The time between Labor Day and the Autumnal Equinox is the time for county fairs in rural America. If you have spent the day at one, you likely have a good understanding of the layout of them all; the entrances and the outskirts hold the agricultural demonstrations and exhibitions, those give way to the midway with the rigged games, fried food, and the flashing lights, and finally a grand stand or horse track as the nexus. As you transition between the two first stages — the agricultural exhibitions and the midway — you may note a jarring shift, an uncomfortable tension, a friction bordering on enmity. What you feel is the conflict between the folk culture and the popular, the traditional and the modern, the local and the global.
If you go to my county’s version of this, the Tunbridge World’s Fair, you drive your car through a thick forested route and park in a grass field before crossing a foot bridge over a shallow river where farmers water their livestock, mainly oxen and cattle, before they return to the nearby show barns. This delights children as they enter the fair shouting “That cow is drinking water!” If you are lucky enough to spot this scene, you must stop and take it in — watching a child find delight in the mundane is good for your soul. You have crossed the foot bridge now and to your left is the barn where the oxen are judged, and to your right is the same for the cattle. You can walk through these as well and enjoy the opportunity to compliment a farmer on his or her specimen and their hoard of blue, red, and yellow ribbons from years past. In these barns is where you will hear the true blue Vermont accents, see what people who work for a living really look like, and be warmly met. There is an undeniable friendliness there, a sense that everyone has truly been looking forward to this week, and you feel entirely welcome — after all, the farmers who work hard all year are, in a sense, there for you. As you return to the main path, you can duck into the Floral Hall where you’re met by the biggest pumpkin you’ve ever seen. There you’ll find the finest produce grown in the good green hills of Vermont, adorned with ribbons and being commented on by passers by. It costs nothing to remark on the shade of a turnip to your fellow fair goer or waft the aroma of a ribbon-winning cutting of silage.
As you exit the Floral Hall after marveling at the pies and the breads, the quilts and the crocheted marvels, you meander down the hill to the Poultry Barn where my own little girl and I wandered through the other night. She’s four and interested in chickens since raising her own this year. She hadn’t yet seen the strange chickens in the rare breed exhibit though. Her favorites this year were the white bantam silkies because, in her words “They’re little like me!” She was quickly distracted by the bin of chicks where she and other small children could gentle pet four-day-old hatchlings. The idyll scene was dispelled for me momentarily by a fashionable younger man of nervous disposition who was nearby smugly explaining to his friends that chickens are so expensive that you can never turn a profit on them and they’re not really worth keeping. “It’s cheaper to just buy eggs!” he sneered. As I considered this man, I noted everything about him had a sort of affectation: his lilting speech, his ironic mustache, his tight clothing. My daughter didn’t notice him or his cynicism. I noted however that he didn’t look very comfortable with his conclusion as he and his friends wandered away from the Poultry Barn toward the midway.
It’s hard to ignore the midway. There you find every manner of tacky kitsch screaming and flashing for your attention. There the hastily constructed rides, the fried foods, the games with their impossible angles and tantalizing promises of plastic joy, the novelty t-shirt and knife sellers. A screeching echo of Las Vegas in the bucolic hills of Vermont. There is of course, the tongue-in-cheek falseness to the midway that everyone acknowledges but doesn’t really care about. Stalls selling unlicensed merchandise featuring the vague likeness of whatever celebrity is popular this year, rigged games featuring some simulacrum of a recognizable cartoon character, advertisements, and so much noise. The globally-approved popular culture demanding you pay attention. It makes you wonder why it has to try so hard.
When you finally make it through the midway, you’re met with the aroma of the sugar house and all its maple confections: candies, syrups, glazed popcorns, and more. It serves as a sort of neutral ground — a compromise — between the flashy midway and the grounded agricultural areas: a sugar high with a local touch. Above it is Antique Hill where the historical exhibits and reenactments from the early Colonial period to the turn of the century take place. There you might find a blacksmith melting down iron ore, a mock-general store from the 1850s, or preindustrial farming equipment. My little girl likes the weaver who gives out little balls of unspun wool that entertain her while I marvel at the old horse-drawn sleds and threshing machines. We always seem to end our visit to the fair up there on Antique Hill.
As we leave the fair, we’re forced to return through the midway — there’s really no escaping it — and I am reminded of the smug hip younger man. He is wrong of course about keeping chickens; they can indeed be profitable but, more importantly, they offer something profound and entirely real. The morning after the fair, as I sat at my work laptop fretting over all the adult anxieties our neon midway world demand we pay attention to, I heard our screen door slam and the patter of little excited feet run through our sunroom. It was my daughter, of course, and announced victorously to the household “I reached under our cloud-colored chicken and there was an egg!” Truth be told, I am not sure if it would be less expensive to buy eggs or gather them from our silly own hens but I am positive there will be a time in my life that I will pay anything to hear my little girl run through the door again shouting triumphantly that she found an egg.
A rural county fair is a good analog to life: the midway is tempting with its bright lights, thrilling rides, games, and cheap tricks, but the true culture, the beauty, what is real, is on the outskirts by the river, the field, the treeline.
Fall county fairs are new to me. I am used to fairs in August, even our local one is. Cooler temperatures make more sense for people and animals though.
Lovely reflection. My daughters recently showed chickens at the county fair, and I was in awe at how timeless it all felt. So few spaces for community gathering are left anymore.