Fairs: A Fixed Point on the Turning Wheel of Time

Abstract

Text by Karal Ann Marling Phil Stong ends his great regional novel, State Fair (1932), as night steals over empty exhibition buildings and deserted midway. Farmer Abel Frake loads his truck and pulls out of Des Moines, headed for home. In dark intimacy of highway, he consoles his tearful daughter with assurance that there will be another Iowa State Fair next summer and summer after that, for all smiling summers of her life: Next year we'll be back up here again-unless you're here with your own family. Like Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July, fair is a fixed point on turning wheel of time that rolls along darkened highways of Mississippi Valley and out onto slumbering plains of American heartland. The peak of national season of celebration comes in winter, starting with Halloween and running through New Year's Day. There are packages sealed with ribbons, Santa Clauses, football games on TV, and electric lights aglow in night. Everybody watches Tournament of Roses parade, of course, but bang-bang-bang concentration and timing of these holidays seems calibrated to demands of brisk city people, for whom indoor months often mark busiest stretch of fiscal year. County fairs are different. Fairs and small-town festivals, rodeos, pageants, and powwows take advantage of long, hot, lazy afternoons, when crop is in ground, sun is in sky, and there isn't much to do but wait for harvest. These are outdoor events, and flat, sharp line of horizon, at edge of earth, is always close at hand. The land, soil-the rhythms of festival life in countryside of middle America are agricultural and its rituals tied to eternal verities of place. Inside, under rickety trusses and spindly columns of fairs of past, reposed towers of apples, baskets of grain, and giant produce that most visibly supported local claims to greatness. At today's fairs, object is to show marketable crops, what customer wants-produce uniform in size and appearance. Despite emphasis on agribusiness, however, there is usually a monster pumpkin or melon to be found among even rows of perfect ones, a hangover from early days, when foot-long potatoes, eighteen-pound radishes, and cabbages so large one could not be crowded into a flour barrel were sources of pride and wonderment, sure to capture blue ribbons. Mammoth vegetables, together with the largest hog in Wyoming or Wisconsin, were symbols of fecundity and accomplishment-things of beauty in a frontier economy of scarcity and travail.