Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

The radio played “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters, “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone and “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran.

Such a playlist means that it’s the time of a good many county fairs followed by the state fair.

Cows, corn dogs and cookies. Rides and pickles. Cotton candy optimism. Fly attraction contests. See the man with no tattoos. The world’s most unusual two-headed man. He had only one head. A mime talked to me. What would Marcel Marceau have said about that? A softhearted fellow cried when an army tank won a demolition derby. A fair reminds us of what the H’s in 4-H stand for — head, heart, hands, health.

I’ve worked at countless fairs. I have a fair attitude. Still, fairs are foreign places to a hick like me. There are lines at fairs. There are no lines in Hartland.

That’s not entirely true. We have lines. It’s just that our lines each have only one person in them. I stood in line at a state fair for 30 minutes before I discovered that it was a line to the ladies’ room.

A fair is life on a stick. Anything that doesn’t move in 10 minutes is deep-fried and placed on a stick. The county fair becomes the county fare. People act upon their fried-food fantasies. Cotton candy is insulation on a stick. Foot-wide hotdogs and cheeseburger-flavored ice cream abound. Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie win the blue ribbon in the featherweight pie division. Milkshakes are $4, handshakes $1. Eat three corn dogs on a three-dog night. Cow exhaust and fried food odors commingle into something resembling a smelly sneaker.

I watched as a family eating fruit walked by. They stuck out like a pork chop in a chicken salad sandwich.

Some of the rides can be frightening. They have intimidating names like, “Smell My Feet.” A friend stopped going on the menacing rides when he discovered that he was running out of clean underpants.

Merry-go-rounds almost always go counterclockwise, but other rides go every direction at once. The longer the line, the better the ride.

I don’t need to go on any wild rides. I get the same feeling by getting up quickly from a chair.

A teacher instructed her grade-school class to write about something exciting they’d done last summer and to draw a picture to illustrate it. One student wrote about going on a particularly scary ride at a fair, but he’d not drawn a picture. When the teacher asked him why there was no drawing, he said, “I couldn’t draw one. I didn’t see anything because my eyes were closed the whole ride.”

Country Living magazine named the five best state fairs as Minnesota, Iowa, New York, Alaska and Texas.

Hamline Church Dining Hall has been serving hungry Minnesota State Fair-goers since 1897. It’s home to a Jell-O salad ice cream inspired by the potluck staple. It features a sweet cream base blended with lime juice, cranberry sauce, and marshmallow crème.

The Steele County Fair is the state’s biggest county fair with a record attendance of 350,899 in 2013. The estimated attendance of this free fair is determined by a formula that includes sales in the beer garden, parking numbers, carnival revenues, ATM transactions, vendor revenues, educated guesses, etc.

Midway barkers yell loud enough to be heard by your wallet. They are drowned out by mothers hollering to wayward children by using the kids’ full names. The only reason to have a middle name is so that your mother could yell at you. Abraham Lincoln didn’t have a middle name. His parents couldn’t afford one.

Daniel Otten of Hayward is part of a brass band that performs at a fair. They practiced regularly before the fair, just as we floss regularly before a dentist’s appointment. The first session may not have been their best effort. Daniel told the group, “I’m glad that we’re playing at a fair and not at a good.”

Each fair is a package that comes without instructions. It’s easy to dismiss a small county fair as “two sick chickens and a tractor that won’t start,” but that’s not fair to the fair. Each fair is perfect in its own unique way. A fair is comparable to a place by the fire on a cold, winter day.

We spend most of our days plowing around the stumps.

Fairs make charming company and they don’t have many stumps.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.