When
I first heard about the idea of “leaf peeping,” I thought it was a joke. It was
in an episode of Family Guy, as I recall, and as I had never spent an
autumn in New England, I could only assume that the “hoards” of tourists who
descend like Hellfire on the Northeast “to watch the leaves change color” was
some kind of hyperbolic mockery of people with a severely bastardized concept
of both nature and vacations…
So
it is with incredulity that I look at the Boston
Globe and see that Columbus Day was Maine’s 2nd biggest tourism weekend
because of the some 700,000 carloads of people, apparently eager to take their three-day weekend and go peep some leaves. Similarly, Eileen
Ognitz at CNN International offers
some ideas on how
to keep the kids entertained on your leaf-peeping trip, and the Aspen Times sadly reports to it’s citizenry
that the 2007
Leaf Peeping season is past it’s peak.
Where’s
the jocular ridicule? Gentle scorn? A stray facetious compliment or an
underhanded jab? Far be it from me to condemn someone’s fetish, dendrophelic or
otherwise, but has leaf-peeping moved so far into the mainstream that
journalists can’t mock it publicly? Seriously: leaf-peeping? Yes, it's pretty,
but that's a perk, not a reason. That's like paying $2200 to stay at the Ritz
Carlton because they put mints on your pillow.
Holy Shit.
I
get nature. It’s splendid, and I readily concede that a picture of the Grand
Canyon cannot begin to substitute for being there, toeing the precipice, wind
in face, sun on back, etc. But there is a sense of grandeur involved in such
things, and I have a hard time imagining that a red leaf is that much better
than a picture of a red leaf, so much so that it would be worth a 3-day
weekend that could be spent watching baseball or… you know… doing nearly
anything else.
-- Jason
O’Bryan