Festival Day

In recent decades many small towns have launched various annual festivals to boost civic pride. Ours is no exception. The festival took place on a recent weekend at the city park. We had almost perfect weather for it, blue and almost cloudless and perhaps a bit too warm. I went in to work for a while in the morning and did not arrive at the event until mid-morning.

There was already a good crowd there. Adults browsed the booths or stood around and chatted. Children ran about brandishing newly-bought toys, wearing funny hats, and shooting Silly String at each other. Both of the local radio stations had booths set up to do live remotes.

I first went around the vendor booths. It was a bit disappointing to see that there were not all that many actual handcrafts on display. One exception that stood out sold all sorts of crocheted items, including teddy bears, a red crocheted piggy, and, in a nice blend of traditional and modern, crocheted cell-phone pouches.

At another booth I found a fellow church member selling locally-canned preserves. She had some muscadine jelly on hand. I snapped up a jar of that; it had been who knows how long since I had had any muscadine jelly. Another booth sold me a jar of excellent regionally produced honey.

The pride of the city park is a carefully reconstructed pioneer cabin, based on a real one that was destroyed in a fire some years back. It is a dogtrot cabin—essentially two one-room structures connected by a breezeway (the dogtrot) and all sharing a shake roof. The rooms are furnished with an eclectic collection of antiques which might have once been used in such a cabin. The local historical society had actually improved their collection since the previous year’s festival.

One of the rooms had a sleeping loft reachable by a tight stairway. As I walked up I saw a boy with a beanshooter (purchased at one of the booths, naturally) let fly at one of two girls who were sitting on the low beds in the cramped loft. He nearly collided with me as he raced away from the scene of the attack. I asked the girls whether they planned to hold a slumber party up there. Somebody had already had a Silly String fight there. It seemed like a desecration in a place like this.

Back outside the cabin I heard the distinctive popping of a primitive gasoline engine coming from the antique tractor show area across the street. It’s an unmistakable sound. Unlike a modern two- or four-stroke cycle engine, those old “hit-or-miss” engines only fired a power stroke when the engine dropped below a certain speed. They make an occasional popping sound, instead of a continuous purr or rumble. Dad is an old engine enthusiast. A bit of that has rubbed off on me. I went across the street to check it out.

I half expected to see a commonplace “Popping Johnny” (John Deere) engine. Instead it was a model I had never seen before at any of the power shows I had attended with Dad. The owner said that it had been made in Canada. Its French name suggested to me that it must have been produced in Quebec. Nobody could say how it had gotten all the way down here. With no load to pull the engine’s metal flywheel clanked along merrily, gradually slowing until the governor on it tripped a mechanism that injected a shot of fuel and fired with a pop and a puff of smoke. Those old engines look like something a backyard inventor would tinker together in his workshop—and that’s essentially what many of them were.

Back in the main festival area I stopped by the Chamber of Commerce’s confection wagon for a funnel cake. It’s fascinating to see them being made at an outdoor event like this. The vendor dribbles batter through a funnel into a ring floating in hot oil. In a few moments the batter fries into a looped, twisting pastry that is dipped out onto a paper plate and sprinkled with confectionary sugar. Lately some funnel cake vendors seem to be going with pre-made cakes that they merely warm up. The Chamber was doing it right, even mixing their own batter at the booth. As a COC member I should probably have been taking a volunteer turn there. But I was ready to spend the day enjoying myself.

I ate half my funnel cake over beside the fenced-in area where they were giving the pony rides. It was a good cake, not too done like so many of them are and with just about enough sugar. As I ate I watched the pony ride volunteers leading the ponies around, each pony with a small child perched on its back. One of the volunteers was a neighbor on my block, a rather large man who seemed to dwarf the animal that he led. He was clearly enjoying himself as he chatted with the mother of his current rider about how much he loved the horses. Behind me, across the pond, I saw people fishing.

As I wandered around the grounds I met various people I knew—some fellow church members, our pastor (who pretended to conceal his IBC root beer bottle behind his back when he saw me—they look a lot like real lager bottles), one of the local radio announcers that I know, our library’s web designer who is also a photographer and was taking photos for parents. About the only person I saw who did not appear to be having a good time was a bashful toddler. “Can you say `I’m a good boy?’” the man holding him asked, as he introduced him to some friends or relatives. But the boy was not in a talking mood. The father (or perhaps grandfather, or uncle) laughed at his decision not to perform on command. “You just like a dog!” he said.

Around lunch time I bought a barbecued beef sandwich and took it and the uneaten half of my funnel cake home. I’d pretty well seen everything there was to see, and I don’t feel like spending a very long time in a crowd if I’m not with someone to share the experience. Besides, it was still a beautiful day and the road was calling. After lunch I rolled out my motorcycle and rode for a couple of hours.

That evening as I sat in the living room with the door open to the cool breeze I heard the booming of amplified music from the park as the evening concert that finished the day’s events wound down. In the city I used to hear loud music fairly often. A lot of people seem to feel afraid of silence—they have to be making some kind of noise all the time. Where I live now the evenings are usually blessedly quiet. This evening wasn’t. But there was a good reason for it, so I didn’t much mind.