In early July my friend Carol and I headed down to Wilmington, Illinois, for the annual Catfish Festival held there. The Festival was scrapped last year (like everything else) because of the pandemic, but this summer it was back in full force, thanks to effective vaccines that most sensible Illinoisans have taken advantage of.
It was fun to see the Festival back in fine form — deep fried catfish and country-blues bands in the beer garden of the Rustic Inn, mud volleyball out behind the Route 66 Bar and Grill, carnival rides and booths in the North Island Park surrounded by the Kankakee River, flea market on Water Street, and more. It’s the kind of “redneck roundup” Carol and I both love, with laughter, lowbrow entertainment and cheap beer.
I used to own a fireplace-heated cabin I built on a strip-mine lake between Wilmington and Braidwood, where I spent most weekends and every summer for 15 years or so, and going back for this year’s Catfish Festival felt like homecoming to me. My band Old’s Cool played at the Rustic Inn at the Catfish Festival in 2019, the last year it was held.
At this year’s Festival, Carol and I strolled from event to event, and later in the afternoon we stopped into a few of the old antique and resale shops that Wilmington has become known for. The shops are not what they used to be 30 years ago, before Chicagoans discovered the cheap treasures you could find there, but they’re still fun to browse—monuments to all things weather-worn, outdated and discarded. Over the years I have bought everything in those shops from nick-knacks to knives, guitars to fishing tackle, bedframes to boating gear.
It’s hard to explain the ironic joy of resale-shopping, of embracing somebody else’s forgotten, flung-away flotsam. If mud volleyball and deep-fried catfish tickle your fancy, you might understand. Let the rest of the world race on to video games and laser tag, lobster and linguine, but sometimes it’s fun to languish in the simple, bucolic pleasures of small-town life of long ago. Sometimes there’s no harm in letting the world pass you by.
Then again, sometimes there’s all the harm in the world if you refuse to keep up with life in the fast lane.
In one of the antique shops we met the owner, a lady named Elaine who was about our age — which is to say “vintage.” Her shop was empty except for us, and we asked her how business was doing.
“Not bad now,” she said. “It was hard getting through the last year, when we were all shut down, but we’re doing pretty well this summer.” She grumbled something about the government strangling the economy by closing down or limiting attendance to public shops.
We told her we were glad things were looking up, now that the vaccine was beating back the virus.
Elaine nodded, but added, “I haven’t gotten the vaccine. But I’m being careful. I keep my distance when I go out in public, and I wear a mask in crowds.”
She wasn’t wearing a mask as she said this to us inside her shop. I wondered if she would put one on if the room were crowded.
Carol mentioned that both of us had been vaccinated, and that we felt far more comfortable going out to events like the Catfish Festival — or walking unmasked into antique shops — because of it.
Elaine shook her head. “I don’t trust it,” she said. “It hasn’t even been approved by the FDA.” We asked her if she would get the vaccine once that government agency expanded its emergency approval into full approval, and she said she might in that case.
We didn’t find anything in her shop to buy, so we walked back out into the street, back to the Catfish Festival.
Still, I couldn’t help but shake my head at the irony of Elaine’s thinking. She waved away the overwhelming evidence of hundreds of millions of Americans somehow surviving the vaccine and steering clear of emergency rooms jammed with the unvaccinated—but feared getting the vaccine only because the government she distrusted hadn’t officially given its full approval.
As I said, sometimes there’s no harm in letting the world pass you by. Sometimes there’s all the harm in the world.
That was in early July. In the two months since then, the more infectious Delta variant of Covid has raged across America, thanks primarily to citizens who, for one reason or another, refused to take the vaccine and thus provided a breeding ground for variants.
Had we all taken the shot as soon as it became available, it is doubtful that any variant could have developed or spread so quickly. Today more and more “crossover” cases arise, with even the vaccinated becoming infected—although with far milder symptoms, if any at all.
While some have valid reasons to avoid vaccines, most don’t. Most, like Elaine, cling to reasons as weather-worn, outdated and discarded as antique-shop clutter.
In late August, the FDA granted full approval to Pfizer’s vaccine, with full approvals of other vaccines pending. I wonder if Elaine relented and got the shot, or if she rummaged around for some other ironic excuse.
I wish Elaine well. I hope she makes it through another year. But with the current Delta surge, had the Catfish Festival been held this weekend, I don’t know if we would have attended.
I hope the Catfish Festival will be held again next summer, and every summer thereafter, but foot-draggers like Elaine may bring an ironic end to that kind of fun for all of us, for no good reason whatsoever.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
