I missed the Southeast Alaska State Fair in Haines this year and had to settle for the big Alaska State Fair in Palmer, which offers junkier junk food, grown men in cowboy hats and a generous serving of Jesus in the form of booths offering ministry to the fallen.
It’s a bit different than the Haines fair, which leans toward kale salad and, except for the Catholic Women’s Burger Booth, seems more religiously aligned with druidism.
Either way, state fairs tend to be gritty, which is why I like them. If you’re afraid of dust, crowds or the back end of cow, you don’t go to fairs and chances are I won’t miss you not being there.
The fair is for whooping and hollering and being sick to your stomach for the peach cobbler you washed down with onion rings. It’s for falling in love at the square dance with the girl in braids, only to be introduced to her girlfriend. It’s summer’s last hurrah and it’s for all manner of thrills not offered in your small town the other 51 weekends of the year.
You don’t attend the fair. You “do” the fair, insomuch as you do what there is to do there. And if you sprain an ankle trying to set a choker in the logging show competition, you had a laugh and gave your friends a tale they’ll tell for years. No one will think lesser of you for it.
The Palmer fair is a citified event with trails of asphalt instead of wood chips, but what it lacks in atmosphere it makes up in attractions like 100-pound cabbages, pig races and the guy at the sharpening booth who’ll put an edge on your pocketknife for free.
I made my obligatory stop at the turkey legs booth. Legs are $11 each and the line to get one never lets up. I sat down at a picnic table with a Jamaican family who immigrated to Alaska 30 years ago. For a long time they didn’t talk. Like me, they were into their turkey legs for a pure, undistracted experience.
As our legs shrunk to bones, we chatted up the weather. One woman said she missed the snow in winter. Another said, “You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be worried about the seals and sea lions dying.” A man with them noted that the Palmer fair was traditionally a cold, rainy event. How much more evidence do the climate-change deniers need, he asked.
I made my way over to watch a competition of women running with full beer kegs. In a field of burly types, a smaller, younger redhead from Alberta prevailed. The crowd gave her a rousing cheer for coming all the way from Canada and I leaned over and asked her father what he feeds her. “Meat,” he said.
At the Alaska State Trooper’s booth I ran into an Anchorage friend who’s trying to convince his wife to move to Haines but she was with him so instead we talked about his family in Haines and how he’s enjoying retirement. I saw him last at the Haines post office. Alaska is small enough that you can pick up the thread of conversation you dropped two months ago, 800 miles away. But not for long at the fair because there are too many other things to do.
I skipped the pig races, which I’ve seen often. The act came to the Haines fair once. After that, a local man figured he’d replicate it, buying pigs and building a track at our fairgrounds. He apparently didn’t sufficiently starve his passel so when the starting gate opened, his racers just kind of ambled along, forcing him to chase them to the finish line. It’s the only pig race I can clearly remember.
Passing T-shirts that said “Sawdust Is Man Glitter” and “The World Has More Problems than Girls Kissing Girls and Boys Kissing Boys,” I made my way to a wine bar located in a former church, with the white cross still out front. For $8, I got a glass of house red. The barmaid said they get a couple complaints a year about serving unblessed wine in a house of worship, but people mostly like the place. She even sold a few bottles of the Ace of Spades Gold Champagne for $350 per bottle, she said.
Who buys a $350 bottle of champagne at the state fair, I wondered. Maybe the same people who later find Jesus at one of the revival tents? The fair is about trying new things and after downing a bottle of champagne and a brick of French fries a person might want to renounce a whole host of sins.
With my energy flagging, I drank a cup of Kaladi Brothers coffee and passed by booths offering telescoping flagpoles and repair of failed house foundations. By then it was well after 9 p.m., with the crowd thinning out.
A little Native girl, maybe five years old, dragged her sleepy-eyed dad into a hair-extension booth, wanting him to buy her a strand of bright pink or orange to add to her long, brown locks. He feigned resistance, but she plopped down into the vendor’s chair, determined.
I bet she went to school the next morning sporting a fluorescent streak. The fair, after all, comes only once a year.