The kids in Whitehorse went back to school on August 28, and that night the streetlights came on at 9:33. Every day the slow leaping mountains across the river to the east were changing colour, the heather and the prickly rose, the dogwood and the grasses growing brighter with each frost.
The kids in Whitehorse went back to school on August 28, and that night the streetlights came on at 9:33. Every day the slow leaping mountains across the river to the east were changing colour, the heather and the prickly rose, the dogwood and the grasses growing brighter with each frost.
The poplars and the cottonwoods changed too, yellow and then orange as the light moved towards darkness, five minutes every twenty-four hours, and as we lost the heat and the light the colours grew deeper. We had been watching out for the change since the ride down from Dawson City, the day after the Music Festival, hung over and tired and the last big summer thing done. That’s always the day you see the first yellow leaves, and we saw them this year, too, but still the change took us by surprise. Some of us tried to pretend it wasn’t happening: my neighbour got so fed up one night with all the sad, summer-is-over talk she went out to Long Lake to have a swim, but when she got there and felt the water she knew what we all knew, that summer was gone.
On the Sunday before the kids went back to school, the Downtown Urban Gardeners Society got together with one of the theatre companies in town and held a Harvest Celebration in the community garden underneath the clay cliffs, at the western edge of town. Usually the theatre company marks the turning of the season in spring, when they lead a torch-lit procession along the Yukon River behind an effigy of Old Man Winter, and at the Robert Service Campground they throw the effigy onto a bonfire and people chant “Burn him, burn him, burn him” as he goes up in flames.
The shindig under the clay cliffs was a gentler affair. People meandered down Seventh Avenue to where the pavement stops and the road becomes a driveway, leading into a once-vacant lot now filled with a dozen or so wooden box gardens in which people grow vegetables and flowers. This is the community garden. At one end of the lot is a shed and at the other a gazebo, painted with bright colours especially for the celebration. Someone had wrapped all the boxes with red and blue and yellow cloth, and glittery flags flew from bamboo poles. Neighbours and gardeners stood talking in small groups, or strolled among the box gardens, discussing chard and potatoes and lettuce, picking up dirt and crumbling it in their fingers.
The Harvest Goddess was there, riding a chestnut horse, bareback, with a nymph dressed all in white perched behind her. The Harvest Goddess was a favourite among us, an actress who has starred in many local productions. Today she was bare-armed in an orange dress, and wore a garland in her hair, and it made you feel good just looking at her. The nymph behind her was a girl in her early teens whom I had never seen before. Someone had decorated the horse with ribbons and orange leaves from the dollar store, and up close you could see where they had traced a star in some sticky stuff on his haunch and sprinkled blue sparkles over it. The goddess had a wand, and she blessed the gardens with it, while the nymph involved herself in the apprenticeship of being beautiful. When the goddess came across a knot of people chatting, she blessed them, too: “May the blue car start tomorrow morning.” “May your haircut grow in nicely.”
Up in the gazebo, the gardeners had laid out a feast on a couple of picnic tables; coffee, and baked goods, and potatoes in many guises: warm with olive oil and chives, cool in balsamic vinegar, tangy with lemon and mint, or cold and plain, with salt. The potatoes tasted extra good, people said, because they came from the gardens, maybe even just yesterday. We ate from paper plates held at chest level and then we wandered back down to the box gardens and found a neighbour, surrounded by uprooted potato greens, raking his hands through the dirt, digging and sifting and coming up with red potatoes and white ones. The white ones were the legendary Yukon Gold, but there was no time to admire them now, there was barely time to get them out of the earth, because the frost was coming, there had already been frost twice since August 10. Nearby, a new gardener who had moved here in February explained that she’d uprooted the chard but left the cabbage because it seemed to be doing okay with the frost. There were four little cabbages in her garden, and my friend Josh reached down and cupped his hand around one of them as though it were a baby’s head.
On the little plateau by the gazebo, four kids at a picnic table were playing Violent Femmes covers on guitars and a stand-up bass and a violin, and the sound came and went as the wind came up and the leaves rustled, and then it was gone. The girl with the violin broke away from the others and went down into the garden, still playing.
In the gazebo, someone spilled coffee on one of the organizers; the organizer got upset and snapped at the coffee-spiller, so he got upset too, and the organizer felt bad, and they both apologized, and went over the incident to find the place where they could have done something differently, and in the end patted each other on the back. People were saying that the fair was a nice event and they were right, it was, sweet and ill-attended and drifty. Up behind the gazebo, past another little plateau where the soothsayer was throwing the I Ching and reading the Tarot, up on the next plateau where, in everyday life when the dog and I are out for a walk, we turn around and head home, a cardboard sign read: “You are about to walk through a symbol that is over 3,500 years old. Please enjoy and honour this site as a sacred area.” This was the entrance to the labyrinth, patterned after the labyrinth in the palace of Knossos in Crete. A criminal lawyer who’s in the papers sometimes was pacing a way through the labyrinth with his head down and his eyes on the ground. A neighbour who works at the correctional facility on the hill walked slightly behind him, smelling a wand of sage. They were in there for a longer time than seemed necessary, in this understated labyrinth, whose walls, made of stone and chunks of clay, were only ankle high, but once inside you could see it was no simple matter to get out, you had to go the long way. While Josh and I were in there, winding around the long way, two small girls in long dresses and wild hair entered, at a run. “This is really cool, this is like a maze or something,” said the one, and the other one replied, “I think this is like a labyrinth, that’s what the sign says.” In the end I had to step over the wall to get out.
The day that was still summer while the sun was out turned colder when the clouds blew across the sun and the cliffs darkened, and the kids scrambling up the side looked back as though their parents had called them and it was time to leave the garden, even though people were still coming in to see what was going on. I saw an old boyfriend picking raspberries with his daughter. He was hunkered down so he was at the same level as she was. They were picking berries and popping them in their mouths, not looking at each other, not looking at anything except their fingers closing around one berry and then around another berry and another.
I rode my bike home along Seventh Avenue. When I stopped for the Yield sign at Alexander Street the Goddess and her boyfriend rattled by in the boyfriend’s truck, with the chestnut horse in the trailer behind them. The Goddess leaned forward across her boyfriend and waved.
