Every year on October 13 I drive from the Front Royal entrance of Shenandoah National Park to the Rockfish Gap exit. The drive is a hundred and five miles along the Skyline Drive, ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, five or six hours at the speed the road requires. I stop when I want to stop. I get back in the car when I am ready.
I have been doing this for several years now. It has become a date I protect.
The October 13 tradition started without design — a coincidence of available time and good weather that produced an experience I decided needed to be repeated. What surprised me the first time was not the colour, which I had been told about. What surprised me was the scale of it. The entire mountain in transformation, every tree a different stage of the same process, the particular light of October that has no equivalent in any month I had previously lived.
In Kenya the seasons are wet and dry. The changes are real but they are changes of water and brown and green. They do not produce this — this specific combustion of a temperate forest moving through autumn, which is not a dying but a display, the trees doing the most vivid thing they do all year in the weeks before they go bare.
What the October 13 drive does, functionally, is reset something. The week before it I am whatever I have been — occupied with work, with the ongoing maintenance of an immigrant life, with the various negotiations that life requires. The week after it I am the same person with a recalibrated interior. Something has been put in perspective that was getting too large.
I have tried to explain this to people who grew up in places with autumn and found that it does not translate. The season is furniture to them — pleasant, familiar, background. To someone from the equator, it is still an event. Fifteen years of Octobers have not fully domesticated it. I am still surprised by it every year, which is part of why I go.
The drive ends at Rockfish Gap as the light is going. I get back on the interstate headed north toward Northern Virginia. The mountains are behind me. I will be back in eleven and a half months.
The date is in my calendar with no description, just the number. Anyone who asks I tell: it is the mountains. That is enough.
These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.