For Sale: Everything

Short Version:
Market forces at work, with pirates. We check out our harvest and some pot then get molested by some enormities.

Long Version:
The Dunster Market was awesome. Quite apart from the happy-meat cheeseburgers and more Mennonite cinnamon buns, there was locally-grown produce galore, and an assortment of characters selling it, or giving it away, depending on how well they liked the cut of your jib. One particularly piratically-attired local, Rob (Hi Rob!), gave me some apples gratis and told me tales of giant zucchini pranksterism in the far-north town of Terrace, from whence he hails. Nowdays he's a Dunsterite* for seven months of the year, and spends the other five months caring for autistic kids in Vancouver, which is an interesting pair of lives to be leading. I can only imagine what the autistic kids think of the leather hat, big beard, dreadlocks, and artificial leg. Also at the market was Stefi and Archie's cross-river neighbor, Alfie, wearing his latest business advertisement: a beige jacket, with "FOR SALE: EVERYTHING. IF I DON'T HAVE IT, YOU DON'T NEED IT" written across the back in marker pen. He looked like a curmudgeonly grandpa from an Amerikan sitcom, crossed with a widowered horse-racing follower who chain-smokes hand-rolled cigarettes outside the TAB somewhere in the Hutt Valley.

The Market is held in the parking lot of the Dunster Hall, near the "Dunster Mall": a shed full of no-longer needed items too good to throw away. Folks drop by, have a looksee, and help themselves to whatever's there that they want or need. We poked our heads in and saw: ice-skates; books; audio tapes; shoes; hats; clothing; a child's car-seat; assorted kitchen implements; knitting needles; and much, much more.

On the way back to the farm we saw the corpse of the squirrel we'd harvested the previous day, lying in the middle of the road with his little paws curled up under his chin. The fir-cone he'd been carrying in his little mouth when he made his ill-fated dash across the road was nowhere to be seen - carried off, no doubt, by his nearest and dearest, for use as post-service snacks at the funeral. We wouldn't have felt so bad about our first (confirmed) mammalian kill if he weren't so darned cute, but when it comes down to it, if we had to run over a mammal I'd far rather it was a tiny, cute squirrel than a half-ton moose or angry grizzly bear**.

After a tour of the pottery studio, where we met not only clay but also kittens and pack-rats, we helped pick apples from some of the many trees, and then Archie took Nene and I (and the two dogs: Momo and Foxy) for a hike: along the river bank to Beaver Point, then up along a gully to a meadow, where we spooked a herd of horses. They soon regained their equilibrium, and came back to check us out, which went from kind of neat to a wee bit scary as they changed from beautiful majestic animals galloping away on the far side of the paddock to blimmin enormous critters, up close and a little too personal: one tried to eat the jacket Nene had tied around her waist, another was blowing in my ear. All of us humans had an enormous muzzle pressed into the middle of our backs, hurrying us along, and each of the dogs had a pursuer that outweighed them at least several hundred times. They were, Archie told us, log-haulers and their descendants, and they were absolutely huge - near as high at the shoulder as a Clydesdale but far more massive. It was kind of nice to get on the other side of the fence and watch them from comparative safety, although their continued enthusiasm to get close to us had the fence bowing and creaking alarmingly, so we wandered down into the wooded gully into which the original homestead was bulldozed by a previous landowner, up the other side into the sloping paddock above the house which doubles as a ski field in winter, and back to the house just as delicious foods were ready to be snarfed.

And then it was time to get dressed up in our best eveningwear finery and our dancing shoes****, and hit the road to the Dunster Hall, to the Old-Time Family Dance.








* = Dunsterian? Dunsterer?

** = Apparently grizzlies have been known to take a disliking to certain automobiles, and use their enormous, clawed strength to peel their way through the metal skins to the soft parts inside. Also, we're told, they like gin***. Not sure if the two are related.

*** = Actually, we were told they like juniper berries - which is where the flavor of gin comes from - and that at this time of year the big bears are quite high up in the mountains seeking them

**** = Jeans and sneakers and off-road running shoes.