There’s something for everyone at the downstate Flea Market and Swap meet: fishing rods, DVDs, tomato plants, children’s inflatable pool toys, King-sized bed linens, knee braces, ducks, handguns, cigar boxes, antacids, bras. All of this and only a dollar (per person) to get in. The center of the property is scooped out by a pond, where children fish for free. At an edge lies another swampy moat, where buyers may be treated to the rare sight of a cow with a blond flop of bangs, a little like Mary J. Blige's, swimming.
We hadn’t even heard of the flea market until our neighbors told us. Since they see us too often in our backyard, childless and apparently friendless, drinking cocktails from re-purposed jars, and since they once caught me attempting to barbeque tofu, they do their best to take care of us, sending one of their amazingly sweet and polite sons over with venison, homemade fudge, or a paper sack of morels. Once they wondered if we wanted to come over for “the fight.” Sure, I nodded. Sure, sounds like fun. What was that about? T. asked. I have no idea, I’d had to say, bolting our door behind me.
So on a more recent afternoon on our front porch steps, watching the neighborhood kids on their bikes in the street bring themselves to peeling stops by direct application of flip-flop to pavement, I heard about the swap meet, and this time had the sense to ask for more information.
It’s open only the second and fourth weekends of the spring and summer months. Vendors roll in to town with their campers and trailers, pulling off the highway to turn down the long gravel drive that runs just next to an oil field and another business that sells oil pipe, right where the red and blue streamers have spent the winter flapping above the tiny signs advertising “Green Peppers! Tomatoes!”
I’d thought the Rural King our local shopping gem, with its selection of deer dressing kits, muck boots, cast iron cookware, belt buckles, and varieties of hard candies that I’d believed extinct, like circus peanuts and fireballs.
At the end of the gravel drive, a sign greets us: hand-lettered, super precise, its message apparently one of great swap meet-specific significance: Please do not leave your trash lying around anywhere.
“Don’t litter?” Translates T., the poet. Buyers are to park to the right, vendors to the left.
“I’m going to buy a flea circus,” he announces next, rubbing his hands with glee.
“I’m going to buy that fishing rod,” I say of the first one I see, at the very first booth not two feet from the car, giddy that we have for once brought cash.
It’s taken us months to get used to the deep disapproval our debit cards induce—and they’re from the local bank! I was even rebuffed at the town newspaper’s main office, though my attempt to purchase a full year’s subscription aroused the first suspicion. Now what do you want? They’d made me repeat myself, as if I were the one a decade behind the times, a hold-out believer in print journalism.
I’m so pleased with my $12-tagged rod and reel—its brand is Shakespeare!—that I don’t even think to haggle. How about I give it to you for $10, the pitying vendor finally says to me, very slowly, just as a Juarez border guard once had to, shaking me down. Handing over my change, he looks at me the way our neighbor did upon discovery that we have an indoor-only cat, whom, when he is not sleeping on our breakfast table, I carry from room to room and coo to like a human infant.
But buying the pole early on turns out to be wise choice, providing each old man behind his table an opening to tease me. Catch anything yet? How they biting?
I take advantage of the joking so I will be permitted to take photos. I call over T. Will you buy this for me honey? T. pulls out a crisp dollar or two, leaning in for his punch line. Now watch, she’ll make me carry it. He’s a hit, the men wiping the tears from their faces. I do make him carry a metal wash tub and some wooden bowls back to the car. I eye garden rakes, tee shirts, He-Man action figures, pink leather purses bejeweled with Crusades-style crosses, a rabbit in a hutch, a scythe, ammo, bins of eye make-up and Herbal Essences hair conditioner, afghans, badminton rackets, a pirate ship lamp, and an antique telephone in its train station box.
A swap meet, it seems, is an entity unto itself.
It is a little like a Portland market in weirdness, though some of the weird factors signify oppositely, politically. The "fresh produce" turns out to be a bunch of bananas. (Local? T. jokes). A man with a long gray beard, almost like a bar-hopping Portland Saturday market Santa Claus, tries to bully me into buying a clearly dead pepper seedling, scowling that he “worked hard” to grow it. Someone has pitched what could be an REI tent by the side of the pond, where he is also casting. It would be like a farmers' market demo, except no one is watching, and the angler, taking the DIY concept further than any Portland market-goer I ever saw, seems likely to clean, fry, and consume right in the midst of the market. That swimming cow better be careful.
At one table an Asian woman with non-native English wants me to examine a pillow slip: “feel how nice, feel how nice." Some things are familiar, familiar to being in a foreign country.
Unlike craigslist, the Portland Rebuilding Center, or a garage sale or consignment shop in any city, the swamp meet seems to put less emphasis on utility and more on collection, the point not housecleaning (for room to buy new) but laying in. One vendor (from whom I want to buy something!) is absent, doing his own shopping. The eclecticism of most vendors’ wares—spanning type, decade, state of repair—makes for curious booths. Yet a few things come to seem true across the board: the items most valued are those that are 1) old, and 2) cheap.
And one gets the feeling, because so many of the old things are also cheap that there is really only one overriding criterion.
At the side of a flat-bed trailer stocked with bins of soaps, lotions, cosmetics, and over-the-counter medication, I decide to ask a vendor where he gets his things. From places going out of business, he replies readily, Wal-Greens, that kind of thing.
In my life I’ve been an avid thrift-store-shopper—beginning with my grandma in the church basement, sniffing at garments that “might need laundering.” I'm not squeamish. I've ordered raw meats from outdoor markets in foreign countries, and drunk things handed to me by strangers, as well as water I filtered myself, while squatted on a bank, thirsty, tattered “how to filter water” instructions in hand.
But I decide to draw the line at after-market allergy, headache, or other pain relief.
I'm over thirty now, and picky about what I ingest. After all, I've spent a year hemming and hawing over where to live, matching my survival needs to my social values and political identity like putting together an outfit around a pair of shoes.
T. finds me. The day is growing hotter—swampier, if you will—and he has been checking out the swap meet’s livestock barn. “You’re not going to want to walk through there,” he says.
“What is it?” I’ve been photographing an antique washing machine, crouching to get it from the best angle while a man who told me he’d sell it for twenty, and then once I took my camera out, forty, told me how he’d found it in his mother’s basement, how she’d used it for years, how it still worked, but just needed a new cord, but how those things were dangerous though, how he’d known a young kid, oh this was years ago, who’d died in one just like it.
T. grimaces. Maybe we have a draw. “Kittens in an aquarium,” he says.
We decide to take that lap around the pond. At a vendor’s table on the far side, I zero in on an old screen door. “Look—could we put this over the garden frame?” We’ve had a bunny lately, at night. The neighbors told us about him, a little guiltily. Their kids feed it. They’ve made a small home for it under their porch. That’s okay with me, though. I think it’s cool that they have their pet. I’m still examining the door, pulling another door away from it, chattering on about the neighbor kids’ bunny, and how the woman with the rabbit in the hutch had given me this tip, that we should just sprinkle a little cayenne or chili pepper on our plants and then the bunny wouldn’t eat it, and I’m prattling on, should we use our good chili pepper though, or can we get some cheap stuff, and finally T. has to say, his voice half-cracked with laughter, with disbelief, “Look.”
I’ve set my fishing pole against the mesh-wire wall where the screen doors are leaning, but all this time I haven’t looked in the cage.
Meeting my eyes when I do bother to look is the biggest peacock I have ever seen, his green shimmering tail fully fanned, the purply-blue eye of each feathered tip staring back at me.
I’m in fourth-grade again, lost to the world for the ending of A Wrinkle in Time, tesseracted to an oxygen-less planet to confront face-to-face a hovering, fluttering deity of feathers and eyes.
