As time goes by

My favorite line in all nonfiction may be E.B. White saying the day man went to the moon, he went to the Fryeburg Fair. I love the palpable glee with which he juxtaposes Cape Canaveral's radio reports from the sky with the livestock auction and Ferris wheel on old Colonial ground, near Maine's New Hampshire border. You don't have to wonder which he prefers, with relish.

I love that White bet right. Nobody goes to the moon any more, but this year more than 350,000 people are expected to visit the 167th annual Fryeburg Fair. On Tuesday, I lived up to expectation. Even though it means a two-hour drive each way, I have been going for at least 45 years. I have seen it all, yet I wouldn't miss it for the world. I just love that it doesn't change. There is no new Fryeburg Fair 7.06. The oxen still pull, the ladies still quilt, the lumbermen still swing their axe, the biggest pumpkin still gets a blue ribbon and the chicks still hatch right before your eyes just like they did when White went in the 1950s. And seniors still get in free on Tuesdays.

That word "still" is very precious nowadays--because what is still can get you to be still. The retro predictability is a welcome breather from the brutal putsch of impermanence in an age psychotically obsessed with next. I haven't found better balm for a bruised soul than a crisp blue sky afternoon wandering around this foot of the White Mountains while the trees are aflame in red and yellow, pumpkins and apples piled high. All feels right with this world. I can lick ice cream or crunch a candy apple strolling through the livestock barns to be awed again by the enormous haunches of herbivore draft horses whose brute strength comes from oats and apples, to be tickled by perfectly belted Galloway cows, and surprised by the differing colors of wool on sheep, differing types of wool on goats.

Last year I watched the pig squeal: 6-year-old kids chasing baby pigs around a straw covered barn hoping to catch one. This year I went through the chicken barn and thought I'd stumbled on Paris Fashion Week. Who knew poultry dressed so magnificently? Here are my friend's pictures:

My style favorite

check the fur booties

This one's the prized turkey!

There is still cotton candy, still barkers trying to get you to ring three moving ducks for a gaudy prize, still squash from local granges and rabbits from Four-H clubs competing for blue ribbons. You can buy tractors, boats, camping toilets, freshly carded wool even from alpacas, and bag balm galore. There's country music and trotter racing and bumper cars and church groups selling homemade pumpkin pie and chowder. All of it for one week every year, as heartfelt and homemade as it was last year and the year before and before. In these moments of "still" and stillness, you are in your right mind where you realize this fair, like all harvest fairs, is a huge exclamation point, a loud celebration of life its own self. That it's still happening is enormously comforting.






~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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