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MEETING THE MYSTERIOUS OLE

When we first moved out here I right away noticed under the railroad bridge, where it crosses the highway, a sign that pointed down to the lakeshore and said in big Roman letters "OLES," offering rental boats, fishing equipment and what not and I thought to myself hey great, some Swedish guy, or maybe Norwegian-- anyway Nordic-- moved out here a long time ago looks like, long enough to set up a business down by the Lake, successful by the look of the sign, I'll have to go visit him sometime.

And as the summer passed I asked folks I met here and there in the general way of things if any of them had ever met this Nordic guy Ole who has the boat place, maybe a marina and bar or something down by the water, but nobody I asked had ever met him, or even heard of him, which was a bit puzzling, but hey I was new here, all in good time, and time passed further, a lot further, the way it can out in the country where the seasons just tick by as pretty as a series of wildflower-russet-snowclad-greening meadows at sunrise-sunset and take your mind off a lot of things you might have somewhat low down there on the old list of to-dos, so getting to meet Ole kind of slipped my mind, though I had gone down to the Lake any number of times, just hadn't turned in that direction along the shore, as fate would have it.

Then one summer afternoon a couple of years later as I was driving northward home, I glanced to the right beyond some rice fields toward the Lake and noticed a boat-business building behind some trees by the shore that had painted on its roof "OLES." But this was too far away to be the original Ole's, I thought; he must have a chain of these things! Then I saw, at this end of the road that led to the place, a sign containing a word in katakana that was pronounced 'ooresu,' and the five-yen coin dropped. Ole wasn't a Norwegian guy at all; he wasn't Swedish either. He wasn't even human. 'Ooresu' was the Japanese phonetic pronunciation of the anciently used English term "oarless," which a couple of Japanese boathouses had simple-spelled in Roman lettering: "OLES." In other words, Ole was a powerboat, or maybe a jet-ski. This kind of thing happens to foreigners all the time in Japan, so let's just keep this between ourselves, ok?