October 27, 2003

• Forty Miles of Pea Soup

  
  

  Last night, Greyfox drove.  The night before, I was the one peering into the fog and wondering where the road was.  Recent roadwork has left a few patches where there are no lines, neither marking the middle of the road nor the margins.  One of those is on a curving hill leading onto a bridge.  I’m very glad I know this road so well from having driven it so often this year, and that Greyfox drives so slowly that there’s plenty of time to make course corrections before we’re in the ditch.

  
  

  Even when there were stripes to show us where the road was, visibility was down to about 20 feet of the reflectorized paint.  Oncoming headlights started out as a faint glow in the gloom up ahead and finally resolved into distinct lights maybe 50 feet ahead in the densest areas of the fog.  The weekend’s trips down the valley weren’t anything as frivolous as a 12-step meeting, or we would have skipped them.  This was work, one of a series of “shows” where we sell our wares.

  
  

  The latest one was a Holiday Bazaar at Raven Hall on the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer.  In coming weeks there will be others at various locations, holiday bazaars, gun shows, etc.  This is not my favorite part of the year, work-wise.  Income-wise, it’s okay, but we earn every cent of it.  Travel, most times, is the least of it.  Fog does make that part of our work a bit dicier, but at least it wasn’t snow this weekend.  We’ll have that to face soon enough.  Yesterday morning on the way in the southbound, downward, lane of the highway had occasional clumps of dirty snow in it, that had fallen from vehicles coming down the valley as they hit the bumps.  That shows that not too far up in the Alaska Range from here it was snowing.  At our elevation, it was rain.

  
  

  The part of these events that is always work is the people.  These people I’m referring to come in two types:  customers and other vendors.  In the “customer” category are, among others, the usual collection of ones who leave sticky fingerprints on the jewelry and knives, who say they’ll be back and don’t, and of course the shoplifters.  This time there was a shoplifter who wasn’t in the customer class.  She was a pretty little curly-haired blonde daughter of another vendor. 

  
  

  I spotted her furtive glances as we were setting up on Friday and pointed her out to Greyfox.  We kept an eye on her all weekend.  She never embarrassed her mother or inconvenienced any of the other boothies by actually taking anything while in my view.  Fortunately, she’s alert and sensitive, knows when she’s being watched.  It’s also fortunate that she signals her intentions so blatantly and sets off the internal alarms of every seller she approaches.  Give her time.  She’ll learn how to be sneaky without appearing sneaky.  She’s only about ten now.

  
  

  Don’t get the idea it was all work, or that all the human contacts were all unpleasant.  There were people there I haven’t seen in years, some of them some of my oldest Alaskan friends.  One of the new boothies (“vendors” in official terminology) is someone with whom I played SCA twenty-some years ago.  She has a teen-age daughter I haven’t seen since infancy.  That girl came by our booth, talked a while and bought one of Greyfox’s most radical two-bladed folding knives, with a sharpened, serrated knuckle guard, as soon as the bazaar opened.  She’d seen it as we set up the night before.  It wasn’t until I was walking around later and saw her sitting in the booth with my old friend Denise that I realized this was her daughter.

  
  

  Later still, I noticed a pleasant-looking young woman with a diverse stock of pottery-ware, everything from practical dishes to whimsical pieces such as a bowl balanced on a pair of bare feet with bowed legs.  When I glanced at her sign and saw her name, I recognized her as the daughter of another old friend and former boothie at several fairs I used to work, Eve, whom I haven’t seen for quite a while.  This young woman was just a girl the last time I saw her.

  
  

  One of the funny highlights of the weekend was while I was walking around on Sunday morning after we were all set up and before the doors opened to the public.  At Alascandle Co.’s booth, I saw a large flat carton of their candles on the floor and stopped to look closer.  I started salivating, because these candles not only looked just like little cherry, peach, pumpkin and blueberry tarts, they smelled like them, too.  As I stood there drooling and being thankful that they were not actually tempting forbidden treats, another woman approached and asked, “Where did you get your health permit?” 

  
  

  She got a blank look and a vague, “…health permit??” from one of the women unpacking the candles.  Then she explained that she knew they needed a health permit for “this kind of stuff.”  The other woman broke in with, “health permit, for candles??”  and the first woman said, a bit testily, ”No, for food.”  I said the stuff only looked and smelled like food, and she took a closer look.  Then I walked on as she stammered out an apology.  I understood her problem.  That building has only two rooms off to one side that have any running water for handwashing or other sanitary uses, so that there can be no more than two food concessions per event there.  She had tried and failed to get a permit herself, and couldn’t let someone else pass unchallenged.

  
  

  There was a baffling challenge of sorts from one of the boothies near us, too.  This tall, slender woman with a pinched and tense look about her spent practically her entire weekend sitting in a chair in her booth across the aisle and down a space or two from us.  She appeared to be sharing the space with a knitter displaying hats and scarves, and one of our former neighbors who was trying unsuccessfully to sell decorated eggs.  The pinch-faced one sat in front of a display of John Deere paraphernalia and memorabilia, but with one exception I never saw her make any attempt to sell it, and never noticed anyone trying to buy any of it at all.

  
  

  Sunday morning, Greyfox was talking to two women who are the type of customers we have the most fun with:  fellow rock lovers.  They were metaphysically hip as well, and Greyfox gave them the URL for our Shaman site where we have some info about the metaphysical qualities of a few stones.  I walked up on the conversation in the middle, just in time to hear him tell them that it is unethical to do psychic “reading” on others without their permission.  “It’s sorta like reading their mail,” I heard him say.

  
  

  The two women nodded and laughed, and then I heard our pinch-faced neighbor, who was standing behind the customers eavesdropping, say, “I have to go get my shovel.”  The shorter of the two rock customers was surely aware of the unspoken second half of that common colloquial saying, “the shit’s getting too deep in here.”  She attempted to deflect the rudeness by pretending to mishear “shovel” as “sweater” and saying that a sweater might indeed be a good idea since there was such a chill in the air.

  
  

  Later on, as another customer was deciding which of several knives to buy as a gift for her son, our pinch-faced neighbor walked up to her and said, “Surely you’re not going to buy one of those ugly things for your boy.  Let me show you a real pretty knife.”  The customer walked away.  She lost us a customer, but I don’t think she made her sale. 

  
  

  What she did was make me curious enough about how her mind worked to focus on her [okay, so it's unethical, so sue me] briefly.  What I picked up from her was fear and denial.  No surprise, there.   Through the rest of the day, my curiosity kept me looking back her way occasionally to see how her business was doing.  Each time we made eye contact, she quickly looked away, blank-faced.  She never held my eyes long enough to get to see the reassuring smile.

  
  

  I know (because I asked) that the decorated egg woman made no sales all weekend.  I know, but didn’t need to ask, that if the pinched John Deere collector ever managed to sell any of her late husband’s collection (and that “late husband” part is another bit of unethical “guesswork”), it didn’t relieve her fear or soothe her anger that others were selling more than she.  She made no sales pitch from her own space, and only that once that I’m aware of did she venture out of her space to try and snag anyone else’s customers.

  
  

  Greyfox works hard at selling.  He has a pitch, and sometimes I get tired of hearing it over and over.  Occasionally this weekend I wandered away and sat a while and talked with my old friend April in her booth, for a break from that sales pitch and the neighboring ones, and to give my chemically-sensitive body a breather away from the two scented candle booths near ours and the heavily perfumed young woman trying to sell Master’s [Lucrative] Miracle just behind us–or attemping at least, even if she couldn’t sell any, to build her downline, poor girl.

  
  

  Sunday morning, I overheard her giving her pitch to an older man who responded that it sounded, “like snake oil.”  Later on, after having heard her offering, as part of a $15 “sample pack”, a “brochure explaining the chemicals in…” the product, I walked around to her side and asked to look at the brochure.  I breathed as shallowly as I could as I waited for her to finish the canned spiel, and as soon as she got to the “brochure explaining the chemicals…” I broke in and asked:  “You mean I have to buy it just to find out what’s in it?”  Because she recognized me as a fellow boothie, she said, she broke into one of her sample packs and gave me the brochure.

  
  

  Before I walked away to read the brochure (which not only didn’t even mention, much less “explain” the chemistry, but also began with a thorough legal cover-your-ass disclaimer of every extravagant claim the girl had been making in her pitch before getting into its own pitch and a bunch of testimonials), I told her that I was with the old guy:  “It sounds like snake oil to me, too.”  She asked, “What’s snake oil?”  That gave me a perfect opening to talk about one of my favorite subjects, history.  I don’t think she expected the lesson, and I know for a fact that she didn’t appreciate it.

  • 5:13 pm
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