Photo: A scene in my mom's hutch. |
Edie and I rented a $50 a night AirBnb “suite” in Palmer,
Being in
(The interweb says “KOS-e-lee” with a long round O, and a fast long E.)
Everything I read about it so far says it’s almost
impossible to translate, at least not with one word. It has to do with how to thrive
psychologically and emotionally when the winter weather outside is cold and
harsh and the nights long, very, very long.
It relates to enjoying the outdoors and then taking refuge with good
company, food and drink, warmth and beautiful cheerful surroundings. This
description is only for a start, I’m sure there’s more. If you want to read a fun article, I’ve
linked in the comments to one by Lorelou Desjardins in a promotion of her book
“A Frog in the Fiord: One Year in
Forgotten Camas Washougal as a title fits part of the
process of writing this weekly column because I spent a few hours last night
trying to remember, or unforget, when and how I experienced koselig while growing up in Camas. Our winter nights
were not as long and cold as they are in
Cloudy. It didn’t
always rain in the NW, as such, but it would be cloudy with mist falling down
all day and night long. July and August were often
dry, but the cold came in October and then it seemed it would “rain” November
through June. I remember one fall in the
early 70s when it rained every day in November, except the last three or
four. A friend of mine from
Bleak. Yes. Camas, and Washougal too, I suppose, was bleak, as I remember, for four months of the year. The cold wasn’t the nice, clean, sharp cold that you can protect yourself from with wind breaking and insulating layers, it was the insidious damp cold that penetrated whatever you might wear. It sucked the heat from your body. Then, working the swing shift at the mill was bleak. You leave for work just before everyone else in the world is arriving home. You work when it is dark outside and you arrive home when everyone else is sleeping. By the time you arise in the morning, everyone else has left the house on their merry ways. And the graveyard shift was even worse. It’s called graveyard for a reason.
I think that instances of koselig in my life in those days were not rare, but they weren’t common either.
When we were children and visiting grandparents, our grandmothers would tuck us in bed every night and we’d say that prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
The prayer was always comforting back then, and it might be now, too, because I'm older. As I look back it might have fostered in us children an unreasonable fear of dying in the night. I confess I don’t know why this would have been a concern of our grandparents and I’d like to know. As active and adventurous as we were, I wonder why she didn’t have us pray in the morning when we woke up that the Lord would take our souls if we died during the play or school day when the danger of a car accident, falling from a tree, drowning in the river, or dropping dead from embarrassment was much greater than, say rolling off the top bunk that had a safety rail or a meteor hitting the house. But I risk being unserious. It was comforting at the time.
Friday night high school football games were koselig. It was dark and cold. Everyone breathed out clouds of steam. Cheerleaders and cheers. Excitement. The ad hoc tag football game in the end zone. Bright lights. And home games usually followed by a dance in the cafeteria. One night returning from an away game on the rooter bus, I didn’t really know anyone. I had gone by myself. The kids were not in my extremely limited social circle. They were in fact the cool, sociable kids. I was a loner back then, basically, because I was unaware of my value as a person and had no skills at conversation, and not a lot of social courage or confidence. I’d never been to a summer camp of any kind, nor was in a church youth group. But that night probably for the first time I experienced a feeling of being part of a group other than family. They sang camp songs. One or several of the kids, girls, I think, led in singing, and I sang along, the best I could not knowing them. I’d never been a part of anything like that. Traveling home in a bus on a cold fall night with a bunch of young people singing cheerful and inspiring songs. It sounds like a poignant scene from a movie. Koselig.
I can cite a lot of examples of long solo walks at night or on a cold winter day around Camas and Fern Prairie and returning to a warm comfortable, bright house. I’ve written here earlier of a Christmas eve at my grandmother’s and later, an evening in high school where I lit a fire in the fireplace at the abandoned Leadbetter mansion with two friend-girls and we shared from a bottle of wine. There are countless tiny examples, but it was never a conscious practice, and I think life would have been richer back then knowing how important it to cultivate a culture of koselig, which in raising a family we did so every day without being aware of the concept.
One story that encapsulates our approach. In the summer of 2002 we travelled with our
six children across the
The next morning we found that the mountain just a few yards above us covered
in fresh unmelted snow, below the line the new snow had melted. It was unbelievably beautiful, with the
pure white and rocky Shuksan prominent and close by to the east. That day we hiked up to the top of
Once we travelled the northern section of the Bartram Trail.
William Bartram was a late 18th Century naturalist who explored much
of the
When I talk about moving to
One of my sons hiked 300 miles last summer on
When Hurricane Helene blew through a month and a half ago we were without on-grid electricity for two weeks and longer. After we got an inverter generator we ran it mostly to keep the fridge and freezer cold, but every night I ran an extension cord to one single table lamp in our main room. Later after bedtime, I kept three of those battery powered flickering votive candles burning all night in the bedroom, and several more throughout the main room in the house, for navigation in the dark.
Now that I know about koselig, I’ll be looking for ways to practice it more and more, and not only in winter. Seems like it would made a good subject for school or a club. Like, you know, Feng Shui, Ikebana, or even Jiu Jitsu.
***
PS: Below is the concept of a short story I started writing.
Working title: “The Long Night Awaits”.
A sleep therapist who began studying the subject because of his own insomnia has a successful career and helps hundreds of patients. But there one patient, his most difficult, who had what’s called Endless Night Disorder (END). It’s a belief and sensation that those hours awake in the middle of the night in the dark last forever, or at least as long as a year.
The therapist asks the patient to begin a journal giving an account of his insomniac periods, which as it turns out is usually between 1 and 6 AM. The patient tells of how he often goes outside and walks in the dark for days and even weeks. How the moon seems to never move and people out and about are like frozen statues cool to the touch. As an experiment he touched a girl on the cheek with the back of his hand and it gave her a blister. Only the nocturnal animals move and carry on like normal, which the patient finds terrifying.
An odd thing is that the patient says he sleeps during these endless nights, but when he awakes, it is still night and the clock has barely registered any passage of time. This supposed sleep explains how the patient is not seriously debilitated by his insomnia, the main problem is he is so alone.
So, treatment
ensues and it emerges that patient was traumatized as a child by realistic
nightmares of Norse monsters when he and his family lived in northern
The therapist is sympathetic and professional in his quite natural skepticism until one session when patient brings in a box of unpublished manuscripts—one box of dozens, the patient says—which the therapist finds immensely disconcerting. Most are handwritten and edited, and a few typed. He wonders if the patient had much deeper problems than insomnia or loneliness that he would create and even believe such an elaborate hoax. On the other hand, what if the patient is actually telling the truth? He begins reading one of the manuscripts, a comic fictional travel guide, and it’s actually well done, perhaps even publishable. The therapist does not consider himself an expert and thinks of sending it around to some of his colleagues who are more literary than his is.
But the therapist
doesn’t get far into the book, because during this time he's distracted when
he wins an international award not just in his own specialized field but in the
world of psychotherapy. A huge cash prize. The therapist is so humble, and
devoted to work (he isn’t married or have any children) he doesn’t have any
idea what to do with the money and feels such a failure because he hasn’t yet
helped the one special patient. The patient then suggests that the therapist go
to
CH is an idea that people who have suffered traumatizing loss or abuse can find healing through overwhelming opposite experiences and life situations to neutralize and counteract the damaging effects of the injury. For instance—and this is relatively trivial example—if an ill tempered neighbor is hateful and curses out a patient because of an irrational grudge, the anger and self-doubt that the patient feels and keeps him awake at night can be made to disappear if another neighbor or two, or a whole team of neighbors, comes over and helps the patient with some chores or throws him a birthday party. (Note, I don’t know if CH is a real recognized therapy because I made it up. I made up END, too.)
When the
therapist returns from
At that time the
therapist’s off-site secretary of the kind that works from home, calls him and
says she has received a registered letter from a bank. He says to open it. And
it’s an accounting of tax-paid millions of dollars in publishing royalties from
multiple companies that are held in his name, and always have been. When the therapist receives the bank’s detail
listing of account activity by email attachment, he finds among the many
charitable contributions, one large sum from late last year donated to the
professional psychiatric society that gave him the award, the money he used for
his
Epilogue: over the next couple years the therapist makes inquiries into the whereabouts of the patient, but he finds no one who ever actually saw him. It’s if he never existed. So, in honor of the patient and his generosity, the therapist always takes a month off once a year and with his new wife explores a place in the world when the sun never sets.