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.

NOVEMBER

DST Ends: A Follow-up Interview

It's my first visit to the community college since my town tour at initiation, and I am being unceremoniously ushered to the back of a back building, on the very farthest edge of the campus. My guide, Dr. Edna Warsaw, smiles sheepishly when I point this out.

"It's the coolant system," she explains as she swipes us through the first door of an airlock. "When the program started, we needed a lot of space around the labs to accommodate refrigerant cycling equipment. As that technology has improved, we've been able to move it into the building's footprint. Here, you'll need this."

I'm handed a series of cleanroom garments that leave me, after some fussing, cloaked from hair to sole and very warm. Everything seems to be insulated. There are lighter versions hanging on the wall, which I'm told are preferred by those actively working in the labs. Saving time, it seems, can be sweaty work.

The room beyond the airlock chills me even through the cloaking. Frost rimes the hands of several clocks, whose second hands have not moved since I stepped inside. Several pairs of insulated gloves have been left on the workbenches, tossed aside while their owners--a handful of physicists, Ph.D. students, and technicians--left for a quick thaw-out break. Banks of equipment all have hoses sprouting through and around them, pumping away the heat generated by captured time, chilling it until it slows enough to be preserved.

This is the Time Savers Laboratory, where every autumn, the spare hours generated by the end of Daylight Savings Time are donated by volunteers and put into cryostasis for later use.

The chairs for the volunteers are not unlike those for blood donors--comfortable recliners with movable armrests and paper covers down the center. The process of donating time must be at least as draining as blood donation. Drinks and snacks are a necessity as well. Part of me wants to try it out right then, just to see the whole process. I'm assured that, while off-season donations are greatly appreciated, the preparations for the surge at the end of Daylight Savings Time take precedent at the moment. Then it will be back to the daily work of maintaining and expanding the system.

"Of course, the main concern at this point is power. Ensuring it never loses power, finding cleaner, more sustainable ways to power it." In the anteroom outside the airlock, in fact, there's a series of posters on just that topic. They depict a proposed method of connecting the stasis system to the waterwheel-powered magical energy storage project underway in another department. "It's not ready, and there would have to be redundant systems to back it up. Who could afford to lose this kind of time, if the power failed? But someday soon, we hope."

As the tour goes on, Dr. Warsaw opens up a panel on one of the pieces of equipment to reveal a bank of crystals wired into electrical panels. Light moves between and through the crystals as they do their work. This is a little closer to my own field, and I can spot a few sigils picked out in solder on the circuit boards. The overall effect, though, is one of general bafflement.

Perched deliberately and with an oddly knowing air on the top edge of the panel is a small poppet of scrap cloth and yarn. "Oh, no, it's not--well. I won't say it's not part of the system," Dr. Warsaw says. "It's a doll. A toy. For the machine. The technicians would be able to tell you more about that, but they insist the computers won't work if they don't have their toys." But I never get the chance on the tour for any technician to give me an explanation more detailed than a repeated insistence that the computers need it. There never seems to be, ironically, enough time for that conversation.

Election Day

While this might not be a major national election year, Lewisia still has its yearly elections for more local matters. The old adage goes, the more local the election, the more bitter the campaign. The rash of curses that disrupted the 1986 race for county coroner resulted in thousands of dollars of damages, one permanently transformed bystander, and the implementation of a series of regulations governing acceptable campaign activities. The donation of magical services to political campaigns by independent operatives, in particular, faced strict new rules that eliminated almost everything beyond using sleight-of-hand to distribute fliers.

This year's campaign for Council Secretary, following Doris McMann's unplanned retirement to the Summer Kingdom, has proved particularly filling: both of the top candidates are avid bakers and wooed voters at Town Hall meetings and park events with a dizzying array of sweets and savories. Exit polling put the double fudge brownie in a comfortable lead, but the ginger-spiked lemon bars had been moving up the ranks. No one had the slightest idea which candidate to vote for, of course, and considering the epidemic of food comas, it was a wonder anyone ended up at the polls at all.

The Great Potluck

It's something of a misnomer: this potluck is no greater than the Grand Picnic in May, personal preferences for spring versus fall notwithstanding. In modern times, it has been somewhat overshadowed by the novelty of Wolfenoot later in the month--it's difficult to beat the charm of receiving gifts of meatloaf and toys from mysterious wolves, after all. This one, though, came first in Lewisia's history and so enjoys the superlative name.

Though the Great Potluck predates the Grand Picnic tradition by a very long time, the specific origins of the Great Potluck are much better documented. Traditions of a final harvest festival before the depth of winter are well known and remarkably consistent across human cultures. It is an expression of gratitude, yes, but also of hopefulness. In spring, we wish for an abundant year and easy work; in autumn, we wish for whatever abundance we received to last us through the dark and cold and hunger of winter.

The first Great Potluck did not include any humans, in fact. It was a shared meal among a dryad, a family of invisible stones (yes, this was back in the day when invisible stones were common, and large, and did much more than trip you on what appears to be nothing), and an unknown number of field mice whose descendants may still be encountered in Lewisia today. The dryad, being a habitual record keeper, documented the food shared, the people present, and a nuanced assessment of the quality of acorns produced in three forest regions that year. It would be years before the first human attended (an otherwise unrecorded person referred to as Willowleaf), but the Great Potluck itself has continued as an unbroken tradition.

This Month in History

The winter of 1903 would eventually be known as the Glacier Year, a year so brutally cold in much of the continent that songs were written about its tragedies and tribulations for decades after--odes to trees that shattered like glass, paeans to people who dug out from snowdrifts that swallowed whole city blocks. But even in the midst of that suffering, November 12, 1903, also saw a blessing of particular foresight. For those about to face down the Glacier Year, there first came the Woodpile Miracle.

In the morning of November 13, Lewisia residents (as well as those in several of our sister cities) awoke to find their woodpiles unexpectedly, unaccountably abundant. Those typically least able to do the work of hauling and chopping wood--the elderly, the disabled, those who worked too long and too far away from home to reliably tackle that chore--saw their piles stacked highest of all. But everyone who needed it found more than enough wood for the winter accumulated before the first vicious cold snap could descend.

And to what or whom did they owe thanks for this gift? That question has remained a mystery, though songs were written to and about possible answers. Theories ranged from a coordinated effort by all the house-dwelling fae of the town to ancestral ghosts. People reported finding traces outside of fur, footprints, and rune-like scratchings of unknown significance, which of course didn't narrow down the possibilities at all. Somehow, seemingly simultaneously, overnight, and unbeknownst to all the townsfolk, someone filled the woodpiles. It is impossible to estimate how many lives were saved by this act of inexplicable kindness, and so the corresponding level of gratitude can never be fully calculated. Both were, in any case, immense.

That's a taste of what November has to offer us. See you next month, when December brings warm socks and noodles, cold nights and water, and one very special fungus.