GREAT SCAT FESTIVAL IN COLIFORM CITY MICHIGAN

By Tim Colin
This past weekend I attended the 14th Scat Festival that is held every other six months in the Northern Michigan town of Coliform City. The festival celebrates the opening of scat hunting season which runs from October until September each year. There is of course the crowning of the Scat Queen and her court along with the Scat Festival parade and family oriented beer tent complete with a hard liquor bar and people dressed up in wild animal costumes to celebrate the wildlife that produces such an abundance of scat in our Northern Michigan woodlands.

In addition to the family fun under the beer tent there are other activities designed to both educate and fascinate everyone who enjoys Michigan festivals. One tent is dedicated to the merchants and vendors who have always worked hard to give Coliform City the name it deserves. Inside the merchant tent you will find an abundance of items which are partially or completely made from scat. I personally bought a tee-shirt with real scat on the front and the back which depicted a wilderness seen. I could not resist the beauty of the shirt with its many different hues of browns, grays along with the old standby black scat.

In addition to the tee-shirt I also bought some scat scented candles for my ex-girlfriend. We only went out on one date before she broke up with me but, I’m hoping these scat scented candles will make her want to come back to me and get married or something.

One of my favorite places in the Scat Festival Merchants tent is the long row of people offering up consumables made from the most versatile material known as scat. There was a variety of items including scat scampi which is made from scat retrieved from the catfish ponds at the Willows farm. There were scat burgers and scat hotdogs which have just a touch of mint added to each to heighten the aromatic fragrances emanating from the scat. I chewed down on scat sausage and later had my fill of rhubarb/scat berry pie. The pie of course was made from bear scat retrieved from a grove full of blackberries. Boy was that delicious.

The rarest consumable in the merchant tent was the scatsup. Scatsup comes from the Hildebrandt Tomato Farm. Scatsup is one of Michigan’s major exports to foreign countries like Pittsburg and Seattle. Scatsup is an expensive commodity as it sells for more than $800 for a half oz. After talking to Dominick Hildebrandt at the scatsup both I realized that scatsup was expensive because it is made from the scat of green tomato worms. It seems that because the tomato worms are so small that each worm only produces about a teaspoon of scat before the tomato worm surcomes to malathion poisoning. Of course it is the malathion that produces the hallucinogenic affects which is what makes scatsup so sought after by the best restaurants around the world. So anyway, the Hildebrandt tomato farm covers about 900 acres but produces just eight gallons of scatsup each year.

Dominick pointed out to me that many entrepreneurs have tried to make large amounts of money by selling a knockoff scatsup product known as sketchsup. The sketchup schemes begin with an entrapanuer donating like a truckload of overly ripe tomatoes to a homeless shelter. Twenty four hours later these men show back up to the homeless shelter and ask for their tomatoes back. Most of the people at the shelter oblige the men and give back to the entrepreneur human scat which contains the tomatoes. Of course human scat has a very foul pungent taste and odor and that is easily detected by connoisseurs who have a trained nose and palette.

After leaving the festival I could not but help wishing to return to the next Scat Festival in the little town of Fecal Michigan. I was also starting to become anxious to receive my license in the mail which would allow me to hunt scat anywhere in Kalkaska County. I hope to get enough scat this year to invite to a scat cookout all of my friends and, family and, hopefully my ex-girlfriend.