Quiet Water Symposium 2002 Report
by Jeff Potter
Well, I just did another Quiet Water Symposium show booth this past Saturday (March 2, 2002).
It was blizzarding and I was sick with a cold, but I got myself to the show only a little bit late and set up my booth.
It’s amazing how the local paddling club puts this thing on every year. Local paddler club dudes were waiting at the door, eager to help me carry in my display items. Other paddlers got me my name tag and found my display place. How many pro quality regional shows (the whole Great Lakes area!) covering everything related to a really big field are put on by a little group of paddlers. Those paddlers are something! Oh, and the local Boy Scouts, too! 3 cheers for them all!
There were about 60 booths and 6 big presentations and maybe 2000 people attended. My guess.
My theme this year was ROCKS. Lake Superior Beach Stones, to be specific.
So I set up my booth. I hauled in several 100 pound buckets of rocks, then set out two birdbaths and slid my old blue plastic snow sled out in front of the table. Then I filled them all with rocks. Then I filled one of the now empty buckets with water and poured it into all the containers (after patching the holes in the sled with duct tape), bringing all the rocks to beautiful life. The sled held the biggest rocks, some maybe were 5-pounders, all brilliantly colored. Not like your usual rocks. Jasper, agate, chalcedony, rhyolite, prehnite, epidote, porphry, ophitic basalt, kooky basalt: I have it all. And it all said “the best of the Big Lake.” I also had a welded wire porch display stand that had a bunch of big dry rocks in it. But to cap it off I had a big open 50’s-style art glass vase on the table, all flowing orange, in the Italian mode, and I filled it with my tumbled, polished gem grade rocks. Then I strewed some more little polished rocks on the table top. And set out my 3 rock identification books. That was the rock display.
On either side of that, I propped up OYB book stuff. On one side I had the “Rare Show Library” book rack, of very unusual outdoor culture books, for browsing only (with sign). On the other I had my display of all-new “Local Spirit” bumperstickers for sale, $1 each. With holders showing my OYB zine issues and OYB books behind that. With signage for everything. What a sight!
Then I got out a sandwich and coffee and sat down.
Immediately my booth was swamped by kids. Ages 5 to 10, I’d say. Over the course of the day, dozens would hunker down at the blue boat sled and play with the wet rocks and ask me What’s this one? What’s this one? I had no idea my display would be a kid magnet. Well, cool. Every show needs one. One little girl hung out there for a couple hours, all told. Her dad was one of the volunteers working the show.
The usual show attraction for kids—the climbing tree—wasn’t there this year. Too much work taking care of all those kids on the ropes! Rocks are no work, no risk. People who attend this show do so to spend as much time visiting everyone they haven’t seen in a year as they do to man their booth.
Man, I don’t really know how to run a booth.
First off, everyone wanted to buy my rock books. I never thought of that either. I could’ve carried some stock in the best one. That would’ve been great. It’s a very rare local book, only available in a few up north rock shops. What a great title, too: “Is this an Agate?”
And, really, I need a proper stand-up display to say what OYB is really about. Nobody gets it. I need to display my BOAT BOOKS, for starters, prominently.
I really want to promote my favorite small boat magazine as well: “Messing About in Boats.” I assume anyone into boats knows about it. They don’t. I bet less than half of the buffs there know about it. What a nice service that would be.
I had some interesting encounters, as usual. And noticed some things.
Right off the bat, when I was setting up, a big guy came by and said “Hey, I just bought a Jack Saunders book off your website, but I got confused and ended up buying it from Amazon.” I said “Oh neat! Yeah, my website can be confusing, but that was kind of supposed to happen. All my bookstore links go to Amazon, but for books that I personally distribute I always add a note saying to order direct from me via my homepage, because the link goes to Amazon and they take 60%, but I see how you can get mixed up.” He said “Well, thanks for the neat stuff, my name is (?), see ya.” “See ya.” I saw him again wandering around and he gave a wave, I gave a wave. Then it struck me. Man, this guy here at the boat show bought a JACK SAUNDERS book on his own. Which one did he get? Did he like it? Jack is a cutting edge novelist who’s working beyond any writer today. Hardly anyone but me and those who read him is giving him any publicity. I need to talk to this guy!” But he was gone….
A big thing I noticed: man, people sure don’t like bumperstickers. They basically shunned my booth like the plague. Sure, I had some great people come up, all interested in the rocks. But the kid love didn’t pass over to adult love very well. I had some people express interest in a couple of the stickers: mainly just the one celebrating my dog! They wanted to know what a GWP was, and why. That was fun, talking about that.
In general, though, I think that people today are afraid of books! Ideas are just as bad.
Or maybe it was just my homebrew look and amateurishness. But aren’t those in today? Especially at a little boatshow full of do-it-yourselfers? Man, I figured this was MY audience finally. But I had very few takers overall. I’d say 5%. It was neat that hardly any of those people knew me already. I only had a few previous customers, old pals, stop by.
I think my core message would go over, but my presentation must be off. You gotta play these people just like fish, sadly. I guess it’s true though. They’re strolling by, like fish in a stream. I gotta hook em. Use gut instincts. A bowl of free candy. A naked model.
The rocks really were beautiful, though. I’m quite proud of them. My display is the cream of the rock crop. What’s nicer than to see real water and rocks at a stuffy old boat show. (Oops, only just now did I remember that I forgot to put my rock fountain on display! Doh!) The orange vase looked nice. The green terracotta birdbaths were Grecian, and nicely set off the triumphant vase. The book displays on either side showed the classical depth of such a display. The huge “pool” of rocks in the watery blue sled was quite refreshing. Sez me. …And the kids.
It also seems like perhaps one can make a glum commentary on our local population. I detect a kind of closedmindedness, a kind of Cosby-sweater mentality. I didn’t know that the homemade small boat scene was socially conservative in a kind of sour, narrow way but maybe it is. My booth is diverse and cheerful. It isn’t political at all, although it’s a bit free. It is intentionally geared to everyone. Maybe some things raise questions, so raise them. But I had a lot of glum people marching by.
We just got back from a drive through the South. It wasn’t so glum. After being around a jillion Southerners for a week, the average Midwestern type wasn’t comparing so favorably. Fortunately, there are kooks everywhere, even in groups of supposed kooks.
Anyway, my friend Tom had the only booth displaying the exotic world of racing canoes and kayaks. He had a neat display also showing the development of the racing paddle, with several quirky deviations that the sport went thru. He said hardly anyone was stopping by his booth. But then he set out some beautiful wooden bowls he’d been turning on his lathe. (They are gorgeous. I bought his masterwork awhile back.) They are a bit beyond your usual bowls, featuring spalted maple and other neat things, plus great wood types such as Osage. Anyway, he said as soon as the bowls came out, his booth was flocked and then everyone got interested in the racing paddle display, too. He was surprised that the bowls attracted people at a boat show when the boats didn’t. Fishing for customers is an interesting sport, all right.
I did get my annual remark from one person who said I had the best booth. I get one of those every year. That gives me hope. (And I don’t think it’s the same person every year, but maybe I need to pay closer attention. There are some ladies who seem to keep dropping by and lingering….)
The rocks were unique and made a big splash, though in a unique way, so that’s fine by me. It shows I’m on to something.
At one point, the booth next to me was getting slow traffic and had played their promo videotape 100 times. A tape of SLIDES, no less. They had photos on their board. I asked if I could pop in this tape that I had. The guy said “Is it safe?” Sure. –It was my “High Velocity” feature film video of action-packed XC skiing. It has a great soundtrack and tons of color and high speed. Man, it drew a crowd pronto. So I know what I’m doing in an offbeat kind of way.
Next year, I’ll take it more seriously. I’m going to care. I’m going to win em over.
This year I was also exhausted from my stupid cold.
Oh, another nice thing was that one of the co-organizers who I don’t know well near the end of the day said Hey we really appreciate you coming and doing your booth, we know it’s a bother for you but we really like it and think it really adds something that we want to have here. Gosh, I was going to thank him for letting me be there. They give me a free booth and I do have a good time, so I was just going to tell him that. Man, those paddlers, they’re great. What pro’s!
I know that they get complaints about certain booths not being pro enough, or up to snuff. But they always defend them energetically. (Maybe they’ve had to defend me, too! I’ve brought bikes before and had people be kind of snide about them, saying Now what do these have to do with water?)
Once an older couple walked by and the guy asked if I was still doing my magazine. He knew about it. I said everyone now and then, had he seen my last one? Well, he’d never seen any. How many people know about OYB in some detail without ever having read it? I decide to go for a hook and mention the boat book that I publish, and that the articles in it were originally published in Messing About in Boats. Oh yes, he’d subscribed since it started 20 years ago, knows the publisher well. I said, “Wow, that’s great, same here, the publisher is a big fan of OYB and runs my stories every now and then. He’s a great guy.” But he still didn’t ask for a copy of the mag. That publisher is a guy who if he endorses something, his readers go for it, they know it’s the real McCoy. I showed him another boat book I publish, saying “And this is a book that International Marine was putting out until they got bought out…” and his wife interrupts in a British accent, offering the name of the new owner, which I’d forgotten. So he bought copies of both my boat books. I had to go for it: “…And can I give you a copy of my magazine in with that?” He was happy to accept. It’s fascinating how baffling people are. How many people at that show knew the story of that publishing company? Just them, I’d think. I let them and their secrets go on their way.
My best moments were finding out that the Canadians were there. There’s a B&B in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, just north of Michigan, that we like to go to, in great ski country, where the owners share their homebrew beer with you (if there’s some still in the cellar to coincide with your visit) and where they host a local folk music series. There were several booths in attendance for the first time from that area. A lady stopped by and said who she was. She knew our pals up there very well. She loved the rocks. She was freakier about them than I was. She said there was another booth of Gooley Bay people there, too (spelled Goulais but said how I spelled it, eh?). I went and found them and said Hi. I hadn’t ever met them. I noticed that the beautiful wife partner was someone who I had enjoyed skiing with many years ago after bumping into her on a way-outback XC ski trail (I’d just hopped onto the trail after 20 miles of bushwacking but that’s another story), so I said Hi and she stopped and said she remembered me from somewhere which was nice. Then I overheard her energetic young husband talking photography. He was an eager beaver Canuck, all friendly and cheerful. A skier paddler guy, just ready to share a beer. He’s talking high-end camera talk with a guy I know. Well, I suppose he looks like someone who might like photography. Then I look down and realize who he is. He’s the guy who wrote and shot all the photos for the best book on Lake Superior. It’s just a max gorgeous coffee book, where some of the proceeds are going to save the Lake. These folks had just finished giving a standing room only presentation on the Big Lake. Her talking, him slide-showing. He’d sold all the boxes of books he brought with him. He said it was more than he ever could’ve expected. Man, that is a fine photo book. How could anyone take even ONE photo like those, is a bit beyond me. (Well, as I overheard, the two main keys to success are: tripod and slow film. Composition comes far more easily, he said, when you slow yourself down via a tripod.) Then I remembered our B&B friends mentioning their wild photo friends who’d done the fancy book. They had the huge wooden canoe on display that they adventure the Big Lake in. It’s gorgeous, and it works. They had their little 2-year-old with them, often in a backpack. I said Hi to Gary and told him I knew his neighbors and he said “Jeff Potter? I have all your magazines! Wow, it’s great to meet you!” I guess we were both kind of excited. I had no idea a famous photographer dude top show presenter guy would be happy to meet me, or know me. We would chat a bit, then he’d talk with someone else, then he’d look at me and smile and shake my hand again and just beam. He said “It’s just so good to see it when someone publishes something honest.” Then he shook my hand again and said it’s so good to meet you again, and again. Sheesh! Well, that made my day. He said “You guys find us the next time you’re up our way and don’t be a stranger. Come up soon.” Now that’s what cultural exchange is all about. I’m game.
