Community festivals take pride in whatever

It just doesn't add up. Duvall, which has more Microsoft code crunchers than amphibians, caps off its summer Duvall Days festival with a frog-jumping contest.

"Summerfest" takes place in Long Beach, which invented fog. Silverdale residents gather each summer for "Whaling Days" — in a strip-malled community whose closest brush with a whale likely was a Saran-wrapped blubber sample from Neah Bay bound for the Kingston ferry in an icebox.

Everyone knows the real intent of a good summer festival is to A) tie up traffic for people just trying to get to Safeway and B) sell shaved-ice treats and worthless authentic local trinkets, mostly made in Taiwan. But a little truth-in-advertising might be in order. Or, failing that, at least some festivals that reflect the true nature of the communities and people they purport to celebrate.

We'll provide our own little list for starters. (Chamber-of-Commerce types should put down their mai tais and take notes.) If we ran the world — heaven forbid — the August community festival listings elsewhere in this publication would read more like this:

• Too @$#!% Hot Days, Walla Walla. It's 105 in the shade. Everybody ready to par-tay? Notable events: Sticky Sheets Fitful Sleep Contest, sponsored by Clorox. Midafternoon downtown drool-off. Large Sweaty Man Self-Wetted T-Shirt Contest.

• Sequim Metamucil Festival. Migratory retired Californians relive the grand occasion, 15 years ago, when the tiny Olympic Peninsula town's fate was sealed for good as the local QFC made history by unveiling an entire aisle stocked with laxative products.

• Pathological Liar Days, Mukilteo: Tens of thousands of thirty- and forty-something professionals line the looping network of streets in the unmistakably residential, buried-cable planned neighborhood of Harbour Pointe (locally pronounced, "Har-boor Poin-tay") to shower their anti-hero, Gov. non-elect Tim Eyman, with crumpled receipts from their old, expensive car-license tabs.

Eyman concludes festivities by standing at a microphone at Mukilteo Lighthouse and convincing 12,000 semi-lucid followers that the more water you drain from your well, the fuller it gets.

• Sewage Lagoon Fest, Everett. Highlights: No-hands biosolid-transport team relay. 4K Treatment Plant Fun Run/Walk/Cough/Choke.

• Renton Traffic Fest. A gala accessible only via the right-hand lane of southbound 405. Don't miss: Wal-Mart Parking Lot Demolition Derby, featuring last year's winning entrant, Suburban Sue in her extra-extra-large Chevy with the custom rear storage compartment large enough to stow four Costco toilet-paper multipacks.

• Arlington Splat Fest. Featuring some of the world's most cutting-edge, home-built experimental aircraft.

• Commuter Identity Crisis Celebration, Vancouver. Wherein tens of thousands of Clark County residents who work, eat, recreate and spend most of their lives in Portland learn the fine skills requisite to being a real Washingtonian — such as clear-cutting and pumping your own gas.

• North Bend Big Blue Tarp Days. Prizes given for most creative use of blue tarpage to: mask a major, unpermitted remodeling project; put off that roof job by another seven years; camouflage a rusting 1967 Chevy on blocks in the back yard; and fashion a full set of sideways-rain-resistant school clothes for the children.

• Slade's Summer Salmon Slam, Port Angeles. Held in conjunction with local tribes, the ceremony honors the decades of obstructionist handiwork by Washington's (finally) retired senior Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Neptune, by using a water cannon to blast migratory salmon against the concrete face of the still-standing Lower Elwha Dam.

• Let's Face It, We Could Give Away Truckloads Of Cash And Still Not Get More Than 50 People To Drive All The Way Over Here Days: Sponsored by the proud — and quaintly realistic — people of Metaline Falls.

• Omak Public Relations Suicide Race: Locals get together and issue press releases espousing the plunging of unsuspecting, fragile-limbed horses off a sheer cliff as a fun, family friendly summer event.

• Blubber Fest, Neah Bay: Local Makahs eat it; distraught Greenpeace volunteers just do it.

• Unfortunate Guilt By (Name) Association Day. For the past decade, a summer highlight in Clinton.

• Camlann Medieval Faire, Carnation. People in the last King County town without public sewers get together to dance around in tights and slay mythical dragons with maces and other state-of-the-art, 14th-century weapons.

Oops. That last one already exists. Don't forget the baby powder. All that chain-mail armor can create some powerful chafing.

Ron C. Judd's outdoors columns appear in Sunday's sports section and Thursday's Northwest Weekend section. Phone: 206-464-8280; e-mail rjudd@seattletimes.com.