BY KIMBERLY MAYER
At the end of every summer season residents of Cape Cod, Massachusetts gather on overpasses to wave farewell to visitors on the bridges that connect Cape Cod to the mainland. Year after year, that’s the tradition. But whenever I heard my mother tell the story, she had them “dancing on the bridges.” Having retired to Cape Cod with my father, I think she was always so exhausted after hosting everyone all summer long she imagined a celebratory dance.
Here too, the visitors, for the most part, have vanished. Short of throwing yourself off the dock on Labor Day like the staff at Roche Harbor Marina, I’m not sure what end of season traditions we have on island. One might say being able to walk the sidewalks with ease in town, and not having to stand in any lines. Our friend Adam Eltinge adds, “and turning left in town,” if you’re a car.
As soon as the tents at the San Juan County Fair are folded up, a seasonal tide is set to turn and autumnal equinox is almost upon us. Big leaf maples start to turn, and summer birds get the memo and head south. We can renew our garden activity with fall planting, although rains will relieve us of all the summer watering. As Susan Vernon wrote in Rainshadow World, “As the days progress, the morning fog drifts in and out gently nudging summer away.”
That nudge may be a little less gentle each year, I’d say. Each time around it becomes increasingly apparent that we’re not here for very long and that our time is going faster. In Late Migrations Margaret Renkl describes this phenomena of time and place as a reminder “… that the world is turning, that the world is only a great blue ball rolling down a great glass hill, gaining speed with each rotation.”
My favorite time of year on island without exception is when hay has been rolled, and round bales dot the fields. This is my “South of France moment” each year. And every year I have every intention to set up an easel and paint it, or sketch it, and as it is I barely catch it with my camera before the bales are gone from the fields. Ten years ago, it seemed I had weeks in which to set up. This year, I must have blinked. Great blue ball, indeed.
Originally published in The Journal of the San Juan Islands 9/18/24
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 
Love it! End of summer rituals endure in cherished places!
Gil Ahrens 415.710.2366 http://www.gilahrens.com
Reading Kim’s and your writing gives me a certain peace and always reminds me how grateful I am to have known your family. The Ahrens love and grace live on through both of you. Your writing seems so effortless and I just wanted to thank you both for being who you are.
The Germans describe a restlessness of the turn to Fall with a word: zugunruhe. A compound derived from the roots zug (migration) and unruhe (anxiety), it describes the seasonal migration of birds and other animals on the move, migrating, storing, and dying.
I don’t know why but the seasons have always been represented as a stair step in my mind’s eye. Straight ahead January to May, take a left and up from June to August, another right and down for September to December then a sharp turn into January, again.
So often I want to linger in Summer to Fall but I find myself racing along the steps – up and down. John Muir wrote in one of his early journals “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Still I would like a pause with a brief suspension of time to take all the nature, interconnections and weather in along with my sentiments – a blend of melancholy and anticipation.
Fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me. I remember when we were young going to Risings Corner for apples, stringing dried cranberries and chestnuts, taking in the changing leaves as we walked the town, and swimming the stream and rock pools of Granby State Forest with light dancing through the trees.
I love your description of the rituals celebrating or marking the transition. In Santa Fe we have a 100 year plus pagan ritual and cultural event called Zozobra.
Artist Will Shuster, Jr. created the first Zozobra in 1924 as a highlight of a private party for Los Cinco Pintores, a group of artists and writers who made their way to New Mexico in the 1920s. He was inspired by Easter Holy Week traditions in the Yaqui Indian communities of Arizona and Mexico, in which an effigy of Judas is led around the village on a donkey and ultimately set alight. Shuster and his friend, E. Dana Johnson, came up with the name Zozobra, which in Spanish means “anguish, anxiety, or gloom.”
Shuster’s creation first burned in his backyard in 1924 as a 6-foot effigy and, over the years, it has grown to a towering 50-foot high marionette. Made of wood, wire, and cotton cloth and stuffed with bushels of shredded paper, which traditionally includes obsolete police reports, paid-off mortgages, and even divorce papers,
Since those early days, the people of Santa Fe, families, and friends have annually made their way to Zozobra Field at Fort Marcy Park, a few blocks from the Santa Fe Plaza around Labor day to view this dark and eerie character, part ghost and part monster burn.
Zozobra is able to wave his arms and move his head, using his mouth to growl ominously prior to meeting his demise. His arch-enemy, the Fire Spirit, dressed in a flowing red costume and headdress, is armed with a pair of blazing torches with which to end Zozobra’s reign of terror. She dances the steps below him before setting him ablaze.
The Kiwanas Club of Santa Fe builds Zozobra every year to mark the transition to Fall and the harvest. As Will Shuster told a friend after the 1924 burning, “After the flames consumed the effigy, and the embers faded into the starlit Santa Fe sky, we stood together, a group unburdened. In the ashes of this effigy lay the worries of the past year, and from them, we shall rise anew, our spirits ablaze with hope and renewal.”
And so we march on and I take the steps one by one. So grateful for you in my life and your ability to transfix me with your writings.
Jane, you and Kim always play the most beautiful duets with her writing and your comments. It is like music 🎵 to my ears.❤️
Val, So wonderful to hear your beautiful replies as well. Lovely to be in touch and feels like just yesterday (well, maybe not yesterday) that we were all walking to school together!
What a beautiful story of Zozobra, a wondrous seasonal ritual. I love Will Shuster’s words, “After the flames consumed the effigy, and the embers faded into the starlit Santa Fe sky, we stood together, a group unburdened. In the ashes of this effigy lay the worries of the past year, and from them, we shall rise anew, our spirits ablaze with hope and renewal.”
Gifts from the fire, we call it, such as seeds that can only be released after the heat of a fire. Thank you for sharing.