Scrotoss debuts at North Country Fair

Every year I go, I make the same mistake of overpacking when I cram my gear together for North Country Fair. It’s not just the volume of jeans, gonch, t-shirts and sweaters I bag up – ridiculous when I know I’ll be in the same gonch and jeans for three or four days – but the volume of useless crap I haul. I pack like an eight-year-old running away from home, stuffing my pockets at the last minute with a junk-drawer collection of flimsy twine, dull scissors, questionable batteries, old comic books, cheap novels, action figures, fresh notepads … and video games.

Nothing’s as useless at NCF as entertainment products. They are unnecessary. If you bring a Game Boy – hell, if you even bring a book – and you actually get around to using it, you’re doing things wrong. NCF is about itself. On the physical plane, there’s the music, the people, the music, the woods, the partying and the people. On the spiritual plane, there’s… more. Drugs may figure into this. On your second and subsequent journeys North – even on the New Land, it is and will be the Fair – the air is crowded with memory, all your previous visits twining into and out of each other: the rainstorm when your buddies almost monoxided themselves, that transcendent moment beside the stream, the terrifying encounter with the Vulture Children… the picture-perfect love affair that died hard on exposure to City psychology and bled regret all over two years of your life… for what the fuck do you need Tetris or Fight Club, here?

That’s not to say North Country is nothing but watching rainy bands, swilling warm beer and wrestling with desperate demons. There is recreation – there’s gaming, even, if for the purposes of maintaining a column’s theme you use a broad definition of the word. That’s right; as predicted in this space two weeks ago, many hippies and hosers at North Country Fair were captivated by the magic that is Scrotoss.

For those of you just joining us, Scrotoss is a pastime based loosely around an old Cree game some friends and I discovered at Fort Edmonton a while back, basically tossing a double-lobed beanbag back and forth with sticks. The historical accuracy of modern Scrotoss begins and ends with the word “Cree”: starting with our awesome but mistaken notion that the dumbbell-like ball was originally a buffalo scrotum, tanned and stuffed, the culture of today’s game is cut completely from whole cloth (specifically, an old suede blazer), created ex tempore by its players, transmitted orally.

It was fun to watch it happen, to see the joy of Scrotoss spread from camp to camp, to hear its vocabulary build as more and more players came up with more and more schoolyard-hilarious terms for the game and its equipage. By the time I had the leather bag sewn -- I stitched it while listening to the Oilers game -- those playing with the temporary scrototype (two sand-stuffed socks tied with nylon tent rope) had a whole giggling glossary underway:

shaft: a scrotoss stick
scro-motion: the act of replaying a good catch in your mind, slowly
teabagging: getting a scrot to the face
tossers: those who play Scrotoss
blue balls: the scrot fails to leave the shaft on a toss
undescended testicle: the scrot is stuck in a tree

… and so on. Was it the pot, the shrooms, the booze, the spirit of the place? Whatever it was, I’ve never been first-hand for such a quick, spontaneous emergence of folk culture. It seriously blew my mind. Hippies, hosers, men, women, little kids and Englishmen, at least a hundred people over the course of the weekend, laughing, tossing the scrot, coining ribald lingo on the fly. And when North Country’s traditional march of children paraded past with their parachutes and started chanting “Throw that scrotum! It’s Father’s Day! Throw that scrotum!”… well. You can just imagine.

Fun to play, fun to talk about… and it never stops being fun to play and fun to talk about. As I mentioned above, North Country magic sometimes has a heartbreaking time in making it home from the Fair, but I think this one’ll stick. Maybe. I mean, who knows? I've got a line on a friend of a friend who works in a saddlery, but... with every electrical day in the steel city, the dream of rolling around the fair circuit evangelizing Scrotoss and selling handmade scrots out of the back of a Westfalia seems more and more unreal…

This post originally appeared as an "Infinite Lives" column in Vue Weekly
Image: Stephen "Dr. Scrot" Notley shows his pair, D. Martineau photo. More pics here!