The only thing better than fishing in November is hunting. This is the month bucks begin rutting and the deer season opens. It’s when pointers and setters are loosed from their kennels, free to fill their nostrils with the perfume of ruffed grouse, woodcock and bobwhite quail. It’s when the first flights of mallards streak across morning skies. It’s when Junior’s redbone coon hound from down the valley begins singing nightly choruses on the ridge above my log house.
Havilah Babcock (1898-1964) understood this seasonal euphoria completely. During his 27-year tenure as head of the English department at the University of South Carolina, Babcock wrote copiously about the joys of late autumn in the southland.
One of his most memorable volumes is a book that sits on the top shelf of my home library. Rarely does a fall go by that I don’t take it down, pour a cup of coffee (or whiskey and a splash, depending on the hour of the day), poke in the fireplace at glowing oak I split by hand the year before, and re-read Babcock’s essay that lent its name to the book’s title: “My Health is Better in November.”
So is mine.
