When we saw colored pictures of a Vermont autumn forest it was another fairy thing and we frankly didn't believe it

When we saw colored pictures of a Vermont autumn forest it was another fairy thing and we frankly didn't believe it. In school we memorized Snowbound and little poems about Old Jack Frost and his paintbrush, but the only thing Jack Frost did for us was put a thin skin of ice on the watering trough, and that rarely. To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America