In honour of the scarecrow

I am working on creating a twinning of hamlets: Slab Creek will likely be matched with the village of Nagoro, which is on the Island of Shikoku, Japan. It will be a good move on the level of global movement. You see, my attraction to the idea is that Nagaro has a population of 35, which is a match for my neighbourhood. At least that’s the number that the Parkway highway sign sez last time I looked. The really big attraction is that Nagaro also has a population of 350 scarecrows, a comfortable ratio of Straw-men/women to humans.

You want to understand that I dearly love the hard-working neighbours down here in the shadowlands of the County. They are decent and industrious folks, producing corn and soy and hops and grapes and just about everything else. The thing is, around this time of year, not only does our single-lane road get jammed with produce wagons going hither and thither (I’ve been waiting to use that saying for a while now) by day, but by night and especially by early, early, like I mean before dawn early morning, the simulated gun shots that are meant to scare off sparrows and crows commence a faux guerilla war between the windrows and acres of granite-hard fields of Hillier clay.

Yes, I know that the birds need to be kept in line to protect the crops, especially the hops, or else my closest artisan watering hole over by Benway Road (an achievable distance after dark on a no-speed bike with an out-of-shape peddler at the handle bars) may run low on brew. You see, that’s why I’m behind the ‘buy local’ thing with no complaint. But here’s the thing: the propane powered corn blasters. These auto noise guns are aggressive—and I’m not even a bird— and they consume non-renewable energy. Oh sure, there are the plastic hawks that twirl in a circle on a pole and work better for mosquitoes than anything. There are also the shiny ribbons on the vines that the crows like to collect to weave nests and make trinkets and the like because we know that crows like shiny things. The inflatable tube men and women ( you wanna be gender inclusive when it comes to these), you know the air dancers you see at every tire sale place, they’re fun, mind you, and with character, but running electrical extension cords out to the fields to keep the vinyl people dancing turned out to have safety issues. The cords get caught up in the harvesters: turns out that the computers in those giant-size machines can’t recognize a power cord when it sees one.

So back to the twinning idea. I have invited the whole village population of Nagoro to a cross-cultural event here at our local hall. The plan is a workshop type of festival where our local population will gain know-how and learn the technology of scarecrow making. It seems it is a dying craft out our way beyond the fringes, and reviving the skills will work for an arts or an economic development grant I’m quite certain. The outcome will no doubt be spectacular.

The end game will be to have 350 multicultural scarecrows made to populate the surrounding fields of Slab Creek to calm the air, so to speak. Not only that, it will be a boost for business in the ‘hood. Imagine when we update the highway sign and what possibilities that can hold? Slab Creek on the world map even. I’ll leave that up to you to come up with the proper way to word it, to announce our population growth, a factor that Stats Can will want to know about for sure: for a small remittance, might be good to even list our rival, Small Pond Arts.

So come on down to our place, why not, and rejoice with us in our newfound tourist Mecca that is sure to be envied in every corner of the County. The door prize is four bales of straw. Second prize is three bales and so on. We will have advanced scare-making skills to offer, plenty of leftover pumpkin pie, huge wardrobe choices, more leftover pumpkin pie, a giant sell-off of retired airdancers, electrical extension cords for recycling, the Scarecrow Trail and much more. Best of all, it will finally be quiet down here on the western front.