Travel by DAR

New England: Country Fairs

(First published in New England Monthly)

Let's see if I remember this right. Along about the dog days of summer, country fairs would billow forth in bare lots all over New England: up in a burst of tent flaps one dewy morning, departing ghostlike six days later, leaving only dry peg holes. But in that one week span: What corrupt commercial bliss! What joie de hokeyness!

It's been ten years since I underwent a country fair -- our town got its lot sold to a dog track, and I'm not traitor enough to visit anyone else's. But the memory of such glorious unadulterated hucksterism still blooms afresh. Instant humbuggery: From the posters all over town showing Huck Finn brandishing a doughboy, the fair was shameless about promoting a New England more gap-toothed, more cow-lickety innocent than anyone from our era had a right to remember. Naturally the hype worked: pre-fab nostalgia so proud of itself had to work, bonhomie so patently bunk could pull off magic. And it did. Against all odds, it managed for one week a year to make my non-native family feel part of things, as though the very act of shelling out for admission wove us into the woof of Yankee fabric, scotched our sense of being outsiders that we usually freighted around as a result of owning European cars. It tricked us into belonging.

This, I repeat, was a decade ago. The boy I carried in my arms to the fair could now better carry me, had he a mind to. The wife who accompanied me: swapped now as if by UFO for a damsel who fairs not, who prefers to tricathalon when it's hot. But in the days when our fair was in flower, its feisty hokum-celebrating fever was contagion, itself. Priming ourselves with a bottle of champagne in the brutal afternoon heat, the fever would run from my wife to me, and thence to the boy in my arms until he was shouting "Fair! Fair!” at which point we placed ourselves perilously atop bicycles and swerved, all exuberant expectation, to the appointed lot behind Bradlees with the rest of our town toting babies in backpacks.

Our elected officials had beaten us there. Mr. DeMotta, town treasurer, was collecting tickets at the gate, which seemed fine and fitting, and he was sporting several discreet buttons that said "DeMotta for Treasurer," which seemed less fine and fitting. (The tickets were two bucks apiece with, it was rumored, half the proceeds going to the DeMotta Family Fishing Fund. Who could fault the man? Graft on such a petty scale always struck me as enterprise.) Two of the town's three selectmen had been on the dunking board for hours, to judge by the dripping look of them. (Fifty cents a shot, and a rare chance to vent democracy at a grass roots level.) The third selectman, a more blatant brigand than his colleagues, had sent his regrets, saying he had to work that day at his tire store; but no one bought that for a minute, even though he'd donated a couple of Firestones to raffle in his absence.

Able as I was to imagine what a tomato looked like when three times its natural size, I skipped the 4H booth and headed directly for the big tent where a performance by Judy Pingkto and the Pingkto Family Accordion Band was in high gear. The amplified sound of Ms. Pingkto belting out "Life is a cabaret, my friend," was shaky, but the visual part of her act was an inspiration. Frozen to her mike, she was moving nothing but her throat muscles. Here was genuine bitter-sweet pathos, country fair style, on the same level as a hay ride with no passengers or a tractor tug-o-war with both engines conking out. Exhilaration seized me, and with it, insight: If Judy was not comfortable with her act yet still made a go of it, what wonders were not possible? How could tackiness possibly compete with such valor? Shooting me a smile, my wife indicated it was time for the chicken tent.

The chicken tent looked and sounded great. There in the dusty air, the densely nervous energy of chicken-think was electrifying: such squawking and cooing and fowl brain-storming! This was the intellectual heart of the fair, no doubt about it, pulsing darkly aromatic under the canvas roof with feathers flying everywhere from the rows of cages, stacked eight feet high. There must have been 6000 chickens in there, all of them auditioning for the part of chicken. In their cut-throat competitiveness, some of them were gussied up very exotic, looking more like Pekingese dogs than chickens. Others looked like junior ostriches. A spaced-out one with red eyes even took on the look of Chappy, our sclerotic mailman. Peering deep in their sharply focused pupils, I could not tell if these brilliant chicken imposters were angry or terrified, or perhaps solemnly rapturous in a way I could not yet fathom. It occurred to me that maybe they reflected me, those chicken orbs; they reflected my future like cloudy crystal balls. Passing thought.

One of the main reasons I wanted to bring my first-born to the fair was so that I could win a pie-eating contest for him; and I should have, I should have, there's no sense in raising a child if you're not going to publicly show him what you're made of; but there I was a father in my mid-twenties and guess what, I was already past my pie-eating prime. So I never entered the contest. My back-up reason, though, was so he could get his first good gaze at a pig, at how surprisingly pig-like they always are. The way they root, the way they sound and smell and act: A pig is a tautology, incarnate. But he would not look at the pig, insisting on looking beyond the pig to the other end of the fairground, where the rides were, when he started saying "moogockle." He was of course referring to the Japanese motorcycles on the merry-go-round, which along with Japanese sports cars and Japanese speedboats had already pretty well replaced the painted carousel horses of truly olden times. He and I climbed on the moogockle and went around 230 times, passing the fat non-Japanese man at the controls who sometimes lazily held out his thumb as if to hitch a ride, and sometimes rubbed his eyes and gaped, as if he too were a fortune teller, and could not believe what he saw in us. Were we destined to stay together, any of us? Or at least to win a fuzzy red turtle that afternoon?

Suddenly I felt like a foreigner: quintessentially American epiphanies like these always had a way of backfiring. The doughboys had worked their evil, the champagne worn off with a vengeance. They picked on you when you were down, those country fairs, and I was starting to feel beat up by the blinking carny lights, by the barkers who cased us up and down like inmates, by the number of visitors who were unaccountably lame, by the Pingkto Family music that had redoubled its volume throughout the fairground ("After the Loving"). I had four tickets left over, and I looked for someone un-seedy to give them to while my wife took the boy to wash up at the water fountain. The roller coaster was vibrating recklessly as I walked around it twice, looking for some sober citizen to give them to who wouldn't think I was a crank. The more I looked, the more like a crank I felt. The roller coaster struck me as sickly and dangerous, both; I swore I had never seen such a rickety, unstable, psychotic roller coaster in my life. Finally after ten minutes of feeling lost under its deafening clatter, I summoned a surge of wild hope and stuck the tickets in the hand of a scholarly little girl with old-fashioned pigtails, and walked away quickly.

When I left I was subdued. I was woozy with the sight of people who looked as if awful things had befallen them in their lifetimes, yet had prevailed, had triumphed, even, in some sense I was too punily fortunate to comprehend; the sort of brave big-hearted folks who always seemed to congregate where a good time was to be had. Cotton candy was sticking to the red fuzz of a turtle my wife had mysteriously bagged while I was lost -- she wouldn't tell me how. Shards of glass lay sprinkled on the blacktop of the parking lot from car windows that had busted in the dream-like humidity. As I straggled towards the bicycle exit, clutching the precious flesh of my family in both arms, a strangely familiar-looking threesome bounded past us on their way in. The mother was radiating happiness in her smile. The father could barely contain the boy jumping in his arms. "C'est ci la fair," she was telling him, "c'est ci la fair."