unraveling anachronisms

last weekend dad and the brothers and I traipsed up to a little town called Monroe and spent a few hours wandering around the 29th Annual Muzzleloading and Pioneer Craft Show. that is the fancy and official name for what amounts to a lot of rather dedicated hobbyists (such as the pirate-looking fellow below, who was so kind as to pose for my photograph) to prance around talking about the good old days before modern technologies sprang up and choked all the quaintness out of the world. my dad loves this kind of thing.

I went along because I had not much else to do and also in hopes of coming across interesting pieces of hardware to use in various sewing projects I've been dreaming up lately.

there were miles and miles of tables covered with odds and ends from days long ago, interspersed with a lot of junk that was really just pretending to be old. much replication, with a few true antiques buried underneath it.

we talked to a fellow who had recreated Jack Sparrow's coat out of leather. it was gorgeous. there were endless amounts of beads, buttons, fabrics and crafts. what I noticed most were the skins of dead animals lying and hanging so unassumingly everywhere.

fur is quite amazing stuff. we decided otter pelts were the smoothest, softest, most lovely. but if you don't like otter, they also had fox, raccoon, badger, ermine, mink, and skunk. they had hats of all kinds, some made out of entire skins, complete with little claws and teeth and ears and tail.

where did they get all this fur? there was so much of it. I thought real fur was dreadfully out of style due to all those animal rights activists out there. apparently the mountain men rendezvous re-enactment folks aren't that up on current events of that sort. they are too busy etching old maps and sayings and secret codes onto their powder horns.

there were also unimaginably extensive displays of weapons, from knives and tomahawks to long bows and rifles, racked in rows, stacked in piles, and tacked all over the walls.

there was a man there selling a chance to win a rifle made by Frank and Lally House, the gun-makers who make the replicas they use in movies like The Patriot. everything seemed very colonial and unraveling. nothing matched. certainly my tennis shoes and digital camera did not match. I felt somewhat like a spy, peering into pieces of someone else's escapism and capturing bits of it to hang in a museum.