Olga Klietzing’s box camera. Olga grew up on the Lucky Me homestead outside of Juneau.
You rarely hear anyone say, “Man, I wish I brought a camera!” anymore. This is the age of immediate documentation of experience. Olga Klietzing was born around 1904, Her brother was Able Anderson. She was one of the first women boat operators in southeastern Alaska, at first she ran a little gas boat back and forth from Juneau to Tennakee. Then she fished for salmon. She claimed to me that she was the first woman to fish her own boat alone. She started sometime in the mid thirties. She told me when she did it caused quite a fuss because she said, “all the men and their wives thought they weren’t going to be able to hang them selves out of their pants and pee over the side of the boat.” It didn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem… nor had it been for the men who had taken their wife’s with them fishing for years before that. There was just something about a woman running her own boat, fishing independently for fish that caused the scandal to come up. Olga admitted it was just “ridiculous” she herself peed in a bucket and stayed well enough away from the other trollers to not catch site of anything “scandalous” on deck and that problem faded. The issue of independent women overtaking the fishery didn’t raise its head until later in the seventies but by then, again it didn’t seem to be much of a problem but a welcome change when everyone was anchored up at night and the women would often have brownies with marijuana baked into them.
But the point being… change is always happening but we turn our mind to it more in the change from summer to fall than from any other two seasons, at least I do and I always have. Fall always meant going back to school and I saw the dinner before school started as akin to the Last Supper. Except there was no rising. No hope of resurrection.
As a fan of traditional haiku every season and every shift of almost every week has its own distinct emotional corollary. Early plum blossoms of May have the feel of the first hint of infatuation where the late plum blossom of mid-June indicates the full throated expression of erotic intention. Where the “rotten plum spiked on yellow grass” of late August/ early September represents the sadness of a romance which has been spent and gone wrong. So, as I have grown older this time of year brings with it a feeling of cheating death. Maybe that’s why I’ve liked living here in that all the seasons feel like fall and I am always cheating death, and every day I has that autumnal feel of melancholy joi de vivre. Here the fires are banked down and the dreams are inner. The magic comes deep within as the story tellers voice. This is what I think of as the magic of the northern voice that turns on this kind of change, this kind of weather the long day to the long night, warm to cool. Darkness with the fire popping up to the stars. Daylight with the bugs humming all around you. The mind is bifurcated. Unlike the magic realism of South American writers where ghosts float up into the world, in the north the mind chases down into the underworld, where Grendel can be tempted out.
And it all begins now, as the earth tilts north away from the sun.
What monster lies here
buried under yellow grass,
my love, my grieving?
jus
Here is a recording of me reading the first chapter from Ed Lin’s “Ghost Month” which is a lunar month which includes August in Taiwan, when there spirits of the dead visit the living. It is a wonderful crime novel.
This morning started off foggy with rain, like waking up inside of a summer cloud. Then the sun burned through for several hours and the cloud closed down by late afternoon. We saw blue skies after lunch but by three thirty it felt likes south eastern wind and rain were gathering us up in a quilt: a humid quilt. A man on the radio said we were at the peek of the summer green foliage and “from here on out the trees would be turning towards autumn.” It was the FM radio station.
The Alder leaves are starting to curl and some are turning yellow. Some of the vines in the underbrush are wilting down and will soon be mulch. Spider webs are plentiful everywhere and in the morning they are heavy with moisture and sag with pearls. The wind through the trees carries a scent of moldy rot. Our potted plants hold on to their flowers but the flowers are clearly weakening their grip. Late summer: turning to fall. Like a middle age man turning to fat. Not me, you understand… not unless I get to live to a hundred and seventy one.
