Illustration by Danny Elchert

I walk onto the Monroe County fairgrounds tentatively, like a distant relative showing up for a wake. I’ve never even been to a county fair, but what with farms going corporate and farm wives working in the city and craft departments closing and canning jars a dime a dozen at yard sales, I felt compelled to report on what might be one of the last such festivities.

When I called for a press pass, George Obernagel, secretary of the fair association, didn’t sound as gloomy as I expected. “Never been to a fair before?” he boomed. “Well, don’t wear no high heels or nothin’.”

Now I’m here—in late June—in New Balance tennies, walking past neatly tied, identical bales of alfalfa (how one discerns prizewinning alfalfa escapes me). There are pumpkins the size of ottomans, obscenely plump zucchini, cornucopias of perfect peppers and heirloom tomatoes. Pieced quilts and crimped pies and pickled everything. Hydrangeas so periwinkle they look artificial. Big plastic bags of dark wool, coarse as an SOS pad, and cream wool, softer. Crates of bunnies and roosters and, without warning, a creature named Mr. Duck, who has huge, reptilian, dark orange clawed feet and the head of a turkey (I could not have invented this).

Urban and supercilious would be the easy tone to take, good cover for ignorance. But I might as well admit I’m clueless, I decide, so I can get enough facts to avoid romanticizing the old agrarian ways.

Luckily, I meet Omar Koester in the exhibitors’ office, and he offers to show me around. He’s been coming to the fair his entire life. “The fair board is third generation,” he tells me.

“But how can this continue thriving, when grain prices are soaring and nobody can afford to feed their livestock or put gasoline in trucks and tractors?” I ask. “This year’s been a disaster, the corn drowned in the rains, the storms get more violent every year …”

He’s just watching me, a small smile teasing at the corners of his mouth.

“It’s what farmers do. They take risks.”

He walks me over to a barn called the “Beef Building.” No denial here.

“I don’t think there’s that much beef here yet,” Koester says, squinting at a few placid occupants who are getting shampooed. We walk past a 4-month-old calf, Samantha, looking mournful amid bales of Baby Jesus manger straw. “You breed ’em, and it’s nine months till they freshen and give milk,” he informs me. “I milked for 40 years myself. Now I’m in real estate.” He points out a father and daughter, saying, “I don’t think he milks anymore either.” To milk, I realize belatedly, is to run a dairy farm. A lot of the small operations have given up—too expensive, too hard to find labor. Surely this proves the fair’s imminent demise: How can there be a fair with no livestock?

Turns out the former farmers are still here. Many actually buy animals just to show at the fair. “I have friends who got good jobs, bought 10 or 15 acres and have animals, because it’s a good way to bring up their kids,” says Kenny Hartman Jr., who quit milking in ’03.

I take close note of the 4-H kids, loving the way the girls wear their hair in a ponytail and save the gel for their horses’ manes. They need even more product to top-line the cows: “We blow ’em up with a hair dryer and use hair spray to keep them fluffy,” Abby Kern informs me. “To win, they’ve gotta look good. And you make sure their back’s straight.”

Later I see Miss Jersey County buying cotton candy, her hair fluffy and shiny under her crown. “You can’t be seen drinking or smoking while you’re wearing your crown,” she tells me, “and it’s just looked better upon if you have better posture.”

At the opening-night pageant, the 2007 Monroe County Fair Queen, Emily Rose Ann Hopkins, greets the crowd with the poise and invulnerable charm of a sorority president. “She is 19 years old with brown hair and brown eyes and stands 5-foot-6,” the announcer reads. “She led her powder-puff football team as quarterback and led mission trips to Belize with her church
youth group.”

Somehow I prefer the qualifications of the first Junior Miss candidate: “Her hobbies are swinging, coloring and playing with her
dog, Moe.”

The little girls step across the stage and curtsy to the queen, their tiny backs straight as rulers. Across the fairgrounds, the carnies sit on truck bumpers, slumped with fatigue. “We just finished tearin’ down a fair in Litchfield at 4 a.m.,” one explains. “We do this all summer, sleep all winter. There’s fairs all over the country.”

•

“By 6 p.m. all livestock must be on grounds, except lactating dairy cows and swine,” the rules read, strict as a 1940s dorm. The swine don’t need to arrive until 10 p.m. Sunday; I’m hoping this is not subtle stigma but simply to allow them more time for a buttermilk bath. (“It makes them shine,” explained a friend who grew up on a farm and understands the world in ways I never will.)

Early Monday morning, the mooing is so loud it sounds like elephants trumpeting. The swine are coaxed onto a brand-new scale (every cent the fair makes goes toward improving the fairgrounds, people tell me proudly) and weighed in solemn ceremony. “They’ll be judged on soundness, how they walk, the meat characteristics—you know, the carcass quality,” a judge tells me. I flinch. “Well, not the quality, you can’t really know that till you’ve got the carcass, but characteristics. We’re looking for a big, heavily muscled loin and hams.” A woman arrives. “MorNING,” she shrills. A pig waddles into the weighing enclosure, pale pink and glowing. “Back ’er off,” a weigher requests—but the second time, the pig’s no fool. Snorting and pawing, she refuses to enter. The guys steer her with their hands, shove from behind, stamp her with a number, then clap a board on top of the enclosure, drowning her outraged grunts. A woman watching murmurs sympathetically, “It’s always rough the first time, ain’t it?”

Mark Neary, who started showing hogs 39 years ago, tells me they used to show boars, but it got too dangerous. His daughter, Jessica Neary, is 10. “I usually help my dad with the hogs,” she informs me. “I walk through buildings and make sure none are dead. Luckily they don’t die too much. But if they figure out one is weaker, they usually beat him up. They are tougher than you’d think.”

So’s she, I decide, as she tells me how carefully she watches her rabbits in the heat: “They have what is called animal instincts: They will bite themselves if there’s no water, and then they drink the blood.” She leads the way to the rabbit and rooster building, its smell warm and musty. Louise, her favorite to win the prize, is lying down. “Oh gosh, is she OK?” Jessica blurts. “That’s not good.”

Louise is fine, just napping. Probably nervous exhaustion.

I ease over to the sheep, which are wearing white burlap overgarments with distinct Klannish overtones. A guy’s shearing one, the lamb’s face pressed into a metal contraption to hold him still. Next he’ll be shampooed with Orvis soap and cloaked for cleanliness.

“If you can make $100 off a lamb selling it for slaughter, that’s pretty good,” he continues. The lamb in the Hannibal Lector contraption stares straight ahead. “But the way corn prices are, you are barely breaking even. Corn’s high, and nobody’s having very good years with hay.”

Behind me there’s a soft chorus of baahs and a few louder bleats, maah. I stop to pet one of the black-faced Suffolk sheep, and he sidles up to have his ears scratched. When I turn to examine the goats, he sticks his neck out of his enclosure and nudges my arm
to continue.

Outside, a hot wind blows, and the paddock dust sticks to the film of sweat on my skin. My sneakers’ treads are clogged with mud and dung. I buy a funnel cake and sit happily in 100-degree heat, steam rising from the grease, powdered sugar smearing onto my cheeks as I grin at the screams of the Serpent riders. Normally this kind of temporary frivolity doesn’t appeal to me: carnival food that’s bliss for three seconds before it starts to congeal, neon thrills that defy gravity just to obey it again. In the city, such ephemeral pleasures seem like siren songs, lurid and cheap and inevitably disappointing. Here, surrounded by cows and earth and root vegetables, their lack of substance makes them delightful.

•

At the swine judging, the first contestant runs circles around the ring, snorting, joined by two equally frisky hogs. They bump playfully into each other, running in a rocking-horse gallop. People just wait. “They’re having a good time, aren’t they?” the man behind me says. “That freedom feels good.”

A gilt (young female pig) comes in, walking almost delicately, haunches trembling, cloven hooves carefully placed. “Change her hips a bit,” the judge suggests, “make her a bit more sure-footed as she hits the sawdust.” Seems I’ve done what men once did: confused a woman’s uncertainty for delicacy.

“You want them wide in body as long as they can still be good on their feet,” Freddie Grohmann tells me. “The toes can’t be turned out. And in the breeding stock classes, you want to make sure they have a good nipple line, so they can nurse litters well.”

At least Miss Monroe County doesn’t get judged on that.

Without warning, two pigs attack each other. “Uh-oh. We’ve got a discussion,” one of the guys drawls, briskly slapping the feistier one.

Just then a buzz runs through the crowd. “Little Miss is here!” Someone turns to the new Miss Monroe County, Carolyn Wicklein. “You gonna carry Heather in with all these hogs?” I adore Wicklein already, because she’s showing up at these events in no makeup, hair normal, wearing any old pair of shorts—and she wants to be a vet. She scoops up the 6-year-old and plods through the hay for the photo op, with two men still wielding boards (like bullfighters’ capes but less fluid) as they try to get the combatants to leave the pen.

Across the grounds the rooster-crowing contest is under way. Amid the hideous squawking, one throws his head back and gives a mellifluous crow. I hear 10 ppssshhhhtttt noises as the other contestants encourage their birds to do the same. One guy pats the roof of the cage; Kaitlyn Kasten blows on Roadrunner’s beak in encouragement. He turns away.

Roadrunner hasn’t made a sound yet.

Nor has his neighbor. “How often does he normally crow?” I ask casually.

“All the time,” the owner says, shaking his head.

Sensing defeat, I head to the other end of the row, where defending champion Dannielle Pretto, age 15, is keeping up a running patter to her multicolored Dutch: “Come on, you got it. [Kissy noise.] [Loud crow.] I know you can do it. Ppssshshsttttt. [Third crow.] I know you got more in there, come on buddy. [Fourth crow.] Come on, little boy.” Sixth. Seventh. Eighth. Ninth. He draws himself up, his beak opening wide. Pretto’s entirely calm, encouraging without urgency or angst. Also no praise; when I ask, like an idiot, whether an occasional “Good rooster!” also helps, she tells me it does no good; they’re oblivious to pleasing you.

By the 58th crow I have to ask her secret.

“I can’t tell you that,” she says, so matter-of-fact I think she’s kidding. But no, she’s not telling me. The announcer says something about a “crow-off” to decide one of the runners-up (Pretto has won easily), and she says, “I gotta go help!” and dashes off. After the crow-off, a pickup truck pulls up, slows without stopping, and she runs and hops on the back with the other kids, her prize rooster cradled in one arm.

I head back to Roadrunner. “He ever crow?” I ask, thumb in my jeans pocket, still trying for casual. “Not once,” Kaitlyn informs me. “He’s chicken ’n’ dumplings.”

•

Thursday night it’s raining lightly, and the sense of festivity’s more vivid, the colors saturated. As the Bud Light Brigade brass band plays “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” I sashay over to the horse show. The first event’s pole bending. “Well, they are supposed to bend around ’em,” a spectator clarifies. A spirited white horse knocks down one pole. Next comes Freckles, painstaking but not happy about it. Dark Prince Caspian balks halfway. When at last a young woman weaves her horse smoothly, in record time, the announcer calls exultantly, “You got a clean run. Come on home.”

I wish someone would say that to me sometime.

Behind the kindly announcer I hear the auctioneer’s patter from a faraway livestock building. It’s the 4-H market auction, and “a lotta big money changes hands there,” I’ve been told. I hurry over, and the first thing I see is my Suffolk sheep. Crowded onto a truck. Eyes glassy, ears twitching, too nervous now to be stroked through the bars.

My throat closes. I should stay, hear the bidding, memorize hard truths.

I head back to the horse show.

•

Everything at a fair is talkworthy, superlative, the best or biggest or gooeyest. By now the Budweiser’s flowing fast—more than 1,500 cases will be sold by fair’s end. Under the dinner pavilion I find gargantuan pork cutlets, macho nachos with extra cheese, cowboy steak sandwiches. Holy Cross of Wartburg, a Lutheran church, is selling fish sandwiches; the Kaskaskia Trail Chorus has Polish sausage with kraut. Beyond the pavilion the Cobra writhes in green neon, a pulsing hip-hop beat at odds with its undulations. Little girls run across the grass to ride the Heart Flip. One of the carnies urges me onto the Sizzler, and I forget everything I’ve heard about middle-aged loss of equilibrium and take his dare, leaping into the cage like Anne Morrow Lindbergh. OK, the Sizzler’s not much. But as it glides, I close my eyes and feel the hot wind on my face, a rush of freedom I hadn’t realized I’d lost.

Afterward, I stroll over to the petting barn, where a little boy is giving a brown-and-white calf his thumb to suck. “She thinks it’s her ma,” he informs me gravely. The calf looks up at him adoringly; she’s hungry. A 3-year-old girl walks up and says, “Hi, Cow.” I step out of her way and pet the lamb, and a minute later I realize, with shame, that I’m whispering—audibly, over and over again—“I’m sorry.”

Hartman admits the way things work is complicated, even for him. “I don’t butcher,” he says firmly. “I just sell the animals.” To a butcher. He sighs. “You’ve got the half of you that loves and enjoys working with animals, but you couldn’t do it if you couldn’t make some money off of it. One thing the fair is about is, city folks can come out and touch a hog or pet a lamb and really enjoy them, not just looking at them as steaks at the store. But by having the auction it also puts the reality in there that you have to have food to live.”

•

Saturday afternoon, the sun’s strong and bright, and the mood’s tired, peaceful. People sit on redwood picnic benches in the shade and talk. Last night’s demolition derby went on—in driving rain—until 3 a.m., and now the field’s been torn up so the sun can beat on it and dry it out. This, too, is a ritual, in preparation for the big tractor pull. “We used to just attach sleds, and another guy would jump on every 25 feet,” a man recalls, leaning on the fence. “Now they are flyin’ down the track, these hot rods. It’d be too dangerous.”

I skip the tractor pull to rest up for Sunday’s big finale, then I miss half the activities, besotted by the miniature horses. The youngest stand stock-still in the ring, their legs splayed out like Bambi on ice. Meagan Hatfield stands on the side with Charisma, a dark yearling. “My summers are nothing but horses,” she says, kissing Charisma on the nose. “One of my foals, I’d lay her down in my lap, and she would fall asleep. I have to cut apples in half for her, because they’re kind of big and she’s kind of small.”

She blows on Charisma’s nose to get her attention; someone else scratches her horse’s tongue. Dani Helbig, 11, is working with Bunny (born on Easter), making slow loopy circles that look like cowboy tai chi. “You take a cookie and try to get their ears up,” she explains, “and you want their neck to arch.”

I walk past Pin the Tail, a miniature donkey who’s angling her head toward a tin of homemade cookies. Then I recognize Danielle, the champion of the rooster crow, out in the ring, blowing the same kisses but this time to a miniature horse. The other contestants occasionally glance around, shift, slouch a little, chat with each other. She stands quiet and straight, attuned to her animal, oblivious to the rest of the world. The animal takes its cue, stands just as quietly. I envy her calm presence, her instinctive connection.

There I go, romanticizing the agrarian tradition.

Now I can see why nobody wants it to end.