The Myth of the Breeze

Cascade Flea Market

My adven­tures in doc­u­men­tary writ­ing have offi­cially begun, jump started with a day long scav­enger hunt for a story. On Sat­ur­day, two radio stu­dents, and pho­tog­ra­pher, and myself trav­eled to the town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine.  Our assign­ment was sim­ply to talk to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble and find a story to fol­low.  These are some field notes.

Stop 1
Cas­cade Flea Market

The Cas­cade flea mar­ket has the space and setup for dozens of ven­dors.  But today most of the booths sit empty, no more than ten ven­dors spaced spo­rad­i­cally through­out the site.  Per­haps most reg­u­lar ven­dors had read the weather report for the day—unlike myself–and decided to avoid the rain.  The sell­ers that showed up today pretty much rep­re­sented the gen­eral spec­trum of flea mar­ket goods.  A booth of Harley Davidson-inspired para­pher­na­lia, knives, leather vests, and the like.  A booth of children’s dresses and silk Chinese-style baby clothes.  Antique tools, boxes of DVDs and romance nov­els, a doll of George Wash­ing­ton that spouted lengthy Wash­ing­ton quotes when squeezed (still in the box).  Meaghan and I spoke with two ven­dors.  Both retired men who sim­ply wanted some­thing to do on the weekends.

The first sold a ran­dom spat­ter­ing of junk.   At his booth were dozens of old lighters with mil­i­tary emblems, switch­blade knives, and boxes of paper­back books.  He also sold a few pieces of art which he’d crafted himself—a tiny pewter train affixed to a gold rail­road spike, tiny duck fig­ures glued to a piece of drift­wood.  I bought the lat­ter for my car’s grow­ing dash­board beach scene.

The sec­ond ven­dor, Dale, col­lected old coins, paper cur­rency, stamps, and base­ball cards that he bought at estate sales and auc­tions over the years.  He had stamps from Ger­many fea­tur­ing Hitler’s pro­file (whom he referred to as Adolf) and knew the year that Canada changed the size and value of their cur­rency.  For­merly a postal worker, Dale has been work­ing the flea mar­ket cir­cuit for over ten years.  When we told him we were in search of sto­ries to fol­low, he rec­om­mended the Curse of the Saco River—the myth that three white men will die in the river every year because a white man once through an Indian child in the river.  Dale doesn’t believe in the curse—he says that as pop­u­la­tions grow, so do the num­ber of drown­ing accidents.