Ode to the Fair

(This is actually from last week, sorry I'm behind)
I have always loved the fair. Being a Vermont girl, to me it is an exciting event marking the last hurrah of the summer. In my childhood we would load into my mother's big blue tank of a Pontiac station wagon and drive the 20 miles through corn and squash laden valleys dotted with red barns between our old, rounded green mountains to the small city of Rutland for the Rutland County Fair. School would have already started and it would be hot and dusty during the day and chilly and crisp at night. Our journey out, usually on a school night, to meet my cousins and grandparents and sample the wholesome and hedonistic delights of the fair would seem like such a precious, exciting adventure next to the expanse of routine and orderly school day conduct stretching out ahead of me. As a young child I couldn't get enough of the bunny barn. There are pictures of me as a toddler in overalls with my face lit up in delight, pressed against the bars of rabbit cages at the fair. I actually got my first rabbits there. I couldn't believe my incredible good fortune as they sat there snuggled in an hay filled cardboard box in the car next to me on the way home. There is a picture of me at about age 7 joyfully squeezing them in my lap. Two fuzzy baby red satins, both supposedly girls except then in a few months we suddenly had like 14 rabbits instead of 2. I also loved to ride on the rolling backs of the shetland ponies trodding with their colorful saddle blankets around in a ring, and see the barns of sheep, cows, goats and pigs, some of them sporting shiny blue and yellow and white prize ribbons on their stalls.

Eating at the fair is fun if somewhat dangerous. Cotton candy and fried dough and french fries and hot dogs. This being Vermont we also had a dairy barn and a maple barn. In the dairy barn they made cheese and you could sample the curds and whey, just like little Miss Moppit in the nursery rhyme. The smell of the maple barn still haunts my memory. They must have frozen and saved some sap from the spring before because they always boiled during the fair and you could smell the warm, hot, mouthwatering sweetness of the sugar across the expanse from the Zipper to the grandstands. Inside you could get maple milkshakes, maple candy, maple fudge, maple-covered donuts, maple cotton candy, and that amazing transforming treat, sugar on snow. (Not really snow because it as September, but they would throw the boiling syrup onto cups filled with ice and it would become chewy, translucent maple taffy before your eyes.) And more lasting than food, the array of fair prizes were memory treasures to be won or bought and then deposited in the back of my closet for eternity. A neon yellow foam lizard on a wire that you could make dance, a fringe bottomed airbrush t-shirt of a unicorn, and a hair clip with turquoise feathers hanging down are a few that I remember. These were the eighties in case you haven't figured that out yet.

I like snacks, and having the stomach fortitude of a dachsund, (if you know dachsunds you will understand this, and it's not good,) I always shy away from the scary and fast rides. But the ferris wheel, the moon bounce, the haunted house, the bumpercars, and those wavy slides were and are just enough to get a laugh, give a little thrill, feel a little wind. Sometimes at night my family would stay for the evening show. We saw Box Car Willy one time. In high school my friends and I would go flirting and laughing and falling all over each other to sit in the grandstands and watch other teenagers run each into each other in brightly decorated jalopies at the demolition derby.

It all sounds pretty wholesome but there was another element to it. Yes, there were the 4-H kids and the farmers and the quilters, but Rutland is one of the few tough places in Vermont, so there were also the toothless elders and the screaming, slapping families and rowdy, reckless boys without much to lose, and as with every fair, the scary and seedy carnies themselves, greasy, unwashed and leering in their low riding jeans and ripped black heavy metal t-shirts. You didn't want to wander away from the family alone, and the dark areas in back of the rides, against the fences and behind the trailers held a suggestion of the sinister. In short, the delight, the gluttony, the joy, the thrill, the shiver of fear were an incredible sensory experience of which such vivid memories were made.

Actually, I don't know how to write an ode, as promised in the title (sorry!), but if I could I would write one to another particular Fair that I have spent a lot of time at in my later life and that I missed this past weekend. The Common Ground Fair. If you have never heard of it you should check it out at www.mofga.org. The Common Ground Fair is the largest all organic fair in the world I think, and it is put on by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener's Association in Unity, Maine. It is a combination agricultural fair, farmer and crafter's marketplace, music festival, sustainability symposium and workshop extravaganza. This event has been going on for over 30 years, and it is something to behold. The pastoral landscape of Unity is transformed into a carnival of brightly striped tents, demonstration gardens and orchards, and it is peopled with families and college kids and gaggles of teenagers wearing flower crowns and some incredibly interesting, skilled and knowledgeable people. It is humming with energy and ideas. If you want to learn how to spin or weave, log with horses, turn your home solar, save your seeds, keep bees, lobby for universal healthcare, become a midwife, make bean hole beans, (old new England tradition that is basically just what it sounds like: beans cooked in a hole in the ground,) you can find out about it all and so much more here. It is a really special event, largely pulled off by an army of volunteers, that is a tradition incredibly dear to peoples’ hearts. It has become so to me. I used to go with a crowd for work and set up and man a table for the duration, spending the nights camping in the fields nearby with hundreds of other volunteers and vendors. Staying at the fair for three or four days is like being part of a strange, peaceful village. It is usually hot and dry during the day, and after the sun wanes and the crowds clean out, the tents light up as people quietly get out guitars and sleeping bags. The weavers always have a shapenote singing session on Friday nights in their glowing white and red tent. The dairy farmers are up early in the frosty dawn to milk. Permeating the entire event is the patron herb of the fair, the green, clean, cheerful scent of sweet annie, sold in bunches. I wish I could attach some right here and we could all inhale deeply.

Last week we continued the fair going tradition by taking the family to the L.A. county fair. I was excited and a little apprehensive. What kind of indigenous industry would be represented here? Tents for plastic surgeons? Drug cartels? Porn? The entertainment industry? We drove through brutal highway gridlock to get there, picked up my stepdaughter at college nearby, and cruised off the highway to an incredibly massive complex of parking lots and pavement. After finally parking and paying a whopping fee just to get in, we entered the fair. There actually was a red barn with animals. It did have a McDonald’s logo on the top (see photo), which I would certainly find suspect if I were a cow showing up there. But the animals didn’t seem to belong to farms as working or livestock animals like you would see at an agricultural based fair in New England. They were more like petting zoo animals. There was a demonstration going on in various corrals explaining to crowds of young families about the lives and care of the farm animals. Almost all of the animals in there were incredibly clean, fluffy baby versions of the real deal. The main attraction was feeding the sheep and goats in the petting zoo area. In part this makes my heart sink, because it just shows how removed we are from an agricultural society these days. Kids need to see demonstrations about how a chicken lays an egg? But…Brick, my 10 year old stepson who is from L.A., had never fed a goat before, and he was delighted and hysterical over the charming, cheeky goats with their intelligent, inquisitive eyes and floppy ears softly nibbling the pellets out of his flat hand. Every kid in there was as happy as he was, so I guess that’s better than nothing. As an old professor of mine said, “You gotta meet people where they’re at,” and people in L.A. are at the entertainment level I guess. Those goats were entertaining.

As for my fears about plastic surgeons etc, the fair turned out to be pretty wholesome and typical. There was a great representation of Mexican food and culture. Roasted corn, chimichangas, chorizo, tamales, tecate, photos, flags and folk music. There were a ton of rides and opportunities to get your name airbrushed on a hat and such. We all rode a gondola over the fairgrounds and then went up on the ferris wheel. The lights sparkled and the excitement at night was palpable. The appealing smells of hot food and the squeals of excited children were everywhere. We ran around and ate and had fun. After all, it was the fair!