Originally published Oct. 3, 2008
Autumn’s vibrant colors are everywhere in evidence in northern Wisconsin, the oranges and gold especially vivid when viewed against the brilliant blue of October skies. But the only color that matters this weekend is red, the color of apples. It is Apple Festival weekend in Bayfield, the biggest and busiest weekend of the year, and apple red rules.
Apple Festival is the one weekend a year when tiny Bayfield, pop. 650 or so depending on who is at home or away visiting the kids, becomes something else entirely. What that something else is can be different things for different people. For some of us, the change from quiet little tourist town to a bustling destination for tens of thousands of weekend visitors can be disconcerting. I had to park blocks from the coffee shop this morning, not just across the street as usual, and then wait in line for 20 minutes for the overburdened barista – yes, even Bayfield has baristas, with tattoos and piercings to boot – to produce my latte. Oh, how I suffer for my art.
But such is the social contract when you live in a tourist town that any personal caffeine crisis must take back seat to the business people who depend on Apple Festival crowds to make their season, one that seems to get shorter every year. The tourist season now begins on the 4th of July, burns white hot through August and into September weekends and finally explodes this first weekend of October. After that, park anywhere you wish. The coffee shop and restaurants, the gift shops, the charter sailboats and fishing boats and cruise boats must make their nut this weekend, because after Monday morning’s hangover the free-spending crowds will be distant memories.
And for all the congestion and lines and annoyances (many in the visiting horde are from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, if you know what I mean) Apple Festival is a great deal of fun, a celebration of red so intense that in a bluff-top cemetery in Appleton old Joe McCarthy must be spinning in his grave. Last night I volunteered at the important apple pie baking contest and pie social, an event my wife and our neighbor co-chaired for the first time. Talk about pressure – mess up the traditional apple pie contest in the apple capital of Wisconsin (sorry, Gays Mills, but you know it’s true) and who knows what shame and besmirchment would be visited on our household. Happily, the contest went off without any real glitches; the dozen volunteer judges sampled pies in a variety of categories from All-American Apple to Commercial to Creative, named the winners and awarded the prizes, all while a packed pavilion of pie-lusting people watched and waited their chance to ravage and sample the entries. Somewhere, Betty Crocker smiled her approval.
Now it is on to the party, a blowout that would likely amaze the growers who started a little fall festival for the community more than 40 years ago. There will be food (pork chops on a stick with apple mustard – hmmmm) and music, a special Apple Ale from the South Shore Brewery in Ashland and more crowds so large that they will have to park in fields at the edge of town and ride buses to the packed downtown streets. There will be a lighted boat cruise, and the popular pipe and drum corps from Thunder Bay will be on hand as always for their wake-up concert at the marina. There is even a creaky little carnival with rides and games for the gullible. And on Sunday the big Apple Festival parade will march down Rittenhouse Avenue, with apple-themed floats and apple-flavored displays and lots of high school bands whose members will rush from the finishing point back to the start at the top of the hill for a mass band that always signals the end of the parade and, by extension, of the season. And we will stand on the hill and cheer the Bayfield band the loudest. Tradition demands no less.
So fine, the city is crowded and maybe a little inconvenient but it is one weekend a year and the economy needs it to be successful. And it will be delicious fun. Better red than dead, I say.
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