Yep, I spent this past weekend outside at the Norwalk Seaport Association’s 31st annual Oyster Festival. I have been volunteering at the Oyster Festival for 22 years, for the past 12, I’ve been part of the crew that sets it up and takes it down. The Festival is a craft show, musical entertainment , beer-drinking, food eating weekend of fun.

The thing about it is that the field on which it is held is a decades-old land fill that was constructed — quite literally — at the water’s edge (just above the water table), with really poor drainage. Hence, when it rains, (and rains hard) the water has no place to go. This is worse if it rains hard at high tide. Guess what happens when hurricanes hit? Yep, it is a mud fest (interestingly enough, when it doesn’t rain for a week or so prior to the Festival, the field is bone dry, and a dust bowl). This tends to make the Festival either muddy or dusty, so in mud, we toss down hay and Turfus to soak up the water; when it is dry, it is so dry that we set up sprinklers to make the field wet to keep down the dust.

Ironic, isn’t it?

So, you want to guess how I spent my weekend? Don’t bother. Starting on August 23, I (along with a half a dozen others) have spent virtually every waking minute building the constructs at Veterans park in East Norwalk for the Festival. On Friday at 6:00 P.M. the event started and lasted until 10:00. Saturday, very early in the morning, local officials chose to cancel the event due to the threat of Hanna Montana.

Needless to say, that didn’t stop us on the crew from working. We spend the next 8–10 hours buttoning up the field. Taking down anything that could be blown down, and storing away anything that could be washed away. On Sunday morning, we went back to work opening up the field for the final day of the festival.

Marvel heroes arrive!

As stated, that meant several hours of pushing water down what few drainage openings as we could reach, pumping water off the parts of the field , and tossing down hay and roping off puddles that we could. Several hours later. the event opened, and we took a break.

At 8:00 P.M. that evening, we went back top work pulling down everything we could, because the party was over. We will spend then next week packing everything up and stowing it for next year’s event, which (hopefully) won’t get washed out.

Oh yea,

The fun just doesn’t stop.

The Perfessor