See you at the county fair

I attended the Thurston County Fair yesterday. I couldn’t take Sam but he would have enjoyed meeting the dogs at the dog show.

I love fairs. Thurston County Fairgrounds is just about a mile from my house. When I lived in the little town of Quincy, California, my family’s house was right across the street from the Plumas County Fairgrounds and ever since then I’ve been hooked.

As fairs go, Thurston County’s is not a big woohoo. Even the Humboldt County Fair in Ferndale, California, is better. At least it has horseracing. Thurston County’s fair is hardly worth the price of admission still, I’m one of those weird guys who actually enjoys strolling through the cattle barn, petting rabbits, crowing with roosters and looking at other people’s canned and baked goods and their art and photography. I even enjoy walking through the commercial exhibits barns and checking out roofing materials, home water heating systems, waterless cookware and other cool stuff.

Like I said, I have been drawn to fairs since living across the street from that one in Quincy. I think I was five or six at the time and two things stand out in my memory regarding that fair: horses and hot-rod racing. I have never forgotten that sweet smell of horseflesh. I even think horse poop smells good. The lion might be king of the jungle, but the horse is king of the fair.

During fair week in Quincy, my family would sit out on the roof of our house and watch the nightly hot-rod races. One night a hot rod missed a turn, soared into the air and slammed through a fence. COOL!

My favorite fairs now are the Northwest Washington Fair in Lynden and the Puyallup Fair. The Northwest Washington Fair is very good; lots of horses, lots of commercial exhibits all displayed in three or four long barns, lots of cattle, sheep and swine, etc. The Clark County Fair is pretty good too.

The Puyallup Fair is spectacular and runs several weeks. That fair has so much stuff you can’t see everything in one day. If I understand it correctly, all the smaller fairs around the western part of the state feed into Puyallup. If you do well at the smaller fairs, you earn a berth in Puyallup. Washington State, unlike California, doesn’t seem to have one huge state fair. The Puyallup is every bit as good as the California State Fair though.

I have only one complaint about fairs. Too many of them bring country western singers in to entertain. I have attended fair concerts I really liked: B.J Thomas, Kenny Rogers, Engelbert Humperdinck. But by and large the fairs bring in twangy country singers. Now they’re even bringing in rock groups that only younger people would like.

But t love fairs. I love corn dogs, elephant ears, comparing the winning dahlia to the other dahlias in the flower barn, comparing the winning zucchini squash to the other squashes. One year I was a member of Haynie Grange up north of Bellingham and helped put together the sweepstakes winning grange exhibit at Lynden.

Fairs are about as American as you can get, although I believe they started in medieval Europe if I remember my Ivanhoe and Robin Hood books correctly. Anyway, hope I see you at a fair sometime.