PORT ANGELES — Its name, you’ve got to admit, is deceiving: The Corn Roast, as in the 13th annual first-Sunday-in-August bash at Andrew May and Carmen Czachor’s place off Black Diamond Road, is so much more than the grilling of 1,100 ears of corn.
It’s hundreds of May and Czachor’s friends, plus their friends — “lots of friends!” as the flier says, basking in the pleasures of summer.
May calls it a Wisconsin-style party in honor of his home state, but it’s quintessential Port Angeles, with barbecued king salmon, home-brewed beer, pies stone-fired by “Pizza Dude” Tom St. Amand, a long table loaded with salads and new this year, gyros cooked up by recent Canada-to-Port Angeles transplant Paul Cousineau.
Cousineau, an artist who grew up in Ontario, moved here in January from Victoria and found Port Angeles a fertile place for a guy who both makes art and cooks.
He began dishing out gyros at sculptor Gray Lucier’s parties held on the second Saturday of every month.
Then “Andrew [May] asked me, ‘Would you . . . ?’ I said, ‘You better believe I would’,” Cousineau said as he got ready to hand a gyro to everybody nearby.
Then there was the 15-pound king salmon, laid out by fishing guide and Peninsula Daily News columnist Pat Neal around 2:45 p.m.
He caught the fish Friday in Freshwater Bay and seasoned it with herbs from May’s garden — but that was the easy part.
The nerve-wracker was barbecuing it in front of all these people Sunday.
“I was really nervous. If you screw up here, you screw up everywhere,” Neal said.
“You get one chance to flip it; if you flip it too soon, it’s not done enough. If you flip it too late, it crumbles into a million pieces — in front of the world,” or at least a portion of Port Angeles’ most prominent people.
He managed to flip it at the right instant, but broke Czachor’s spatula.
That was a crisis, Neal said, but it was soon forgotten as partygoers dug in to the perfectly pink meat.
Neal noted too that with primary election season at its height, politicians were plentiful at the corn roast.
He asked Steve Tharinger, the Democrat seeking the state House of Representatives seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Lynn Kessler, if he could be his speech writer.
“He said he’ll get back to me,” Neal reported.
By 3:30 p.m., a little over a quarter of the way into the 12-hour party, horticulturist May pronounced himself “getting happy,” as “the numbers are starting to swell.”
The corn roast’s attendance typically peaks between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., he said, for a total of around 450 by the end of the night.
He and Czachor always hold it on August’s first weekend to make the most of the sweet-corn harvest and the low likelihood of rain.
“It’s from noon to midnight, so there’s no excuse” for not coming, May added.
“The emphasis is people and food. No bands, no electronics, no light show” just a couple of stray musicians strumming string instruments south of the salad table.
“The show,” he said, “is the salmon. The show is the corn and the gyros,” to which he directed a freshly arrived couple.
“Just listen,” to the hum of the crowd, May said. “It’s happy noise.”
Over the years, May’s corps of friends have made this thing happen.
He and Jackson Smart met about 15 years ago when they worked on the “Welcome to Port Angeles” sign in front of Thurman’s on Front Street.
Smart became the one who picks up the 3-foot-deep bin of corn, this year priced at $167.50, from Sunny Farms in Carlsborg on Sunday morning.
Then Paul Gottlieb, a senior PDN writer, stands amid the cloud of smoke over the grill, rotating the seemingly infinite cobs.
May, the PDN gardening columnist and a horticulture instructor at Peninsula College, is always meeting more invitees, as is Czachor, the veterinarian at Family Veterinary Clinic.
And May approaches the corn-roast invitation process with great vigor, handing out fliers in the PDN newsroom, at the college and to his friends at KONP-AM radio.
But when he heard an announcer promoting the party on the air, he said he had to immediately phone the station and put a stop to that. It’s not a public event; rather, May calls it “restricted general” admission.
Last week, though, word got out that May was distributing his handbills at Safeway, which momentarily alarmed some who help him throw the party — but he quickly clarified things, saying that yes, he had given out some invitations, but only to the many friends he had run into at the supermarket.
The best part about the corn roast, said Czachor, is that she doesn’t have to do any of the work once it gets going; the partygoers bring the food, cook it and do much of the cleanup during and after the event.
And this year, she departed Sunday evening to take her sons, Spencer, 14, and Jackson, who’ll be 12 on Thursday, to a fantasy soccer camp in Seattle, leaving May to mop up.
He said this isn’t as gigantic a task as one might think; the food has largely disappeared, and the participants, May said, just aren’t all that messy.
And “it happens on Sunday for a reason,” he added. If the corn roast were on a Saturday, people might be more inclined to stay all night, making cleanup a much more drawn-out process.
But this host isn’t the type to spend much time talking about what happens later.
May is in the moment, pointing people toward the pizza, the cold beverages, the gyros and everything else.
“Have you been trying food?” he asks a reporter.
Well, yes, couldn’t resist.
“Good!” May says, a smile lighting up his face.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
