Solstice

Summer and winter solstice tie together. Primitive skills friends lead to a primitive skills mate.

The first thing we decide to do when they arrive, five days before winter solstice - stiff and carworn from their four-hour journey, is kill a rabbit. 

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping meat elsewhere. Freezers at home as empty as I can, so when meat arrives in whatever form it will, I’m ready. The meat I keep close is the meat I do not expect anyone else to eat - meat that’s touched poop or came from the sick, or any of the other dozen reasons someone who has not gradually built up their immune system to calibrated scavenger perfection - might not want to eat a thing. 

As we head out to the rabbit hutch, Canis points out the escaped rabbits, three males who recently broke through the wooden latch to be free. “Let’s catch one of those.”

As if. I think. Rabbits are not so easily caught without nets or bows, or any of the other instruments of human cunning - but it might be fun to try. I remember a story told in my youth of someone doing it, children laughing and chasing until amazingly they actually caught a rabbit barehanded. “Sure,” I say.

These friends are all currently training at the Wilderness Awareness School, (WAS) - and they move with the practiced ease of people who spend time off-trail. We circle, herding the rabbits in. Canis wants the black one who escapes, but we’re getting our flow now, communicating easier, anticipating each other and the rabbit, moving, again and again, to cut it off. 

I imagine how terrifying this must be to the rabbit. To be anticipated. Humans moving as a pack, making our odd noises and knowing things we cannot see. The rabbit makes a bolt for it into the ditch, but we’re ready. Bracken and Cedar have the far side, Kat guards the end, and as the rabbit makes a desperate climb up the side of the ditch towards the cover of brush I full-body dive and catch a back leg. 

We bring him in then. Cradling him as he catches his breath, and hopefully soothing him - but he knows. Yeshua and Blythe arrive just then, hauling groceries and soft things to line the one bedroom they all plan to camp in. We all sit around the kitchen table and sing together as I guide Kat through the cuts that she ends up not being able to do. 

As I cut, and they sing, the rabbit screams. High and piercing. Canis begins to cry, and as the death goes on for longer than is easy - as bleeding an animal out always goes - I feel us catch the thread of another kind of time. Slowing down long enough to be with a rabbit in transition. Long enough to notice the world around us. Long enough to notice each other. 

A foretelling. Tender and true and timeless. This is going to be a good solstice.

---

Last summer when I went to Saskatoon Circle I arrived late - just after midnight, and all the good camping spots were taken. This year I decide I am going to arrive early to get the very best camping spot. Yeshua does map magic and finds a spot 10 minutes away where we can camp on forest service land the night before the first day we can show up. 

We’ve taken a couple days to get here, camping once at hot springs with an unnamed fire, once in the cascades where I tried to recreate my beloved masonry heater Calcifer out of tumbled stone slabs (Cascalcifer,) and again adjacent to Saskatoon where I slow cooked a martin I found going over the pass on my second stone monolith (Sascalcifer.) 

I travel with Kat and Yeshua, my car packed with hides and food.

I awake the morning of the skills gathering bleary-eyed, not having slept well with the wind rushing through our valley, to find that my tarp has vanished in the night. I crawl out of my bivvy and search the direction of the prevailing wind for a long time finding nothing before Yeshua wakes up and tells me he took it down because one of the ties came loose, and it’s been in his tent all along.

We wake Kat and pack up camp at 7:30 to drive down to the gathering where I find that, of course, the work traders have already set up in the spot I had been imagining. There’s Canis too, already camped close to the area, and prowling. We’re spotted right away and Canis comes to say hi, as Kat closes down - every couple at Winter Solstice has split by now - and these two harder than most. 

Kat and Yeshua want to camp in the far corner of the field, not so far from where I was last time, but this side of the barbed wire fence I had to trek around before. Kat needs sanctuary, and I consider the spot, but it’s not what I was dreaming of. 

“I think I saw one tiny spot where I was imagining,” I say. “Can we check it out again?”

It’s up against an area where people have hung hammocks, but there’s a row of aspens between here and there, so I judge it won’t be impinging. Soon I have inflicted my will on the other two and I’m unloading piles of hides while Yeshua sets up tarps. We’re pretty much all set up when Equis peeks her head out from her tent across the way. 

“Oh, I was worried when I heard people setting up that you might have made camp in the altar of Pan, but it looks like you’re great.”

“The what now?” I ask. 

“The Altar of Pan,” she says. Pointing. 

I look and the hammocks I had taken as a campsite become a circle of hammocks around a statue, unmistakable. Antlers adorn the sacred aspens who whisper at me as is their want.

Yeshua chortles. “So that’s why you were so insistent on this spot.”

I guess so. 

Canis comes over, and I try to use my presence as a mirror - asking Canis to keep an eye out for my future wife and talking about what she’s like - so that Kat doesn’t have to engage but I can already tell this is going to be hard for her. When I turn she’s gone, having escaped out the back. Soon I hear her laughter at the campsite adjacent, just opposite the altar, and Yeshua goes to join her, and after a while, I follow. 

It’s nice to have friends already making connections. I’d likely be too shy to go introduce myself to my neighbors without some sort of excuse, but Kat is already sitting there weaving a basket, and Yeshua is doing the same beside her. Across from them are two women. I plop myself down next to the more attractive one and ask if I can play. She hands me some willow with the note that she can’t give much instruction - but I’m welcome to explore. She’s Talia, this is her campsite, and I’m immediately struck, as I am at these things by how everyone here is so obviously someone of quality. The first woman I meet at Saskatoon Circle is dressed in a buckskin dress, among the things she’s made herself, speaking in the way we do when we tend to the earth. 

A foretelling. This is a very good place to seek a mate.

---

The next day Ryan shows up, to make the 9th member of our winter solstice tribe. He comes with a fox. 

“You said that if I saw any roadkill you would help me process it,” he says. 

“Thank you for coming,” I say, as we place the fox where the rabbit had been the night before. It’s just the two of us, the rest of the crew away to the corner store. 

Ryan is a neighbor, newly moved into Baba Yaga’s house, and not yet having tangled with the witch. We met at a neighborhood party last month where we talked of trees. Now we talk of foxes, this one found just across the Oregon border where the speed limit goes up. He tells me how much more roadkill there suddenly is with just 10 miles an hour different.

We’re working on the tail when the crew comes back. Canis comes in interested, asking questions. Canis is short and thin and moves like a coyote. Easy to make conversation. Easy to draw you in. Good at giving instructions, and moving groups, but somehow also always walking the sidelines sniffing at edges.

Canis has brought Kat, my first time meeting her, and often the quietest of the group. I’ll learn that she’s an eighteen-year-old punk, avoiding her draft in Israel. She has keen eyes and notices plants and fungi I’d passed a hundred times.

Bracken I’d met before, first to learn, when, on my birthday this year I’d come to visit Cedar and we’d found a Mink. Bracken has the most delightful home-schooled curiosity and has brought a partner, Quinn, from England and I am in love with the way their accents play off each other. Quinn and I will come to enjoy sword fighting in the coming days. 

Cedar enjoys being in the background of things, keeping the homestead running smoothly, and checks in every day on what we need and what she can do. She’s unruffled, hard to read, but somehow also always in the tide of things. I won’t catch the thread between her and Bracken until they get together in the spring. 

Yeshua is another who keeps things running. He’s seen enough of the way the house runs and rearranges to keep things flowing, and loves when community comes together. This gathering is his instigation and I see his bright smile as he picks up his guitar and begins to play the songs that will echo throughout our ten days together.

Blythe - a fairy of a woman, bright and bubbly and playful - who has been coming consistently to hide Saturdays, sits with him, snuggles up, and adds her voice to the music, weaving harmonies and inviting play. She leads people in interesting directions. I like her at gatherings.

Gammi, one of Yeshua’s oldest friends, is also here. Bright, social, and playful he doesn’t lead much but is easygoing and follows the flow of things. He joins in on his banjo to the endless music.

Days slide into each other with endless iterations of the same songs and good food. We eat rabbit and fox and deer and I am amazed by how well the space takes the nine of us. My house winds and tucks and people stash themselves in the far corners of it. Ryan stays through the evenings bringing spoken word slam poetry into the musical mix. 

On the third day it snows, blanketing the world in white, and we go out tracking for raccoons and opossums and the rabbits still running loose. We build up Calcifer and keep stew and tea on the stove all day as we work our hides and sing. 

On the fourth day, we’re sitting around the table when Blythe interjects.

“Quinn, you were moaning last night - it was really cute.”

Quinn blushes and Bracken raises an eyebrow. “Do you remember what you dreamed?”

“No, not a clue.”

“Wait, what were you doing up in the middle of the night that you would hear moaning, huh?” Canis says jokingly - and then when both Yeshua and Blythe turn beet red, adds “Noooo - really?”

A chorus of voices. An admission. Laughter. 

“I love it when I get to hear other people moan,” Blythe interjects. “People moan so different.” - successfully pulling attention off her again. We agree. Moaning is nice. We’re all curious. 

Canis interjects. “Let’s go in a circle and see what we’re like.” 

Kat opts out, but the rest opt-in - and soon we’re discovering just how hard it is to moan out of context. 

When Yeshua’s turn comes around he asks for “Some supportive moaning” which turns out to be wildly helpful in getting the moaning engine rolling and as we go around we often ask for it. 

Gammi descends at this point from a nap he was taking to ask “What is going on down here?” We laugh and fill him in.

A few rounds of sounds and someone asks about words, and I get a sprinkling of knowledge I wouldn’t have expected. Bracken takes top, Quinn's bottom. Cedar, I would expect to top but is trying on submissive as well. Blythe likes to struggle. Yeshua is less of an over-communicator in bed than in life.

Words come easily to me in sex - and so it’s surprisingly easier to share them than moaning. I give my repertoire of dirty-talk-check-ins, and then a little of the fantasy - mastery and ownership, impregnation and availability. Canis starts to look at me a little differently.

It’s clear that none of these are the mate I’ve been calling in, but it’s fun to let loose. When Blythe suggests we go upstairs and get naked together, and Bracken sets boundaries - we let the energy ebb and move into music and projects and sleep. 

That night Blythe climbs up into my bed - and when she brushes against me, my touch-empathy finds her full of grief. Imaginings facing reality. Yeshua is jealous and sad - implying intentions I hadn’t caught, and so she’s sad, and I spend hours bringing her back to some emotional equilibrium so maybe I can enjoy the physical touch I’m craving right now. 

The following day each couple will touch the cracks between them. 

---

I’m sitting around the Saskatoon fire pit as they set up the fire. I wince as one man thumbs a lighter. 

“I guess it would be kind of lame to light this with a lighter,” another man interjects. I sigh in relief. 

Every campsite I’ve camped at this trip I’ve made char - making the means to light a flint and steel fire at the next. I have it on me, and offer - “I can make a flint and steel fire if no one better comes up,” but then we get the hand drill teacher and the community rallies, people coming in, singing and whooping the fire into being. 

I see the tinder bundle has been made but nothing between that and the huge logs so jump in, splitting down wood with my knife to prep the transition. I sprinkle some of Sascalcifer’s char into the tinder bundle so it’s sure to catch. The teacher whispers his thanks to me as the flame comes stable. “I couldn’t have done that without you - that was key.” He says. I grin, glad. The fire will stay lit the whole gathering.

Morning brings announcements - a man who had a sleeping child collapse a pelt into his lap I know to be Talia’s and take for her. A reunion with friends from the year before. 

They don’t announce what’s going to be at Saskatoon before you come, but inevitably there are a dozen classes I want to take, all stacked in the same time slots. I came here to level up and I throw myself into lessons. I make a pine needle basket, learn a ton of bird language, grouse traps, leather working, more fox walk and deer ears, hand drill, spoon carving, salmon smoking, feather and bone ID . . .

The event I’m most excited for though is one that they had last year - but, on the tail end of partnership, it would have been unwise to attend. Saskatoon speed dating.

We arrange ourselves into three circles, which rotate to spit out groups of three. In our groups, we answer a question Equis has posed us, with two minutes per person. The event is delightful - even in the groups of three men, none of us interested - there’s still a sense of camaraderie - connection made - and as hopeful as I am here I also think of these people as bridges to my eventual mate. I’m gonna be picky this time. This point in my life is simply forging connections.

When we’re done Canis bounds up to me. “I found the one!” 

“Oh?”

“Talia.” 

“Okay” - I nod and add her to the list. There are five or six people I deem to be my age and now that I know they’re single, plan to be male and do the pursuing thing. I haven’t gotten the sense that Talia is attracted to me, but it’s worth following. Back at the fire I sidle up to another one of my prospectives. 

“What are you looking for in a mate?” I ask.

“I’m not even sure I want a mate.” She says. “That sounds like too much work.”

“Oh,” I say. 

I work my way over to another, casually waiting until we’re both staring into the fire, and ask 

“What are you looking for in a mate?”

She looks over at me. Smiles, and ponders. “I’ve never really thought about it before. I guess someone loyal. Someone I can rely on.”

“What about you?” she fires back.

“I’ve shortened it down. I am seeking peace, passion, health, and a connection to nature - and wants babies.”

“That’s a good list.” She says noncommittally.

That night - Yeshua settles down next to me. “You should talk to Talia,” he says. “She wants babies as much as you do.”

“Noted.” I say.

After he’s asleep I slip out of my sleeping bag and head to the altar of Pan. In silence, I stroke myself to the night and the laughter still drifting from the fire and the potential of how many women of quality there are at this gathering. If not this year then maybe the next. I feel expansive and alive and aligned. 

The following day I will come back with honey to offer the god of instinct. Tonight I give of myself.

 

---

Every Winter solstice I sit vigil through the night from midnight until sunrise, always alone, always outside. As my fire skills have grown better I’ve let myself salvage materials and build a fire from what I have on me. 

Today I feel relaxed and ready - less tight in my need for solstice to be a specific way. The rest of the group is touching their shadow a little. Kat pulls Canis aside to say she feels uncared for. Bracken and Quinn hold the tightness of loss yet unfelt and Yeshua and Blythe both secret themselves away to process. Yeshua gave me a big hug and told me he loved me this morning. I don’t feel worried, but perhaps should. 

For once I am actually older than most of my friends here, Yeshua and Blythe are my seniors, probably Gammi too, but the role of elder I adopt even with my elders feels easy and I guide a few conversations, reminding them all that this is happening because we feel comfortable enough 

Despite the rifts, I’m impressed by how good it’s feeling to still have them all here. The house feels alive and I don’t feel overtaxed. I imagine having nine people living here all the time - and it’s not terrible, not if we could step through the inevitable moment. 

I decide it’s a good time to smoke hides. 

The ground is covered in snow and frozen, so I set up in my covered shop space, placing a metal bowl down to avoid the moisture in the ground. After I have a fire going I cover it in a metal lid until it goes out and then sprinkle “punk wood” - rotten wood I’ve dried for this purpose - on top, and place a half dome of sticks above my smoker. On this, I lay all the hides we’ve been working on. Canis adds a bunch. Ryan’s fox goes on the pile. Yeshua’s raccoon, Blythe’s Opossums. Jasper the magical rabbit, my mostly rawhide bison, and my otters, bobcat, and coyotes. On top of the party we layer blankets. Wool first - the smoke will protect them from moths - and then the synthetic simply to keep in the smoke.

The trick to it is that you don’t want it to get hot. If the fire catches you can crunchify - or even burn your hides. If the fire goes out, no smoke. Smoking hides means watching them, someone is always there and alert. Every twenty minutes we take everything off and do it again, switching the animal’s positions, trying to evenly smoke the whole thing. 

I end up making another fire to keep warm, large and crackling next to the hide-dome, and ask my friends to come keep me company. They bundle up and take shifts hanging out by the fire and helping change the hides.

“Brain tanning should really be called Smoke tanning,” I tell Gammi when he asks. “The fat just makes the hide soft - the smoke does what the tannins in vegetable tanning do, making the hide inedible to most things.”

When midnight comes Cedar asks if she can hold vigil with me, and for the first time I accept. I head out to the outside firepit, bundled up in all my layers, and clear the snow to build a fire. Tonight I’ve just brought a candle from Calcifer - a flame lit by friends this morning before I arose. 

Soon I have warmth and light glittering out across the snow and I sit centered, awake, and aware. This vigil is a time for me to know a primal part of myself - and often ends up in nursery rhymes and silliness but tonight I float clean and clear. There are things I want to think about, but nothing feels unthought or overdue.

“I would like a mate,” I tell the solstice snow. “I would like peace, a connection to nature, passion, and health.” Satisfied I lean back. 

Cedar comes and joins me. She’s struggling, eyes opening and closing. I teach her a song and we trade it back and forth “I am a the wind, I am the wail.”

She answers “I am the teller, I am the tale.”

“I am the mountain, I am the peak.”

“I am the strong and I am the weak.”

We carry on for a long time. 

Blythe joins us just before dawn. We sit together in the rising clarity of light, and joy fills me, fills us, as the grey skyline begins to spread. She goes inside and wakes the others and they groggily join me. Canis and Kat, Bracken and Quinn, Gammi and Yeshua. We stand around the fire I’ve kept alive and thank the sun. Blythe brings a basket of Quapulch (Devil’s Club) sticks and we burn them one by one, casting hopes and desires and thanks into the flames.

Then Yeshua brings out a string and winds it between us, visible bonds of connection we then burn. We speak with certainty of consistency that won’t happen. And repeats that will be attempted but never as magically as this. 

Normally after vigil, I sleep the day - but today they are all leaving so I stumble with them out into the clearcut to look back at my home and see it surrounded by mountains as I have never seen it before or since, snow-capped and huge and vivid - too clear to be real, and even now I wonder if I dreamed my home like that.

Then I sleep, awaking at 5 unsure what 5 I am awaking into, tidy for a bit, and then sleep again until dawn.

---

In the summer heat, friction fire - once impossible comes to me twice. The teacher is overfull so I sit beside Yeshua as he gets his first coal, and then use the same kit to do the same. I’ve been around bow drill a fair bit and know more or less what not to do. Don’t forget to breathe. Don’t try too hard too fast. Focus on the technique and the coal will come. 

Hand drill still eludes me, but I learn a bunch of the things I’m doing wrong. 

When evening comes, my hands hurting from all my practice - I imagined I might get two kinds of fire in one day - what a story that would be - I pull coals from the eternal fire to cook on and settle into a seat, scraping a beaver I really should have dried in a rack.

“Should have racked that beaver,” someone comes by and tells me every half hour or so. 

I sidle up to a young woman from speed dating. “What are you looking for in a mate?” I ask. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just got out of a relationship that was kind of a lot and I’m still sorting it out. Someone good?”

“Fair enough.”

I go sit adjacent to Talia for a bit while we eat, but she’s part of a larger group so there isn’t space to talk. Today's buckskin dress is particularly revealing though, and I note that - yes. I am definitely attracted. Which probably means she’s asexual or something. You can’t get attached. 

I go and try and sidle up to Selene but she has a man who apparently outranks me and makes eye contact as I approach and I, along with every other man who heads her way over the course of the night, pass her by - as she obliviously stares into the fire. 

Antonia is next on the list. 

“What are you looking for in a mate?”

“I’m looking for a good man.” She says. “Someone who listens, and is loyal and good.”

She goes on to tell me that she can tell immediately when men aren’t in their integrity. How she has a man who’s learning how to be this thing. How they’re on break. How she’s learning to be in her radiant femininity attracting rather than controlling. It’s the best answer I’ve gotten so far -but she sounds taken.

“You should have racked that beaver.” A man across from me interjects and I move on.

In spring I went to a Beltane celebration on the intuition of an oracle, thinking I would find my mate there. The group is old - the place where the feral pagans of Port Townsend earned their name, and I had high hopes.

This summer solstice gathering is by its nature what that gathering was trying to be. Where those people were city folk trying to connect to their roots - these are tenders of the land and I feel it in the timbre of their feet on the earth. 

There is alcohol here too but they’ve made it all themselves - and honey slides between us more than unruly drunks. The live drumming here is practiced and powerful. The fire is huge. Erotic energy hums from the earth and I feel it in my body, pulsing through us all. The dance gets bigger and bigger until it circles the fire and even I, who avoid these sorts of things get swept up in the turn of it, and then everyone is dancing. 

I’m dancing when I see Tallia behind me squatting to get a drink of water. I crouch beside her. 

“I hear we’re both looking for babies,” I say
“Yeah,” she says. Later I’ll learn she thought I was asking if I could sit next to her. The drums continue to beat, the bodies sway.

“Canis told me I should talk to you.” She says.
“Same.” We share a smile.

“Well -” I ask, “what are you looking for in a mate?”

“Babies.” She says. “I’m looking for a good father for my children, someone who shares my values. Someone I live well with. Someone I’m attracted to. Someone who smells good. Someone with a deep connection to nature. A good communicator - that’s key. I’d love someone with an off-grid homestead. Someone whose actions align with his ideals . . .”

We talk for a good long time, there as the drums beat out their rhythm and the dancers pulse before the ever-increasing flames. We talk about parenting philosophies. We talk about how we were raised. She asks about what I’m seeking and asks questions - what does peace look like? - Conflict is important.

She loves making hide garments, I have too many tanned hides. We’re both roleplayers. Both wanted to be comic artists as teenagers. Both roadkill tanners - walking the line between honoring and dishonoring our bodies. Both basket weavers. Both silly. Both the same age. 

“I am - at least in the things I can know - what you are looking for,” I tell her. 

“What don’t you know?” she asks.

“Are you attracted to me?” I ask.

“That - will not be a problem.” She says. 

“Do I smell good?”

“Can’t tell,” she admits. “Too many people.”

Later, on our way home, Yeshua, having first invited Talia to travel with us and then sneakily set us up to sleep outside under the tarp together, she confirms that I smell good. 

“Our kinks match,” she tells me.

“Oh?”

“Canis told me all about you - apparently you have great moans?”

“I’ll show you.”

She gives some supportive moaning too.

---

The night before I left Saskatoon I went to visit the altar of Pan one last time. Honey still smears the spot at his base and my unborn the rampant c**k of the effigy. I had spent the day smoking my hides - everything tanned since winter solstice - there is a rightness in preserving my work on the extremes of bright and shadow. I hadn’t intended it that way. 

Life happens, most of it, in the between times. I have the rest of my life to show up or run away. The equinoxes to find my light equal to darkness. This thing that courts me now will take balance, created as it was between snow and fire.

Offerings, the good ones, always come in threes. Three times visited, three times given, and I am hopeful here. Looking in every direction to see that I am unseen I slip a hundred-dollar bill under the statue and whisper my thanks.