Over the course of my life I have attended and taken part in a number of festivals. From county fairs to street festivals and town festivals I’ve been to just about little of everything. The most recent one I've had the pleasure to attend was Mantorville’s Marigold Days.
The main reason I went to Marigold Days this year is because one of my friends asked me to come down to the firefighter show. Which I readily agreed to do. Now I had never been to a firefighter show before, however, my brian immediately went to the lumberjack show. Which I have seen before. Even though I knew that was probably not quite the same thing.
I did go in with the assumption that it would be somewhat similar. Instead of watching lumberjacks do their thing we would get to watch firefighter’s run their drills. Which sounded like a great time to me.
Well first off I was wrong, that's not what we were going to see. Secondly it was so much better than that. It turned out that it was a firefighter water battle.
If you are like me and have never seen or heard of a firefighter water battle before then you are missing out. Teams of two to three firefighters faced off against each other in the middle of the street with the fire hose. Over their heads was a long rope pulled between two poles.
The rope had a marker in the center and a knot on either end with a big black ball hanging from it. They would pull the ball into the middle and then spray it with the water trying to push it to the other team’s side.
Each round lasted one minute or until one of them made the ball hit the other side’s knot.
As white jets of water shot out of the fire hoses. Crossing with one another while fighting for control of the ball. It was one of the most existing things ever to watch and something that I now feel should be at more town festivals.
