08/05/0950h. Under way at 4 mph on the Press Tour, on a kind of flatboat with wheels and a lengthwise bench so ridiculously high that everybody’s feet dangle. The tractor pulling us has signs that say ETHANOL and AGRIPOWERED. I’m particularly keen to see the carnies setting up rides in the Fairgrounds’ “Happy Hollow,” but we head first to the corporate and political tents. Most every tent is still setting up. Workmen crawl over structural frames. We wave at them; they wave back; it’s absurd: we’re only going 4 mph. One tent says CORN: TOUCHING OUR LIVES EVERY DAY. There are massive many-hued tents courtesy of McDonald’s, Miller Genuine Draft, Osco, Morton Commercial Structures Corp., the Land of Lincoln Soybean Association (LOOK WHERE SOYBEANS GO! on a half-up display), Pekin Energy Corp. (PROUD OF OUR SOPHISTICATED COMPUTER-CONTROLLED PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY), Illinois Pork Producers, and the John Birch Society (we’ll be checking out that tent for sure). Two tents that say REPUBLICAN and DEMOCRAT. Other smaller tents for various Illinois officeholders. It’s well up in the 90s and the sky is the color of old jeans. Over a system of crests to Farm Expo—twelve acres of wicked-looking needle-teethed harrows, tractors, harvesters and seeders—and then Conservation World, 22 acres I never do get straight on the conserving purpose of.
Then back around the rear of the big permanent structures—Artisans Bldg., Illinois Bldg. Senior Center, Expo Center (it says POULTRY on the tympanum, but it’s the Expo Center)—passing tantalizingly close to Happy Hollow, where half-assembled rides stand in giant arcs and rays and shirtless guys with tattoos and wrenches slouch around them, fairly oozing menace and human interest—and I want a chance to chat with them before the Hollow opens and there’s pressure to actually ride the carnival rides, since I am one of those people who gets sick on Near-Death-Experience carnival rides—but on at a crawl up a blacktop path to the Livestock Buildings on the Fairgrounds’ west (upwind!) side. By this time, most of the Press is off the tram and walking in order to escape the tour’s PA speaker, which is tinny and brutal. Horse Complex. Cattle Complex. Swine Barn. Sheep Barn. Poultry and Goat Barns. These are all long brick barracks open down both sides of their length. Inside some are stalls; others have pens divided into squares with aluminum rails. Inside, they’re gray cement, dim and pungent, huge fans overhead, workers in overalls and waders hosing everything down. No animals yet, but the smells still hang from last year—horses’ odors sharp, cows’ rich, sheep’s oily, swine’s unspeakable. No idea what the Poultry Barn smelled like because I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Traumatically pecked once, as a child, at the Champaign County Fair, I have a longstanding phobic thing about poultry.
The ethanol tractor’s exhaust is literally flatulent-smelling as we crawl out past the Grandstand, where there will apparently be evening concerts and harness- and auto-racing—“WORLD’S FASTEST MILE DIRT TRACK”—and head for something called the Help Me Grow tent to interface with the state’s First Lady, Brenda Edgar. It occurs to me that the 366-acre terrain of the Fairgrounds is awfully hilly for downstate IL; it’s either a geologic anomaly or it’s been man-enhanced. The Help Me Grow tent is on a grassy ridge that overlooks Happy Hollow. I think it’s near where I parked. The dismantled-looking rides out below make the view complex. The Expo Center and Coliseum across the Hollow on an opposite ridge have odd neo-Georgian facades, a lot like the older buildings at the State U. over in Champaign. Nature-wise the view is lovely. The serious flooding’s well to the west of Springfield, but we’ve had the same rains, and the grass here is lush and deep green, the trees’ leaves balloon explosively like trees in Fragonard, and everything smells juicy and highly edible and still growing here in a month when I remember everything as tired and dry. The first sign of the Help Me Grow area is the nauseous bright red of Ronald McDonald’s hair. He’s capering around a small plasticky playground area under candy-stripe tenting. Though the Fair’s ostensibly unopen, troupes of kids mysteriously appear and engage in rather rehearsed-looking play as we approach. Two of the kids are black, the first black people I’ve seen anywhere on the Fairgrounds. No parents in view. Just outside the tent, the Governor’s wife stands surrounded by flinty-eyed aides. Ronald pretends to fall down. The Press forms itself into a kind of ring. There are several state troopers in khaki and tan, streaming sweat under their Nelson Eddy hats. My view isn’t very good. Mrs. Edgar is cool and groomed and pretty in a lacquered way, of the sort of female age that’s always suffixed with “-ish.” Her tragic flaw is her voice, which sounds almost heliated. The Mrs. Edgar/McDonald’s Help Me Grow Program, when you decoct the rhetoric, is basically a statewide crisis line for over-the-edge parents to call and get talked out of beating up their kids. The number of calls Mrs. Edgar says the line’s fielded just this year is both de- and impressive. Shiny pamphlets are distributed. Ronald McDonald, speech slurry and makeup cottage-cheeseish in the heat, cues the kids to come over for some low-rent sleight of hand and Socratic banter. Lacking a real journalist’s killer instinct, I’ve been jostled way to the back of the ring, and my view is obscured by the towering hair of Ms. Illinois State Fair, whose function on the Press Tour remains unclear. I don’t want to asperse, but Ronald McDonald sounds like he’s under the influence of something more than fresh country air. I drift away under the tent, where there’s a metal watercooler. But no cups. It’s hotter under the tent, and there’s a reek of fresh plastic. All the toys and plastic playground equipment have signs that say COURTESY OF and then a corporate name. A lot of the photographers in the ring have on dusty-green safari vests, and they sit cross-legged in the sun, getting low-angle shots of Mrs. Edgar. There are no tough questions from the media. The tram’s tractor is putting out a steady sweatsock-shape of blue-green exhaust. Right at the edge of the tent is where I notice that the grass is different: the grass under the tenting is a different grass, pine-green and prickly-looking, more like the St. Augustine grass of the deep U.S. South. Solid bent-over investigative journalism reveals that in fact it’s artificial grass. A huge mat of plastic artificial grass has been spread over the knoll’s real grass, under the candy-stripe tent. This may have been my only moment of complete East-Coast cynicism the whole day. A quick look under the edge of the fake grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing.
One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid?—that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow?—that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?
Maybe what I really miss now is the fact that a child’s radical delusive self-centeredness doesn’t cause him conflict or pain. His is the sort of regally innocent solipsism of like Bishop Berkeley’s God: all things are nothing until his sight calls them forth from the void: his stimulation is the world’s very being. And this is maybe why a little kid so fears the dark: it’s not the possible presence of unseen fanged things in the dark, but rather the actual absence of everything his blindness has now erased. For me, at least, pace my folks’ indulgent smiles, this was my true reason for needing a nightlight: it kept the world turning.
Plus maybe this sense of the world as all and only For-Him is why special ritual public occasions drive a kid right out of his mind with excitement. Holidays, parades, summer trips, sporting events. Fairs. Here the child’s manic excitement is really exultation
at his own power: the world will now not only exist For-Him but will present itself as Special-For-Him. Every hanging banner, balloon, gilded booth, clown-wig, turn of the wrench on a tent’s erection—every bright bit signifies, refers. Counting down to the Special Event, time itself will alter, from a child’s annular system of flashes and sweeps to a more adultish linear chronology—the concept of looking forward to—with successive moments ticking off toward a calendar-X’d telos, a new kind of fulfilling and apocalyptic End, the 0-hour of the Special Occasion, Special, of the garish and in all ways exceptional Spectacle which the child has made be and which is, he intuits at the same inarticulate depth as his need for a nightlight, For-Him alone, unique at the absolute center.
08/13/0925h. Official Opening. Ceremony, introductions, verbiage, bromides, really big brass shears for the ribbon across the Main Gate. It’s cloudless and dry, but forehead-tighteningly hot. Noon will be a kiln. Knit-shirt Press and rabid early Fairgoers are massed from the Gate all the way out to Sangamon Avenue, where homeowners with plastic flags invite you to park on their lawn for $5.00.I gather “Little Jim” Edgar, the Governor, isn’t much respected by the Press, most of whom are whispering about Michael Jordan’s father’s car being found but the father being missing, still. No anthropologist worth his helmet would be without the shrewd counsel of a colorful local, and I’ve brought a Native Companion here for the day (I can get people in free with my Press Credentials), and we’re standing near the back. Governor E. is maybe fifty and greyhound-thin and has steel glasses and hair that looks carved out of feldspar. He radiates sincerity, though, after the hacks who introduced him, and speaks plainly and sanely and I think well—of both the terrible pain of the ’93 Flood and the redemptive joy of seeing the whole state pull together to help one another, and of the special importance of this year’s State Fair as a conscious affirmation of real community, of state solidarity and fellow-feeling and pride. Governor Edgar acknowledges that the state’s really taken it on the chin in the last couple months, but that it’s a state that’s resilient and alive and most of all, he’s reminded looking around himself here today, united, together, both in tough times and in happy times, happy times like for instance this very Fair. Edgar invites everybody to get in there and to have a really good time, and to revel in watching everybody else also having a good time, all as a kind of reflective exercise in civics, basically. The Press seem unmoved. I thought his remarks were kind of powerful, though.
And this Fair—the idea and now the reality of it—does seem to have something uniquely to do with state-as-community, a grand-scale togetherness. And it’s not just the claustrophobic mash of people waiting to get inside. I can’t get my finger onto just what’s especially communitarian about an Illinois State Fair as opposed to like a New Jersey State Fair. I’d bought a notebook, but I left the car windows down last night and it got ruined by rain, and Native Companion kept me waiting getting ready to go and there wasn’t time to buy a new notebook. I don’t even have a pen, I realize. Whereas good old Governor Edgar has three different-colored pens in his knit shirt’s breast pocket. This clinches it: you can always trust a man with multiple pens.
The Fair occupies space, and there’s no shortage of space in downstate IL. The Fairgrounds take up 300+ acres on the east side of Springfield, a depressed capital of 109,000 where you can’t spit without hitting some sort of Lincoln-site plaque. The Fair spreads itself out, and visually so. The Main Gate’s on a rise, and through the two sagged halves of cut ribbon you get a great specular vantage on the whole thing—virgin and sun-glittered, even the tents looking fresh-painted. It seems garish and innocent and endless and aggressively Special. Kids are having like little like epileptic fits all around us, frenzied with a need to somehow take in everything at once.
I suspect that part of the self-conscious-community thing here has to do with space. Rural Midwesterners live surrounded by unpopulated land, marooned in a space whose emptiness starts to become both physical and spiritual. It is not just people you get lonely for. You’re alienated from the very space around you, in a way, because out here the land’s less an environment than a commodity. The land’s basically a factory. You live in the same factory you work in. You spend an enormous amount of time with the land, but you’re still alienated from it in some way. It’s probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it. (Is this line of thinking somehow Marxist? Not when so many IL farmers still own their own land, I guess. This is a whole different kind of alienation.)
But so I theorize to Native Companion (who worked detassling summer corn with me in high school) that the Illinois State Fair’s animating thesis involves some kind of structured interval of communion with both neighbor and space—the sheer fact of the land is to be celebrated here, its yields ogled and stock groomed and paraded, everything on decorative display. That what’s Special here is the offer of a vacation from alienation, a chance for a moment to love what real life out here can’t let you love. Native Companion, rummaging for her lighter, is about as interested in this stuff as she was about the child-as-empiricist-God-delusion horseshit back in the car, she apprises me.
08/13/ 1040h. The livestock venues are at full occupancy animal-wise, but we seem to be the only Fairgoers who’ve come right over from the Opening Ceremony to tour them. You can now tell which barns are for which animals with your eyes closed. The horses are in their own individual stalls, with half-height doors and owners and grooms on stools by the doors, a lot of them dozing. The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stableboy’s boom box. The horses have tight hides and apple-sized eyes that are set on the sides of their heads, like fish. I’ve rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horses’ faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed and more or less odorless—the acrid smell in here is just the horses’ pee. All their muscles are beautiful; the hides enhance them. Their tails whip around in sophisticated double-jointed ways, keeping the flies from mounting any kind of coordinated attack. (There really is such a thing as a horsefly.) The horses all make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They’re not for petting, though. When you come close they flatten their ears and show big teeth. The grooms laugh to themselves as we jump back. These are special competitive horses, intricately bred, w/ high-strung artistic temperaments. I wish I’d brought carrots: animals can be bought, emotionally. Stall after stall of horses. Standard horse-type colors. They eat the same hay they stand in. Occasional feedbags look like gas masks. A sudden clattering spray-sound like somebody hosing down siding turns out to be a glossy chocolate stallion, peeing. He’s at the back of his stall getting combed, and the door’s wide open, and we watch him pee. The stream’s an inch in diameter and throws up dust and hay and little chips of wood from the floor. We hunker down and have a look upward, and I suddenly for the first time understand a certain expression describing certain human males, an expression I’d heard but never truly understood till just now, prone and gazing upward in some blend of horror and awe.
You can hear the cows all the way from the Horse Complex. The cow stalls are all doorless and open to view. I don’t guess a cow presents much of an escape risk. The cows in here are white-spotted dun or black, or else white with big continents of dun or black. They have no lips and their tongues are wide. Their eyes roll and they have huge nostrils. I’d always thought of swine as the really nostrily barnyard animal, but cows have some serious nostrils going on, gaping and wet and pink or black. One cow has a sort of mohawk. Cow manure smells wonderful—warm and herbal and blameless—but cows themselves stink in a special sort of rich biotic way, rather like a wet boot. Some of the owners are scrubbing down their entries for the upcoming Beef Show over at the Coliseum (I have a detailed Media Guide, courtesy of Wal-Mart). These cows stand immobilized in webs of canvas straps inside a steel frame while ag-
professionals scrub them down with a hose-and-brush thing that also oozes soap. The cows do not like this one bit. One cow we watch getting scrubbed for a while—whose face seems eerily reminiscent of former British P.M. Winston Churchill’s face—trembles and shudders in its straps and makes the whole frame rock and clank, lowing, its eyes rolled almost to the whites. Native Companion and I cringe and make soft appalled noises. This cow’s lowing starts all the other cows lowing, or maybe they just see what they’re in for. The cow’s legs keep half-buckling, and the owner kicks at them (the legs). The owner’s face is intent but expressionless. White mucus hangs from the cow’s snout. Other ominous dripping and gushings from elsewhere. It almost tips the steel frame over at one point, and the owner punches the cow in the ribs.
Swine have fur! I never thought of pigs as having fur. I’ve actually never been very close to a pig before, for olfactory reasons. Growing up over near Urbana, the hot days when the wind blew from the U. of I. Swine Barns just southwest of our neighborhood were very grim days indeed. The U. of I. Swine Barns were actually what made my father finally knuckle under and let us get central AC. Swine smell, Native Companion reports her own father saying, “like Death his very own self is takin’ a shit.” The swine in here at the State Fair Swine Barn are show hogs, a breed called Poland China, their thin fur a kind of white crewcut over pink skin. A lot of the swine are down on their sides, stuporous and throbbing in the Barn’s heat. The awake ones grunt. They stand and lie on very clean large-curd sawdust in low-fenced pens. A couple of barrows are eating both the sawdust and their own excrement. Again, we’re the only tourists here. It also occurs to me that I didn’t see a single farmer or ag-professional at the Opening Ceremony. It’s like there are two different Fairs, different populations. A bullhorn on a wall announces that the Junior Pygmy Goat judging is under way over at the Goat Barn.
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