Trekking the Landscape . In late October and early to mid-November, when you'd expect the color to have died completely out of the moors, there is still a vibrant quality to the landscape.
Individual trees dot the hillsides in bursts of orange.
A few species of oak continue to hold golden yellow tops in their slow decline towards brown. A very low brush type, bearberry perhaps, makes fiery gestures that spread across the open, brushless patches of ground. The occasional high bushes that sport red berries are stripped of leaves, revealing their bright umbrellas above wet depressions and marshland edges. And there is still green in the grasses that will later, in the bleak stretches of January through March, bleach to a soft yellow ochre. Before hunting season is in full swing, and before the first stretch of hard, sub-freezing nights, I have found this an exhilarating time to take the paint box out into the wilder reaches of Nantucket.