Jacoby

I stepped onto my back porch on a recent evening, long after the dark had come, and I winced slightly as you do when you expect to encounter a draft of chilly air that slinks down your neck.

But the light breeze on my cheeks was as soft as a mother’s caress.

It was the third day of October.

October is a milestone month by my reckoning.

Once September has gone, I no longer trust Baker County’s climate, at least not after the Elkhorns have done away with the sun for the day.

If I’m going outdoors in the gloaming I don a jacket, even if I doubt I’ll need the garment to ward off hypothermia.

The air in our mountain valley, once deprived of sunlight, tends to shed degrees with a speed shocking to those accustomed to more moderate climes.

But this year, as sometimes happens, a vestige of summer persisted for the first few days of October. Later that evening the weather station next to my bed showed 68 degrees at 8 p.m. On many a July evening it’s not that warm so far into the day.

I don’t much mind such unseasonable intervals, to be sure.

Winters hereabouts are sufficiently cruel, and long, that I don’t feel bereft because of a balmy night in fall, when it might well be frosty instead.

Still and all it was a slightly queer sensation to stand there on the stoop, with a pumpkin perched on the top step, and willow leaves thick on the lawn, and the stars already sharply defined against the black backdrop not long past 7 o’clock.

The body adjusts to the seasons, and though the transition is not so precise as on the calendar or the thermostat, it is no less tangible.

Well before Halloween, I come to instinctively associate darkness with at least a palpable chill, and quite possibly with outright frigidity.

I brace for the shock every time I step outside, and when it goes missing I notice its absence, though I don’t mourn it.

Soon enough, I know, the crispness of a fall day will seem nostalgic as I struggle to scrape the layer of hoarfrost the car windows have accumulated after another arctic night.

A 40-degree evening that in October provokes a minor chill, tinged with pleasant pine smoke that wafts from nearby chimneys rather than from distant wildfires, will, in the depths of January, seem positively springlike.

On the night before Halloween we drove out to the dark lands east of town, hoping to see the northern lights.

We did not.

At least we did not see the shifting swathes of green and red, dancing across the sky, that define the popular image of the phenomenon.

Living as far as I do from the arctic circle I have no reason, of course, to expect that sort of light show.

Only rarely does the sun get feisty enough to paint the night sky here, halfway between the equator and the north pole, with even a pale version of the spectacular scenes common in Alaska or Canada.

But the mere possibility is enough to compel me to stand in the dark, blinking away the tears provoked by the bracing breeze of late October and trying to discern any hint of brightness on the northern horizon.

We met my daughter, Rheann Weitz, and her husband, Jesse, where the Keating Road branches off Highway 86. It’s plenty dark out there, and with a sprawling view to the north.

I stood beside their pickup truck and tried to entertain my grandsons, Brysen, 4, and Caden, 2. Caden was belted into his car seat and not terribly interested in the proceedings. Brysen was not so confined. And although he didn’t seem to care much about the northern lights, he was awfully insistent about being able to get out of the pickup.

My wife, Lisa, and I thought we detected a slight greenish glow in a narrow band on the horizon.

Probably this was the product of wishful thinking rather than of a coronal mass ejection.

But it was nice enough to stand there, listening to the ever-interesting chatter of a 4-year-old, until the wind, which is far more reliable than celestial spectacles, overcame our optimism and drove us into the shelter of the car.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.