Falling for the Ozarks

There’s something entrancing about the dance of the leaves of fall, especially if you are lucky enough to live someplace where fall is an actual season and not a weekend event.

Fall in the Boston Mountains of Northwest Arkansas comes just when you can’t take one more day of 90-plus heat and humidity, when your car AC can’t work hard enough, and when you start to think there might be something to global warming after all.

Then, mercifully, one September morning there is a cool mist that settles on the fields, a noticeable chill in the air at night, and a wind that comes up along the hillside whistling gentle songs in the back of your consciousness.

The magic of the leaves starts with color.  Right at the tops of the branches, green slowly gives way to scarlet, vibrant orange, or vivid yellow.  Over the course of a few weeks, you can almost track the earth’s tilting by the way the colors migrate from some of the grander maples around town, down through their branches and along the roadside to smaller trees of all kinds.  Different colors for different trees, but very few are left unpainted by late October.

As grand as color is, it’s the way fallen leaves dance that entrances me most.  Flying down the back roads and highways on our bike of choice (BMW K1200 RS), it’s as if they rise up to meet us even before our tailwind catches them.  An unseen wind seems to appreciate our mutual search for speed and adventure, racing toward us across a field and swirling up a tumbling wave of painted leaves just as we cross its path.

I am mesmerized by their movement.

So it is not surprising that my husband and I found ourselves many a night this fall with maps spread out across the kitchen table plotting weekend rides.  We couldn’t stay away from the lure of the leaves.

Apparently we were not the only ones who couldn’t kick the habit.  As I learn more about motorcycling, I have discovered that I live in one of the most beautiful places in the central United States for riding.  During our many escapes this past fall, we met riders from Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Missouri and I’m sure many other places I never asked about.

All had come for a quick weekend Arkansas riding fix – to maneuver the hairpins of the Pig Trail, or follow the crooked highways of Newton County, to stop in Eureka Springs or Hot Springs for a meal or a massage, to get to the top of Mount Magazine or the bottom of the Buffalo River waterways.  Where you ride doesn’t really matter.  It’s that you get to ride that counts.