My County, ‘Tis of Thee
I have been rereading the Illiad as of late. Often, when a hero of any note is introduced, the nature of his home is detailed, followed curtly by his black death. Like any good book it has made me ponder my own final moment of mortality, and which scenes preceding my undoing would flash briefly before the reader’s eyes.
Coincidentally, the Knox County Fair is this week. I can only dream of the wondrous sentences that might issue from a day spent by Homer on the fairgrounds. Postmodernism would be undone and replaced by an agrarian Renaissance. There would be delicious statements like “the wooly must of sheep, gathered together beneath the peeling timbers,” “the balooned toys, gimrack rewards offered by tight-fisted strangers,” “the salty air of manure and straw, tossed in the gated aisles,” “the long-haired maidens, their legs wrapped in denim.”
It is not too absurd a fantasy: Homer came from a time when respectable poets wrote bucolics and ecologues, things that would not pass muster in the modern English department. So we would be obliged to book him should he be inclined to pass this way.
The Knox County Fair is inherently a dying thing, for it celebrates dying things. Husbandry and showmanship are obsolete, as are antique tractors; welding, woodcraft, photography, crafting and agriculture are all things that can be done cheaper elsewhere in the world, and because we are modern America we will chase that option. It meets nearly all the requirements for a national treasure: it is dying, doomed in the free market and a bit backwards. Upon becoming a national treasure, preserved in some facade or within the “historical context” of the predominantly white fair-goers as recorded by serious-minded academics, it will become bland and ersatz, an atrabellious jab against an already victorious West Coast. Kids will confuse this amateur portrait for what really was. But for a brief time still, it is alive and colorful, vibrant, a little less attended then last year but healthy as a grand champion steer.
The ice cream is still $2.00 for a generous bowlful, heaps more then would be deemed excessive in Boston or Los Angeles and a hundred times better. The Porkettes ply their pork patties miraculously for $3.25, condiments gratis. They recognize me by now, the accumulation of a familiar face over the years; in Boston there is a café that still doesn’t know me, in spite of much patronage and a daily sacrifice of $3.50 for an espresso. Dichotomies like this make me wish the venture capitalists and developers were surrounding the fairgrounds now, ramming against the walls with bulldozers: then it might be appropriate to take up a rifle and die for this utopia. But venture capitalists prefer more subtle versions of invasion.
The requisite battle flag of Virginia is flown or painted upon several of the tough truck entries; it will receive its due as well during the demolition derby. I don’t think the painters or bearers know much about Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee, but since the county fair will no doubt die under pressure from the new North (i.e., the cities), it is perhaps appropriate.
The youth are the ruling class in this sinking aristocracy. Of this group, the 18 year-olds are the elite, quite wise and possibly moneyed from a summer job. On the opposite end of the spectrum are 13 year-old boys, an awkward age when girls have inexplicably started to smell good and you still smell like whatever you mom is buying you. But they all mill about in the euphoria that is having a stake in the fair, having laid some portion of your labor at its base.
The projects are all on display in the 4H and FFA buildings, the proud efforts of months. Some have blue ribbons for firsts, others reds for seconds, but half-assed attempts are few and far between. The quality is that of kids doing their damnedest. Posterboards document the growth of calves, chickens, a yard project over the course of the last spring, handwritten notations documenting the obvious. You can feel the fullness of their days, how this spring held volumes of moments, how the weeks were vast.
Animals are tied to the wash racks, dish soap lathered around their hides as owners try to undo several weeks of mud and manure. Large wooden boxes, most of them personalized, line the barns’ dusty aisle ways containing the fair essentials: curry combs, grain, halters, a change of clothes, a deck of cards. A single fair week lasts two weeks when you are younger and you must be prepared for each of the twenty-one days. Really, this Friday evening is the end of an era for many, a conclusion to something thought about since January.
For me, it is the end of another week. After I pitchforked bundles of straw and manure from our sheep pen into a trailer, I went back home and worked on some consultation stuff, sentimental but not morose. It will take until mid-August for these kids to get over the fair being over, a period of vast freedom within an enclosed area holding everything worthwhile the world has to offer. They will think profane thoughts, like I can’t wait to get out of Knox County.
Cracks are already appearing in this heaven, I suppose. The reliably crusty carnies have been slowly replaced with mostly cleanshaven young men from south of the border; their Spanish rattles strangely with the country music as they eye the highschoolers. They cannot comprehend, I imagine, the American utopia they have penetrated, the final echoes from a shout of freedom originating in Virginia two and a half centuries ago. We are not even los yanquis to them but los gringos as I heard uttered several times, foreigners in our own land. They are left behind as one walks back towards the animal barns, same as the carnies were in years past. Maybe not too much has changed.
The virginity of the evening nights is electrifying, intensifying every sensation. The distant rides spin like a kaleidoscope against the dark shadows, lighting up the grand stands. The swing ride is strangely empty except for two people during one run; the next it is filled to capacity. One’s vision is dotted with the Midwestern haircuts of the fair girls, long, even lengths, diversified by a not infrequent ponytail or braid. If there is pretension, it is in the form of a dash of makeup or an edgy top purchased in that den of lust, Columbus. These girls will never grow old nor go quietly into respectable adulthood; that will be other people, poor mortals. They, Aphrodites all, will live forever in this moment while the young men and old men age onwards and away.
Big hoary oaks line the fairgrounds, tranquil for all weeks except this one when their dark green leaves grow neon blue and red above the foodstands. Their boughs rustle underneath the smells of fries, cheesesteaks, sautéing onions, diesel exhaust, manure. Off their bark echoes animal lowing, roaring engines, cheers, the mechanical ding of someone getting lucky at the 4H dunking booth. Fair relationships abound; it is Friday night and time that the decision to end this or continue it into the school year (which is all of eternity) must be made.
But the carnival lights, they go on. The livestock low at the moon as it falls into the horizon. The next day, and the day after that, are as inevitable as this week was for months. “The whirlwind is in the thorn trees; the virgins are all trimming their wicks.”
