Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- Pizza Joe Parnell wore his basketball referee shirt to officiate the fishermen's rodeo Saturday afternoon during the 40th Southeast Alaska State Fair here Saturday, and he periodically reminded fans to support the sponsor, Olerud's, a combination sporting goods and grocery store, by buying lots of "guns and butter."

His funny commentary kept us at the net-mending competition longer than planned. Watching someone tie knots in the strings of a salmon gillnet is not that riveting, especially when there are other things to do.

My husband had already drifted down the boardwalk, to the back porch of the Klondike Saloon, to watch the horseshoe tournament. The bar is part of the set of the Disney movie "White Fang," filmed here when I was pregnant with a daughter who's now on her way to college.

Back then, Pizza Joe rode a three-wheeled pedicab to deliver pizza. Today he is the assistant harbor master. My favorite picture in the fair photography exhibit is of Joe and friends sitting on a sofa watching TV in an outdoor living room. The walls and floor are snow. There is nothing but sky overhead. It's titled, "White Man's Igloo."

Joe marched in the morning parade, wearing a tall, square-shouldered, foam-headed body puppet, with stuffed trash bag boxing gloves swinging off rope arms. He spun circles and the mitts made a wild arc and everyone near him backed up. A sign on his chest said "I Fight the Man." Another dangling placard read "Joe Parnell for Mayor." (The current mayor, Fred Shields, rode down Main Street on his vintage Norton motorcycle.) On Joe's back was another sign that said, "Can I Be a Candle Dancer?"

The Candle Dancers are lovely women who dress like Barbara Eden in the old "I Dream Of Jeannie" TV show and hold candles in goldfish bowls while doing hip-swaying, shoulder-shimmying routines in the dark.

I missed the Candle Dancers' fair performance but managed to catch most of the ax-throwing contest.

The logging show announcer, a volunteer fireman who knows everyone, was even better than Joe. "Not bad for a greenie" he said of a bull's-eye-sticking nature lover. "This guy's hugged more trees than the rest of you have cut down." Everyone, even the ax thrower, laughed. Then he introduced "Leo -- definitely not a greenie -- the Logger Smith," who, well into retirement, still wears the woodsman's uniform of stovepipe pants, red suspenders and a gray-striped work shirt. He lobbed that heavy ax end over end, wedging it hard into the stump target.

I heard later that the greenie (I mean that in the best sense) won, but by then I was listening to a local bassoonist playing Italian songs on the main stage.

Friday's deluge left the fairgrounds mucky as a horse paddock in spring. Just about everyone wore rubber boots. At a wedding on the waterlogged golf course later that afternoon, boots could be seen underneath the most formal dresses. The ceremony was on the sixth hole, next to the river, with the Cathedral Peaks rising from the opposite shore.

Well, you couldn't actually see them, except in occasional cloud breaks, but we knew they were there. It was still beautiful, in the soft way wet days are, like a watercolor. It was also freezing. The bridesmaids tried not to shiver in their sleeveless gowns. It started to rain in earnest while we waited for the service to start, and since the cello and electric piano weren't waterproof, we all hummed "Here Comes the Bride."

It was the most formal wedding I've been to in Haines. The bride's family worked for months to organize it, but like all weddings, it made me think of my own, and how young we also were, and how brave my parents were to send us off into the world with plenty of blessings and good things to eat, even though none of us knew where we were going.

By the time my husband and I got home from the fair, we were too tired and full to go back to the fairgrounds for the big dance and climbed under the quilts instead. Our daughter poked her head in the bedroom door about 1 in the morning and said it was fun and "everyone was there." I was sorry we hadn't been. My husband said we'd go dancing in the afternoon, when the Swing Set, another local band, was playing.

This time, everyone wasn't there. The fair was winding down. The dance floor of the open pavilion seemed so big and so public with only a handful of people shuffling across it. I demurred, but my husband insisted. We were a little rusty with the jitterbug-style turns and catches, but soon it felt like it did when we were young parents, back when Pizza Joe didn't have to explain his nickname and Leo was still logging. We danced like newlyweds, in rubber boots and jackets in the wet wind, until we were warm, and the band quit playing, and the fair was over, until next year.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." Reach her at hlende@adnmail.com.

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