As I pulled my pickup into the tailgate market this past Saturday morning, I was met with the sound of sirens and the eerie glare of flashing lights and a parking lot full of trucks and cars. "Wow!" I thought to myself, "the word has gotten out and the farmer’s market is a hit!"

Unfortunately, it wasn’t some sort of attraction gimmick and the hordes of early-bird shoppers that I had imagined, but rather Aquilla Green’s old pickup had had a carburetor fire and the entire volunteer fire department was on the scene to put out the flames. An auspicious, if not fiery, beginning to what promised to be another hot August day!

As the fire department trucks and the various hangers-on disappeared from the scene, and the growers and vendors began backing their vehicles up along the curb to set up their stations for the rest of the morning, a light, weepy mist began falling from a mizzly, gray sky.“Not a good sign,” the vendors were saying to each other through the looks in their eyes. And I remembered an old mountain adage: “When raindrops gather like berries on the bushes you can bet your thumb there’s more rain a-coming.” But only the rain gods - Pluvius, Zeus and Thor - knew what was in store, weather-wise, for the rest of the day. Looking up at the sky, the only words that came to mind were words that I’d heard long ago as a child over in Graham County, “Yes, it’s goin’ to weather.”

And “weather” it did. For the next two hours, and until almost 11 a.m., we got a steady, light Scottish rain. Not the "thundery weather" we’d been getting all week, not a "sizzly sod-soaker," or "nubbin’ stretcher," as the elder generation of mountain folks would refer to it, but a "pretty good chunk of rain" none the less. As we all stood around our trucks in our slickers and rain ponchos watching our baskets and tailgates fill up with water, and wondering whether we should just call it quits for the day, a remarkable thing happened. People started coming to shop. Despite the dreariness of the day, customers began showing up, milling around and buying produce. With this bit of unexpected good fortune, instead of packing up and returning home, we vendors hung in there, braving the weather as well as our earlier and equally dreary forecasts of a cat-and-dog day for sales.

While we were getting our "soft day," as the Irish call them, in Sylva, over in Madison County they were getting a real "Devil’s footwasher!" A brash of thundersqualls and flash floods were filling the rain gauges. Most of the county was being transformed into a "moving road," or "a strong brown god" as T.S. Eliot called it in one of his poems. At the news of the rains over in Madison County, a customer who has been fondling my bushel basket of large Kinnebeck potatoes says: “That rain over there must be the effect of the men walking on the moon - or so Mama says. We’ve had so much rain around here lately, that what we need now is a good hard rain to settle the mud." I smile at her colorful speech and count my blessings that our spell of rain, here, is as siccative as it is.

It’s been a good year, weather-wise, for us gardeners. After several years of drought and near drought conditions, any rain would have been welcome. We’ve had what I’m going to call an "ole timey" summer - with rain showers occurring almost like clockwork late in the afternoons like what I remember when I was a boy here in the mountains. In those days there was still a mountain superstition for rain-making that said: For a dustsettler - hang one dead blacksnake by the tail to a sassafras bush. For a gully-washer, hang two snakes. And for a sizzly sod-soaker: three snakes.

We’ve not had to conjure rain this year, and I’ve not had to irrigate my gardens at all. In fact, the pump across the road down by the river hasn’t been cranked up even the first time. If anything, we may have had too much rain. But I’m not complaining, and here at the tailgate market we’ve all gotten a bit giddy, braving the rain today. To pass the time, Jackson County Agricultural Extension Agent Christy Bredenkamp has broken out her umbrella and is doing an impromptu song-and-dance version of Gene Kelly’s "Singin in the Rain," with all of us vendors clapping and singing along in chorus. Our spirits warmed by our own foolishness, sporadic water fights, umbrella antics, and by the steady stream of customers that continue to come, we slosh on through the Scotch mist of the morning.

By eleven o’clock or so, the rain begins to back off. The sun is trying to make its way through the clouds, as soon thereafter our slickers come off, and what we are realizing is that we’ve all but sold out of produce.

Despite the gout of rain that has been dribbling down all morning, we’ve had the best selling day ever! Who would have thought?! I am reminded of how, while living wild out in the woods along the Green River in Polk County, I learned to "read the signs" in the weather and could pretty much predict what would come. Would that we could predict good sales days here at the tailgate market in the same way! I don’t think a one of us would have predicted that we’d have sold near this much produce, if any, by the end of this day. But we’re not rain doctors or fortune tellers here, yet I suppose we’ve all learned a lesson today, and all become a little more proficient as neophyte, knee-jerk hyetologists.

As the customer crowd thins out and the pools of water around our trucks begin to evaporate from a now-strong, directly overhead noonday sun, and with our pockets full of change and cash, having stuck out this Saturday morning to the very end, we begin packing up our baskets, bags and scales. It’s already after noon and Christy does one last version of "Singin in the Rain" with a folded umbrella, tap-dancing in water still pooled in the gutter to sarcastic, good-natured applause, as Mrs. Green’s truck starts up this time without fiery incident and rolls toward the street. It’s the end of another Saturday’s adventures here at the tailgate market - where the conversation and the tales are as puzzling as they are endless, and as interesting as the food is good.

(Thomas Crowe is a writer who lives in Jackson County)

 

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The Smoky Mountain News