It sounds strange, but after spending a week in San Francisco, with its cosmopolitan and determinedly liberal — some would even say libertine — spirit, I kind of forgot what it’s like here in the Land of Zion. Fortunately, as I’ve been catching up on my blog and newspaper reading from last week, I’ve found plenty of items that remind me of those finer details that make living in Utah so very special.

1. Have you ever been apple picking? Not in the sense that this question is probably intended, i.e., walking out into an orchard with a bushel basket under my arm like an image out of a Norman Rockwell painting. However, my grandma had an apple tree in her back yard when I was a kid, and I picked fruit from it all the time, including in the autumn.
2. Is there a dish you make/eat only during this time of the year? Pumpkin pie, I guess. It’s weird — you can make the stuff anytime of year, really, but nobody ever does, do they? There’s just this brief window around the end of October through Thanksgiving when anyone actually wants it.
3. Will you attend a tail gate party this season? Definitely not. I am most assuredly not a sports person.
4. When do you turn on the heat? When it gets cold. Duh. Most years, that’s around the beginning of October, so it wasn’t inappropriate that the furnace came on the night I got back from San Francisco.
5. How many sweaters do you own? You know… I honestly don’t know. I have a wonderful wool cardigan I bought in England many years ago, and I did go through a Hemingway phase in the ’90s when I acquired a pretty extensive collection of heavy cable-knits, but off the top of my head… I don’t know.
6. Are you fond of Nouveau Beaujolais wine? The what now? I know next to nothing about wine, and what little I do know, I picked up from the one time I saw the movie Sideways.
7. Do you get excited about Halloween? I suppose so. It’s always been my favorite holiday — I always liked dressing up as a monster or a pirate when I was a kid — but these days, I think a lot of the fun is getting sucked out of it by the same retail forces that made Christmas into an annual drudgery of buying a whole new barrel of animated, light-up crap to replace all the animated, light-up crap from last year.
8. How about Thanksgiving? Nah, I’ve never been a fan of Thanksgiving. The gathering-of-the-clan stuff that many people look forward to was always a chore at best for my family, if not an outright catastrophe.
9. Is there an activity you do only in the autumn? Raking leaves. There’s not much call for it the rest of the year.
10. Have you ever burned leaves? Nope.
11. Do you own any “scarecrow” decorations? No, but my mom always hung this paper scarecrow with real straw hair in our front window for Halloween, for as many years as I can recall. She still has it; I may see if she’ll let me borrow it this year…
12. Do you plant bulbs? Nope. Not much of a gardner, I’m afraid…
13. Your fondest autumn memory? Hm. There’s a lot of them, actually, mostly associated with Halloween. I always loved walking in my elementary school’s costume parade, and there was one year when my costume — a sort-of Phantom of the Opera get-up, I suppose — was so impressive that some guy I trick-or-treated had me wait on his porch while he ran for his camera. There was another year when a neighbor created a walk-through spook alley in his barn and invited me to be one of the spooks. And I always loved going to the professional and semi-pro spook alleys; the March of Dimes Haunted Old Mill was a family tradition for a long time. There used to a lot of those “haunted attractions” around these parts; I remember when a dozen or so of the big spotlight beams they used to advertise themselves swept the valley’s nighttime skies, like London during the Blitz, all through the month of October. Most of those haunted houses are gone now, and the ones that remain are, like modern horror films, a little too horrific for my tastes.
14. When does fall begin for you? When the heat of afternoon seems to lose its oppressive quality in late August or early September. The temperature may still be in the 90s, but there’s a sort of dull quality to it, just beneath the surface, like the driving energy of summer has been spent and now the season is slowly draining away. Not long after I sense that shift in the temperature, the mountains start to turn yellow as the leaves in the higher elevations change.
15. What is your favorite aspect of fall? I like the quality of the light, that dusty golden haze that turns everything into a sepia-tone photograph. Combine that with some sweet-smelling wood smoke from a fireplace and I feel… content.
16. What do you like to drink in the fall? Cider, hot chocolate, the usual stuff. I’m thinking, however, that I may have to work Irish coffee into the rotation. There was this place in San Francisco, you see…
17. What is fall weather like where you live? Depends on which part of fall you’re talking about. Early fall around here is more like a classic Indian summer. As I said, it was pretty warm at the end of September this year, and the last couple days have been comfortable as well. However, the forecasts show the temps plunging this weekend, and it’s not unusual to have snow, or at least damn cold rain, on Halloween.
18. What color is fall? The expected answer is probably orange, but honestly I think of the blindingly blue skies we get in the early part of the season, before the storms start coming in.
19. Do you have a favorite fall chore? Hm. Not really. Raking leaves can sometimes be therapeutic. Often it’s simply Something That Must Be Done, though.
20. What is your least favorite thing about fall? The sense that another year of my life has passed and there are still so many things I’ve not accomplished.
21. What is your favorite fall holiday? There’s really only two of them, right? Halloween and Thanksgiving? And we already covered my feelings on these above…
22. What’s your favorite kind of pie? I like pumpkin quite a bit, and also a particular Dutch Apple recipe my mom makes for Thanksgiving. It has toasted coconut on top… very yummy.
23. Do you have a favorite fall book? Not a specific book, but I usually find myself in the mood to read Stephen King around this time of the year.

And there you have it… my nostalgic musings on the season. See you all at the spook alley!

There is, for example, the story of an organized band of prudes who last week bullied a state park museum in southern Utah into moving a sculpture of Kokopelli — a sculpture that has happily occupied the same spot for 19 years without causing a problem — because they were offended by his, shall we say, masculine attribute. (Kokopelli, if you don’t know, is an Indian fertility god whose abstract image is a ubiquitous motif down around the Four Corners area.) Now, you’d think people from a state that proudly boasts of having the highest birth rate in the Union would be totally down with a fertility god, especially since he’s usually rendered in a way that’s no more graphic than a well-fed stick-figure, but, well, this is Utah so you would be wrong.

(Incidentally, the same bluenoses who got all fluttery at the sight of a completely undetailed phallus that looks for all the world like a stick also wanted the park to remove a certain plant from in front of the museum because it’s known to have hallucinogenic properties and they feared having it right there by the entrance might encourage people to use it for recreation. This same plant happens to be indigenous to the area and grows pretty much all over the place.)

Then there was the item in the New York Times with the unexpected dateline of “Riverton, Utah.” That’s my hometown, you know, a one-time rural community that’s now a bedroom suburb to Salt Lake. The article describes the reaction of a crowd gathered at the Rock Creek Pizza Co. (less than a mile from the fabulous Bennion Compound!) as they watched the Palin-Biden debate last Thursday. Let’s just say I’d have felt more pride if, during Riverton’s moment in such a large spotlight, there’d been a somewhat less, ahem, uniform point of view being expressed. I’m tempted to write to the Times and let them know we’re not all marching in lockstep out here in Deseret.

Moving along, I was amused by this item (found via this), which points out that even Mormons who live in other states think Utahns are weird. Although the writer here purports that “some of the stereotypes about us are essentially true, and some are based in fantasy,” I have to say that I’ve seen all of these examples on display at one time or another during my 39 years in this state.

Lastly, the following list, sent to me in an email and supposedly attributed to comedian Jeff Foxworthy.* My out-of-state readers may not see the humor of these and may not even believe they’re for real, but trust me, they are

1. If your local Dairy Queen is closed from September to May, you live in Utah.
2. If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t work there, you live in Utah.
3. If you’ve worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you live in Utah.
4. If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed the wrong number, you live in Utah.
5. If “vacation” means going anywhere south of Salt Lake City for the weekend, you live in Utah.
6. If you measure distance in hours, you live in Utah.
7. If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you live in Utah.
8. If you have switched from “heat” to “A/C” and back again in the same day, you live in Utah.
   (I actually did this on Sunday, the first day Anne and I were back from SF.)
9. If you install security lights on your house and garage but leave both doors unlocked, you live in Utah.
10. If you can drive 75 mph through two feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you live in Utah.
11. If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit, you live in Utah.
12. If the speed limit on the highway is 75 mph, you’re going 80, and everyone is still passing you, you live in Utah.
13. If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow, you live in Utah.
14. If you know all four seasons — almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction — you live in Utah.
15. If you find 10 degrees “a little chilly” you live in Utah.
    (Another related anecdote: everyone in San Francisco was wearing jackets and scarves and apologizing to us for the chilly weather. Anne and I were comfortable in t-shirts and thought it was gorgeous.)
16. If you actually understand these jokes and forward them to all your friends, you live in Utah.

Yeah… I’m back home all right…

* For the record, I don’t believe Foxworthy really authored this list; it’s just written in his familiar “you might be a redneck” formula. I frankly would be amazed if he’d ever set foot in this state, although his folksy humor seems to be immensely popular here.