Soule Live Steam Festival

(Photograph by me.  I just wanted you to know that.  Be impressed.  Be very impressed.  Ha.....)

Aaaanyyway...

I went to the 2010 Soule Live Steam Festival today.  I've been meaning to go for the past two years, but I have always forgotten about it or something else has been going on, and I've missed it.  It's really something to see.  The festival is held in the Soule Steam Feed works, a factory that made steam engines and other parts for generations before it shut down.  Now it houses the Mississippi Industrial Heritage Museum, and every November, the doors roll open, the boilers are relit, and the belts spin across the ceiling again.  People from all over the country come down with their restored steam engines, both large and small, to show them off.

When I arrived, the entire grassy area outside Soule was covered with various large engines that looked like something out of a steampunk or Dickens novel.  It was fantastic.  They were all kicking clouds of vapor into the cool morning air.  Whistles were sounding at various intervals, gears were turning, and a pleasant smell of mingled wood smoke and lubricating oil permeated everything. There was a man with a gas-powered portable saw-mill slowly planing a cedar log, showing how the old saw mills worked.  He was giving away cedar chips. 

The crowd was a curious mixture of very old and very young at first.  It seemed that the grandparents had all brought their grandkids out for a day with the big machines.  I liked that idea very much.  It was the sort of thing my own grandparents would have done. They used to load us up and take us places like the Ag Museum and Williamsville.  I remember those as wonderful trips.  As time went on, more couples and younger people began to show up. The older people seemed to know exactly what they were looking at, and I had the feeling that many of them had worked on or with these impressive things in the past.  Most of the younger people were like me, curious and learning.  I hope the organizers had a big day of it.  They were asking people to sign in, saying something about getting a government grant.  

The machines themselves are beautiful and awesome in the sense of the word that means inspiring respect and wonder.  Most of them had been beautifully restored and brightly painted.  They hulk, they tower, they gleam, they stutter, sputter, puff, whir, purr, and grumble.  Since I like to take photos of details of things, they were perfect for that.  I loved their precision and their relentless motion.  I loved that they were "old tech," yet they were perfectly content, continuing to split logs, saw timber, run whistles, power factories, provide electricity.  They didn't know they'd been replaced.  There was something admirable about those steam engines, something somehow independent and noble about them as they issued their streamers of white into the perfect November morning.

As is always the case at these small festivals, everyone there was happy to be there.  I love that.  People come out because they have a genuine love of the craft, the item, the culture surrounding it.  Even though I don't really know anything more about the steam engine than what I read off the placards today, I want to know more now thanks to those people, and of course, any day I can take a bunch of photos and find something to be curious about qualifies as a good day.

I walked and looked at everything; I bought the requisite t-shirt, as much to support the festival as out of a need of another one; I strolled through the food stands outside and resisted the urge to consume.  Around the corner, I stood and listened to the sweet sound of something I'd been thinking of, oddly enough, only this morning, a massive steam-driven calliope.  I left with a smile on my face, a scarf I picked up in the craft fair outside around my neck, and that calliope's song in my heart.  Not bad for a Saturday powered by live steam.