The Polson Parade

July 4, 1996

It was the parakeet that set this parade apart from all the others.

I've attended my share of parades over the years - and having shivered on the crowded sidelines of several Macy's Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City, I've gradually become so jaded that I no longer bother watching extravaganzas on TV like the New Year's Rose Bowl parade. But none of those big, flashy shows has a parakeet, carried lovingly in a tiny gilded cage by a wizened Grandma Moses who must have celebrated her first Fourth of July during the Civil War here in Polson, Montana.

I hadn't planned to watch the Polson parade, but it was a sunny, cloudless day under a cobalt sky, and only a hermit could stay indoors. When I read about the plans for the parade, I thought, "Well, why not?" The local newspaper had announced it on the front page a few days earlier, but described it as a simple affair: the procession would march down Main Street for three blocks, turn east for two blocks, then south on Second Street for another two blocks to the courthouse square before disbanding. And in comparison to commercial hooplas like the Macy's parade, it was pretty simple: from beginning to end, the whole thing took only 30 minutes. But it was a 30-minute time warp, turning the clock back 40 years, and I was watching a Fourth of July parade once again in forgotten, dusty towns like Roswell, New Mexico, where I spent my tenth summer.

No more than a hundred adults lined Main Street to watch the parade, most with feisty, fidgety kids who were convinced this would be the event of the summer. The adults were primarily local residents, and the men displayed their occupation with their hats: huge broad-brimmed, weather-beaten cowboy hats for the ranchers, dirt-caked baseball hats for the farmers, and oil-stained hats of all kinds for the auto mechanics, the truck drivers, and the loggers. A few visitors, instantly identifiable by t-shirts advertising tourist traps in Idaho, California, and Utah, scanned the street with video cameras; the tourists also had their kids lined up in neat rows, sitting knee to knee on the curb. And on the sidelines, I also spotted a few isolated Native American families - quiet, dark-eyed mothers with long raven hair, carrying shy young children who had come for the candy treats that would be thrown from the parade trucks. They reminded me that the entire town of Polson is located in the middle of the Flathead Indian Reservation; the people of the Flathead Nation, as the local Salish and Kootenai tribes refer to themselves, are unlikely to look upon July 4th as an "independence day," and the men were conspicuously absent.

Right on schedule at 10:30, a thunderous fire-cracker exploded with a puff of white smoke a hundred feet up in the sky, its baritone boom rattling down Main Street and bringing the crowd to its feet. Around the corner, down at the Elks Lodge where East Sixth Street crosses Main Street, a gleaming red fire truck cranked up its siren - and the parade began. The lead fire truck was a beauty from the 1930s, retrieved from the local museum, and it was followed by a succession of big and small vehicles of more modern vintage, bristling with enough knobs, dials, levers, and hoses to extinguish all the fires in the state, if necessary. What I didn't expect was the fire boat - a tiny wooden tugboat, up on a flatbed truck, that was apparently intended to cope with marine emergencies out on Flathead Lake, which dominates the landscape around Polson and stretches 28 miles up toward Glacier National Park.

Another flatbed truck, toward the end of the fire-truck procession, carried a rock band, consisting of three sullen, disheveled teenagers who desperately attempted to play "Stairway to Heaven" loudly enough to be heard over the fire-engine sirens. The crowd smiled indulgently, but didn't applaud; the band scowled, and the guitar player kicked at his amp as the truck went by. Another band followed a moment later, also on a flatbed truck; I guess the days of marching bands are a thing of the past. The second group consisted of a dozen clean-cut kids from the Polson High School band, bravely belting out a rendition of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." This generated bigger smiles and some enthusiastic applause from the crowd, some of whom waved to their children on the truck.

Children of all ages and sizes were in every truck and car in the parade, all beaming from ear to ear with the pleasure of being at the center of attention. Actually, I suspect that what really made them smile was the Safeway grocery bags they held, from which they flung handfuls of candy toward both sides of the street as the procession moved past. Each toss produced squeals of joy from the children lining the street, except for one scruffy towheaded youngster standing next to me, who kept muttering, "Don't they have nuthin' 'cept them dang Tootsie Rolls?" Indeed, he was so intent on scouring the ground for non-Tootsie treats that he didn't see what was happening on the very last fire truck in the procession: a grinning firerman had hooked a garden hose to the water tank in the back of the truck, and as he went past us, he aimed it at the children squabbling over the candy and sprayed them with a mischievous grin. Howls and hoots erupted from the children, and most of them went tearing down the street, threatening bloody revenge upon the squirter. But one little girl, drenched from head to toe in her best party dress, sat down on the street and began to sob.

After the fire trucks came the soldiers and sailors - all six of them. They were a generation older than me, and there was no reminder of wars in Vietnam, Bosnia, or Iraq; the six grandmothers and grandfathers who marched stiffly with their enormous flags were all from the days of the Second World War. The crowd fell silent for a moment, then clapped steadily; it didn't seem that they felt any sense of personal connection, but they were clearly respectful and appreciative of the old veterans, who beamed in turn at the recognition they received. Maybe the old soldiers get more of a turnout at Veteran's Day or Memorial Day, but it created a spooky feeling to see so few of them here: could it indeed be that war is a thing of the past?

The theme of the Polson parade was "American heroes," and after the aging military heroes had carried the country's flag past us, a series of domestic heroes strutted their stuff for all to see. The town fathers had decided that their children should learn that teachers, doctors, nurses, dentists, firemen and policemen are the real heroes in their lives - and they were on full display. I can't say that it made a huge impression on the spectators, but it was heart-warming to see dozens of kids dressed up in their parents' uniforms, announcing with their swaggering march that when they grew up, they too would be heroes.

The next set of heroes was the high school track team, a dozen handsome, tan, blond-haired athletes who had won the State championship a month earlier. The crowd knew the kids and yelled their congratulations as they went past; the champs waved proudly at their parents in the crowd, and the sun sparkled on the state trophy that they held triumphantly in the air. The girl's high school softball team was on the next truck, and though they hadn't won any championships, they were obviously just as popular with the crowd; one girl turned and wiggled her pert little bottom at her boyfriend as the truck passed me, and everyone but the boyfriend and the girl's mother guffawed. The girls also seemed to have the largest bags of candy, and the air was filled with Tootsie Rolls, bubble gum, and jaw breakers as they went past.

You can't have a parade without politicians; but we were fortunate to have only one, located at the end of the "heroes" procession. The placards all over his car announced his candidacy for the State Senate, but his name meant nothing to me. Weighing 300 pounds if he weighed an ounce, with oily black hair and a round piggy face, he smirked and waved frantically at the voters on the sidewalk as his car went past. I don't know if he gained any votes from his effort, but I couldn't help thinking: What a way to make a living! Wouldn't it be easier to get a real job?

The parade of heroes was followed by a procession of cars that took my breath away. The first one was a 1962 pink Cadillac with gigantic tail fins - pink, for goodness sakes, just like the song. It was followed by a burgundy 1930s Plymouth, a cherry-red Model T pickup truck from the 1920s, a lemon-yellow Studebaker convertible that had probably been used to seduce every girl in town in the 1950s, and a shiny, glistening black 1947 Chevrolet. The Chevy was exactly like the car my family had when we moved from New York to Texas in 1951, and its owner looked like he had bought the car new and kept it waxed and shiny ever since then.

"Hey, mister!" shouted a chubby girl with corn-yellow pigtails across the street from me, as the burgundy Plymouth went by. "Your lights are out!" The driver, decked out in a seersucker suit and a straw hat, smiled indulgently and waved his hat at us as his car glided past. Well, the lights weren't really "out" - they simply didn't exist. Empty sockets stared straight ahead where headlights should have been; and after the car had passed, I could see that there was no glass where the rear window should have been. Hmmm... no way this car could withstand the rain storms and the cold Montana winters unless its owner kept it safely under wraps in his garage, bringing it out only once a year, for the triumphant parade down Main Street.

It was the Studebaker that carried Grandma Moses and the little yellow parakeet. The old woman must have been in her nineties, but she was nodding her head, laughing and waving at people on both sides of the street, holding the cage up high so that the parakeet could see everything she saw. Nobody else remarked about the bird, and I could only guess that it was a familiar fixture in the town. Well, I thought, why not? If I had a parakeet that I loved, I guess I'd bring it along on a parade, too.

In the midst of the automobile procession was a line of hot-rods and souped-up, ugly racing cars, driven by grinning, toothless men with a glint in their eyes. A man standing in the doorway of the pharmacy shop behind me remarked that these same men had raced the very same cars down Main Street in the middle of the night when they were high-school hooligans, and joked that the hot-rodders were probably relieved that the Police Chief couldn't arrest them this time. But the crowd loved them even if the Police Chief didn't, and the kids whooped with delight as the drivers revved the motors of their glorified jalopies.

The last car in line was not a vintage relic, but I couldn't really make out its year or model. If I had to guess, I'd say it was a 1985 Chevy compact of some kind, with an off-white color and rust on the bumpers. But this is just a guess; it was smashed in so far in the front that it was hardly recognizable as a car at all, and the huge gouge marks on the driver's passenger door made it evident that a newfangled contraption called the Jaws of Life had been used in desperation to pry the occupants out. The mangled heap of metal was resting on a flatbed truck, which carried a sign that read, "Sometimes it takes a family of five to stop a drunk driver." The crowd fell silent as the car went by, and a tall, lanky rancher standing next to me swore softly under his breath while his wife bowed her head and closed her eyes. Everyone knew what it was, and even though I've only been in Polson for a few weeks, I knew too: a small flowered cross by the side of the road, about a mile outside town on the highway to Kalispell, marks the place where Jana and Anita met their executioner head-on a few years ago. The town hasn't forgotten.

The cars were followed by a procession of horses, each with its owner proudly guiding it along the street. Mares and stallions, playful ponies with their tiny riders, huge Clydesdales hauling a wagon with fiddlers and banjo pickers strumming and stomping a rollicking country-western tune that was far more popular with the crowd than the heavy metal noises from the teenage rockers in the first band - they pranced and they danced and they waved gaily to everyone, erasing the gloom from the Chevy wreck that had passed just seconds before. I've never owned a horse, and it's been 40 years since I could ride them as casually and easily as these children could; but I could see in a moment why so many people in Montana think that a horse is the most noble animal on earth.

The last horse whinnied and snorted and trotted smartly past us, hooves clip-clopping a complicated rhythm that hypnotized children and adults alike. When it was past, I suddenly realized that it was all over - the fire engines, heroes, politicians, bands, trucks, hot-rodders, cars and horses had all reached the end of Main Street, and had turned east to head for the courthouse. Parents were rounding up their children, shooing the toddlers who ran out onto the street to see if any last morsels of candy had been left behind. Five minutes later, Main Street was empty and silent again, just as it is every week-day evening after 6 PM.

Sitting alone on the curb, with the echoes of the parade still playing faintly in my memory, something happened that I hadn't expected, and can't fully explain: I cried. I wept with sadness for all the Fourth of July parades that have gone unmarked and unnoticed in a thousand little Polsons during the past 200 years; and I wept with happiness at the unexpected, simple pleasure of having seen this one. But then it was time to go: the time warp was over, at least until Grandma Moses returns next year with her parakeet.