The County Fair and the Thrill Continues

When I was kid, growing upstate in the middle of the woods, going to our county fair in Schaghticoke, New York was my annual vision of the World.  My mother would give my sister, brother, and me a dollar each and send us off to ramble about the fairgrounds by ourselves. (Mothers did that then.) Here, I believed, was what a city must be like, full of excited people, crazy technological miracles, color, movement, music, and shady men with scary eyes and false seductive voices urging us on rides and to play unwinnable games.  (This early infatuation was, in fact, a pretty accurate preview of my future experience of NYC.)  One year, I think I was about eight, I spent what seemed like hours talking to a mechanical farmer, entranced by the magical feat of conversing directly with this robotic creature.  Best day of my life up to that point. 

I still love the county fair, but with the irony that time presents us with, it now literally means country to me -- not city.  When we first started coming upstate on the weekends, we went to the very extensive and grand Duchess County Fair.  But now we favor its much smaller Columbia County neighbor, which smells like grease, hay, and a hint of cow manure no matter where you are on its grounds.

After arriving this year, we first aim for the animals: floppy-eared bunnies, humps of warm thoughtful cows, sheep staring vacant-eyed at nothing, and cages of chickens -- feathered bimbos gloriously clothed and rackety with silly chatter.  I'm especially searching for the goats, who, unfortunately, never warrant their own section at the Columbia Fair.  Now, I can't find them at all.  A couple of young slow sheep men point vaguely in the direction of the back end of their large area.  There, we find only three young kids huddled together in one pen.  Where were the goats this year?  I find this disconcerting. Our family had in fact raised some goats for a few years and we loved their goofy looks and cagey intelligence.  If I had retired when I was younger, I would have taken on a few.

Michael and I next check out the winning vegetables, studying with scorn the blue ribbon won by the flaccid Anaheim peppers withering in their baskets, and I remind myself to enter my far superior Big Jim chilies next year.

We skip the awful games along the runway, with the hanging corpses of large unattainable panda bears and stuffed Looney Toon characters and where small children aim semi-automatics at cute metal animal heads.

We are hungry now and ready for the terrible irresistible fair food, which has, like the world, evolved since the corn dogs and cotton candy of my youth.  Ethnicity bellows from each stand, democratically displaying foods with equally uncertain bacterial counts. Michael buys lamb souvlaki, and I pick up a taco, an unfortunate choice of bland chicken chunks drippy with bright yellow cheese food suffocating in a thick flour tortilla.  Ugh.  I throw it away and eat instead a Polish sausage with sauerkraut and mustard, which is fine but tastes suspiciously like a big hot dog.  We are eating at a battered wooden picnic table, and I stare longingly at a meatball sandwich and a blooming onion, that miracle of deep frying, with horse radish ranch dressing pooled lavishly in the center of golden oily petals, being enjoyed by an appropriately overweight couple across from us.

After lunch we head for our main objective.  This year, the Columbia State Fair has a special focus.  The mechanical marvels we seek out now are not ungainly talking metal farmers but shiny green John Deere tractors, which growl about heavy lifting, snow plowing, and the transformation of our land.  It is not clear yet whether we'll need a Mama tractor in the 2 series or a smaller version.  We'll have to pay an excavator to rough out a road and the building site in order to determine the horsepower we'll need.  But before we head home, today I sit happily in the clam shell of a 2032, and poke at the handles, envisioning the fields of wildflowers and native trees and fat shiny blue-ribbon winning vegetables that our property will produce with the help of our steel-clad pal.  

And while the fair of my childhood gave me my view of the future, so now we beat on, tractors against the furrows, back ceaselessly into my past.