I thought, as a change of pace, I would describe to you where I've been this past week. To many of our U.S. members, I would think this won't be nearly as interesting or news-worthy. But considering the international scope of our membership here, I thought some of you might be interested in an event that we back-woods farm-country folk look forward to each year. Perhaps even some of our members from the U.S. are not familiar with a county fair. So I hope at least a few of you will find this at least partially interesting, informational or amusing. 
Every year here in Iowa, each of our ninety-nine counties has a county fair, usually held sometime in the mid-to-late summer, near the end of July. The main (and original) focus of the fair is the local farm kids who come to show off the livestock they've raised that year. Many families spend the entire week at the fair, sleeping in campers or tents. There are shower facilities on the fairgrounds specifically because so many people live there all week during the fair. There are all kinds of animals, each in their own barns -- pigs, cattle, sheep, horses, chickens, and even rabbits. They are judged and prizes are awarded to the best animals of each type.
Originally this was just for the farm boys. The farm girls had their own projects -- arts and crafts, needlework, sewing and cooking, etc. Nowadays there are many girls who raise animals for the fair, and many boys who also do crafts and other types of projects. And you certainly don't have to live on a farm to enter the contests either. My kids enter art projects each year. All these are also judged and prizes are awarded to the best projects in each category.
The winners go on to the Iowa State Fair in August where they compete against the winners from the other 98 counties in Iowa. If anyone remembers the movie (a musical, I think) called "State Fair", it was based upon the Iowa State Fair, which boasts the (probably disputed) title of "Best State Fair" in the country. (I think the movie either didn't specify which state's fair it was supposed to be, or said it was a state other than Iowa's, but local lore states this as a hard fact: it IS supposed to be the Iowa State Fair depicted in the movie. I don't think I've ever seen the movie myself.) I have been to other State Fairs in some of the neighboring agricultural states, and I've yet to see one that even comes close to the size and scope of Iowa's State Fair. I've been to the Iowa State Fair many times, and it is essentially the same thing as a county fair, but about 100 times larger, which makes sense since we have 99 counties, and thus 99 county fairs in Iowa. Most of what I describe here of our county fair can be said also of the Iowa State Fair, except, as I said, that each part is about 100 times bigger at the State Fair.
One of the main features of the fair is a carnival with amusement park rides located on the "midway" (a term generically used to describe the location where the rides are set up). Most of the rides are very familiar to most people I would think. I've visited (via the Internet) an amusement park near where my friend Mats lives in Sweden, and I discovered that I recognized nearly all the rides as being exactly like the ones we have here. There is always a Ferris wheel, and lots of other things that either go 'round fast, or go up high, or both. The prices are absolutely ridiculous! This year we could buy 18 tickets for $10. But it takes two or three tickets per ride, per person. And the two-ticket rides were too small for my kids a couple years ago already. However, the fair does feature two days when there is a three-hour window (in the middle of the hottest part of the afternoon, of course) in which you can purchase a wrist-band for $10 and ride an unlimited number of rides. This is when most families allow their kids to ride, because otherwise you would spend your next two-months' paychecks buying individual tickets!
The midway also features a long gallery of games of skill (rigged of course!), where you can win prizes if you are lucky enough to somehow beat the game. If you pay the two dollars to play the game, you better enjoy it a lot. If you are thinking you are actually going to win a prize, you are either incredibly naive or totally clueless.
But some things are fun enough to play regardless of any prize. In my case it's the B.B. machine gun game. This game features a fully automatic machine gun (resembling no real model of automatic rifle that I am aware of) that fires B.B.s (tiny little one-eighth-inch ball bearings). The target is a piece of paper with a red star on it. Theoretically, if one shoots the entire red star away, a prize would be awarded (some stupid stuffed animal or a picture or something else you would never pay money for). But personally, I just love shooting that thing. And, yes, I am perfectly willing to blow a ten dollar bill just to shoot a machine gun five times... even if it is just shooting B.B.s.
In another game you can throw darts and try to pop balloons, or bowl miniature bowling balls at impossibly small bowling pins. The ring-toss is a classic. You have to toss a ring around a pop bottle (i.e., "soda" bottle -- for those of you from other parts of the country
) or some other impossibly small target.
The common theme among all these games is how simple they appear --accentuated by the ease at which the carnival worker seems to be able to do it-- and yet how impossible they really are once you actually try it. From a purely capitalistic standpoint I understand the economics of it. They have to make it difficult enough that you will end up spending far more to win the prize than you would have to spend if you sought to purchase the same item from a store. Yet, they have to make it just easy enough that every near-miss seems to invoke that instinct to try again because "I was so close that time!"
The people who run these games are extremely aggressive in attempting to lure customers to play. They will call to you and plead with you to play their game, often even offering you bargains such as twice as many tries for the normal price, or a larger prize than usual if you can win. Their manner reminds me of the stereotypical merchants at an open-air market in some foreign country in a movie or television show. We Americans normally frown on such behavior in our public shopping places, but the midway at a carnival or fair seems to be a solitary exception in our culture.
In fact, the people who work the carnivals even have their own slang name. We call them "carnies" and the word conjures a specific stereotype in our minds. A carnie is a very dirty, unattractive person with far fewer teeth than is normally desirable, many large tattoos on his body and a cigarette constantly hanging out of his/her mouth. He looks like he hasn't bathed in a month, and has no desire to break that streak any time soon. In short, a carnie is the polar opposite of anyone you would want your son or daughter to bring home!
Obviously they are real people, with real feelings. And we try to be nice to them, and never poke fun at them to their face (partially out of fear!), but they are clearly people who display different morals and values than most of their customers. It's an odd relationship. But it wouldn't be a fair without the carnies. 
My son's favorite part of the midway is a tent where a miniature race track has been constructed. For two dollars you can drive a radio-controlled race car, complete with steering wheel and gear shifter, racing against other people driving other cars. This is a lot of fun, even for the adults.
Another important feature of the midway is the many food stands where one can buy things to eat and drink. They normally feature foods which are traditionally only eaten at the fair, such as caramel-covered apples, corn-dogs (hot dogs on a stick, covered with breading, and deep-fat fried), cotton candy, funnel cakes (doughnut batter which is dripped into hot grease through a funnel, resulting in a plate-sized tangled cake which is covered in powdered confectioner's sugar), flavored popcorn, and snow-cones (a paper cone filled with shaved ice and drowned in colored, flavored syrup).
Lemonade is also a traditional favorite at the fair. In the spirit of tradition, most stands pretend to make lemonade as it was probably made a hundred years ago -- using real lemon juice squeezed out of a lemon just before it is served, and mixed before your eyes with water. I think most of these booths actually just make an enormous batch of powdered, sugared lemonade and pretend to mix it when you order it. But they do throw in a chunk of lemon to make you feel like it is somehow different from the lemonade we've all been drinking all summer at home.
And there's no disputing that it's yummy -- no matter how they actually make it.
Nowadays there are also a lot of food stands offering foods less often thought of as traditional "fair food" including bacon and eggs (for those who have spent the night at the fair), pizza, tacos and nacho plates, beef burgers, and even a kind of bread-like taco-type thing called a "gyro." (I think it's Greek or something -- anyway, it's Greek to me! ...sorry 
)
There is also a petting zoo, which is a little barn-like structure with no walls. Inside are all sorts of animals which have been selected specifically because they have proven themselves to be friendly to humans, especially to kids. Kids love to go there to pet and play with horses and sheep, pigs, geese and ducks, cats and dogs, bunnies, etc. There's usually nothing to terribly exotic, but there is often a peacock or an ostrich or a llama or something else not normally seen in Iowa. When my kids were little this was THE highlight of the fair -- and I think it is for most kids who live in town. Some years they even have small ponies the kids can ride. Of course you can have a picture taken of your kid sitting on the pony if you're willing to pay extortionist's prices for said photo. hee hee...
A huge portion of the fairgrounds is dedicated to displaying farm machinery. Local farm implement dealers display the equipment they have for sale and allow people to sit on them and try them out. I don't care if you have grown up in the middle of a city or have hay-seed growing out of your ears -- I have never seen a kid (grown or otherwise) who can pass up the opportunity to climb around on a half-million dollar combine and scope out all kinds of cool-looking tractors and trucks and things that can be pulled by them. There's always even a few of the extra cool-looking racing tractors (no, I'm not kidding! ) -- they are loaded with chrome and look like a demented product of an experimental cross-breeding of a racing car and a farm tractor. And, yes, they actually race them ...somewhere.
The local National Guard unit always has some of their equipment available for inspection. One year the kids got to climb and play on/in a Humvee; another year they got to sit in one of those massive 8-(or more)-wheeled transport trucks. I also remember seeing a Bradley fighting vehicle at our fair once, but I don't know where they got it -- it certainly isn't a part of the regular arsenal of OUR county's National Guard unit! .
Antique tractors from all over the area are brought to the fair to be displayed and judged for their upkeep, rarity, or simply by their extreme age. If you are a connoisseur of tanks, you can imagine what the tractor connoisseur thinks as he wanders through several acres lined with hundreds of tractors of every imaginable make and model. Somebody always brings an old covered wagon which carried some local family to this area two hundred or more years ago. There's also tons of stuff I couldn't even begin to describe because I can't imagine what on earth they are/were used for. I can only assume they are tools and equipment farmers used at some point in time. The antique tractors and farm implements which are brought to our county's fair alone could fill a world-class tractor and farming museum. I'm not into tractors, but if I was, I'd be in paradise at our county fair!
The fairgrounds is a fairly extensive piece of real estate. It is somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred acres -- slightly less than that I believe. I would think it is easily the largest tract of land in the county which is devoted to a single purpose. It only serves to demonstrate the importance of the annual fair to point out that most of that land, and the buildings on it, are used exactly one week each year, and no more than that. The county tries very hard to find alternate uses for the buildings and the grounds the other 51 weeks of the year, but very little ever goes on at the fair grounds except the fair itself. And it can truly be said that every square inch of the fairgrounds is used more during one week each year than the other 51 weeks combined.
There are a lot of individual barns -- at least one for each type of animal -- as well as a large pavilion for showing the animals, and a fairly large grandstand where different events are held throughout the week, including musical concerts, rodeos, car and horse races, and tractor pulls. A tractor pull is a fun event if you've never seen one before. The purpose is to see whose tractor can pull a special wagon the furthest distance. The wagon, or "sled", as it is called, has a weight which gradually slides forward, making the sled increasingly more difficult to pull over the period of a minute or two. Eventually the weight sits directly over the sled's wheels, making it impossible to pull any further. Many people work on a special tractor all year, as a mechanic works on his race car, getting ready for the tractor pull. Other people just bring their family tractor in and give it a try. They have different classes and categories for both types of tractor owners. My son loves to watch this and I have to admit it is sort of fun to watch.
The grandstand events all culminate in the Saturday night Demo-Derby ("Demo" being short for demolition). The demolition derby is a fairly unique concept. If you've never experienced it I feel obliged to describe it to you. All year, people prepare their car for the demo derby. They buy on old car and strip it down to basically a chassis, a body and an engine. Almost everything else is eliminated, including any glass parts, such as windows, which must be removed. There are rules as to what you can and cannot do to customize your car, such as welding armored plating in certain areas. Very little care is taken to make the car nice in appearance. If you know what the demo derby is, you understand why this is so. But some people do paint their cars --some in wild colors -- or paint numbers or slogans on their cars. In some cases I think the owner must have let his kids just go wild with a couple cans of spray paint.
Essentially the demo derby is like a massive group wrestling match for cars. The cars are lined up side-by-side in two rows opposite each other. They are pinned into a relatively small area in front of the crowd with the rear ends of one row of cars facing the rear ends of the other row, with perhaps twenty meters separating the two rows. When the flag is waved, all the cars are thrown into reverse, the accelerators are pushed to the floor, and the melee begins. What began as two neat rows of cars quickly becomes a mass of tangled wreckage. Each car has a little flag flying from the top of it, near the driver. When a car is no longer operable, or has sat still for too long (normally about 30 seconds) the car is disqualified and the driver must pull down his flag.
The best part is probably the end, when there are only two cars still flying flags. The other cars are all sitting wherever their life ended, with their drivers sitting trapped in their seats. (To try and escape your car would be far more dangerous than just sitting in it until it's all over.) The last two cars have to really maneuver in order to avoid all the wreckage and find each other in all the mess. Reverse is almost exclusively used because a frontal hit is quite likely the last. So you have two (probably drunken) idiots driving their cars in reverse through an enormous pile of wrecked metal, trying like crazy to inflict the death blow on each other before it is inflicted upon themselves.
Believe me, if you've never seen (or heard of) a "demo-derby", you're really missing something special. You know how much people love to see an accident -- especially if no one is injured... well, image getting to sit and watch several dozen planned accidents! It's a lot of fun.
Another part of the fair seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon, I'm tempted to say. But upon further thought, I imagine the first fairs -- however many hundreds of years ago they were -- saw something similar. Many local vendors and business people, as well as civic or governmental organizations, set up displays known as "booths". Today, we have specific areas dedicated to these booths, aptly called a Varied Industries building. Nearly every business in the area rents a booth space and sets up shop.
The city police and county sheriff's departments have booths; their presence is justified as serving as a deterrent to any illegal activities going on at the fair. The county hospital has a booth which doubles as the fair's first aid station. The local hot-tub dealer has a popular booth -- a fact of which the irony has not escaped me. I don't know how they get people interested in owning a Jacuzzi in the midst of the hottest days of our year. The local beekeeper always has an interesting booth showing a colony of bees busy at work behind a pane of glass. The county conservation administration has another fun booth because they always bring in examples of indigenous species of wildlife such as snakes. The kids always love this one!
The local toy store has a large booth where they display many of the items they normally sell at their downtown store, as well as a few specialty toys they order especially for the fair. They do much more business from their booth during one week at the fair than they normally do during any full month of normal operations in their store (with the probable exception of December). Many seed dealers have booths since a large percentage of the visitors each day are the local farmers whose kids are showing livestock. There are also a large number of booths dedicated to home businesses and cottage industries.
Most of the businesses represented are local. However, not all 99 county fairs have as extensive a scope as our county's fair does, so we do get a few business from out-lying areas which don't have large local fairs. For many of these businesses (like mine) it's the one week out of the whole year in which they have a store front.
One type of business which has become very standard at fairs is home improvements. This stems from the earliest days of county fairs when fair-time was one of the few occasions when some families ever traveled into town. Although this is no longer true, it continues to be a large part of most fairs. A good number of people specifically plan to shop for home improvement contractors while at the fair, and I know from personal experience that some people come to the fair solely with the intention of finding a contractor to perform some sort of work on their home. This, of course, is where I come in. Windows, along with siding, is perhaps the most commonly seen type of home improvement displayed at fairs. We've had a booth at the fair nearly every year we've been in the window business. And we can get enough business during the fair to last us all year long! (It doesn't hurt that I'm the only window specialist in our county. ) Businesses who build decks or buildings, as well as those that provide swimming pools or other remodeling or capital improvements are also quite common in the Varied Industries building.
Obviously, I spend 99% of each fair sitting in the Varied Industries building, manning my booth. Years when it is especially hot or unusually rainy are the worst. Not only are they the most miserable conditions in which to sit and watch the sweat pouring off your nose, but they are the least busy, as many people decide not to attend the fair when the weather is particularly unseasonable. I've found that sweating buckets while working is much more rewarding and much less uncomfortable than sweating an equal quantity of perspiration just sitting on my butt waiting for even a solitary individual to stroll by my booth. I also wear different clothing while working than I do when I'm manning my fair booth. The clothes worn while working the fair are far less comfortable in hot weather than my normal work clothes.
But in those particularly nasty years, there is almost always one or two days when the weather turns a bit nicer. And on those days every soul in the county who has been debating all week whether or not to brave the elements and visit the fair, suddenly decides this might be their best opportunity. That's when we are literally flooded with people. The booths in which merchandise is on display for sale have to keep a keen eye out for shoplifters on those days because it's nearly an endless sea of humanity covering every inch of the fairgrounds.
This year we had terrible heat for the first two days -- well over 100 degrees (F) with extreme humidity. But then late on Tuesday a series of severe thunderstorms rolled through. We lost electricity several times, and for an hour or two everyone was trapped in whatever building they had entered just before the storm hit. But the temperature dropped like a rock, and after that storm front had passed through, we had very pleasant temperatures for the remainder of the week. That brought people out in droves! Bathroom breaks were few and far between!
One local company builds and sells "manufactured homes." (the term "mobile home" is apparently politically incorrect nowadays! ) This company has one such home on display which you can inspect and tour at your leisure. This company is especially ingenious in that this home is completely air conditioned, a feature wholly unique at our fair. That means they always have a constant stream of people wanting to get inside and "look around." (yeah right! they just want to cool off! ) It is truly an oasis on a very hot day. I can only imagine how many of these homes they have sold simply because they had the brilliant idea of attracting visitors with the lure of a few minutes of air conditioning in the middle of the hot fair grounds.
This year's fair was especially significant for our family. We got the unique experience of watching our daughter make her very first boyfriend. At eleven years old, she barely even knows what that means, and hasn't been interested in boys for even a full year yet. But it was a very significant event in her life, and therefore in ours as well.
For whatever reason, she is somewhat of an outcast at her school even though she is universally adored by adults and other kids who don't attend her school. The population of the school is nearly homogenous. It was founded by Dutch people and continues to be supported by the Dutch community in the area. Easily ninety percent of the kids there are Dutch-Americans (they leave off the "-Americans" part -- I only add it for clarity), and they are all related to each other, go to church with each other, live in the same neighborhoods as each other; their parents all went to that same school with each other, and in some cases, their parents' parents did too! Outsiders are not particularly made to feel welcome, but since it's a private school, they are more than willing to take anyone's money -- Dutch or not.
So our daughter has very few friends at school, and no close friends. Any boy who has ever shown an interest in her has been scorned by his friends until he abandons the notion. (...and most boys her age aren't very interested in girls yet anyway)
But a boy who knew Amber from church started hanging around our booth early in the week, trying to find her. When he found her at last, he mustered the courage to ask her if she would like to walk around the fair with him -- every Iowa girl's dream! She'd had her eye on him for some time anyway and was tickled right down to her toes to join him. Walking with a beau at the fair is probably one of the most ubiquitous clichs in Iowa culture. And the most classic portion of that clich is to have the boy playing a game of skill for you, fighting against the odds which are inherently stacked against him, until he finally walks away triumphantly with a stuffed animal prize and gives it to his girl. That is exactly what happened with Amber and her new friend at the fair this year. It is surely the ugliest stuffed dog I've ever laid eyes upon, and in an intimate moment she'll even admit that to be true -- but the manner in which she received it makes that stuffed toy dog her most cherished possession.
It nearly brought tears to my eyes when I saw her come racing back to the booth with her new "friend" in tow and a stuffed toy in her arms. I shan't soon forget that. I was pleased to see that neither of them are even to the stage where they dare hold hands with each other. I am afraid that will come all too soon as it is. But to be accepted by a peer --especially a boy!-- was something she had longed for all her life, and it was touching to witness. Her friend even defended her honor and wouldn't back down when some boys from her school saw the two of them together and had to throw a couple barbs her way. Since the boy does not attend her school and therefore holds no stock in what the Dutch kids think, he had no problem telling those boys where they could go. And they immediately left them alone for the duration.
Another personal note relating to the fair: my son (19 months younger than his sister) is the luckiest person on earth. I don't mean the most fortunate or the most privileged -- I mean sheer dumb luck. When he was barely more than a toddler he saw a contest on television and wanted to enter it. We entered his name almost as a formality. A few weeks later he was asking when the prize was coming. We tried to explain that he probably wouldn't win, and attempted to make him understand the enormous odds stacked against any one individual's chances of winning. Sure enough, the next day his prize arrived by courier. He had won. It didn't surprise him in the least.
I could give numerous such examples, but suffice to say, if there's a contest based solely on random chance, Johnny will win it.
The fair is rife with contests. Almost every booth has some sort of drawing or contest. Some people go around to every booth entering each and every contest that is offered. Some have rubber stamps or address labels made specifically to expedite filling out the forms required as part of entering these drawings and contests. Do I need to tell you how my boy fares at these? He's a winner every time.
The sheriff's booth has the same contest each year. They have a treasure chest with a padlock on it. Inside is a prize. Next to it is a ten pound coffee can (what? two liters??) FULL of keys. Only one key in that enormous batch is a winner. Pick a key and try the lock. If you get the lock to open (what are the odds??) you win whatever's inside. It's usually a T-shirt or a cup or something. I know exactly what the prizes are because he's found that key each and every year!
But wait, there's more! He's always the first person to try the game! Why? Because our booth is always right beside the sheriff's booth, and as we're setting up the booth the day before the fair, he gets to wander around the Varied Industries building watching the others set their booths up. So he knows the very moment a booth is set up and in operation. When the sheriff has his treasure chest ready to go, John is always there to try it before anyone else even knows it's ready. And every year, he somehow finds that key and opens that lock on the first try! The first try of ANYONE at the fair!! You might think it's because the winning key is sitting on top that first day. Nope. I've watched him dig in nearly up to his elbow in keys and extract what he declares to be the winning key. And every year the sheriff's deputies watch in disbelief as he tries the key and opens the lock to claim his prize!
For the people from the sheriff's office it's become a sort of running joke, and a bit of a spectacle each year -- wondering how he does it. It wouldn't surprise me if they started putting less desirable prizes in as the very first prize, since they all KNOW who is going to get the first prize each year. The boy has a complete wardrobe of sheriff's T-shirts, and a nice collection of sheriff's mugs and cups and other paraphernalia from that treasure chest game.
I try to get the boy to enter all the contests he can, but he seems reluctant. He only enters certain ones, and it seems like he wins every one he enters. I just wish he would enter one where the prize was a new home or car or something.
Well, I guess this has now wandered off track a bit and turned into a set of personal stories relating to the fair. So I'll get back on point, and try to conclude this long post.
As I've gotten older I've come to realize how important the county fair is to the fiber of the community here in rural America. It isn't as though we all wait around with bated breath each year, living only for the week of the fair. But the year does very much revolve around it. Events are often gauged by their position on the calendar relative to the fair. This thing is x-number of months before the fair; or that event is always x-number of weeks after the fair. It's a measuring stick in our community. One thing is for-sure: if you want anyone to attend your event, it better not coincide with the fair unless it takes place on the fairgrounds! No one would show up.
I'm sure there are people in the county who pay no attention to the fair whatsoever. But it would almost have to be a conscious and concerted effort to completely ignore it. And I'm sure the fair is even more important to those farm kids who participate in it more fully than I do -- the ones who actually live there all week (...as opposed to those of us who only FEEL like we've lived there all week!
).
And, although I've never been a farmer or lived on a farm, I know that in a farm state such as Iowa, the fair IS life in rural America in a nutshell. Even though much of what constitutes the fair is unique only to the fair, it does define what is and what is not normal everyday life out here in the "boondocks" -- the middle of nowhere. And even though a part of me dreads this annual week-long interruption of my limited working season, I know this: I can't imagine life without the county fair.
Every year here in Iowa, each of our ninety-nine counties has a county fair, usually held sometime in the mid-to-late summer, near the end of July. The main (and original) focus of the fair is the local farm kids who come to show off the livestock they've raised that year. Many families spend the entire week at the fair, sleeping in campers or tents. There are shower facilities on the fairgrounds specifically because so many people live there all week during the fair. There are all kinds of animals, each in their own barns -- pigs, cattle, sheep, horses, chickens, and even rabbits. They are judged and prizes are awarded to the best animals of each type.
Originally this was just for the farm boys. The farm girls had their own projects -- arts and crafts, needlework, sewing and cooking, etc. Nowadays there are many girls who raise animals for the fair, and many boys who also do crafts and other types of projects. And you certainly don't have to live on a farm to enter the contests either. My kids enter art projects each year. All these are also judged and prizes are awarded to the best projects in each category.
The winners go on to the Iowa State Fair in August where they compete against the winners from the other 98 counties in Iowa. If anyone remembers the movie (a musical, I think) called "State Fair", it was based upon the Iowa State Fair, which boasts the (probably disputed) title of "Best State Fair" in the country. (I think the movie either didn't specify which state's fair it was supposed to be, or said it was a state other than Iowa's, but local lore states this as a hard fact: it IS supposed to be the Iowa State Fair depicted in the movie. I don't think I've ever seen the movie myself.) I have been to other State Fairs in some of the neighboring agricultural states, and I've yet to see one that even comes close to the size and scope of Iowa's State Fair. I've been to the Iowa State Fair many times, and it is essentially the same thing as a county fair, but about 100 times larger, which makes sense since we have 99 counties, and thus 99 county fairs in Iowa. Most of what I describe here of our county fair can be said also of the Iowa State Fair, except, as I said, that each part is about 100 times bigger at the State Fair.
One of the main features of the fair is a carnival with amusement park rides located on the "midway" (a term generically used to describe the location where the rides are set up). Most of the rides are very familiar to most people I would think. I've visited (via the Internet) an amusement park near where my friend Mats lives in Sweden, and I discovered that I recognized nearly all the rides as being exactly like the ones we have here. There is always a Ferris wheel, and lots of other things that either go 'round fast, or go up high, or both. The prices are absolutely ridiculous! This year we could buy 18 tickets for $10. But it takes two or three tickets per ride, per person. And the two-ticket rides were too small for my kids a couple years ago already. However, the fair does feature two days when there is a three-hour window (in the middle of the hottest part of the afternoon, of course) in which you can purchase a wrist-band for $10 and ride an unlimited number of rides. This is when most families allow their kids to ride, because otherwise you would spend your next two-months' paychecks buying individual tickets!
The midway also features a long gallery of games of skill (rigged of course!), where you can win prizes if you are lucky enough to somehow beat the game. If you pay the two dollars to play the game, you better enjoy it a lot. If you are thinking you are actually going to win a prize, you are either incredibly naive or totally clueless.
But some things are fun enough to play regardless of any prize. In my case it's the B.B. machine gun game. This game features a fully automatic machine gun (resembling no real model of automatic rifle that I am aware of) that fires B.B.s (tiny little one-eighth-inch ball bearings). The target is a piece of paper with a red star on it. Theoretically, if one shoots the entire red star away, a prize would be awarded (some stupid stuffed animal or a picture or something else you would never pay money for). But personally, I just love shooting that thing. And, yes, I am perfectly willing to blow a ten dollar bill just to shoot a machine gun five times... even if it is just shooting B.B.s.
In another game you can throw darts and try to pop balloons, or bowl miniature bowling balls at impossibly small bowling pins. The ring-toss is a classic. You have to toss a ring around a pop bottle (i.e., "soda" bottle -- for those of you from other parts of the country
) or some other impossibly small target.The common theme among all these games is how simple they appear --accentuated by the ease at which the carnival worker seems to be able to do it-- and yet how impossible they really are once you actually try it. From a purely capitalistic standpoint I understand the economics of it. They have to make it difficult enough that you will end up spending far more to win the prize than you would have to spend if you sought to purchase the same item from a store. Yet, they have to make it just easy enough that every near-miss seems to invoke that instinct to try again because "I was so close that time!"
The people who run these games are extremely aggressive in attempting to lure customers to play. They will call to you and plead with you to play their game, often even offering you bargains such as twice as many tries for the normal price, or a larger prize than usual if you can win. Their manner reminds me of the stereotypical merchants at an open-air market in some foreign country in a movie or television show. We Americans normally frown on such behavior in our public shopping places, but the midway at a carnival or fair seems to be a solitary exception in our culture.
In fact, the people who work the carnivals even have their own slang name. We call them "carnies" and the word conjures a specific stereotype in our minds. A carnie is a very dirty, unattractive person with far fewer teeth than is normally desirable, many large tattoos on his body and a cigarette constantly hanging out of his/her mouth. He looks like he hasn't bathed in a month, and has no desire to break that streak any time soon. In short, a carnie is the polar opposite of anyone you would want your son or daughter to bring home!
Obviously they are real people, with real feelings. And we try to be nice to them, and never poke fun at them to their face (partially out of fear!), but they are clearly people who display different morals and values than most of their customers. It's an odd relationship. But it wouldn't be a fair without the carnies. My son's favorite part of the midway is a tent where a miniature race track has been constructed. For two dollars you can drive a radio-controlled race car, complete with steering wheel and gear shifter, racing against other people driving other cars. This is a lot of fun, even for the adults.
Another important feature of the midway is the many food stands where one can buy things to eat and drink. They normally feature foods which are traditionally only eaten at the fair, such as caramel-covered apples, corn-dogs (hot dogs on a stick, covered with breading, and deep-fat fried), cotton candy, funnel cakes (doughnut batter which is dripped into hot grease through a funnel, resulting in a plate-sized tangled cake which is covered in powdered confectioner's sugar), flavored popcorn, and snow-cones (a paper cone filled with shaved ice and drowned in colored, flavored syrup).
Lemonade is also a traditional favorite at the fair. In the spirit of tradition, most stands pretend to make lemonade as it was probably made a hundred years ago -- using real lemon juice squeezed out of a lemon just before it is served, and mixed before your eyes with water. I think most of these booths actually just make an enormous batch of powdered, sugared lemonade and pretend to mix it when you order it. But they do throw in a chunk of lemon to make you feel like it is somehow different from the lemonade we've all been drinking all summer at home.
And there's no disputing that it's yummy -- no matter how they actually make it.Nowadays there are also a lot of food stands offering foods less often thought of as traditional "fair food" including bacon and eggs (for those who have spent the night at the fair), pizza, tacos and nacho plates, beef burgers, and even a kind of bread-like taco-type thing called a "gyro." (I think it's Greek or something -- anyway, it's Greek to me!
...sorry )There is also a petting zoo, which is a little barn-like structure with no walls. Inside are all sorts of animals which have been selected specifically because they have proven themselves to be friendly to humans, especially to kids. Kids love to go there to pet and play with horses and sheep, pigs, geese and ducks, cats and dogs, bunnies, etc. There's usually nothing to terribly exotic, but there is often a peacock or an ostrich or a llama or something else not normally seen in Iowa. When my kids were little this was THE highlight of the fair -- and I think it is for most kids who live in town. Some years they even have small ponies the kids can ride. Of course you can have a picture taken of your kid sitting on the pony if you're willing to pay extortionist's prices for said photo. hee hee...
A huge portion of the fairgrounds is dedicated to displaying farm machinery. Local farm implement dealers display the equipment they have for sale and allow people to sit on them and try them out. I don't care if you have grown up in the middle of a city or have hay-seed growing out of your ears -- I have never seen a kid (grown or otherwise) who can pass up the opportunity to climb around on a half-million dollar combine and scope out all kinds of cool-looking tractors and trucks and things that can be pulled by them. There's always even a few of the extra cool-looking racing tractors (no, I'm not kidding!
) -- they are loaded with chrome and look like a demented product of an experimental cross-breeding of a racing car and a farm tractor. And, yes, they actually race them ...somewhere.The local National Guard unit always has some of their equipment available for inspection. One year the kids got to climb and play on/in a Humvee; another year they got to sit in one of those massive 8-(or more)-wheeled transport trucks. I also remember seeing a Bradley fighting vehicle at our fair once, but I don't know where they got it -- it certainly isn't a part of the regular arsenal of OUR county's National Guard unit!
.Antique tractors from all over the area are brought to the fair to be displayed and judged for their upkeep, rarity, or simply by their extreme age. If you are a connoisseur of tanks, you can imagine what the tractor connoisseur thinks as he wanders through several acres lined with hundreds of tractors of every imaginable make and model. Somebody always brings an old covered wagon which carried some local family to this area two hundred or more years ago. There's also tons of stuff I couldn't even begin to describe because I can't imagine what on earth they are/were used for. I can only assume they are tools and equipment farmers used at some point in time. The antique tractors and farm implements which are brought to our county's fair alone could fill a world-class tractor and farming museum. I'm not into tractors, but if I was, I'd be in paradise at our county fair!
The fairgrounds is a fairly extensive piece of real estate. It is somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred acres -- slightly less than that I believe. I would think it is easily the largest tract of land in the county which is devoted to a single purpose. It only serves to demonstrate the importance of the annual fair to point out that most of that land, and the buildings on it, are used exactly one week each year, and no more than that. The county tries very hard to find alternate uses for the buildings and the grounds the other 51 weeks of the year, but very little ever goes on at the fair grounds except the fair itself. And it can truly be said that every square inch of the fairgrounds is used more during one week each year than the other 51 weeks combined.
There are a lot of individual barns -- at least one for each type of animal -- as well as a large pavilion for showing the animals, and a fairly large grandstand where different events are held throughout the week, including musical concerts, rodeos, car and horse races, and tractor pulls. A tractor pull is a fun event if you've never seen one before. The purpose is to see whose tractor can pull a special wagon the furthest distance. The wagon, or "sled", as it is called, has a weight which gradually slides forward, making the sled increasingly more difficult to pull over the period of a minute or two. Eventually the weight sits directly over the sled's wheels, making it impossible to pull any further. Many people work on a special tractor all year, as a mechanic works on his race car, getting ready for the tractor pull. Other people just bring their family tractor in and give it a try. They have different classes and categories for both types of tractor owners. My son loves to watch this and I have to admit it is sort of fun to watch.
The grandstand events all culminate in the Saturday night Demo-Derby ("Demo" being short for demolition). The demolition derby is a fairly unique concept. If you've never experienced it I feel obliged to describe it to you. All year, people prepare their car for the demo derby. They buy on old car and strip it down to basically a chassis, a body and an engine. Almost everything else is eliminated, including any glass parts, such as windows, which must be removed. There are rules as to what you can and cannot do to customize your car, such as welding armored plating in certain areas. Very little care is taken to make the car nice in appearance. If you know what the demo derby is, you understand why this is so. But some people do paint their cars --some in wild colors -- or paint numbers or slogans on their cars. In some cases I think the owner must have let his kids just go wild with a couple cans of spray paint.
Essentially the demo derby is like a massive group wrestling match for cars. The cars are lined up side-by-side in two rows opposite each other. They are pinned into a relatively small area in front of the crowd with the rear ends of one row of cars facing the rear ends of the other row, with perhaps twenty meters separating the two rows. When the flag is waved, all the cars are thrown into reverse, the accelerators are pushed to the floor, and the melee begins. What began as two neat rows of cars quickly becomes a mass of tangled wreckage. Each car has a little flag flying from the top of it, near the driver. When a car is no longer operable, or has sat still for too long (normally about 30 seconds) the car is disqualified and the driver must pull down his flag.
The best part is probably the end, when there are only two cars still flying flags. The other cars are all sitting wherever their life ended, with their drivers sitting trapped in their seats. (To try and escape your car would be far more dangerous than just sitting in it until it's all over.) The last two cars have to really maneuver in order to avoid all the wreckage and find each other in all the mess. Reverse is almost exclusively used because a frontal hit is quite likely the last. So you have two (probably drunken) idiots driving their cars in reverse through an enormous pile of wrecked metal, trying like crazy to inflict the death blow on each other before it is inflicted upon themselves.
Believe me, if you've never seen (or heard of) a "demo-derby", you're really missing something special. You know how much people love to see an accident -- especially if no one is injured... well, image getting to sit and watch several dozen planned accidents! It's a lot of fun.
Another part of the fair seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon, I'm tempted to say. But upon further thought, I imagine the first fairs -- however many hundreds of years ago they were -- saw something similar. Many local vendors and business people, as well as civic or governmental organizations, set up displays known as "booths". Today, we have specific areas dedicated to these booths, aptly called a Varied Industries building. Nearly every business in the area rents a booth space and sets up shop.
The city police and county sheriff's departments have booths; their presence is justified as serving as a deterrent to any illegal activities going on at the fair. The county hospital has a booth which doubles as the fair's first aid station. The local hot-tub dealer has a popular booth -- a fact of which the irony has not escaped me. I don't know how they get people interested in owning a Jacuzzi in the midst of the hottest days of our year. The local beekeeper always has an interesting booth showing a colony of bees busy at work behind a pane of glass. The county conservation administration has another fun booth because they always bring in examples of indigenous species of wildlife such as snakes. The kids always love this one!
The local toy store has a large booth where they display many of the items they normally sell at their downtown store, as well as a few specialty toys they order especially for the fair. They do much more business from their booth during one week at the fair than they normally do during any full month of normal operations in their store (with the probable exception of December). Many seed dealers have booths since a large percentage of the visitors each day are the local farmers whose kids are showing livestock. There are also a large number of booths dedicated to home businesses and cottage industries.
Most of the businesses represented are local. However, not all 99 county fairs have as extensive a scope as our county's fair does, so we do get a few business from out-lying areas which don't have large local fairs. For many of these businesses (like mine) it's the one week out of the whole year in which they have a store front.
One type of business which has become very standard at fairs is home improvements. This stems from the earliest days of county fairs when fair-time was one of the few occasions when some families ever traveled into town. Although this is no longer true, it continues to be a large part of most fairs. A good number of people specifically plan to shop for home improvement contractors while at the fair, and I know from personal experience that some people come to the fair solely with the intention of finding a contractor to perform some sort of work on their home. This, of course, is where I come in. Windows, along with siding, is perhaps the most commonly seen type of home improvement displayed at fairs. We've had a booth at the fair nearly every year we've been in the window business. And we can get enough business during the fair to last us all year long! (It doesn't hurt that I'm the only window specialist in our county.
) Businesses who build decks or buildings, as well as those that provide swimming pools or other remodeling or capital improvements are also quite common in the Varied Industries building.Obviously, I spend 99% of each fair sitting in the Varied Industries building, manning my booth. Years when it is especially hot or unusually rainy are the worst. Not only are they the most miserable conditions in which to sit and watch the sweat pouring off your nose, but they are the least busy, as many people decide not to attend the fair when the weather is particularly unseasonable. I've found that sweating buckets while working is much more rewarding and much less uncomfortable than sweating an equal quantity of perspiration just sitting on my butt waiting for even a solitary individual to stroll by my booth. I also wear different clothing while working than I do when I'm manning my fair booth. The clothes worn while working the fair are far less comfortable in hot weather than my normal work clothes.
But in those particularly nasty years, there is almost always one or two days when the weather turns a bit nicer. And on those days every soul in the county who has been debating all week whether or not to brave the elements and visit the fair, suddenly decides this might be their best opportunity. That's when we are literally flooded with people. The booths in which merchandise is on display for sale have to keep a keen eye out for shoplifters on those days because it's nearly an endless sea of humanity covering every inch of the fairgrounds.
This year we had terrible heat for the first two days -- well over 100 degrees (F) with extreme humidity. But then late on Tuesday a series of severe thunderstorms rolled through. We lost electricity several times, and for an hour or two everyone was trapped in whatever building they had entered just before the storm hit. But the temperature dropped like a rock, and after that storm front had passed through, we had very pleasant temperatures for the remainder of the week. That brought people out in droves! Bathroom breaks were few and far between!
One local company builds and sells "manufactured homes." (the term "mobile home" is apparently politically incorrect nowadays!
) This company has one such home on display which you can inspect and tour at your leisure. This company is especially ingenious in that this home is completely air conditioned, a feature wholly unique at our fair. That means they always have a constant stream of people wanting to get inside and "look around." (yeah right! they just want to cool off! ) It is truly an oasis on a very hot day. I can only imagine how many of these homes they have sold simply because they had the brilliant idea of attracting visitors with the lure of a few minutes of air conditioning in the middle of the hot fair grounds.This year's fair was especially significant for our family. We got the unique experience of watching our daughter make her very first boyfriend. At eleven years old, she barely even knows what that means, and hasn't been interested in boys for even a full year yet. But it was a very significant event in her life, and therefore in ours as well.
For whatever reason, she is somewhat of an outcast at her school even though she is universally adored by adults and other kids who don't attend her school. The population of the school is nearly homogenous. It was founded by Dutch people and continues to be supported by the Dutch community in the area. Easily ninety percent of the kids there are Dutch-Americans (they leave off the "-Americans" part -- I only add it for clarity), and they are all related to each other, go to church with each other, live in the same neighborhoods as each other; their parents all went to that same school with each other, and in some cases, their parents' parents did too! Outsiders are not particularly made to feel welcome, but since it's a private school, they are more than willing to take anyone's money -- Dutch or not.
So our daughter has very few friends at school, and no close friends. Any boy who has ever shown an interest in her has been scorned by his friends until he abandons the notion. (...and most boys her age aren't very interested in girls yet anyway)
But a boy who knew Amber from church started hanging around our booth early in the week, trying to find her. When he found her at last, he mustered the courage to ask her if she would like to walk around the fair with him -- every Iowa girl's dream! She'd had her eye on him for some time anyway and was tickled right down to her toes to join him. Walking with a beau at the fair is probably one of the most ubiquitous clichs in Iowa culture. And the most classic portion of that clich is to have the boy playing a game of skill for you, fighting against the odds which are inherently stacked against him, until he finally walks away triumphantly with a stuffed animal prize and gives it to his girl. That is exactly what happened with Amber and her new friend at the fair this year. It is surely the ugliest stuffed dog I've ever laid eyes upon, and in an intimate moment she'll even admit that to be true -- but the manner in which she received it makes that stuffed toy dog her most cherished possession.
It nearly brought tears to my eyes when I saw her come racing back to the booth with her new "friend" in tow and a stuffed toy in her arms. I shan't soon forget that. I was pleased to see that neither of them are even to the stage where they dare hold hands with each other. I am afraid that will come all too soon as it is. But to be accepted by a peer --especially a boy!-- was something she had longed for all her life, and it was touching to witness. Her friend even defended her honor and wouldn't back down when some boys from her school saw the two of them together and had to throw a couple barbs her way. Since the boy does not attend her school and therefore holds no stock in what the Dutch kids think, he had no problem telling those boys where they could go. And they immediately left them alone for the duration.
Another personal note relating to the fair: my son (19 months younger than his sister) is the luckiest person on earth. I don't mean the most fortunate or the most privileged -- I mean sheer dumb luck. When he was barely more than a toddler he saw a contest on television and wanted to enter it. We entered his name almost as a formality. A few weeks later he was asking when the prize was coming. We tried to explain that he probably wouldn't win, and attempted to make him understand the enormous odds stacked against any one individual's chances of winning. Sure enough, the next day his prize arrived by courier. He had won. It didn't surprise him in the least.
I could give numerous such examples, but suffice to say, if there's a contest based solely on random chance, Johnny will win it.
The fair is rife with contests. Almost every booth has some sort of drawing or contest. Some people go around to every booth entering each and every contest that is offered. Some have rubber stamps or address labels made specifically to expedite filling out the forms required as part of entering these drawings and contests. Do I need to tell you how my boy fares at these? He's a winner every time.
The sheriff's booth has the same contest each year. They have a treasure chest with a padlock on it. Inside is a prize. Next to it is a ten pound coffee can (what? two liters??) FULL of keys. Only one key in that enormous batch is a winner. Pick a key and try the lock. If you get the lock to open (what are the odds??) you win whatever's inside. It's usually a T-shirt or a cup or something. I know exactly what the prizes are because he's found that key each and every year!
But wait, there's more! He's always the first person to try the game! Why? Because our booth is always right beside the sheriff's booth, and as we're setting up the booth the day before the fair, he gets to wander around the Varied Industries building watching the others set their booths up. So he knows the very moment a booth is set up and in operation. When the sheriff has his treasure chest ready to go, John is always there to try it before anyone else even knows it's ready. And every year, he somehow finds that key and opens that lock on the first try! The first try of ANYONE at the fair!! You might think it's because the winning key is sitting on top that first day. Nope. I've watched him dig in nearly up to his elbow in keys and extract what he declares to be the winning key. And every year the sheriff's deputies watch in disbelief as he tries the key and opens the lock to claim his prize!
For the people from the sheriff's office it's become a sort of running joke, and a bit of a spectacle each year -- wondering how he does it. It wouldn't surprise me if they started putting less desirable prizes in as the very first prize, since they all KNOW who is going to get the first prize each year. The boy has a complete wardrobe of sheriff's T-shirts, and a nice collection of sheriff's mugs and cups and other paraphernalia from that treasure chest game.
I try to get the boy to enter all the contests he can, but he seems reluctant. He only enters certain ones, and it seems like he wins every one he enters. I just wish he would enter one where the prize was a new home or car or something.
Well, I guess this has now wandered off track a bit and turned into a set of personal stories relating to the fair. So I'll get back on point, and try to conclude this long post.
As I've gotten older I've come to realize how important the county fair is to the fiber of the community here in rural America. It isn't as though we all wait around with bated breath each year, living only for the week of the fair. But the year does very much revolve around it. Events are often gauged by their position on the calendar relative to the fair. This thing is x-number of months before the fair; or that event is always x-number of weeks after the fair. It's a measuring stick in our community. One thing is for-sure: if you want anyone to attend your event, it better not coincide with the fair unless it takes place on the fairgrounds! No one would show up.
I'm sure there are people in the county who pay no attention to the fair whatsoever. But it would almost have to be a conscious and concerted effort to completely ignore it. And I'm sure the fair is even more important to those farm kids who participate in it more fully than I do -- the ones who actually live there all week (...as opposed to those of us who only FEEL like we've lived there all week!
).And, although I've never been a farmer or lived on a farm, I know that in a farm state such as Iowa, the fair IS life in rural America in a nutshell. Even though much of what constitutes the fair is unique only to the fair, it does define what is and what is not normal everyday life out here in the "boondocks" -- the middle of nowhere. And even though a part of me dreads this annual week-long interruption of my limited working season, I know this: I can't imagine life without the county fair.
