September 18, 2004

• The Wasilla Farmers Market

  
  

  The last one of the season was held this week, and it is such an important part of my life, it seemed altogether fitting and proper to blog about it.  But first a few words about Wasilla. . .

  
  

  By Outside standards, it is a small town–maybe four intersections with  traffic lights in town,  a library that is only open four hours on Saturdays, one high school, one tiny museum, run by the local historical society-more on that later.  But with a population of 5,469 (2000 census–it is lots bigger now), it is one of the biggest communities in the state. (More than half of the 600,000+  folks in the state live in or around Anchorage.) It is not a pretty place–anal-retentive zoning Nazis like to point their fingers at Wasilla as a bad example.  The dominant impression a visitor gets is road construction, strip malls, and more road construction.   In some ways it is your basic bedroom community: many  people who live here commute to Anchorage to work, a drive of maybe an hour or so.  But you gotta love a place where the local high school holds a gun show as a fund-raiser for the soccer team.

  
  

  One of the prettiest spots in town (other than  Lake Lucille,  a great place to swim in the summer if you like brutally-cold glacier-fed bodies of water) is the historical park off Main Street, behind the public library and historical museum.  It is a little vest-pocket park, not really big enough for a good game of touch football.  It has a half-dozen or so old buildings–cabins, a barn, a blacksmith shop, a one-room schoolhouse–with more or less historical value.  Each Wednesday during   the summer, a retired guy called Leroy, a volunteer from the historical society, sets up folding tables on the lawns and charges $12 to sell your wares.  (Plus you have to pay the 2.5 % local sales tax.)

  
  

  On one busy summer day, there were over a dozen venders.  Three or four were selling produce. A school-marm was selling her unremarkable ceramics (but I did get one plate I loved–it has a charmingly child-like picture of a bear with a fish in its mouth: traded a hematite necklace for it); a family of “hill-billy Jesus freaks”, as the father described them, was selling wild blueberries they had picked plus some silver coins they were selling for spot (WAY less than their collectable value); a photographer was selling prints; a retired guy was selling big metal-work wind vanes and other things with moose and other Alaska critters on them; a Urantia-book reading guy was selling diamond willow walking sticks; a young wood-carver was selling his–guess what–wood carvings.  Then there was me.

  
  

  I sell mostly  edged stuff–all sorts of knives, from  three for $20 cheapies to $125 Columbia River folders, fancy fantasy knives, kitchen knives, plus the occasional sword or battle-axe.  I sell lots of rocks and tumbled stones, from Alaska and all over the world.  I sell jewelry, some made by Kathy, and a lot of hematite necklaces, sometimes hyped as “Alaska black diamond,” which is foolish and  I tell people so.  Hematite is nice– it is shiny neutral gray in color so it goes with everything, it doesn’t tarnish and it feels good against the skin, but it is nothing in the world like diamond, being relatively cheap and soft.  (Also, the necklaces are made in China by slave labor, but I usually keep that to myself.)  Plus I sell the inevitable Alaskana–t-shirts, collectable pins from the Iditarod and various local events, hand-made fossil ivory belt buckles, Native carvings, model dog sleds and so forth.  All of this goes on the 8-foot folding table they provide, plus three of my own card tables, and a folding chair that holds my high-end knives in a cardboard flat with the longer knives and swords just sort of propped up against it.

  
  

  It is an extremely pleasant environment, lots of grass, and a comfy rest room nearby.  There is a good mix of tourists and locals.  One local lady always brings her sweet old low-slung dog–looks sort of like a basset/husky cross, and there are two girls in their 20s who work fifty miles up the Valley at Sheep Creek Lodge who like odd-ball knives. There is a local Wiccan who comes by a few times a summer for rocks and crystals. Sometimes their keepers bring in a bunch of crips and tards and droolers–one actually drooled on my merchandise– giving me good lessons in patience and tolerance–but not political corectness.  Most of the tourists are okay, but there are a few rich arrogant snots I could cheerfully gut.  And I do get  tired of hearing “Oh, I can’t take that on the plane” as a lame excuse for not buying a knife–sometimes I want to scream “If you don’t want a  knife, fine, don’t buy it, but please don’t insult my intelligence”.  But mostly everyone is fairly mellow, and no one is loaded and there is minimal noise and no dust.  The latter is a  huge advantage over my flea market location, which is on a very dusty strip and is plagued by morons stirring up the dust and making life there hazardous by driving their dirt-bikes or 4-wheelers at 50 mph through the place–the posted speed limit is FIVE mph. (Digression: Alaska is one of the more special places on the planet–even our dust is special.  Our local dust contains a mix of fine glacial silt and volcanic ash, and it is both finer and more abrasive than ordinary, “Outside” dust.)

  
  

  Business is spotty.  Some days, it is fairly brisk all day.  Somedays, I don’t do any business at all until late afternoon, and then BOOM, I’ll sell a hundred bucks worth of stuff in half an hour.  If I net $100 for the day, I consider that a pretty good day.  Once or twice a summer I’ll come close to $300.  The last day was one of those days; attendance was sparse, but I was in full-blown Turkish rug-peddler mode.  Someone wanted  some $10 hematite necklaces, but only had enough money for one–fine, today it is two for $10.  Someone else wanted a nice $15 ammonite fossil, only had $11–no problem, take it.  Someone wanted my half-price wood carving, which I had marked down from $39 to $20, and insisted she only had to pay $10–okay lady, you got it. (At this point, Kathy is probably REAL glad she wasn’t there–one on the benefits of her  not being to physically handle working shows with me is that she does not have to endure listening to my sales pitch–heck, sometimes I get tired of hearing it myself.  But I digress.  Again, and yes, I know I say it a lot.  Part of my style.)  I even sold my battle-axe twice.  Really.  A young woman who worked in the park bought it (for less than half-price), then realized that she had to walk home and didn’t want to be schlepping a battle axe.  She “traded” it for two smaller, and more portable knives.  We were both happy.  An hour later, another young woman sent her hubby off on a pretext and slipped me $40,  asked me to hold the axe for her.  She came back alone just before closing time and picked it up.

  
  

  So all in all, it was a good day, even though it ended, not with a bang or even a whimper, but a shower.  I was so busy dealing with customers I neglected to keep an eye on the sky, and it started to drizzle around 5:30 pm.  I quickly put the more water-sensitive stuff under the tables and gimped off to my car to get the visqueen  sheets I use to cover up when it rains, and managed to get everything protected.  After getting most of the lighter items into the car, which was parked on a side-street, I pulled  around and into the park to load up the heavy knives and folding tables and stuff.  I didn’t panic or anything, but the quick rain DID sorta discomboobulate me, and my last-day closing was  kind of like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, only without the guns and horses.  But that was okay.  I settled up with Leroy, said I’d see him next year, and went off to do my shopping.

  
  

  Back in my cabin, I greeted Silky the cat and gave her some pets, and nuked a Marie Callendar’s chicken pot pie for dinner and munched on a broccoli salad while I waited for it to heat–yum!

  
  

  Life is good.

  • 2:38 pm
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