A Lewisian Year

Presented in partnership with the Lewisia Communications Board and Lewisia Public Library

Sponsored by The Historical Society

Hello, readers, listeners, and psychic osmosizers! Welcome to A Lewisian Year, a monthly showcase celebrating the rich culture here in the Lake Lewisia district. Each month, we'll highlight some seasonal events, local celebrations and interpretations of national and world holidays, and historical tidbits.

JUNE

Midsummer Bonfires

It's Midsummer Day, and you're headed to the park through the noonday heat. But this time, it won't be to cool off in the shade of the trees or around the fountains where children splash in the water. No, it's only going to get hotter, thanks to a dozen or so large bonfires burning on temporary platforms dotted around the park. As you walk, you carry with you a stone, about the size of your outstretched palm and fingers, softly rounded in a way that suggests it might have spent a few eons in a riverbed long ago.

In the park, the air is thick with wood smoke, which spirals up in grey towers over each of the bonfires. The bonfires are heaped high with fallen limbs gathered from the forest over the past year, and it took weeks to assemble them all here. Each fire has an attendant watching over it so the burn stays safely contained. As always for such events, there are booths selling food and local crafts scattered between the fires. Maybe you'll grab an ear of roasted corn or a s'more later (though these are never cooked using the bonfires, as that's seen as depleting their power and thus bad luck). But most people quickly drift back to one particular fire or another. Their eyes stay fixed on the platform under the bonfire and the ring of stones assembled there--on their stone, wherever it may sit in the circle.

You find an empty spot around a fire and, with the use of iron tongs to save your hands, nudge it into place around the flames. As the sun beats down and the fire crackles, the stones bask in all that heat, soaking it up. How long this goes on depends on the year, because what you are waiting for is true midsummer, the moment when the day stretches as long as it will all year. This year, 2021, that won't happen until 8:32 PM in Lewisia. So the fires burn until then, standing in for the sun for the short time after it sets in the evening.

When midsummer arrives, the stones are pulled out away from the fire to cool. Some people wrap them up in blankets when they are ready to go home, the insulation more symbolic than practical. You just wait until it is cool enough to touch barehanded, and then you carry it back to your home. It will sit in the house--sometimes on mantles, or on bedside tables, or tucked at the back of the kitchen counter--all through the year. In the depth of winter, it is said, the midsummer stone in a house will keep the people warm against all odds. It is a little piece of summer sunlight and the promise of warmth to come, sustaining people through darker, colder times.

Pride

The annual Gay Pride events in Lake Lewisia seem to lack some of the wild flair of the event in other cities. Previous years have seen themes on outreach, community history, and representation of marginalized voices both in the wider world and within the community itself. The events are characterized more by volunteer hours than parades and more by art exhibits than merchandise booths. (I hear the community dance and fireworks display, though, is a very good time if you're the outgoing sort!)

This year's theme--"Season the Soup, Raise the Roof"--focuses on food and housing insecurity for QUILTBAG individuals throughout the nation. Members of the community are far more likely than the general population to experience homelessness at some point in their lives, often as a result of abusive family circumstances. Plenty of Lewisia residents found their way to the town for the first time during their own experience with homelessness born out of rejection by their former families and communities.

Observances this year include a number of volunteer opportunities around the community and outside it. The mixed-use building at Prism Place, which houses the largest queer collective within the town boundaries and the retail space they run to support themselves, is raising funds for repairs to the roof and heating systems of the building. Sea Mink Pastries needs help with baking bread to take to soup kitchens around Marguerite County and surrounding counties. Also, trips are being organized to distribute the latest prototype from Shipwreck Repair Collective for a pop-up living space to help shelter the unhoused in those areas. This iteration of the tent-like structure boasts more legs than previous versions for faster rescues and escapes, as well as an improved guiding intelligence (about which the representative from the Collective was rather cagey--industry secrets, I suppose).

Summer Art Walk

Toward the end of the month, the downtown area will be bursting with even more art than usual as exhibits go up for the Summer Art Walk. From still-lifes and landscapes to portraits and abstracts, new pieces created for the event and some old favorites brought out of galleries and private collections will all be made available to the public to walk. Taste the chalk pastel fruits and walk the shaded paths of pointillist forests. Slip between the brushstrokes and into worlds real and imagined within the frames.

Don't worry if your sense of direction seems insufficient to the task of such an exploration. Expert artists and adventurers both will be on call in case anyone gets a little lost. There is, I hear, a whole team of guides available to help people navigate an Escher-inspired pastoral piece this year, where infinite flocks of sheep graze up gravity-defying hills.

I was lucky enough to be treated to a preview of one of this year's pieces, something a little different even for those who are regular attendees of the Art Walk. Studio Tallaios, the bronze work partnership between sisters M'kayla and Soriya Johnson, has created an interactive sculpture. Without revealing too much of the surprise, I can say the piece took inspiration from both sea caverns and the architectural traditions of the Doorway Maximalism movement. I only took a short tour of the piece, and even that much required me to don a harness and rope to ensure I could find my way back. It was, I promise, worth the possible risks.

This Month in History

On June 2, 1921, the Sunglow Distillery, then only a backyard operation, exploded in a shower of high-proof liquor and spirits of a more supernatural sort. Only a year and a half into Prohibition, Charles Fojt had been making a good living brewing and distributing his moonshine throughout much of the west coast. It was during this time that the multigenerational rivalry began between the Fojt family and the Espinoza family, vineyard owners intent on maximizing the legal loopholes that existed in the Eighteenth Amendment regarding grape juice and wine.

However, in his eagerness to outdo Pedro Espinoza, Fojt had been expanding his operation into land abutting his small farm. As it turned out, several human graves existed on those lands and the spirits of the place considered the moonshine brewing over their final resting places to be partially theirs. Letters written by Fojt at the time indicated he suspected the haunting around his stills but chose to ignore it. The explosion--which created a soft and highly intoxicating rain for several miles around--seems to have been the last resort of the frustrated spirits.

Following the explosion, Fojt relented and began making regular offerings of moonshine in the general vicinity of the gravesites. After that, and the rebuilding of his equipment, he saw ever-increasing success throughout the duration of Prohibition.

That's a taste of what June has to offer us. See you next month, when July brings heatwave hatchings and a convention for every occasion.