Street clears and everyday life pauses for town parade
By Kathie Durbin
Published: July 25, 2010, 12:00am
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A procession of horses -- including one of a different color, tinted lavender, with a horn -- was a hit with the crowd Saturday during the annual Camas Days Parade.Photo Gallery
Take a warm July morning on a tree-lined small-town main street. Add kids and grown-ups and balloons and cotton candy and wafting food smells and clowns and fire trucks and — well, you get the picture. The stage was set for the Camas Days parade!
Thousands of people stood or sat along Camas’s pretty Fourth Avenue, with its shops and restaurants and boutiques, on Saturday morning to watch the 90-minute procession go by.
Before the parade, along both sides of Fourth, vendors plied their wares, from fancy cat-scratching posts to wooden animal jigsaw puzzles to designer wrap-around skirts.
Sisters Angie and Jackie Steffanson were busy twisting balloons into animal shapes and selling them out of their booth.
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“I’m hoping they each make enough to buy an outfit for school,” said their mother, Susie Steffanson.
Three-year-old Chantee Wukawitz came with her grandmother, Teresa Grove. As they sat in front of the Liberty Theater, waiting for the parade to begin, Chantee worried aloud that the people ambling down the street were going to get hit by cars.
Grove assured her that the police would clear the streets. Even so, once the parade began, Chantee spent the first several minutes anxiously hugging her grandmother’s leg.
Clark County Sheriff Garry Lucas led the procession. After that, there was no apparent logic to the order of parade entries.
A slew of politicians and their supporters, including 3rd Congressional District candidates Denny Heck, Jaime Herrera and David Hedrick, hoisted banners and passed out literature along the route.
A cavalcade of shiny Corvettes representing the Northwest Corvette Association inched by; some drivers revved their motors and spewed exhaust, to the annoyance of nearby spectators.
Six sleek pintos, one tinted lavender and wearing a unicorn horn, were a big hit. So were baton twirlers, drill teams, Shriners clowns, the fat hens and turkeys on the 4-H truck, people in theater costumes, people dressed as wizards.
At several points there were long gaps. Spectators drifted into the street, only to have someone call out, “Parade’s not over yet!”
Politicians tossed candy into the crowd, but the most popular swag turned out to be the large rolls of toilet paper lobbed by Georgia Pacific Corp. workers from a float called “Wizards of the Paper Making Universe.”
Veterans groups, volunteers from fire and rescue agencies, senior center residents, helmet-clad cyclists, Cub Scouts — was it over yet?
Not quite. Near the end, several gentle llamas wearing plastic flower boas ambled by; their riders let the children pet them.
A 1931 Model A, the high-stepping Camas Papershakers drill team, a banjo player.
Members of the Camas-Washougal Soccer Club tried to dribble a soccer ball down the street, with limited success.
Congressional candidate Hedrick’s contingent of supporters brought up the rear. And then it really was over.
The line was forming already in front of the home-squeezed lemonade stand.
