There might be a critter inside that hollow log
A full month ago on these very pages, I described the cardboard outhouse my wife and I were constructing for a float in the parade to commemorate 175 years of the Wayne County Fair. The paperboard privy was only half the story. Now, with the glorious event marching briskly off into the sepia folds of fond memory, I can reveal the other portion of our parade project — the part that contained a surprise.
Our committee agreed early on that any float representing the Buckeye Agricultural Museum and Education Center ought to depict life on the farm in 1849, the year the first Wayne County Fair took place. Playing on the pioneer theme and anchored by an outhouse, we brainstormed other icons of 19th century rural life. A “milkable” plywood cow, already in the museum’s collection, was an early front-runner, but the beast was culled when it was determined she’d have a tough time keeping her feet on a rocking wagon. We added a high wheel cultivator, a butter churn and a corn sheller that pulled the double duty of keeping the outhouse supplied with a crude predecessor of toilet tissue. Still there seemed to be something missing.
Felling trees, sawing logs and chopping firewood were continuous and endless chores in the early days of our state, so it seemed only appropriate to make a nod toward that daily drudgery. Ax-wielding, however, is often discouraged in association with present-day parades, and the addition of a razor-sharp bucksaw may have caused safety concerns as well. I proposed a “model” log-sawing operation featuring a phony log and a plywood bucksaw that couldn’t cut a man if he were made of marshmallows. To my delight the idea was quickly embraced. To my chagrin I spent the majority of my summer building it.
I will not go into all the details of the project other than to say my pickup truck was displaced from its rightful spot in the garage for a full four weeks as I toiled to fashion a pile of scrap wood, a dumpster’s worth of cardboard and a gross of drywall screws into a convincing log and saw. Suffice to say that had it not been for my wife Kristin and her artistic skills, the parade crowd would have been left wondering what the two guys were doing as they pushed and pulled a skinny board through what looked like an oversized toilet paper core.
While my lack of artistic skill may have been amply evident, I did include one little design touch that may have made up for it — a hidden raccoon.
Two guys sawing wood on a wagon may be charming and authentic, but adding a stuffed raccoon to pop out of the end of the cutoff log, now that’s flat-out fun! Our sawyers wowed the crowd again and again with the stunt as they traveled the parade route. And while our collective artistry may have fallen short of a prize, we won the day for fun. I’m already planning for the 200th anniversary parade.
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John atjlorson@alonovus.com.
