I went to the state fair this weekend, not for any reason I could name — I’ve only been to it once before, when my parents took me as a little kid. All I remember from that trip was seeing some cows, not really enjoying the smell, and having the best corn on the cob in my short little happy life. But why go back this year? I’m not entirely sure.
When I asked Wendy if she was up for the trip, her face took on that funny expression she wears when I’ve said something insane, but politely claimed she had lesson plans to work on. “I’ll win you something,” I told her as I headed out the door Sunday morning.
First thing that happened after I handed over my $8 at the gate was an Eastern European guy about my age pointing a camera at me. “SMILE FOR YOUR GATE PHOTO,” a placard on the ground next to him read. I thought it was some kind of security thing, but then he asked me to smile and I realized they were just trying to sell me a portrait. It was… strange.
I wandered around the livestock pens, snapping photos though most of them came out blurry. I don’t understand my camera’s settings all that well, so I just put it on the most automatic mode I could find, which probably doesn’t know handle motion.
The first-place ribbons sprinkled around the pens seemed quaint, almost outdated — an attempt at preserving a subculture that first flourished two centuries ago and hasn’t changed much. In the meantime, the rest of us have overdosed on irony and media saturation. They had little kids riding around on miniature John Deere tractors, for God’s sake. I could just picture the ironic captions you could run over this photo on a site like icanhascheezburger.
But irony is a luxury, and I don’t think we will be able to afford it soon. When the hammer really drops on gas prices, and it will, it’s these people who will save us. When it gets too expensive to truck oranges, beef, milk — everything we buy every week at the grocery store — across state lines, it’s these guys who are going to keep the local Giant from turning into a wasteland.
The smell wasn’t as bad as I remembered, by the way.
I walked around the carnival rides, which seemed so much smaller, so much less frightening than when I was a kid, and browsed through the building rather euphemistically entitled HOME ARTS. There were quilts, cakes, even a couple of science fair projects (”Hypothesis: worms prefer moist soil to sand” and “Hypothesis: cows digest food with four stomachs”), but hidden among a wall of the usual landscapes and family portraits was this self-portrait:
It won first prize, but even so — I couldn’t help but think that whoever made this deserved better than a 4-H fair, and I had trouble even imagining her as part of the 4-H crew. It is strange and reassuring, how talent reveals itself anywhere it can.
It was nearing noontime, so I grabbed a pork BBQ sandwich and an ear of corn from the food pavilion which I think we had gotten food so long ago, and ate lunch next on a bench with a pair of cops. Sadly, the food was not as good as I remembered it; the pork was okay but Andy Nelson’s blows it out of the water, and the corn was good but not exceptional. Hmm.
Next to the bench was a carnival stand where a man offered prizes if he couldn’t guess your age, weight, height — or most puzzling, a number, 1 to 10, that you were thinking of. I threw away the remnants of lunch and handed him $5, told him I wanted him to guess the number I was thinking of.
The guy spoke into a microphone broadcasting across the fair, seemed to be having an hours-long conversation about a different world than the one I was in. “Alright, a young fella, choose your number, think of it, got it?”
I nodded.
“Okay, write it down on this and fold it up at least twice, at least two times.” He handed me a sheet of paper the color of a middle school hall pass and a pen. I turned my back to him, suspicious already, and wrote down a number.
“Okay, got it?” he asked. “Fold it up and hold it up against your forehead.”
I turned back to him and did as he asked — “Okay, now whatever you do,” he continued, “don’t think of the number!”
I laughed, but half-playing along, I thought of Wendy waiting at home, the lesson she would be teaching this week on Julius Caesar, her feet tapping out the slow rhythm of her thoughts…
“Three,” the man said.
He was right.
I have a couple hunches as to how he did it, but it doesn’t really matter, does it, when you have to come home empty-handed to a pretty girl?
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Tagged animals, festivals, longposts
