Pumpkin Festival

I booked a ticket for Seattle on a whim after a facebook feed broke regarding the 4th Annual Pumpkin Festival. Here is that provocative advertisement in its entirety:

PUMPKIN FESTIVAL

Here we celebrate the harvest season with whisky and love! 

If you love pumpkins, leaves, autumn, beer, whiskey and music, then you'll love this hootin annie ho down. Bring yourself, all your friends and pumpkin beer.

The festival would be thrown by one of my oldest allies, "Cool Dave," as my roommates call him. I've also heard him called, at different stages of his eclectic life, Hip Dave, Emo Dave, Detar, Daver, and, much more basely, Short Dave. In fact, on more than one occasion, on separate occasions actually, though each time while dining at a Denny's restaurant, I found myself at the loud end of a shouting match with a complete stranger, once threatening fisticuffs, because some low dog had referred to Dave's stature in a condescending way. Humans can be terrible creatures.

The history between Dave and I is thick, but we were enemies before allies. I found myself pitted against him the year my team, Ragersville Blue, rallied for the championship over Hampshire Insurance. He played for Hampshire and maintained a steady on-base-percentage, but I didn't care for his attitude one bit. He was arrogantish.

Then I heard a few good things about Dave, like how he had go-carts.

A few years later the alphabet put us next to each other in Home Room, and soon I found myself under a bridge wielding a sawed-off BB gun and setting off firecrackers with my new comrade. Back then we had ammo tins full of skoal and cigarettes, the occasional cherry cigarillo, or a mason jar of rum, and always plenty of firecrackers. We called ourselves the Winfield Militia, but mostly we just smoked cigarettes and traipsed around.

Dave hoarded a stockpile of small explosives and firecrackers, mostly procured from a man named Boot who sold baseball cards at the Amish flea-market in Walnut Creek. Boot was a local legend. I'd heard stories -- he'd eatin' car bumper on a dare, grinding it up little by little over the course of a year. Others swear they'd watched him eat his own shoe, hot off the grill and smothered in BBQ sauce. Then there were the stories of his time with The Yankees in New York, some kind of skipper or janitor or hot dog vendor. Boot certainly did have a lot of autographed sports paraphernalia, but a kid once claimed he caught him forging a signature on a baseball. I don't doubt Boot was loose on the details morally, but forgery is lofty allegation, and that kid was sort of a liar anyways.

It's not hard to trace the seeds of some of the legend that followed Boot. For one, Boot looked like he'd eaten the bumper of an automobile. He was big and fat, with bulldog jowls covered in coarse stubble, always pouring out of some variation of gray threadbare t-shirt. He was a hulking man, as I recall, but mind you, I was smaller then.

Boot was the sort of sports fan who means much more to the sport than the athletes ever could. He was also a huge fan of Ragersville Little League baseball, a fact he downplayed when he umpired our games. He was probably umping when we won that championship. He used to squat behind me when I was catching and whisper in my ear, "How we lookin' here Joey? Can we throw one by this guy high and tight?"

Well, Dave and I would go to Boot's baseball card stand to browse his knife and nunchuck collection, but when the other customers cleared out, we'd follow him out to his van where he'd sell us fireworks illegally. At 14, we were pretty cool. As I recall, Dave had another insider at the flea market, in case Boot was a no show -- an Asian man that sold toys. His code word to Dave for fireworks was, "Boom booms."

**

I wake up on the plane. Out the window I watch the land stretching on and on so far below my aching back. I think about dying, of dropping through the sky in a big metal contraption. I would go quietly, think of a nice memory; my father singing a hymn, eyes wet with tears, voice shaking like he understood the words he sung.

But I do not fall through the sky. My back continues aching.

Below, the huge plains are swelling toward one Great White Peak in reverent folds of earth and rock -- Mt. Rainier.