Free The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna

before with a spectacular fireworks display over the river, then resumed in the morning with a parade down Judd Street, Marine’s main drag. The parade was, as usual, a motley assemblage; pretty much anyone could take part, though it helped to have some kind of message or theme. The big news in July 2011 was the political stalemate that led Minnesota’s state government to shut down a few days earlier. The winning “float” featured a gaggle of marchers carrying blank banners—their way of mocking a state that couldn’t even pay for ink. As always, the show was silly, hokey, drenched in small-town Midwestern charm, and quite moving in a nostalgic way. It’s a yearly reminder that though the pace of change in the world is ever accelerating, certain aspects of small-town life remain frozen in a timeless eternity of iconic Americana.
    My memories of childhood in Colorado include the treasured recollections of events that could have been plucked from the same summer-dazed grab bag as the Fourth of July in Marine. As a kid in Paonia, the Fourth was second only to Christmas on my personal liturgical calendar. It was also Cherry Day, a series of events celebrating the luscious Bing cherries that were picked, in a good year, from the fruit orchards that covered the surrounding mesas. Back then, the local economy, such as it was, relied on two things: coal mining and fruit cultivation (apples, peaches, plums, apricots, and those sweet and succulent Bings, ranging in color from dark ruby to midnight black). The mining persists and has actually been more active in recent years, with the growing market for the area’s high-quality coal reserves. But due to climate change and the uncertain harvests, the fruit industry has devolved into a gentleman’s hobby. Even back then, a late spring freeze regularly wiped out the cherry crop, which meant the town had to get its cherries from Fruita, near Grand Junction, about seventy miles to the west. True to its name, Fruita always seemed to have a good harvest by the Fourth, a fact that many of Paonia’s farmers probably resented. There in the vaunted home of the best cherries in Western Colorado, it was never clear before the end of May if the festivities in their honor could count on local supplies to meet demand.
    Though the cherries were good enough to tempt me and many other kids into diarrhea-inducing excess, they were not the highlight of my Fourth of July. What I most eagerly awaited was the appearance of the traveling carnival. Happy Day Rides was a dusty, ragamuffin caravan of carneys that would show up one day unannounced (at least, unannounced to me) a week or so before the Fourth. Their arrival served as a midpoint in the bucolic three-month ecstasy that was summer in Paonia. Here was proof that, yes, Cherry Day would happen, cherries or no cherries, and that the summer would spin itself out like every summer before it. Their two-week stay was an enchanted time, at least in the lives of young boys, inevitably followed by a touch of sadness. Their departure meant the end of another glorious, school-free, sun-drenched summer was not that far away.
    I was blessed among my peers to live across the street from Paonia Park, where, in one corner, Happy Day Rides would set up shop. I’d get up one June morning and there they’d be, having quietly straggled into town during the night. They didn’t look like much: just two or three semitrailers and a few flatbed trailers and smaller trucks. They had no large animals, no lions or tigers or elephants, probably because it was too expensive to keep such a menagerie fed and cared for on the road. None of this mattered; I was most interested in the rides, which the carneys would spend the next few days unpacking and assembling like a scuffed-up, adult-scale erector set. As these marvels took shape—the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, the Tubs Of Fun, the electric train, and, in later years, the Octopus and the Loop-O-Planes—I tracked