The first weekend

All over the north country, there appear to be lots of town and village festivals. I guess since there's not too much else to do, local chambers of commerce and the like get inventive. So my first weekend in my apartment, I experienced my village's very own summer festival.

And it was hilarious. Of course it had the necessary craft fair and a radio station was there. And it ended in fireworks and there was fried dough and a book sale at the library. But that can be found anywhere.

The highlight - and the only part I really got to see - involved bed races. Two gurney-looking things, teams of five, and a stretch of Main Street, which of course, had been closed down for the affair.

How it works:
Four people push the "bed" - one at each bedpost.
One person on top of the bed, holding on for dear life.
Oh, the bed has wheels.
The team pushes the bed down maybe 50 feet of Main Street.
They stop, the one on top has to get off and chug a small cup of beer.
Jump back on and away they race to the top.

It was done in heats - two teams at a time. Until of course, one of the wheels broke off one of the beds and snapped in half because of the massive cracks on one side of the street. Then they did it one at a time, but the one team that went fastest of the two paired together advanced to the next heat. Obviously, it was sponsored by the biker bar across the street from my apartment. That's key.

It was awesome. The street was packed with people watching, the team member on top got progressively more drunk as the heats went on, and at one point, one of the beds actually flipped over. That was fantastic. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Ironically, that was not when the wheel snapped in half, though it may have compromised its structural integrity.

At first I thought it was absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Then, to my surprise, I got totally into it and was rooting for a team or two - cheering them on and everything. Granted, I was cheering quietly - I wasn't whooping or anything. And one of the teams I was rooting for actually won, so that was even cooler.

Then there were the duck races. I had to leave before they started, but I heard about them. It involved plastic ducks - think rubber ducks but not squeezable. The woman who owns the hardware store, and is great, went around in a ridiculous hat that looked like a duck's head - complete with beak in place of the rim and a tuft of feather at the crown. This is a 50+ year old woman, by the way. She was selling the ducks to residents, along with plastic quackers to "cheer on" your not-quite-sentient duck.

There's nothing funnier than seeing grown men and women with quackers around their necks, blowing them - they sounded kind of like kazoos as blown by a duck - in each other's faces. And precious little more annoying after the first 15 minutes when you have neither your own quacker nor a beer - or five - in your hand.

The race part, which I didn't see, apparently had to do with the plastic ducks being released down a short, netted, stretch of the river to float down to the finish line. I'm not sure how they could tell the ducks apart, but I wouldn't put it past some people to decorate theirs with glitter, or at least sharpies. I would have.

Of smiles. And strangers.

As my mother is from Yonkers and my father from Long Island, I am not used to friendly strangers. I know all about the "You talkin' ta Me?" guido with the pinky ring and more hair than is quite natural. I understand him. I see him coming and promptly look at the ground, in case my heel gets stuck in a grate. Or, more likely, I trip over something.

So it was strange to me when I got up here to discover that people say hello to strangers on the sidewalk. Of course, the towns up here are so small that no one really stays a stranger for long, and odds are good that you will bump into someone you know every time you go to the gas station. Because you know there's only one or two in each town.

Nor to people lock their doors - of either houses or cars. My landlord's fiancee never locks her house door. And when the two of them go to Florida for the winter, she leaves her car unlocked, with the keys inside! I lock my car when I'm running into Stewart's for ice cream. And there's no one else in the parking lot.

But here, they trust each other. In fact, they have no reason not to - the only crime up here is drunk driving. And drug smuggling.

I live next door to a bait shop, run by a really nice guy. He rents out the apartment above the shop to fishermen - or anglers, as some prefer to be known. There are these two guys from the Bronx - or maybe Brooklyn, I can't remember - and they are like fish out of water up here, if you'll forgive the pun. But they come up a few times a year. They've already been here twice since I moved in. One morning, I was hanging out outside on the communal patio furniture, and one of them came out to throw some trash away. I decided to take the leap into north country culture and said hello. And like any normal southern new yorker, he looked askance at me and muttered "hi" while looking into the trash can as if he expected to find buried treasure. Later, when I actually met him, I called him out on it and he was properly embarrassed. Quite funny. But I didn't blame him.

My neighbor downstairs, however, simply does not understand their reticence. This is the woman who bakes every week for friends and neighbors, even though she and her boyfriend both hate sweets. She is going to buy pumpkins, hay bales, and corn stalks to decorate our little communal patio area for Halloween, her favorite holiday. She loves people, says hi to everyone who walks by and constantly tries to set me up with her son. But I digress. We were sitting outside one afternoon and got to talking about the Bronx/Brooklyn guys and she just didn't understand that where they're from, you simply don't talk to strangers. I tried to explain it to her - we just inherently don't trust other people. She looked at me like I was crazy. I just laughed and told her she's been living up here too long.