Fair Fun
Comments(1) This weekend I went to the Durham Fair, in Durham CT.
The Durham Fair is one of the biggest in the area, and apparently the largest agricultural fair in the country totally run by volunteers. Arvind is visiting from London, and I thought I’d take him to see an authentic, Americana experience. I have great memories of going to the country fall fairs when I was growing up – marveling at the year’s biggest turnip, the Junior League’s best pumpkin pie, the most perfect goat, etc etc. The horse pulls were always a favorite, when they brawny horse teams would stamp and snort and foam as they strained to pull the great blocks of concrete. Fairs meant conady apples, carnival games you never win (for big stuffed animals you don’t really want), and those frisbees that spun around as you poured paint on them to and made psychedelic splatters. So it was with great anticipation that I planned to go to the Durham fair this year, and show all the quaint joys of simple country life to my sophisticated Anglo-partner.
Well. Maybe some things are better left nostalgic memories. The experience started in a parking lot that had been until very recently a corn field – a beautiful bumpy, rutty, once-a-year justification for all the SUV drivers. The lot was right next to a cow-filled barn, the odor of which got us into “country” mood right away. From the lot, we piled into a bright yellow school bus, directed by Dunkin’ Donuts-fed volunteers. In fact, everybody at the fair looked rather Dunkin Donuts-fed, not quite the exemplars of the healthy outdoor life that us urban dwellers might fantasize about as we pound the treadmills at our indoor gyms. And if it wasn’t Dunkin Donuts, it was fried dough, or pulled pork sandwiches or corn dogs, or hot fudge sundays… let’s just say the prize pigs weren’t the only well-fed livestock at the event.
There were some highlights: we saw a pig race, five little porkers sprinting around a track, which was quite sweet; some charming llamas with snaggy teeth shorn like poodles; and a lady hand-cutting those old-fashioned black paper silhouette/ cameo/ whatevers. I think my favorite thing was the baby goats in the petting zoo, adorable as they piled on top of each other on the barrels in their pen, legs that wouldn’t quite fit dangling off.
It all started to go a bit wrong when we made the mistake of patronizing the Durham Republicans food booth not just once (for the Lime Ricky) but twice (on the way back for a pulled-pork sandwich) – before we noticed their subtle political identification and solicitous behavior to the Marine in full dress uniform. Having been out of the country, and for Arvind not being from here, the heaviness of the barn-sized American flag, the stall selling “Baghdad Bracelets” and the country girl group singing about “God Bless the American Housewife” all became a bit overbearing.
Sadly, I realized that my romantic notions of pastoral autumnal bliss are much better served by overpriced farmers markets that come into the urban centers and trips to apple orchards in chi-chi towns like Guilford. I find this is sad on several counts – for urban sylistocrats such as myself who can only take a gentrified pastiche of a rural or foreign other, for the conservative strain gripping much of non-urban America, and for the widening cultural gulf between us.
OK, it was a complex experience, that fun fair, which in itself seems to suggest that the Visa Diariast and I spend too much time in our heads.
The switch moment for me was when the dulcet chords of “God Bless the American Housewife” came blaring out of the triplets Daisy. My suspicion that their jingoistic-christian rock anthem was not ironic, was latter proved true when we discovered that they are full on Mormons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHeDAISY
Somewhere in the chorus, I was filled with a sense of strong otherness. That these fine, pig rearing, hog eating, llama petting folk, full of limb and true of heart though they maybe, were not folk who I could be entirely at ease with, at least not en mass.
That could be a product as much of my mind as any reality, and certainly no one at the fair was anything but charming to us, but I think your final paragraph puts it well. America has become a country divided against itself, and agaist the world, and the air in that fair was just a little too think with the scent of Bush, llama or otherwise, for my urban lungs.