Slurp 'til you Burp

It is said that the desire to perform is no indicator of talent. This applies to any endeavor, at any time, whether in the pursuit of fame or fortune, and often as a result of broken self-awareness.

But at the South Bend, Washington, seafood festival, participants convinced of their oyster-eating prowess gather during the first weekend of each October. It is, after all, the oyster capital of the world, 

 

For the unschooled, oysters can be consumed raw or cooked. The former condition has a texture that is at once slippery, slimy, and gooey, and has been equated with heavy phlegm, a loogey of prodigious proportions. They are not for everyone.

 

A gregarious crowd was on hand to watch the presumptive winner, champion for the past four years, a bachelor fisherman named Rampart McTavish, eat a truly disgusting amount of sea snot. 

 

The contest held at sunset is a ritual of unknown origin. Strings of Edison lights powered by a noisy generator illuminate a waterfront boardwalk, near the marina where local fishermen ply their trade. Seating is on the adjacent beach.

 

Oysters are a legendary aphrodisiac. The consumption of 46 dozen slimy creatures in one sitting can leave one howling at the moon and vomiting, often simultaneously. Last year, Ramp did exactly that. Local women sequester themselves when Ramp competes.

 

Ramp enters a variety of eating contests. He is a large man with a large appetite, but he is not a foodie. Neither is Shawna Anderson, similarly proportioned and another serial contestant who can repeatedly affirm her ability to down enormous quantities of strawberry rhubarb pie. She is from Minnesota, but is passing through South Bend and thought she’d give it a try.

 

This year’s contest will be her first with seafood, and Ramp has been speaking derisively about her presence in “his” arena. Still, he plans to not only humiliate Shawna, but to break his own record of 560 oysters eaten in ten minutes, set last year.

 

There are other contestants, but Ramp and Shawna are drawing all of the attention.

 

The contest begins with the firing of a flare gun. This supports the nautical theme of the event. The contestants begin sucking, slurping, and swallowing in a bivalve-gorging frenzy. Ramp is off to a great start, consuming over one hundred in the first minute and a half. Basically, one per second.

 

Shawna doesn’t even look up, much to Ramp’s dismay. She matches his pace, mollusk by mollusk. She discovers that the sensation of oysters in her mouth is not that different from strawberry rhubarb.

 

Ramp picks up the pace. In the next three minutes, he downs another two hundred oysters. Taking an allowable drink of beer, he prepares his mouth and throat for the next few minutes of punishment. He briefly thinks about Joey Chestnut’s record-setting 70 hot dogs and buns, then refocuses on the task at hand.

 

Shawna is a machine. She hesitates for nothing, drinks no fluids, and never takes her eyes off her plate. Ramp sees this and becomes concerned. Sweat drips from his forehead, further lubricating his next oysters.

 

The clock approaches the ten-minute finish. Digital counters display the results. Ramp has the lead, but only by two. He glances over his shoulder at the totals and smiles. He thinks he has her, since the pace of consumption generally slows to a crawl toward the end. But in a last-minute effort, Shawna stands, tilts back her head, and shakes it from side to side, like a goose downing a fish. Both of her hands are forcing oysters into her face, eyes closed and trancelike. Two, four, six, the final seconds of the contest count down, her total rapidly catches up to Ramp’s and passes his. He is stunned, stops eating, and knows he’s beaten.

 

Shawna wipes her mouth with the back of her fleshy hand and winks at Ramp. He is smitten, aroused. Not long after the contest ends, twin howls are heard from the water’s edge on the dark and distant beach. They are harmonizing, and to no one’s surprise, they marry six weeks later.

There are two volumes of non-fiction essays in my "Park Ridge Memories" collection available on Amazon. Click on the image below if you're interested.

The Dog Days of August

When I was a student in the 1960s, we enjoyed summers that were long and hot, mostly without the benefit of air conditioning. I don’t remember sweating or feeling uncomfortable. Those are adult things. And our season of learning began after Labor Day, so that we could finish bringing in the harvest and putting up crops for the long winter to come. These were the incessantly cold and snowy times of mythic walks uphill and miles away to school.

The dog days of August, which began in July, were the hottest, most humid period of our summer vacation, so named because of Sirius, the Dog Star, and its imagined influence on the weather. These were also the days when back-to-school sales began, a source of dread for us and excitement for our parents. As parents ourselves, we later came to understand this shift in perspective.

 

My parents never had much money, unlike those gilded individuals in more affluent parts of Park Ridge. Our relative poverty deprived us of frequent trips to Dairy Queen and Pines Store for Men. But the annual trip to buy school supplies was a carte blanche experience during which I not only received pencils, a ruler, eraser, scissors, and a variety of other less exciting items like mucilage, notebook paper, and Elmer’s Glue, but also my yearly brilliant white and spectacularly special gym shoes, generally PF Flyers or Keds. I outgrew these long before they wore out, but they came home with me the following June, carried in a brown paper grocery bag of locker contents, and served me well for another season of plowing fields and laying in the corn and wheat.

 

Honestly, when Mom told me to go out and play after breakfast, the screen door slammed shut behind me, and I disappeared to parts unknown until I caught the requisite quota of nightly fireflies at sunset. But we called them lightning bugs, and did unspeakable things to them. For our crimes, we were sentenced to a lifetime as adults, looking back fondly on our unfettered times of freedom and joy. Good times.

There are two volumes of essays in my "Park Ridge Memories" collection available on Amazon. Click on the image below if you're interested.

 

Forgiven but not Forgotten

At a relatively young age (21), I tackled a couple of challenging projects. First was the construction of a backyard swimming pool. Not just any pool, this one was forty-two feet long and ten feet deep. “As big as you can make it within the boundary limitations imposed by City codes,” I told the contractor. And he delivered. You can Google the monstrosity by searching for 925 Goodwin Drive in Park Ridge, Illinois. The aerial view is impressive.

Next, I needed private living quarters. The small brick ranch I inherited from my parents, whose untimely death left me sharing space with my grandmother, denied me the journey into independent adulthood being traversed by my peers. So I applied the rudimentary drafting skills I learned during my brief time as an engineering student to a design for a complete second-floor addition to my little house. Oh, the audacity!

 

Those were different times. I strolled into Citizens Bank in Park Ridge and applied for a construction loan. I had the benefit of a debt-free home to use as collateral, but they could have denied me, personally redlined, based on age and career inexperience. They positioned the funding as a mortgage loan.

 

I hired a local contractor, a friendly family man from Des Plaines named Arny. He liked to build things, including his own large family, but he was not great at business, as I would later discover. He should have hesitated to undertake an ambitious remodeling project under the direction of a twenty-five-year-old, but he needed the work and quickly put together a bid.

 

Arny was also generous to a fault. When he saw the large in-ground pool out back, he said it would be nice to have a balcony overlooking what I’d earlier created. He sold me on the idea, but this should have been the time for what’s commonly known as a change request. Instead, he simply added an expansive cantilevered second-floor deck the width of the house, accessible by two sets of double sliding doors, also not part of my original design. 

 

This is commonly called scope creep. When finished, there was a massive $14,000 wooden structure hanging off the back of the house that could have supported one hundred people. The entire project had been estimated at $40,000, the size of the loan I had taken.

 

I worked nearby, at Lutheran General Hospital at the time, which afforded me the ability to run home during my lunch hour to oversee progress. It was during these visits that I was presented with opportunities to add even more creep to the scope. For instance, the electricians noted that light fixtures were not included. Nor were there electrical outlets sufficient to be practical. I had been quoted a basic package that would have required extension cords everywhere I wanted to place a lamp. “Oh, and wouldn’t recessed and track lighting look nice by the fireplace and bar?” You betcha! Kaching!

 

But those were the good times, long after a period when the house was almost destroyed. Arny was not only lazy with numerical planning, but his construction methods lacked, shall we say, foresight.

 

I believe that God was being very kind to me during this period of my life. Perhaps it was in heavenly sympathy for the five years of darkness during which death and disease robbed me of my formative years, ages sixteen to twenty-one. My Heavenly project manager gave me very loud and clear warnings, but, like Noah during the construction of the Ark, displayed rainbows following deluges. Two of them.

 

The first historically rainy period came during the construction of the pool. I’ve written about this previously. The entire backyard nearly collapsed inward, sliding like a burn-scar mudslide in heavy California rain and perilously close to the neighboring property line.

 

The next was an equally unusual two weeks of monsoon-like downpours that began immediately following the removal of the roof protecting my little house. Roofs and gutters are very important. This is common knowledge, especially if you’ve ever experienced rain without one or the other.

 

The rain began without concern but quickly took on a dire character during the middle of the first, second, and third nights. Arny had rather carelessly covered the completely open insulation-filled rafters above our heads with a tarp that was of inadequate size, improperly secured, and full of holes. Grandma and I raced around the house (yes, we lived there during construction) with every pot, pan, and garbage can we could find. Victoria Falls erupted through the living room ceiling. Bridal Veil Falls came through a light fixture in the dining room. Smaller but no less damaging leaks pitter-pattered throughout the house as the loose, decades-old insulation became saturated. Walls, ceilings, and carpeting were ruined.

 

I had moved into the basement when the installation of sliding doors impacted my first-floor bedroom, another unplanned scope change that created very useful ground-floor egress to the pool. That room temporarily became the most efficient fly trap ever devised during a time of year when house flies peaked. The open rafters invited them into the house but resisted allowing them out. I was horrified when I opened the inside door to the room. I quickly donned a face mask and devised a Ghostbusters-like apparatus with a ShopVac to suck up literally a million black bugs. When I turned the power off, the Vac’s five-gallon container hummed from the trapped insects.

 

My temporary bed in the basement, a pull-out sofa, was in the center of the tiled area, next to the ping-pong table and across from the laundry. Comfy but damp and a bit creepy. The morning I woke up on an island surrounded by muddy water was a definite low point. Earlier, I mentioned the importance of gutters. Their absence allowed water that would normally be whisked away by downspouts to fill the window wells, overwhelming the drain tile and flowing down the concrete walls like lava from a volcano.

 

Meanwhile, in another part of the devastated house, Grandma walked from her intact bedroom through the dining room, where water had stopped dripping from the ceiling light fixture. As she stepped into the Kitchen, the entire ceiling collapsed behind her in a single piece and with an explosive thud. Her life had been spared with one short stride and by literally one second. She very likely would have been killed, neck and back shattered by the weight of the falling plaster and rain-soaked insulation. Thank you, God!

 

By now, Arny was complaining bitterly that he was running out of money. He even sat on the newly constructed staircase to the upper level, crying to Grandma while having a smoke. When he approached me, the child-boss, for additional funds, I told him that I had gotten a loan for the amount he told me and that there simply wasn’t any more money.

 

At this point, he could have walked off the job, leaving me with an untenable situation. To his credit, he finished the project during evenings and on weekends, hiring unskilled neighbors to help with drywall and trim. An insurance claim for the flood damage, unbelievably, came through. A windfall for rainfall.

 

But this is all background for the point of my story. Many years later, I ran into Arny at a local store, now defunct, called Service Merchandise. I hadn’t seen him. He spotted me, the little man looking up at me with a distraught expression. I wasn’t aware of the impact our time together had on his life. Much later, his house near the Des Plaines River was completely flooded. He was the Job to my Noah.

 

“I forgive you for what you did to me,” he emphatically commented, but there was a hint of anger in his voice.

 

“You do?” I said, surprised and naively unaware of the resentment he’d been harboring.

 

“Yeah. I’m a Christian. I have to.”

 

So, there it was: forgiveness. But it was directed at me like a blast of reproachment from a Biblical shotgun. He was able to forgive but not forget, and I wondered if at any time it occurred to him to forgive himself for the many mistakes he’d made. Did he consider that I’d never even gotten mad at him through the entire ordeal?

 

Arny was better equipped to be in sales. He had an irrepressible smile and was good-natured to the core. He just shouldn’t have been a general contractor. He’s gone now, but he provided for a large, adoring family, sort of like Bob Cratchit. I hope he’s comfortably ensconced in his Heavenly hereafter. I just hope God doesn’t let him build anything.

• • • • •

If you enjoyed this essay, consider buying one or more additional collections totaling 134 tales of growing up in the 60s and 70s. Set in the City of Park Ridge, but ranging far beyond its borders, these coming-of-age tales should resonate no matter where you're from. Search for Vic Larson on Amazon for a peek.