A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (19 page)

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.

Pigs are in fact fat, and a lot of these swine are frankly huge—say ⅓ the size of a Volkswagen. Every once in a while you hear about farmers getting mauled or killed by swine. No teeth in view here, though the swine’s hoofs look maul-capable—they’re cloven and pink and kind of obscene. I’m not sure whether they’re called hoofs or feet on swine. Rural Midwesterners learn by like second grade that there’s no such word as “hooves.” Some of the swine have large standing fans going in front of their pens, and twelve big ceiling-fans roar, but it’s still stifling in here. The smell is both vomity and excremental, like some hideous digestive disorder on a grand scale. Maybe a cholera ward would come close. The owners and swineherds all have on rubber boots nothing like L. L. Bean East-Coast boots. Some of the standing swine commune through the bars of their pens, snouts almost touching. The sleeping swine thrash in dreams, their hind legs working. Unless they’re in distress, swine grunt at a low constant pitch. It’s a pleasant sound.

But now one butterscotch-colored swine is screaming. Distressed swine scream. The sound is both human and inhuman enough to make your hair stand. You can hear this one distressed swine all the way across the Barn. The professional swinemen ignore the pig, but we fuss on over, Native Companion making concerned baby-talk sounds until I shush her. The pig’s sides are heaving; it’s sitting up like a dog with its front legs quivering, screaming horribly. This pig’s keeper is nowhere in sight. A small sign on its pen says it’s a Hampshire Swine. It’s having respiratory trouble, clearly: I’m guessing it inhaled either sawdust or excrement. Or else maybe it’s just had it with the smell in here. Its front legs now buckle so it’s on its side spasming. Whenever it can get enough breath together it screams. It’s unendurable, but none of the ag-professionals comes vaulting over the pens to administer aid or anything. Native Companion and I are literally wringing our hands in sympathy. We both make plangent little noises at the pig. Native Companion tells me to go get somebody instead of standing there with my thumb up my butt. I feel enormous stress—nauseous smells, impotent sympathy, plus we’re behind schedule: we are currently missing the Jr. Pygmy Goats, Philatelic Judging at the Expo Building, a 4-H Dog Show at something called Club Mickey D’s, the Semifinals of the Midwest Arm-Wrestling Championships at the Lincoln Stage, a Ladies Camping Seminar, and the opening rounds of the Speed Casting Tournament over at the mysterious Conservation World. A swineherd kicks her Poland China sow awake so she can add more sawdust to its pen; Native Companion utters a pained sound. There are clearly exactly two Animal Rights advocates in this Swine Barn. We both can observe a kind of sullen, callous expertise in the demeanor of the ag-pros in here. A prime example of spiritual-alienation-from-land-as-factory, I posit. Except why take all the trouble to breed and train and care for a special animal and bring it all the way to the IL State Fair if you don’t care anything about it?

Then it occurs to me that I had bacon yesterday and am even now looking forward to my first corn dog of the Fair. I’m standing here wringing my hands over a distressed swine and then I’m going to go pound down a corn dog. This is connected to my reluctance to charge over to a swine-pro and demand emergency resuscitative care for this agonized Hampshire. I can sort of picture the look the farmer would give me.

Not that it’s profound, but I’m struck, amid the pig’s screams and wheezes, by the fact that these agricultural pros do not see their stock as pets or friends. They are just in the agribusiness of weight and meat. They are unconnected even at the Fair, this self-consciously Special occasion of connection. And why not, maybe?—even at the Fair, their products continue to drool and smell and ingest their own excrement and scream, and the work just goes on and on. I can imagine what the ag-pros must think of us, cooing at the swine: we Fairgoers don’t have to deal with the business of breeding and feeding our meat; our meat simply materializes at the corn-dog stand, allowing us to separate our healthy appetites from fur and screams and rolling eyes. We tourists get to indulge our tender Animal Rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon. I don’t know how keen these sullen farmers’ sense of irony is, but mine’s been honed East-Coast keen, and I feel like a bit of a schmuck in the Swine Barn.

08/13/ 1150h. Since Native Companion was lured here for the day by the promise of free access to sphincter-loosening high-velocity rides, we make a quick descent into Happy Hollow. Most of the rides aren’t even twirling hellishly yet. Guys with ratchet wrenches are still cranking away at the Ring of Fire. The giant Gondola Ferris Wheel is only half-assembled, and its seat-draped lower half resembles a hideous molary grin. It’s over 100° in the sun, easy.

The Happy Hollow Carnival area’s a kind of rectangular basin that extends east-west from near the Main Gate out to the steep pathless hillside just below Livestock. The Midway is made of dirt and flanked by carnival-game booths and ticket booths and rides. There’s a merry-go-round and a couple of sane-paced kids’ rides, but most of the rides down here look like genuine Near-Death Experiences. On this first morning the Hollow seems to be open only technically, and the ticket booths are unmanned, though heartbreaking little streams of AC’d air are blowing out through money-slots in the booths’ glass. Attendance is sparse, and I notice none of the ag-pros or farm people are anywhere in sight down here. What there are are carnies. A lot of them slouch and slump in awnings’ shade. Every one of them seems to chain-smoke. The Tilt-a-Whirl operator’s got his boots up on his control panel reading a motorcycle-and-naked-lady magazine while two guys attach enormous rubber hoses to the ride’s guts. We sidle over for a chat. The operator’s 24 and from Bee Branch Arkansas, and has an earring and a huge tattoo of a motorcycle w/ naked lady on his triceps. He’s way more interested in chatting with Native Companion than with me. He’s been at this gig five years, touring with this one here same company here. Couldn’t rightly say if he liked it or not, the gig: like as compared to what? Broke in the trade on the Toss-a-Quarter-Onto-the-Plates game and got, like, transferred over to the Tilt-a-Whirl in ’91. He smokes Marlboro 100’s but wears a cap that says WINSTON. He wants to know if Native Companion’d like to take a quick walk back across the Hollow and see something way out of the usual range of what she’s used to. All around us are booths for various carny-type games. All the carny-game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying “Testing” and reciting their pitches’ lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: “You got to get it up to get it in”; “Take it out and lay’er down, only a dollar”; “Make it stand up. Two dollars five chances. Make it stand up.” In the booths, rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet like game put out to cure. One barker’s testing his mike by saying “Testes” instead of “Testing.” It smells like machine grease and hair tonic down here, and there’s already a spoiled, garbagey smell. My Media Guide says 1993’s Happy Hollow is contracted to “… one of the largest owners of amusement attractions in the country,” one Blomsness and Thebault All-Star Amusement Enterprises of Crystal Lake IL, up near Chicago. But the carnies themselves all seem to be from the middle South—Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma. They are visibly unimpressed by the Press Credentials clipped to my shirt. They tend to look at Native Companion like she’s food, which she ignores. There’s very little of that childhood sense of all the games and rides being Special and For-Me, I have to say. I promptly lose $4.00 trying to “get it up and in” by tossing miniature basketballs into angled straw baskets in such a way that they don’t bounce back out. The game’s barker can toss the balls behind his back and get them to stay in, but he’s right up next to the baskets. My shots carom out from eight feet away—the straw baskets look soft, but their bottoms make a suspicious steely sound when the balls hit.