“You must not try to be too pure, you must fly closer to the sea.”
— Sinead O’Connor
This past Saturday morning, me and Arle get up early to go to the flea market. We are going to peddle her creative wares, but there is a real possibility (read that: guarantee) that I will wander/ and seek/ and peruse. The ride down there is lovely; the Juniata Valley is lush now; the early summer drought of June having been bashed in the head by somebody somewhere doing some kind of intense rain dance. It pours a little almost every day now. The corn is 100 feet high. The soybean fields are green Volkswagen traffic jams as far as the eye can see.
Cows are fish.
Farmers raise their eyes to the skies and thank God. And Donald Trump.
The land here, along the formidable Juniata River — as she eases towards the vast Susquehanna, then rolls southbound into the Chesapeake Bay — it is ancient and rocky and wild and creepy. We get off the exit of the highway and pass the State Police barracks where a guy started shooting at parked cop cars last month. Later in the afternoon, he led the authorities on a wild goose chase down country roads. In the end, he wounded one senior trooper and killed another younger one before they cornered him against a row of trees by someone’s house.
They shot him dead as hell right there.
It was pretty much the only ending on the menu at that point.
I keep wondering if anyone was watching from their kitchen window.
The trooper that was murdered was 29 years old. When I was 29 I felt invincible. I think it’s the only way you can be at that age.
It’s such a bright morning here: the idea of deer rifles and death seems so far away as we hang the right at the bottom of the hill. But it never really is, I guess. A simple sign on someone’s front lawn says ‘We Love Our PSP’. Pennsylvania State Police. It’s the only indication that something really bad happened here not long ago. One sign. But maybe one is all you need, isn’t it?
The flea market is going down at this old drive-in theater. It’s a straight shot throwback to another era. Friday and Saturday nights, they show two current features here starting around dark. It’s cheap and they have a snack bar straight out of some 1950s teenage rebellion flick set in Texas. Before the movies, you can throw a football around with your kids. Hawks and eagles fly over on their way to the river just beyond the woods behind the towering screen. Later on, you’ll need bug spray or you will get devoured.
This is a place where families come mostly to make memories and relax. There’s not really any drinking or rowdy boys as far as I can tell, but I was only there once at night so what the hell do I know? I guess at a lot of shit, in case you haven’t noticed before. I guess at things based on my gut feeling. Like: there is no God and there is no Heaven and there is no Hell and you can probably bet there are at least 20 or 30 handguns in the cars and trucks parked at this drive-in on any given weekend evening. In case someone else starts shooting.
This morning is different though. The sun is already baking the small rolling rows of grass that move horizontally across the entire length of the screen. We are among the last vendors to arrive; the rest are earlier birds than us, I guess, even though it’s 7:15am when we pull in.
I help Arle put up the pop-up tent and heave out the old barn wood doors she uses as table tops. Here today, she will test the waters at a place that isn’t college-educated hipsters who dig a certain Etsy style (though it’s hard to pin down!). As she gently lifts out her art pieces one at a time and places them on her carefully arranged display, I am struck by how deep art goes in her.
Around every corner is a person selling a thousand styles of ‘handcrafted’ laser-cut earrings and they are the ones who clean up at the crafting pop-ups more often than not. More than once, I have watched as Arle sat patiently, a smile on her face that was genuine, if resigned, as hordes of people moved past her set-up. Mostly stopping to look, complimenting the work, then moving on to something else.
Other days, she sets the woods on fire, pulling in enough money to have made all of the hours of toil and dedication worth it. Do the financial figures ever even out according to the way business is supposed to go? Well, I don’t know. Probably not all the time, no. But whatever. We never talk about that stuff much, even though I know we both understand that that’s where all of the “successful entrepreneurs” hang out.
Arle seems so different than that to me. Her desire to create, it appears to run deeper and cleaner than most of the so-called creatives I have known in this life. It’s almost cliche to say it, but what the hell.
I don’t think she actually cares that much about proverbial bad days at the market. To her, just being able to set up again, to talk to kids flicking through her sticker bowl, to engage with a couple of college kids who are torn between liking a piece she made with a brilliant Smiths lyric/ or hating it because Morrissey now is a twat, those are the things that seem to fulfill her.
All of that, and just sitting by herself when the house is quiet. Sitting there on the side room rug, coffee tables set up to barricade the dogs out, hot glue gun cocked and loaded on a crumpled up aluminum turkey tray, she plonks at her typewriter and snips at her patches of dried moss. The music she plays is her music. I feel shut out from it when I’m around, almost as if it’s not meant for me to hear. Almost as if, if I listen to it, if I horde it into my ears and into my skull and drizzle it all over my own nerves instead of leaving it for her, then I am fucking with my own person as she wanders around down in the fields of a world where no one else is welcome.
That’s art.
That’s where she goes.
Arle down in the fields of art, wishing to Christ that I would just evaporate as Lizzo comes on, as the afternoon wanes.
There’s some kind of bird of prey flying over the drive-in. At first I’m saying eagle, but then Arle focuses in on it too and we see that it is not that. Maybe an osprey. Maybe a fat falcon. I don’t know. It flies into a murder of crows and disappears beyond the distant tree line.
We have been here an hour and the crowd isn’t really the artsy type. They are pleasant enough/ lots of ‘good mornings’ and polite glances at our table. But these people aren’t after Walt Whitman quotes in antique frames. They are after 200 tube socks for $3. They are after a 100 foot industrial strength extension cord with old tire tracks all over it. This is a flea market and these are flea market people and while they likely appreciate the efforts of a woman attempting to sell her homemade handiwork to them early on a sweltering Saturday morning, they all mostly float in and out of our lives with a swift, tight smile before they’re gone.
Probably forever.
Real lessons come at the expense of missing out on other things. In my case, I miss out on doing even more shopping around the flea market than I do actually do because I am trying to spy on Arle and take it all in. Once I see that this day is more or less a pooch/ and that she is fine with it/ gracefully accepting the unchangeable around her rather than resist what cannot be avoided, I am hungry to witness more. And so I keep going for short recon missions out into the flea market only to return not long after, hoping she doesn’t suspect anything.
And out there in the thick of it: I fail myself. I spend a little money even though I promised myself I would not. I buy four Skynyrd records on vinyl and the kind-eyed chatty biker dude that sells them to me throws in a Marshall Tucker and Sinatra for free. I buy a plastic deer for my own art. I buy a big wooden bat someone cut out with a jigsaw. 2 bucks. I buy a wood box. I buy two magazines.
I buy no handmade art. Because there is none here. Only Arle. I want to buy something off of her but I don’t. That would make her cringe. Instead, I just sit there in one of our cheap uncomfortable camping chairs and I watch her watching the people. The true faint smile always ruling her lips. She doesn’t even know it but I see it. She doesn’t know she’s smiling, but I do. I notice it. All morning long. Even without any real sales and even without any real action, she still just smiles quietly to herself. Watching the world go by on a summer day. Happy to be a part of it all. Unfazed by the disinterest. Aware that this was not her crowd. Alive down in the feeling that the art in front of her is hers. She made it. All of it. And she will make more.
Hot glue guns in a cop killer world.
We watch a heron fly over and I wonder what it thinks of all this down here.
Then we pack up early and go.
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
• • •
Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
