Every spring Harrison Falls has its annual Spring Strawberry Festival here are the Harrison Falls Fairgrounds and Event Center (a rather grandiose name for two hilly pieces of land with an elevation difference of twenty-five feet between the two halves). It's one of those little events that towns have that no one really pays any attention to, but a couple of years ago it make the front page of the paper.
Part of my job as handyman at the Harrison Falls Fairgrounds and Event Center is helping to set up the Spring Strawberry Festival. I don't mind it, it's part of my job; I just wish they organizers would give me the things I need on time. One thing they always fail to give me on time is the main banner that is hung in the upper fairgrounds so it can be seen from the street. They normally don't get this to me until the first day of the festival, and that year was no different.
“Here you go, Dennis,” said Melanie Nagannaset, they head of the festival board, a short, round woman whose over-styled hair brings her height up to almost six feet. She rolled the cart with the boxed banner on it towards me, “I'm sorry that we didn't get it to you sooner, but we just got the banner on Wednesday.”
“It's Saturday,” I pointed out, not wanting to just come out and say that they could have given it to me on any of the days between Wednesday and that day.
“Yup, so you still have plenty of time to get it up before we open the gates!” Melanie exclaimed cheerfully. If there is one thing I can say about that woman, it's that she sure knows how to appear cheerful. I expect that this means she is probably a misery behind closed doors.
“The gates open in an hour,” I pointed out.
“Then you'd better get moving, huh?” she said, pushing the box towards me. Most people would be incapable of saying that without sounding condescending, but good old Mel sounded as genuine as you could want. It's a little surprising that she never went into politics; perhaps if she had been born just a few years later.
Without waiting for me to comment again, Melanie turned her back to me, and started to walk away in the direction of the steps to the lower fairgrounds, “I must get a move on,” she called to me over her shoulders, “The produce booth isn't going to set itself up!”
I knew it wasn't, because I had already finished setting it up an hour earlier.
Instead of smarting off to Nagannaset, I called out to my sole assistant, “Mickey, go get the Hippo!”
The Hippo was the name some school kids gave the fairground maintenance truck years ago; before I worked there. I would imagine it was because the truck was big and purple. Those kids were probably in high school by the time this happened though.
While I waited for Mick to come back with the Hippo, I took the banner out of its box, and roll it out on the wet grass. I was a little annoyed to see that it was the same banner as the previous year, but with vinyl stickers over the dates. If Melanie did not get that back from the sign-makers until Wednesday, it can only be because she didn't give it to them until Monday.
I rolled the banner back up, and carried it over to the first of the large poles. The banner was big, about twenty feet long and five feet tall, but it's not large enough to really need a cart to push it around on. I would certainly never expect Ms. Nagannaset to break a sweat though.
The Hippo announced itself before I could see it. It was a flatbed Chevy from sometime in the early seventies, and I was not the first handyman to be stuck with it. I had asked for it to be replaced every year, but the answer was always the same: “As long as it still runs, there's no reason to replace it.”
Mick guided the rumbling truck between the tents and booths set up for the festival, being careful not to hit the Dashell kid as he darted out of his mom's cookie tent (as if he couldn't hear the truck coming) on his scooter.
Every dip and bump in the grass was punctuated with creaks and groans due to the truck's complete lack of functioning shocks as rolled along.
I remember the first time Mick rode in the Hippo; he made the mistake of bringing a cup of coffee with him. You can be assured that he never made that mistake again.
So Mick pulled the truck up next to the first pole, and hopped out. Together we pulled the ladder off the rack, and set it up in the truck's bed.
I had been after the city council to get me a cherry picker for this sort of thing, but there was never room in the budget, so I had installed bolts in the bed of the truck and brackets on the bottom of the ladder. We bolted the ladder down to the truck bed for use.
The ladder wobbled disconcertingly as I climbed it, but I knew it was stable... or at least as stable as the truck anyway; something I had always taken for granted until that day.
I was able to hook the banner onto the first side with the carabiners in my pocket easily enough, and then I yelled down to Mickey, “Hey Mick, give me that broom there!”
Mick handed the broom that had been clipped to the rack behind the Hippos' cab up to me, and I slid the handle into the center of the rolled up banner, turning it into a spool, “Okay, move me over to the other pole,” I called.
“What, with you up there?” he asked.
“No, I'll just float over there and wait for you,” I answered, “Yeah, with me up here.”
“That ain't safe, Dennis.”
“It is if you drive carefully. Can't you drive twenty feet without getting into a wreck?” I asked. He knew I was making fun of him for the incident the week before where he lost control of the big mower, and crashed it into the elementary school kids' flower garden that they were growing for the county fair.
“You're a funny guy,” Mick called up, “Fine, it's your funeral. Hang on!”
The Hippo's engine rumbled to life with a belch of exhaust , and with a lurch that almost dislodged me from my perch, we moved forward.
I suppose I should have told Mickey that I planned on riding across to the opposite pole before we set the ladder up so that he could position the truck appropriately, Since I didn't, I got to enjoy his backing up and moving forward a couple of times to get facing the right way. He didn't need to do that since the banner was plenty long enough for him to make the turn in one try, but he hadn't thought of that.
I gripped the ladder tightly with my left arm while holding the broomstick in my right hand, letting the rolled up banner unfurl as we went. I grabbed the end of the it before it could slide off of the broom stick and flutter away as Mick stopped the truck next to the second pole. I tossed the broomstick down to the grass below.
“You close enough?” Mickey asked as he climbed out of truck.
“Yup, this is fine,” I replied as I started fishing for the carabiner clips in the pocket of my coveralls. The truck was pointed down the slant here, which made standing on the ladder feel awkward, but it was still stable enough.
I hooked the first carabiner through the top ring on the banner, but as I reached out to hook onto the ring on the pole, the pole moved away from me. It took me a moment to realize that the pole hadn't moved in the slightest; I had. The truck had started rolling down the slope towards the edge of the upper fairgrounds.
Now Mickey still swears that he put the truck in park, and I don't really doubt him; it would hardly be the first time the truck had slipped into gear. It would have been nice if he had set the parking brake, but no one ever asked about that, and I was hardly going to bring it up and get him fired; he felt bad enough about the whole thing without piling on.
Mickey had his back turned to the truck, watching the Dashell kid nearly knock over Moira Hansen as she carried a box of her homemade dream catchers to her stall. I'm sure he could have stopped the truck if he had been paying attention, but again, I am hardly going to throw him under the bus over it.
I was dumbstruck. I could have yelled down for Mickey, but I found myself completely speechless. I probably would have ridden that stupid truck all the way down if the banner itself hadn't pulled taught in my hand.
In a moment of what can only be called instinct, I gripped the banner in both hands, and let it pull me off the ladder. I felt like Tarzan swinging through the jungle as I soared down from that ladder, although if my stumbling landing that ended in my face-planting in the wet grass didn't convince me that I was not so graceful, the video of the incident that Becky Martens took with her phone and then later posted on FriendFace showing what it really looked like it did.
I rolled over on the grass in time to see the Hippo crash through the safety fence, and go flying over the edge of the upper fairgrounds. I didn't see it land, but I certainly heard it.
It took me a second to get to my feet, and in that time Mickey, Becky Martens, Suri Dashell and her kid, and a few other people got to the edge first. I should have told them to stand back, what with the fence being broken and all, but I was just as captivated by the sight as they were.
In the lower fairgrounds, lay the carcass of the Hippo, steam rising from the gaps around the hood, but the ladder still securely bolted to now misshapen truck bed. It was swaddled in the ruins of the produce booth. There was a spray of the loose strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries that had been meant to be the tent's stock scattered amongst the broken window glass.
Thankfully Melanie Nagannaset's story about going to set up the booth had been nothing more than a story. No one had been in the booth, which is good because if someone had been, then more questions would have been asked about what happened, and Mick and me might well have found ourselves facing manslaughter charges.
The Harrison Falls Reader, one of those free papers that end up on your driveway every week or so whether you want them to or not, had one of their reporters, the one who owned a camera, there to do their usual page ten piece about the festival. He got a great shot of Melanie freaking out as she saw the wreck of the Hippo and the produce booth. She looked like she was trying to pull her hair out; I keep a framed copy of that picture on the wall at home.
That picture not only graced the front page of the next edition of the Harrison Falls Reader, but it even got shown on the local news and made the rounds on those FAILSpot-type blogs. It was probably the most fame Harrison Falls has ever had, and certainly the most that the Spring Strawberry Festival is every likely to get.
After that we got a new truck, late eighties this time. It's still an ugly piece of junk, but it's reliable. For some reason they chose a pink truck, I'm guessing it was cheap, and the kids dubbed it the Pig. They still haven't sprung for a cherry picker though.
So there you have it, that's the story about how the flying Hippo made the Spring Strawberry Festival front page news. I'm still the handyman at The Harrison Falls Fairgrounds and Event Center, although Mickey has moved on to greener pastures. I figure I'll finish out my working days here, and who knows, maybe I'll still be around to someday see the Pig fly.