As I remember it. The Christmas of 1962 Santa brought me a red Schwinn 2 speed bicycle.  It was a remarkable present as I had not asked for the bike and was not expecting anything as spectacular as this gift.  On Christmas day I was out front of our house trying desperately to learn how to ride such a wonderful bike.  I was falling into the hedge and the roses and my father would alternately yell at me for falling into the bushes and wrecking his plants and pulling me out of the thickets and putting me back on the bike and pushing me for another start.  After an hour or so of scratches and bruises and pain I was able to get around the neighborhood and visit my friends close by.  This two-speed bike was a marvel for a kid in Omak.  Everyone else had a one-speed bike and they had to huff and puff up hills with the same gear.  I, on the other hand, had a second gear I could shift into by touching my pedals backwards and engaging the second gear.  It was like getting the wind blowing behind your back.  I felt like a prince.

By the summer of 1963 I was allowed to be gone on my bike for long stretches of the day.  I should qualify being allowed to be gone.  I think it was more like my parents weren’t watching me anymore.  My little brother was still a second grader and had to be watched and my sister was the most perfect person in the world and was driving and dating and my parents were paying close attention to that behavior.  I was the middle child who was the adventuring slacker who always skirted with trouble but managed to get home for dinner at 5:30 and no one asked where I had been.  As I was saying I was on my bike a lot that summer traveling about the little town I grew up in.  Omak, Washington.  The population was 4,061 in 1963.  By the time I left for college the population had spiraled up to 4,064.  I rode everywhere my 12 year old legs would take me.  I would ride to Harry Monahan’s house about a mile away and see if he was up yet but he never was.  At twelve I think Harry was smoking and drinking coffee to wake up in the morning and his parents didn’t seem to mind.  Then I would venture off to other friends houses and find myself four or five miles from home and I would have to spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to get home by dinner.  Once I made it back to main street I was fine but the final ride home took a lot of effort because my parents lived up on the hill overlooking the river and I would always stop at Puffert’s grocery store on main street to get an Orange Crush or a fudge cicle to refresh myself for the journey home.  That’s where all of the 12 year old hoodlums would hang out eating corn nuts and drinking coke.  I was never a cola guy.  You had to have a hard edge to drink that stuff.

This day was different though.  I was riding around my neighborhood and decided to look out over the river to East Omak.  It was August and the Omak Stampede was coming to town and there was excitement in the air.  Omak was sort of the end of the world.  Not completely but you had to make a great effort to get there and once you were there there wasn’t much to hold your attention.  But Stampede weekend was different.

It was a time of gatherings and cowboys and Indians and horses and grownups drinking and strangers in town and lots of cars and pretty girls in cowboy shirts and tight jeans and dirty old men drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes on the sidewalks thinking about the pretty girls in the tight jeans and cowboy shirts with the top buttons open and country music blaring out of Chevy convertibles as they cruised down main street and the regular citizens were starting to loosen up and get into the spirit of the carnival atmosphere and grownups were drinking and strangers were in town and lots and lots of beer trucks were unloading lots and lots of beer.

So there I was leaning over the bicycle handles and staring over to the Stampede grounds viewing the cars and trucks that were pulling into town.  The whole town was transforming itself for the one weekend a year where you were allowed to do whatever you wanted as long as you didn’t get caught doing something very bad.  What caught my eye that morning were the big trucks for the carnival pulling into the Stampede grounds.  There were trailers with rides on them, trailers with booths, big trucks full of prizes and most of all big trucks full of carnival vendors or as we kids called them carnies.  On this morning in 1963 I was excited the carnival was finally back in town.  It was thrilling to go to the carnival and ride those clunky old rides that we thought were spectacular and scary.  There was the Rocket 88 that was basically two nose cones on either end of a singular piece of steel that rotated and gyrated and made you sick to your stomach.  My friends and I lived for that ride.  There was the Ferris wheel and of course some falling apart roller coaster ride that was a accident waiting to happen and dozens of other dangerous rides that would be shut down in a minute today but in 1963 we kids eagerly paid our 25 cents and rode these rides until the money ran out. 

Did I say it was hot in Omak in August. It was hot when you woke up and it was so hot by 10 am that you had to have the lawn mowed or your other jobs done or your sweat would roll off your head and the lawn clippings would stick to your legs because you were dripping wet or the weeds you were pulling would dissolve in your hands and get you incredibly sticky or the paint on your paint brush would dry stiff while you were painting and your father would ask what the hell you were thinking off when he came home and the side of the house you painted in the sun looked like it had been hit with a blunt stick with chalk on the end.

Yes it was hot.  You would have to search out the shade sometimes when you were riding your bike and you had better have some coins to buy a cold drink or you were going to be incredibly uncomfortable crying all the way home because you lived too far away and the neighbor kid you’d been with was already home and you were climbing the hill to your parents house and it was hot and the nosy neighbor you hated was out in their yard puttering around and they yelled at you that you’d better get home soon because it was time for dinner and your mother was looking for you.  That’s all I needed now.  The parents!  I didn’t need the parents at a time like this when my twelve year old body was wreathing with pain and exhaustion and I was desperate for some cold water I was so thirsty I was even imagining a cold drink of water with ice cubes in a wonderful plastic tumbler that my mother set out on the picnic table for us when we ate outside and I really hated this neighbor for busting me on my way home and now I was worrying about my mother yelling at me and I would have to wait for the drink of water while she gave me the business but when I got home she wasn’t thinking about me any more.  I was checked off her list even though I was panting and exhausted and needing a drink so bad I think my tongue was white no I was not the problem anymore.  It was now almost 5:30 and any moment my dad would be roaring into the driveway and dinner would have to be on the table and everyone sitting down in just a few minutes.  My mother was making a mad scramble to get the food out on the picnic table which was set with a bright red table cloth and those wonderful green tumblers filled with lemonade and then the dishes were carried out and just a 5:30 there was my father arriving in a cloud of dust in his 1956 2 door Ford Coupe and we all made it to the table and another dinner was somehow managed and somehow we managed to be a family for another night and my father was incredibly proud of himself and my mother was incredibly exhausted and my sister was having a perfect evening and my brother was being 10 and probably doing a math puzzle and I was just happy I was home and not so thirsty and tired but happy I had been out adventuring and glad it wasn’t so hot when the sun went down but I knew we would be doing this again tomorrow.

But Stampede weekend was different.  Even at 12 I understood there were different morals at play during this weekend.  So I decided to ride my bike over to the carnival grounds and watch the carnies set up shop.  I rode as fast as I could down the hill to town and pedaled and pedaled so the wind was hitting hard against the hair on my head.  My crew cut hair was even finding ways of being wind blown.  I rounded down through some alleys behind the greyhound bus station and then onto the bridge across the river riding on the pedestrian sidewalk.  The river was low that year and you could almost see the mud at the bottom of the river if you stared at the river long enough.  I had no time for that now.  I rode over the bridge and started to weave my bike in between all of the big trucks unloading the carnival.  The public swimming pool was adjacent to these makeshift carnival grounds and I could see some of my friends there taking lessons that morning but I was more intent on watching the carnies than connecting with my friends. 

What was it about these scraggly looking men and women who wore leather vests and dirty jeans and rolled up cigarettes in their white t shirt sleeves.  The girls wore rose colored sunglasses and had long hair without hair spray and they wore hip hugger jeans and they didn’t look like they had to ask any one’s permission to do anything.  These carnies were all from California and maybe they had come from San Francisco and maybe they were thinking that it was time for the culture of America to change and maybe working in the carnival was easier if you thought that way because no one running a carnival cared if you wanted to be liberated because if you were working in a carnival you were already out of the norm and since you were out of the norm it would be perfectly wonderful to smoke dope and not shave and not wash your clothes and pick up on all of the girls you wanted to and move onto another town where you were re-inventing yourself again every week. 

In Omak you were the same person day to day.  You couldn’t change because you wanted to because people knew you from when you were a little kid and they had their finger on you.  “Oh yeah, your Charlie’s kid.  I know about you.”  So, at twelve, you are just starting to understand that you were already pre-determined and you were thinking that maybe this wasn’t exactly how you wanted to your life to be molded you might think that carnies were pretty fun and interesting. 

That summer the carnival brought us saint Christopher medals and incense and you could sense that a cultural wave was coming along with the carnival.  The girl carnies were smoking and swearing and acting like they didn’t need a boyfriend to run their lives.  These girls were not much older than girls in my high school and they were out on the road taking care of their business.  And they didn’t need hair spray.  How did they look so beautiful without hairspray. 

There were peace symbols that summer too at the carnival.  Viet Nam was mentioned but I didn’t know where it was.  Peace and women’s liberation and probably a lot of free love in the trailers.  The 60’s had come to Omak.  Later when I was older we used to joke that we had watched the 60’s on TV in Omak but truly the carnival had brought this message to us all along one weekend a year.

I remember riding my bike all around the carnival grounds that day watching the carnies set up the big rides and the interplay of the workers putting up tents and setting up booths and laying out the trinkets that we kids would be hovering around and trying to win by the next day.  We’d be back after dinner that night and pay our money and take our chances with the rides and the games of chance in the booths and ask a thousand times what was a saint Christopher medal and what does it mean and why would we want to wear it around our necks and then when we did wear the Saint Christopher medal the young teen age girls thought we were so cool and we liked that so we bought a medal for the girl as well and hoped they would let us kiss them under the shade of the trees near the swimming pool or better yet they would go on the Rocket 88 with us and then we would be able to hold their hand while they screamed their lungs out and we screamed with them and then afterward we’d pretend that we didn’t know the girls when our buddies showed up but then some girls were better than others and they didn’t want to be seen with you when other friends showed up. 

Anyway the carnival was different this year.  I could sense that in my little 12 year old brain.  The carnival was not bringing us culture it was bringing us counter culture and that was a spin for a twelve year old.  I only knew this instinctively.  I could feel the change in the air like incense swirling around.  Leather vests, girls living on their own, girls without hairspray, rose colored sunglasses, guys with goatees and leather hats and carnies living outside the box not just as drunks and ex-convicts but as young kids checking out the adventures in life.  I wondered what happened to all of those young hip carnies.  Who knows.  All I know is that even as a twelve year old I could tell that there was a change in the air.

When the carnival was over and we had all had enough of the rides and enough of the cotton candy and bad hot dogs and rode the rides until our necks and stomachs were raw with pain and we had met all of our friends and watched them do ridiculous things and our parents yelled at us that it was only a carnival and we had seen lots of grownups doing silly things and old men chasing those beautiful women in the cowboy shirts and the tight jeans and the beer cans strewn around and old cars that wouldn’t start anymore and the sound of the Indians playing stick games that kept you awake for 3 days because it was hot and your windows were open and the sound of the stick games permeated the air all around town and you were excited because the town was so alive and different and you were hoping it would go on forever like some magical transformation of your little world.

And then you awoke on Monday morning and got out on your bike and the Carnival was gone and there was hardly a trace that the carnival had been in town except for the trash and the beer cans and you wondered did this really happen.  I rode my bike over to where the Carnival had been and did figure eights in the dust and stopped for a while and stared at the river and then I could feel the wind blowing.  It was different that day.  Cooler than just yesterday. A different wind was blowing and you could feel autumn was coming.  Change was inevitable and school would start and I would be in middle school for the first time.  But I knew life had changed after that weekend at the carnival.  My culture had been countered.