Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [96]
“I believe it,” Frank replied. Although, in another irony, the weather at that very moment was rather glorious. The days were still hot, while the cold between two A.M. and sunrise was sharp and bracing. Here they were, only a few weeks past the depths of their Congolese summer, and already there was frost on the leaves at dawn.
For Frank these chill nights meant the deployment of his mountain gear, always a pleasure to him. He basked in that special warmth that hominids have enjoyed ever since they started wearing the furs of other animals. Clothes made the man—and therefore one of the earliest instances of the technological sublime, which was to stay warm in the cold.
Waking up in his treehouse, Frank would wrap his sleeping bag around him like a cape and sit on the plywood edge, arms over the railing, swinging his heels in space, looking at the wall of trees across the gorge. The leaves were beginning to turn, the autumn spectrum invading the green canopy with splashes of yellow and orange and red and bronze. As a Californian Frank had seldom seen it, and had never imagined it properly. He had not understood that the colors would be all mixed together, forming a field of mixed color, like a box of Trix spilled over a lawn—spelling in its gorgeous alien alphabet the end of summer, the passing of time, the omnipresence of mortality. To all who took heed it was an awesome and melancholy sight.
He let down Miss Piggy, descended into this new world. He walked absorbed in the new colors, the mushroomy smells of decay, the clattering susurrus of leaves in the wind. The next hard frost would knock most of these leaves down, and then his jungle treehouse would be exposed to the gaze of those below. Lances of sunlight already reached parts of the forest floor they hadn’t before. The park was still officially closed, but Frank saw more and more people out there, not just the homeless but also the ordinary citizens of the city, the people who had used the park before the flood as a place to run or walk or bike or ride. Luckily the creekside roads and trails were irreparable, and few would venture up the gorge past the giant beaver dam, which had started like a beaver dam and now really was one. You had to bushwhack to get around the pond’s unstable shore. Still, the treehouse’s exposure to view would exist.
But that was a problem for another day. Now Frank walked north on the deer’s trail by the creek, observing how the variegated colors of the leaves altered the sense of space in the forest, how there seemed to be an increase in sheer spaciousness, as his depth of field now took in a vast number of individual leaves in complete clarity, be they ever so small.
And so when he ran with the frisbee guys, these leaves all functioned as referent points, and he seemed to be engaging a new GPS system that locked him more than ever into the here-and-now. He saw just where he was, moment to moment, and ran without awareness of the ground, free to look about. Joy to be out on days so fresh and sunny, so dappled and yellow. Immersion in the very image and symbol of change; very soon there would come an end to his tenuously established summer routines, he would have to find new ones. He could do that; he was even in a way looking forward to it. But what about the gibbons? They were subtropical creatures, as were many of the other ferals. In the zoo they would have been kept inside heated enclosures when temperatures dropped.
Native species, and the ferals from temperate or polar regions, would probably be all right in that regard. Very often playing frisbee they spotted white-tailed deer;