Somewhere in America this weekend, a town of two thousand people is crowning a Roadkill Queen, racing outhouses down Main Street, or charging admission to watch grown adults compete at something no other place on Earth would dream of celebrating. Welcome to the gloriously strange world of the American small-town festival.
A hall of fame of the bizarre
The roster is real and it is wonderful. In Roswell, New Mexico, tens of thousands gather each summer for a UFO festival, complete with alien costume contests and guest speakers. In Nederland, Colorado, Frozen Dead Guy Days celebrates a cryogenically preserved local legend with coffin races and frozen-turkey bowling. West Virginia's Roadkill Cook-Off dares chefs to make squirrel and venison genuinely delicious. Every region has its own.
Why the weird wins
There's a logic under the lunacy. A festival no one else has is a festival people will travel for, and a weekend of visitors can sustain a small town's diners, motels, and gas stations for the season. But it's not only money. A strange tradition gives a place an identity, a story it tells about itself, a reason for neighbors to build something together year after year.
It's also a kind of defiance. In a country that can feel increasingly the same from one highway exit to the next, a town that throws a parade for a frozen corpse or a pageant for a vegetable is insisting, loudly, on being unmistakably itself.
Bring an open mind (and an appetite)
If you ever find yourself driving through rural America in summer, watch the roadside signs. The hand-painted one advertising the annual something-or-other festival is an invitation: to eat something questionable, laugh with strangers, and witness the particular genius of a place that decided the best way to be remembered was to be a little weird. America's small towns figured out long ago that normal is forgettable.