How you can tell it’s fall in L.A., according to a guy from Vermont
As the leaves turn colors, we can make out fall in LA’s skies from the sky.
“It’s quite a spectacle,” Adam Pritchard told me from his home in the hills of northwestern Vermont, after a rare cold snap that dropped below zero in Burlington over the weekend.
For the last three days, I’ve traveled back and forth between two neighboring states, a trip I made three years ago, while on assignment for a magazine, and a current assignment for Quartz. When I was there, it was the first time I saw fall in person. I’d never once seen the color red.
Pritchard is a writer and photographer based in the tiny town of Dighton. In his recent book, “Saints in Vermont,” he visits the St. George Orthodox Church in Dighton one Sunday a month, and he has lived in the town his whole life. He describes the fall color as the most important part of the season, and he’s convinced it’s the reason he fell in love with the West Coast.
And he is convinced that fall in L.A. is an experience even the locals don’t get to experience because they move to LA City each year.
“Los Angeles is about to have its very first full fall in 50 years,” Pritchard said, sitting on a plastic lawn chair in his front yard. We were both warmly clothed, but he had on a fleece coat and I wore shorts.
“It’s only an illusion,” he said, “but an important one. … It’s an important part of the year, and it’s one of the things that make California special.”
I found Pritchard while researching fall in San Francisco. He had written for a publication called North Coast Live, a magazine that covers the North Coast of California, and I wondered why his fall in Vermont is his fall in California.
I emailed him about his theory and we settled on Sunday, October 18, one day after the official start of fall.
“It was cold, and my dad was home from the hospital, so we were driving back and forth all week, and this Sunday was my favorite day