Foliage Freaks

"Enjoy, the beauty of New England on a fall foliage tour," exhort the travel brochures, conjuring up visions of rustic splendor only hours away from the seasonless megalopolis. All too often, city folk who drive to the rural areas of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine in search of autumn find each other instead. The once solitary experience of watching the leaves turn color has become a mass spectator sport in the Northeast.

Lines of out-of-state cars this fall sped past blazing vistas along the highways, then spilled onto narrow country roads, causing slowdowns near picturesque spots. "I've covered more accidents caused by people running across a street or highway to take a picture," said New Hampshire State Trooper T.R. Korbet. Growled one tourist: "The traffic is so bad along the Mohawk Trail that they had to bring out Indians to entertain all the leaf freaks sitting in their cars with nothing to do."

Following two snowless winters, which have spelled near disaster for the New England ski industry, business and tourist officials were merchandising the foliage as never before. Ski areas opened their chair lifts and gondolas for bird's-eye viewing of the foliage, and towns held foliage festivals, turkey shoots and lumberjack breakfasts. Travel agencies booked tree-watching tours on buses, sightseeing boats, antique steam engines and even World War I biplanes.

Fresh Antiques. Nightly TV foliage reports and toll-free telephone bulletins on "peak color" kept thousands of viewers up-to-date on the most colorful areas. Varying with temperature and elevation, maples displayed the most brilliant reds, and birches, beeches and oaks were at their brightest yellows and oranges in mid-October this year.

If shopping were not on the tourist's mind, it might have occurred to him while he was stalled in heavy traffic on a back road, a captive audience to seasonal radio commercials. "Colorful sweaters to rival the surrounding hillsides with their brilliance," gushed one commercial in New Hampshire. Along the byways, picturesque barns bulged with suspiciously fresh antiques, and every front yard seemed the site of a garage sale of faded castoffs rescued from the attic.

Though it was no longer exactly the lonely countryside of Thoreau, most tourists, nonetheless, did not seem to mind either the fast hustle or the crowds. Those not prudent enough to reserve hotel rooms weeks in advance seemed content to sleep in their cars, turning on heaters periodically to ward off frost. Others considered it quaint fun to be matched up with locals who turned their homes into "foliage houses"--that is, they rented out their guest bedrooms for $5 to $10 per person. Even the traffic was bearable for true leaf watchers. Said Donna Carpenter, a former New Englander on a weekend visit to New Hampshire: "If you could drive fast, you wouldn't see as much."

All the fuss over foliage bewildered some natives. Watching the traffic creep past him, one old Granite State sage concluded, "After they go home I've got to pick up all these leaves."

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