My Favorite Holiday in Crestline Memorial Day is probably my favorite holiday up here. For one thing, it’s when I get to see all of my long lost neighbors. My neighborhood is usually a ghost town, with most of the houses owned by part-timers. I like living in a place where people come to vacation, relax, or spend a holiday weekend. It tells you that you live in a place where people would love to live if they could. Now I don’t mean to be arrogant, but when visitors see you walking around the lake with your dog and they stop and ask you about the town, they seem to be a little envious. It makes you feel privileged. There was lively bunch at the lake over the holiday weekend, lining the shores and soaking up the good weather. Question: How do people start drinking beer at 10 a.m. and continue to do it all morning in the sun? I’d have to sleep the whole afternoon away if I did that. A different kind of visitor comes to Crestline. If you go to the ocean, beachgoers are often loud, boisterous and unconcerned about the people around them. Many of the visitors in Crestline are family people. They’re soft-spoken, they pick up their trash, and they stay relatively sober, despite drinking all day. Even the bikers you meet up here are nice. The school of carp and koi that somehow got into Lake Gregory has doubled in size since last year. I pointed out the school to a guy on the shore, who must have been a veteran of fishing the lake. “Yeah they don’t bite on nothin’,” he said. “I’ve tried almost everything and they don’t bite on nothin’. One of these days I’m going to try some of that floating corn—maybe they’ll bite on that.” It’s probably just as well. I hear that koi look a lot better than they taste. I also look forward every year to the opening of the swimming area at Lake Gregory. There is a lot less beach this year because of the water level. It used to be a long walk to the snack bar from the water. Now the water is lapping at the building. You can tell the water is not yet warm; there are a lot of people on the beach, but the only people in the water are floating on the rental boards. Another thing I like about Memorial Day is the yard sales. I’ve never seen a town in which this is such a holiday tradition. I never have much luck with my yard sales, because the stuff I sell belongs in a yard sale, if you know what I mean. This year I tried for the second year to sell this sort of exercise bike/rowing thing. It’s great. It really burns off the pounds, but your back aches for days after you use it. A bad invention. Next year, I’m going to put a big FREE sign on it. I like those FREE signs. I almost picked up a couch with a FREE sign on it once, until I got about five feet away from it and realized that it must have been used for years by a tomcat as a urinal. Two years ago I spent $20 on a reflective telescope that someone had made with his bare hands from a metal tube and scrap lumber and hardware. Everything looks blurry through it because the mirror is old and oxidized, but it’s a neat piece of machinery. I showed it to an experienced amateur astronomer, and he was amazed at how smooth and steady the mount was. He said it worked better than his own expensive, professional mount. This year I got a great 21-inch Weber charcoal grill by talking a guy down to $15. I used to have a Weber that served me well for 10 years, but I didn’t have room in the last haul of the moving van, so I left it at my old house. A few years ago I bought this imitation Weber, and it’s falling apart. It has fallen over twice with fire in it. So now I have a good one again. We also got an ice cream maker for $5 and made some strawberry chocolate chip ice cream to go with the hamburgers I made on my new grill. Other treasures included a Harry Potter Trivia Game for my 6-year-old son and a vegetarian cookbook for my 10-year-old daughter, who decided three months ago to become a vegetarian and who has stuck with it. Next year, I hope my sister-in-law will come down from Mount Shasta, where Memorial Day yard sales are also a tradition. She is an expert who can get excited about a $1 bowl or an ashtray. I’d get excited too if I sold the same bowl the next week on E-bay for a hundred bucks like she does. Just a note of caution for everyone. As I was writing this column, my wife rushed in and said that while she was walking our dog out in the forest, she and the dog were attacked by a pack of at least six coyotes. She had let our dog off of the leash and he ran out of sight. Suddenly she heard yelping and ran to the dog, who was lying legs up on the ground, surrounded and being bitten by the pack. The scary part about this is that my wife could not chase them away. She decided to run and the dog ran with her. The coyotes even chased them for a while after that. I don’t know if this behavior is caused by the drought or lack of food, or some other reason, but I would recommend that people be very cautious around coyotes, and watch your little ones closely when they’re playing in the forest. |
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