Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?”

Lucas Marquardt

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Lucas Marquardt

Ada Limón says she was swimming in Chesapeake Bay when she had a moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?”

Lucas Marquardt

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: I went looking for a few lines that could attempt to represent the whole of U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s work. I don’t think I succeeded because her poems are so full and touch on so much – from the natural world to very personal longing. But I think this gets close:

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?

This is a line from the poem Dead Stars and I love it because here you see her acknowledge the hard stuff of living, but it’s embedded in perseverance and optimism.

“What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?” I read that and I’m like, “Yes Ada. I’m all in. Let’s at least try, right?” She is urging us to keep going and it’s not a prescription from on high, she’s right here with us reaching for another day.

Ada is one of those people who can recognize all the ways we inflict pain on one another, not to mention our planet, without getting consumed by it. She writes in that space between grief and joy, and I love that space.

Writing from that space is one thing — talking from there is quite another, which is why I was moved when Ada used one of the questions in our game to talk about something incredibly personal. And in her story you’ll hear echoes of that same line of poetry: “What would happen if we decided to survive more, to love harder?”

I spoke to Ada just before the publication of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems she edited and introduced, featuring the work of Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown and more.

This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.

Question 1: What’s a smell that brings back a vivid memory for you?

Ada Limón: My grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side made dueling types of fudge. My grandfather’s was a hard sort of old-fashioned kind of fudge and my grandmother’s was a soft fudge like See’s Candy.

My favorite thing was to go into their walk-in cupboard, and they would have all of their Tupperware full of their different kinds of fudge for guests and things. And you could smell it. You couldn’t reach it, unfortunately, but you could smell it.

Rachel Martin: Did you spend a lot of time with them growing up?

Limón: I did, yes. And my grandmother just died last August and she’s been on my mind a lot. So I think that she’s with me in my heart.

Martin: Was she a lover of poetry?

Limón: She did like poetry, although she was very confused that not all my poems rhymed. I told her that some of them do. And when my grandfather passed away, she asked me to write a poem for him and I made it rhyme.

Question 2: When’s the last time you forgave yourself for something?

Limón: This morning. I’ve been traveling a lot and it’s been beautiful. And this morning I was doing yoga, which I try to do every morning, and I was just very stiff. I felt like I hadn’t been moving as much as I should and I was very hard on myself. And then I told myself, “You were doing amazing things. You were doing other things that mattered and it’s OK.”

I think it’s very important because early on I thought all of self care was really more self punishing.

Martin: What does that mean?

Limón: Oh, I just felt like if I miss a day of working out, or if I feast too much and enjoy too much, I’ll have to go into…

Martin: Deprivation mode.

Limón:. Yes, exactly. And I just don’t do that anymore. I think that’s been really healthy for me because I feel like you spend a lot of your twenties and thirties, at least for me, trying to do everything right. And the nice thing about being in my mid-to-late forties is that I forgive myself all the time. I have to.

Question 3: Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true?

Limón: I think that I knew that we weren’t going to be able to conceive a child before we decided to give up on fertility treatments. I think I knew that. And I think it actually helped me to make some decisions to not move forward with any more of the treatments.

It felt like my body knew something and it was able to offer me another option and another future. And it felt like, OK, now what else is possible? Because I think as women in our culture, the only possibility oftentimes offered to us is motherhood.

Martin: That’s right.

Limón: I felt very bound by that and letting that go was really freeing. And I love my life and I love being child-free. And I think that premonition offered that.

Martin: Did you have a specific dream, or was it just a knowing in your bones?

Limón: I was floating in the Chesapeake Bay and I just had this moment of feeling, “What if my body was only my body?” And it felt really powerful. What if it didn’t belong to anyone else? And it was just mine.

Martin: We never talk about it that way.

Limón: I had never felt it that way. All I wanted was to carry something in me — a baby, a child. And then it was so freeing. And I got out of the ocean, I remember thinking, “That was beautiful.” Like, what if I’m enough? What if just my body, what if these boundaries and these borders of my skin touching the water, was enough?

If you’ve ever considered growing your own pot plant at home in Southern California but found the whole tents-and-timers-in-a-closet thing impossibly confusing or prohibitively intimidating (or both), the good news is that it doesn’t have to be either. That’s the takeaway from a series of workshops that have taken place at nurseries and gardening centers across L.A.

Motivated by a desire to demystify and destigmatize growing hemp and cannabis at home (and funded in part by a USDA grant), Emily Gogol (head gardener of Oregon-based Grow It From Home) and Penny Barthel (author of “The Cannabis Gardener” and Bay Area co-founder of the educational website Wondering About Weed) have been helping aspiring ganja greenthumbs across the Southland get their grow on since earlier this year. Their basic premise? A cannabis plant is as easy to grow — in your backyard garden or on your patio — as a tomato plant.

That was one of the surprising things I walked away with after catching one of the duo’s hourlong free workshops at C&S Garden Center in Lawndale one late April Saturday afternoon. There, surrounded by bags of fertilizer, shelves full of planters and every kind of leafy green plant imaginable, Gogol and Barthel offered pointers and answered questions for a group of 30 hobby gardeners who had come seeking guidance before growing their first pot plant in the natural SoCal sunlight.

Having experienced the whole lights-and-timers thing firsthand when I grew my first plant a few years back, I was intrigued by the garden-club feel of the duo’s approach as well as their efforts to move cannabis gardening from the exclusive, insular realm of basements and bro culture and put it in its rightful place: on the patio right next to the trellised tomatoes and cooking herbs. (As Gogol pointed out early in the workshop I attended, the whole reason most cannabis plants grown at home were traditionally indoors and out of sight was because of a half-century of pot prohibition.)

Even before I caught their late April workshop, I’d considered adding a plant to the greenery of my L.A. backyard. But something Gogol told the workshop attendees really sealed the deal for me: “You guys actually live in one of the best places on the planet to grow cannabis,” she said.

Once I heard that, I felt compelled (for journalistic purposes, if nothing else) to see just how easy it could be. Especially because, as I was soon to learn, I had not missed this season’s outdoor planting window. And as of this publication, neither have you, so if you’re a backyard gardener thinking about adding a pot plant to your plot or a weed head contemplating an adventure in hazy horticulture, here are five things that will help you successfully (and legally) get growing.

Home-grow enthusiast Christina Wong, wearing an appropriately themed pair of earrings, listens to the April 27 workshop presentation.

1. Know what’s legal where you live

Although it may be as easy to grow as tomatoes or zucchini, growing cannabis is different in one very important way: Under state law, you have to be age 21 (different regulations apply to medical marijuana patients), you’re limited to growing six plants per private residence and, most important, if you’re growing outdoors (that’s why you’re here, right?), the plants must be in a locked space that is not visible to the public. (In other words, the front yard is no-go; a fenced-in backyard or enclosed patio is a better bet.)

What you’ll need to know beyond that to keep your home grow legal depends on where in California you live because cities and counties can further restrict (or outright ban) personal-use cultivation. The cities of Los Angeles and West Hollywood don’t have additional regulations, while L.A. County’s ordinance (which applies to unincorporated areas of the county) has all kinds of specifics to keep in mind. These include a minimum distance from rear and side property lines (10 feet), maximum plant height (6 feet) and type of fencing (masonry or wood is OK; chain link is not).

If your eyes are starting to glaze over — and not in a good way — check out the county’s very helpful handout on the topic. For L.A. County residents, a good starting point to find out local laws is the database of rules and regulations compiled by the Los Angeles chapter of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) at lanorml.org.

A workshop attendee holds packets of cannabis seeds that Emily Gogol says can legally be purchased at C&S and a handful of other local gardening centers and nurseries.

2. Get the right seeds

“One of the differences from tomato [plants] that makes cannabis so special and fun — but also confusing — is that cannabis plants can be male or female,” Gogol said during the C&S workshop I attended. “And basically, when you grow cannabis for flower, you want them to be the female plants, so we’d encourage you to purchase female seeds — they’re called ‘feminized’ seeds.”

Another seed term to be on the lookout for, especially if you want to make the most of the SoCal sunlight, is “photoperiod,” which means the resulting plant will start to flower (i.e., start producing those tasty buds) when the amount of light drops below 12 hours each day. (There are also autoflower seeds whose resulting plants begin to flower after a set period of time regardless of the amount of light they receive.) Beyond that, what kind of seeds you buy depends a lot on what end product you’re hoping to harvest as well as what you can find.

This brings me to what might be the coolest thing (of many cool things) I took away literally and figuratively from the C&S workshop: an old-timey-looking seed packet no different from what you’d find at any garden center. Except, that is, for the bold letters THC in the upper left-hand corner of the front, an artfully drawn leafy green pot plant and the words “Afternoon Punch” (a cultivar described on the back with the words sweet, raspberry and hibiscus).

Inside the $45 packet were five feminized, photoperiod seeds from Gogol’s Oregon farm, and they can be purchased with no more hassle — or stigma — than anything else at C&S Garden Center. (Grow It From Home’s seeds also are available locally through Fig Earth Supply, Flora Grubb Gardens L.A. and International Garden Center as well as the C&S Nursery in the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw neighborhood.)

While that may not seem like a big deal — especially in a place like Los Angeles, where seeds (and seedlings) have long been available in dispensaries (or surreptitiously via mail, arriving in unmarked packages) — Gogol and Barthel see being able to pick up cannabis seeds in the same place as any other gardening supplies as a game-changer when it comes to making patio pot growing more accessible to the kind of casual gardeners who would feel much more at ease in a nursery than a dispensary.

It’s also something that’s relatively new and uncharted territory, Gogol said, explaining that she is relying on a 2022 Drug Enforcement Administration letter (known as the Pennington letter) that clarified that cannabis seeds containing less than 0.03% THC (which they do) are legally classified as hemp and exempt from the Controlled Substances Act. “It’s legal,” Gogol said about making seeds available this way. “I’ve got a whole binder on [the topic].”

In an interview with The Times, Shane Pennington, the lawyer whose inquiry resulted in the DEA’s clarification, confirmed Gogol’s interpretation but added a note of caution. “Just because it’s not illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act doesn’t mean that it’s legal for all purposes, under every other law in the United States or in every state or every jurisdiction in every state,” he said.

Emily Gogol, left, and Penny Barthel gesture toward a bag of Fox Farm’s Ocean Forest potting soil in response to a question about growing medium. “It’s what you would buy if you were going to grow a couple of tomatoes and maybe a miniature eggplant on a trellis on your patio,” she said.

3. Seek out the sun

Assuming you’re keeping legal requirements in mind, where’s the best outdoor place for your plant? “Where you get your sun is where you should grow your cannabis,” Barthel told attendees. “Even if it’s not in the ground.”

Gogol concurred, adding that “it’s better to grow in a container with full sun — eight to 12 hours a day — than in the ground in a shade situation.”

If you’re going the container route, Gogol suggested using one in the 10- to 15-gallon range (“terracotta, plastic, fabric — it doesn’t matter”) and to use a high-quality potting soil. “Something like [Fox Farm’s] Ocean Forest. It doesn’t say ‘cannabis’ on it. It doesn’t say ‘dank’ anything,” she said. “It’s what you would buy if you were going to grow a couple of tomatoes and maybe a miniature eggplant on a trellis on your patio.” (Another option, suggested in “The Cannabis Gardener,” Barthel’s book for beginners, is EB Stone’s Recipe 420 Potting Soil.)

Whether you’re growing in the ground or using a container, Barthel said, “You can’t go wrong by using compost.”

If it gets full sun and the right amount of water, this bit of legal-to-grow backyard greenery could be up to 5 feet tall by fall, according to workshop organizers.

4. Plant between 4/20 and Father’s Day

“When to start your seeds or get your [seedlings] is about controlling the size of the plant,” Gogol told workshop attendees. “So if you want a 5-foot-tall, human-size plant that’s going to yield bags and bags of flower — and be easy to harvest and take care of and manage and give you almost no trouble — we tell folks to start anytime after 4/20 and before Father’s Day. It’s really a window.”

Always the third Sunday in June, Father’s Day falls on June 16 this year, so this year’s window is only open for a few more weeks.

This was another one of the many things from the workshop that surprised me because I’d previously read — and taken as gospel — that seeds needed to be planted no later than Mother’s Day.

Examples of what could be grown “as easily as tomatoes” were passed around. According to the workshop organizers, getting photoperiod seeds planted in SoCal by Father’s Day has the potential to yield “bags and bags of flower.”

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5. Don’t overwater

Gogol and Barthel said the No. 1 mistake budding gardeners make is overwatering their plant babies. “You want to water [your plants] as deeply and as infrequently as possible,” Gogol said. “If you’re growing in a container, put your hand in the soil and dig around. If it feels bone dry all the way down to finger length, then give it water. And if you’re watering in a container, you’ll want to water fully so the water flushes out the bottom of the pot for a little bit. In [Southern California] where it doesn’t get that hot, you can honestly water deeply once a week or maybe twice a week if you’re having a hot dry spell. But you want to err on the side of under-watering. It does not want wet feet — it’s not a hydrangea. Again, think of it like a tomato.”

Is growing weed in your garden — or on your patio — any more complicated than that? Gogol and Barthel assured us it’s not. Even so, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what both pot professionals covered in that hour-long workshop, so if you’re feeling canna-curious and want to pepper a pro with questions before the get-’em-in-the-ground window closes, you’ve got a handful of options. One is a June 3 online workshop (prices start at $5) or a handful of in-person workshops in the L.A. area in the run-up to Father’s Day and one on the day itself (the latter will include giveaway Father’s Day bouquets that incorporate cannabis foliage).

Additional information and free tickets are available at growitfromhome.com. (There are also four workshops scheduled for the Bay Area before the planting window closes.) Otherwise, these five pointers should at least get you started down the ganja garden path legally and logistically.

And who knows, if it really is as easy as growing tomatoes, in the fall I (and perhaps some of you) may be signing up for another one of their workshops — the one where they teach how to properly harvest all that backyard bounty.

A group of Okalolies head toward a house belonging to one of their own in Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on Tristan da Cunha, in the South Atlantic Ocean, on Dec. 31, 2023. New Year’s Eve, or Old Year’s Night as it’s known on the island, is a chance for the whole community to come together.

Julia Gunther

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Julia Gunther

A group of Okalolies head toward a house belonging to one of their own in Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on Tristan da Cunha, in the South Atlantic Ocean, on Dec. 31, 2023. New Year’s Eve, or Old Year’s Night as it’s known on the island, is a chance for the whole community to come together.

Julia Gunther

Dec. 31, 2023, shortly before 2 p.m. Gray, low-hanging clouds obscure the tops of green cliffs that tower over Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, a village of 238 people and the sole settlement on the island of Tristan da Cunha.

Tristan lies in the middle of the South Atlantic ocean, a famously wild and unpredictable expanse of water.

The closest inhabited place is St. Helena, the island where Napoleon Bonaparte lived out the last of his days that sits 1,514 miles to the north; around 2,434 miles to the west lies Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay; to the south, you’ll find nothing but cold ocean and icebergs until you hit Antarctica; and 1,732 miles due east lies Cape Town, South Africa.

Buffeted by blustery South Atlantic gusts, I follow brothers Dean and Randal Repetto as they make their way through the deserted streets. We’re the last to arrive at a small sawmill nestled in between two corrugated iron warehouses.

An Okalolie poses inside a clandestine changing room — a small sawmill. The Okalolies are part of a type of visiting custom known as mumming in which young men disguise themselves, visit homes and engage in playful pranks — mainly at Christmas and on New Year’s Eve — that have existed in Europe for the past 500 years.

Julia Gunther

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We walk into an impromptu, clandestine changing room, home of this year’s Okalolies of Old Year’s Night. Old skirts and masks and cans of spray paint that are ordinarily used by islanders to mark their sheep line both sides of the sawmill. The other participants are already getting dressed. The goal is to disguise oneself as fully as possible and to remain anonymous throughout the day.

On Tristan da Cunha, the Okalolies only come alive on Dec. 31, hours before the start of the new year. For 26-year-old Dean and 21-year-old Randal, who were both born on Tristan and have lived here their entire lives, Old Year’s Night is an annual tradition they look forward to.

Photographer Julia Gunther and I asked if we could join the Okalolies for the day, which they agreed to.

An ecosystem of global significance

A single dormant volcano reaching 6,765 feet above sea level, Tristan da Cunha is part of a remote archipelago with the same name. Other than Tristan, the islands — Inaccessible, Nightingale, Middle and Stoltenhoff — are uninhabited, except for a South African manned weather station on Gough Island.

Two of the islands were awarded UNESCO World Heritage status for their outstanding natural beauty and universal value: Gough Island in 1995 and Inaccessible Island in 2004.

The Okalolies pose with Janine Lavarello, who holds Emily Swain, after she stopped to say hello. Riaan Repetto, Emily’s father, is the Okalolie on the far right.

Julia Gunther

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The waters around Tristan are some of the richest and pristine in the world, and the archipelago is home to the world’s only breeding colonies of spectacled petrels and Atlantic yellow-nosed albatrosses, as well as 37 endemic species of plants and the world’s largest population of sub-Antarctic fur seals.

In a testament to the significance of the archipelago’s flora and fauna, the waters surrounding Tristan da Cunha were declared a marine protection zone in 2020 by the island’s government along with the U.K. — the largest in the Atlantic Ocean.

An archipelago of islands difficult to reach

The first thing most people will tell you about traveling to Tristan Da Cunha is just how hard it is to get there. For many, though, that’s part of the appeal.

Depending on the weather, the trip from Cape Town can take seven days across flat, calm water, or up to two weeks rolling and pitching in the strong westerly winds that blow sailing ships from Europe to the East Indies or Australasia.

Most will have traveled from Cape Town on the MFV Edinburgh or MFV Lance — two lobster fishing vessels that offer the only regular connection to Tristan. A third far larger ship, the Agulhas II, makes the trip once a year.

A group of Okalolies share a drink while on a break from roaming around the village. The Okalolies are often invited for a drink by “brave” members of the community who open their doors to the group. Many are also fathers and will pass by their own houses during the day’s festivities.

Julia Gunther

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A lucky few will have arrived here on one of the cruise ships that regularly cross the South Atlantic as part of their annual relocation from the Northern to Southern hemispheres.

Our own trip was a good example of the uncertainties islanders and visitors face to reach the island. After spending a month in Cape Town waiting for space on one of the regular ships, we decided to risk hitching a ride on an expedition cruise ship, the SH Diana.

After five days at sea, we arrived at Tristan to find the only harbor closed due to heavy swells. Luckily, the Edinburgh was fishing nearby and we were able to transfer to her to wait out the weather. After another five days, the seas were calm enough for us to land. Had the Edinburgh not been where she was, we would have ended up at the cruise ship’s final destination, in Ushuaia, Argentina.

Other than day tourists from visiting yachts or cruise ships — the latter of which can momentarily double or even triple Tristan’s population — and a busy few weeks at the end of August when the largest regular ship of the year, the SA Agulhas II, drops off new expats, returning islanders and a few tourists, the island sees very few visitors.

Several Okalolies peer into the kitchen of a house belonging to one of their own. Although they are careful not to frighten children and the elderly too much, they are expected to make light mischief, and will attempt to soak any woman they find with a garden hose.

Julia Gunther

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On Tristan da Cunha, a night for making ‘mischief’

You’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s impossible for a group of 15 young men to keep anything a secret in a community this small, but that is exactly what we — 16 Okalolies in total — manage to pull off.

Okalolies are always male. There is no selection process. “You just need to be brave enough,” explains Randal, who himself was 15 years old when he first took part.

Young boys see the tradition as a rite of passage. Randal remembers putting on an Okalolies mask as a child. “I looked into the mirror and frightened myself to death,” he laughs as we get into our costumes. Now, he can’t wait to find others to scare.

One of the first years that Albert Green, 67, was an Okalolie, he and a friend were getting dressed in his father’s shed. “We had our backs to one another and when we turned ’round, we both jumped with fright,” Albert says.

At 94, Gladys Lavarello is one of the oldest Tristanians on the island. She remembers a young woman called Liza, who, during one Old Year’s Night back in the 1970s, dressed up as an Okalolie and managed to fool all the men into thinking she was one of them. “She was dancing around with them and they didn’t even know it was her,” Gladys recalls with a smile.

Like his older brother, Randal is a seasoned Okalolie. Now, it’s their job to show Tristan Glass, 16, Kieran Glass, 18, and Calvin Green, 15, how it’s done. “The young guys learn by watching us older ones. They just follow us and pick it up as they go on,” Dean explains.

Kieran Glass (left) waits for a drink while Tristan Glass checks on Jake Swain, who is fast asleep. Most children are terrified of the Okalolies and will cry or hide when they approach. Jake, however, was utterly unimpressed and slept through most of the day.

Julia Gunther

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Julia Gunther

Although the village fully expects them to appear and cause havoc — as they have for at least a hundred years — exactly who will be an Okalolie and where they will get dressed remains a closely guarded secret.

“We don’t want to let people know where we’ll be coming from, as it makes it scarier,” Randal explains.

Randal knows the look he’s going for. “Anything that looks ragged and scary, especially zombie-like,” he tells me as we walk through the sawmill.

Dean has been an Okalolie for the last 13 years, but he still gets excited. “I feel really energetic,” he says. “I’m ready to look scary and roam the village, knocking on doors and frightening people.”

Some Okalolies, like Randal, Dean and 36-year-old Shane Green, planned their looks days before and have brought their own masks or dresses — Shane has worn the same costume for the past 10 years.

Others, including me, design their outfits on the spot, picking from an extensive collection of masks ordered from the U.K. and South Africa by a community development fund — which helps pay for and promote island traditions — as well as old skirts and coats and bits of worn workwear.

A group of Okalolies — Calvin Green (from left), Dean Repetto, Christopher Swain, Shane Green, Kieran Glass, Cedric Swain and Callum Green — take a break from roaming around the village. Roaming normally lasts a few hours, and the men will stop for breaks at friendly houses to cool off before putting their masks back on.

Julia Gunther

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I choose a white disposable coverall — which I am encouraged to “personalize” with green and orange spray paint — and a black and red cape. For a mask, I pick out an alien-type thing.

I’m told that Okalolies don’t speak, as this would give away our identities. The silence also adds to our eeriness — a masked group of young men, marauding through the village, looking for “mischief.”

As we head out onto the empty streets of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, a few last islanders hurry past.

We communicate through hand signals, whistles and whispers, but we can make noise by banging on windows and doors, blowing on horns and playing whatever instrument is at hand — this year, it was a toy accordion and a child’s tambourine.

We decide as a group which houses to visit. Some have made arrangements with the residents, who allow us to frighten their children or invite us in for a beer or cider.

Tristan da Cunha’s Head of Tourism, Kelly Green, greets the Okalolies with her daughter Savanna after they’ve arrived at their home. Moments after this image was taken, Kelly was soaked with water from a garden hose. Kelly’s husband, Shane, was one of the Okalolies, and Kelly had trouble figuring out who her husband was before he finally revealed himself.

Julia Gunther

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A rich and eclectic history

Despite being discovered in 1506 by Portuguese Admiral Tristaõ da Cunha, who named the main island after himself, Tristan da Cunha wouldn’t be permanently inhabited for another 300 years.

In 1810, Jonathan Lambert, from Salem, Mass., claimed the archipelago as his own and renamed them the “Islands of Refreshment” in hopes of attracting passing ships in need of fresh water and supplies.

Six years later, in 1816, Tristan da Cunha was annexed by the British, who were worried the French would use the island as a staging post for freeing Napoleon from his imprisonment on St. Helena.

Another major concern was the possibility of American occupation. During the War of 1812, Tristan had served as a base point for American ships to disrupt British maritime activities. Interestingly, the final naval engagement of that war was fought near Tristan in 1815, just a year before the British arrived.

Shop-bought masks and cans of spray paint — normally used to tag sheep — lie ready to be used inside the Okalolies’ clandestine changing room: a small sawmill. The Okalolies use a mix of shop-bought items, old dresses and coats to put together their outfits. The goals are to disguise themselves as scarily as possible and to remain anonymous throughout the day.

Julia Gunther

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When the British garrison departed a year later, three men, led by Corporal William Glass, opted to stay behind. They embarked on an extraordinary venture dubbed “the firm,” grounded in a formal agreement for communal living.

This document, now kept at the British Library, entailed equal distribution of shares and provisions, equal division of profits, shared responsibility in covering expenses, and a commitment to equality without any individual islander holding superiority over another.

Although now a part of the British Overseas Territories, much of the independent spirit captured in Glass’s document is still present on the island today.

A tradition of uncertain origins

The Okalolies are part of a type of visiting custom known as mumming or guising, in which young men disguise themselves, visit homes and engage in playful pranks — mainly on Christmas and New Year’s — that have existed in Europe for the past 500 years.

Although she can’t remember how or why the Okalolies got their start on her island, 94-year-old Gladys Lavarello knows they existed when she was a little girl. “The men would dress up and come ’round, singing and dancing. Then they’d take their masks off,” she tells me in her living room, a few weeks later.

“My father would go ’round with a wheelbarrow and a pitchfork and say that he was cleaning up the mess,” she adds with a laugh.

There is no academic consensus on the origins of the name for the tradition here. It could be derived from the Afrikaans words “Olie Kolonies,” meaning “old ugly men” — Cape Town, South Africa, has long been the main port of call for ships traveling to Tristan.

According to Peter Millington, a retired research fellow at the University of Sheffield who has studied house-visiting customs around the world and who took part in the Okalolies tradition in 2019, the Okalolies are likely “an amalgam of the customs of the home countries of the original settlers, including families no longer present on the island.”

An Okalolie peers through the window of a house, looking for children to frighten. Tristanian women try to outsmart the Okalolies by hiding in groups behind locked doors. Where no “victims” can be found, Okalolies enter the homes of families who have left their doors unlocked.

Julia Gunther

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“The name might have been introduced by transient expat residents, or it might simply have been made up on the island,” Millington offers.

New Year’s Eve used to be called Old Year’s Night in much of Scotland. Corporal William Glass, one of the three British soldiers who elected to stay on Tristan after the garrison departed in 1817, hailed from Kelso, Scotland, where “Auld Year’s Nicht” was still being celebrated in 1923.

Old Year’s Night is also a direct translation from the Dutch Oudejaarsavond. Peter Green, formerly Pieter Groen, from the Netherlands town of Katwijk, was another early settler who remained on the island after his ship, the Emily, wrecked on the coast in October 1836.

The oldest known account referring to the Okalolies tradition on Tristan da Cunha — albeit not by name — is detailed in K.M. Barrow’s book, Three Years In Tristan Da Cunha, and dates back to 1907.

An Okalolie dressed as King Charles III walks out of their clandestine changing room. In honor of the king’s coronation last year — Tristan da Cunha is a British overseas territory — two participants transformed themselves into the king and queen.

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For Tristanians, a tradition that’s expected and — for some — still feared

As with most long-lived cultural practices, the Okalolies’ tradition has changed over time. When Gladys was a child, it was predominantly about celebrating the end of the year.

“They used to fire guns to announce they was coming ’round,” Gladys remembers. “We didn’t have much in those days, but we’d always make sure there was milk for them, and if we had a little flour, we’d make them a cake.”

Initially, participants didn’t wear masks but would paint their faces, and the tradition supposedly was teetotal, whereas more recently, alcohol is consumed throughout the day.

“The whole island would dress up,” Albert Green recalls. “We’d go to every house and wouldn’t finish till the next morning.”

Over time, the Okalolies have gotten smaller in number, more mischievous, their outfits more frightening, and the day itself more focussed on scaring people rather than visiting homes.

More recently, homemade masks were incorporated, and nowadays, many wear shop-bought latex horror products.

Although all Tristanians are intimately familiar with the Okalolies, some remain genuinely afraid and hide inside their homes when they know they’ll be out on the streets.

On this Old Year’s Night, we roam together as a group for a few hours, during which we stop for breaks at friendly houses to cool off. Luckily, the weather was unseasonably cold for summer in the Southern Hemisphere — walking up the settlement’s steep roads makes wearing latex masks and multiple layers of tweed and plastic outfits a hot and stuffy experience.

Then, silently and suddenly, we split up, with smaller bands roaming between houses searching for “victims,” almost exclusively women or girls.

An Okalolie poses with Savanna Green. After quickly taking off his mask to identify himself, the two posed for a picture, like they’ve done every year since Savanna was a little girl.

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Tristanian women try to outsmart us by hiding in groups behind locked doors. Where no “victims” can be found, we enter the homes of families who have left their doors open.

Chantelle Repetto, 18, tells me she’s been afraid of the Okalolies for as long as she can remember. “Being scared is normal — we don’t know what the boys will do,” she explains.

Rachel Green, 25, is not as frightened as she used to be, but she’ll still run away when she sees them. “They used to throw people in the pool or in the flax,” she says with a laugh, referring to the now-invasive plant first introduced to the island in the 19th century that’s used to provide thatching materials for roofs. “But now they really only wet you with a hose.”

Although some villagers are genuinely afraid of being caught, the Okalolies tradition is all in good fun.

“During Old Year’s Night, the whole community comes together,” explains Chief Islander James Glass — a Tristanian elected by the people of Tristan every three years who represents their interests alongside the Island Council.

“As we’ve become more Westernised; we’ve lost much of our culture,” Glass continues. “The Okalolies are an established tradition that we want to maintain.”

We’re careful not to frighten children and older adults too much, and briefly remove our masks to calm scared children. In a community this small, chances are high that one of the Okalolies will confront their own son or daughter.

After removing his mask to reveal himself, Julian Repetto holds and comforts his daughter, Makayla. When this did not calm the little girl, the other Okalolies followed suit. The Okalolies are careful not to frighten children and the elderly too much. Some islanders, however, are genuinely afraid and will lock themselves inside their houses.

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After two hours of knocking on windows and spraying water, I join Randal and Tristan as they rush back to the sawmill and quickly change into a new set of outfits. In honor of King Charles III’s coronation, Tristan transforms himself into a king, and Randal into his queen.

Together with a “royal guard,” King Tristan, Queen Randal and I climb onto the trailer of a waiting decorated tractor.

First, our procession heads to the residence of Administrator Philip Kendall — the U.K. representative on the island — to collect his wife, Louise. Then we move on to James Glass’ house — to pick up his wife, Felicity.

Our passengers safely seated on two armchairs in the trailer, we escort our guests to Prince Philip Hall, the building that houses the village hall and the only pub on the island. There, the waiting administrator and chief islander, along with the entire village, wait to welcome us.

The Okalolies’ tractor arrives at the Prince Phillip Hall, home to the village’s town hall and the only pub on the island, to deliver King Charles and his queen. After they’ve roamed around the community for a few hours, the Okalolies pick up a tractor and trailer to collect the wife of the U.K.’s representative on the island, as well as the wife of the Chief Islander.

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It is only now that we finally reveal ourselves. Then, it’s time for dancing, barbecues — or braais, as they’re known on Tristan — and, at midnight, the ringing of the fishing gong, an old gas bottle suspended from a rope and hit with a hammer or metal bar.

Although Randal, Dean and the other Okalolies don’t yet know where they’ll meet to get dressed for next year’s Old Year’s Night, they’ll do their best to keep it a secret. Above all, Dean, like Chief Islander James Glass, is keen to carry on the tradition passed down by his ancestors.

“We frighten the old year out and bring the new year in.”

The Okalolies take part in a traditional Pillow Dance after arriving at Prince Phillip Hall. It’s only now that the Okalolies finally reveal themselves. Then, it’s time for dancing, barbecues — or braais, as they’re known on Tristan — and, at midnight, the ringing of the fishing gong, an old gas bottle suspended from a rope and hit with a hammer or metal bar.

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Nick Schonfeld divides his time between writing children’s books and working on stories about affordable health care, gender equality, education and distributive justice.

See more of Julia Gunther’s work on her website or follow her on Instagram: @juliagunther_photography.

Catie Dull photo edited and Zach Thompson copy edited this story.