That’s Enough of That.

We had low expectations. We would meet some friends, we would look at some art. There would be a highway drive with the radio on, sunshine, scenery. We would get out of town for the day. So that is what we did. We got in the car and drove East, over Snoqualamie Pass. The roads were open, the sky was open too. We made our first stop in downtown Yakima in hopes of finding a decent bakery for snacks and coffee, but instead, we found the main street shut down for a three on three basketball tournament.

Never mind. We found coffee elsewhere, and then, after winding up hill through apple and pear orchards, through acres of espaliered tress, we parked and walked through a smallish Scottish clan gathering. We found a large man in a purple tunic teaching a skinny blonde girl how to shoot arrows. “Five dollars for five arrows,” he said. “Five dollars for ten arrows if you’ll shoot them at my daughter’s boyfriend.”

The art we’d come to see was in a immaculate warehouse. Our friend, the artist Nia Michaels was in the show, she’s the reason we got up early on Saturday to drive 150 miles to look at art. It was quite a good show, and J and I especially liked the wooden barns by Matt Sellars.

The streets of tiny Tieton were full of a crazy mix of humans, Mexican kids in ball caps, a guy who looked like a taller, skinnier Willie Nelson, hipsters from the city. An old guy in a bright kilt had wandered off from the dusty ball field where the Scottish clans were gathered and while snapping photos of a peeling auto parts sign, I was distracted by a group of civil war re-enactors, crossing the street in their heavy woolens.

Nothing about the day fit together. It was as though there were several small groups who wanted to gather, but did not have enough of each other to warrant an entire festival. Even the mini-mart was full of mysteries. While I snapped pictures of the Korean cashier’s dog, two ladies stopped to talk to me. “Have you heard? Did you know people are doing plastic surgery on dogs like that to make the wrinkles go away? What’s the point in getting that breed if you don’t love it for the wrinkles?”

The carnival across the street was poorly attended; the man in the ring toss booth sat texting while the bottle breaking booth,  a mess of shattered glass and discarded baseballs, was abandoned. A tiny three car train lapped circles on a short track; the only passenger a pale, extremely serious faced little girl. The sole ride seeing any action was the Tilt-a-Whirl, occupied by lots of tween kids, and Spiderman and his mom.

I was finding the whole experience weirdly overwhelming and surreal. We decided to call it a day and head home, but first, I wanted to see what the noise was coming from behind the used tractor and farm equipment building.  The field was full of pickups with horse trailers, squeaky horns and a strange rhythm were coming from the other side of a ring of metal bleachers. We plunged along the fence line into the crowd and looked in to an army of Mexican cowboys in immaculate white hats and dress western shirts.

Julius hoisted me up on to to the back row of the bleachers. The little girls next to me looked up and smiled. Two big guys in front of me looked back and teased.  “No movies of us!” they said, in accented but clear English. I had a perfect view of the judge, a stout man in a white costume trimmed with gold, a vast sombrero on his head, a clipboard under one arm. The band was on a flat bed trailer marking the other side of this makeshift showground. And in the center? Of course. A dancing horse.

On the drive back out of Tieton, we passed a yard with a bizarre collection of lawn ornaments surrounding a home made pond. Standing next to the fence, pecking at the grass, was a giant gray emu. We did not stop to take pictures. I had seen more than enough for one day.