COUNTY FAIR

by

Joseph J. Dehner

Our bronze Pontiac Chieftain sped westward from Cincinnati on the annual pilgrimage to Iowa. It was 1958, when two-lane, undivided federal highways had no set speed limits. I watched Dad slam on the brakes every forty-five minutes to avoid the small-town speed traps, as Mom coached from the right. In between the traps, green and yellow fields of corn, sunflowers, and soybeans skirted the pavement. Each field looked like the last, a monotony interrupted occasionally by signs like this: 

DON’T STICK YOUR ELBOW

OUT SO FAR

IT MAY GO HOME

IN ANOTHER CAR

Burma-Shave

After a night at a motel, we’d continue on, and by afternoon we’d cross U.S. 6’s iron-girded bridge across the Mississippi River and enter Iowa. Soon we’d arrive in Iowa City.

Gramma would greet us in an apron over a flowered dress faded from Twenty Mule Team Borax washings, her face wrinkled like a sun-scorched prune, gray hair stretched into a bun. She served kolaches and tea as a welcome. Years later I would learn how her family, the Kozderkas, fled European wars to settle on farmsteads with Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, and Germans near where Dvořák composed the New World Symphony. There she met and married Adolph, a grandfather I never knew. They built a grand farmhouse on his earnings as a saloon owner and New York Life Insurance agent. When I visited, Gramma had been a widow almost fifty years.

Her aging, gabled house refereed a land battle between city and country as Iowa City sprawled and farms surrendered to housing plots. A damp straw odor spewed across the yard, filled with its hand-planted vegetable and blackberry patch that was home to snakes. Chickens clucked in the barn, home to spiders as big as golf balls with legs. In command of all the inhabitants was a guardian goose I’d been warned never to approach.

Gramma loved having Dad come home, and though he no longer considered this home, he loved seeing his mother. Iowa certainly wasn’t my home, and I had no plans to make it so. The week in Iowa interrupted my city library’s how-many-books-can-you-read contest, hitting tennis balls against a wall, and bicycling to a woodland park where I hunted trilobites and crinoids in a glacier-carved creek. 

Dennis Detwiler lived right across the blacktop street from Gramma’s house in a cottage built of boards with peeling paint. He and I were both nine that summer. I pictured our fathers growing up as country boys, when Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren Harding took turns as President. Black-and-white photo scrapbooks and a framed collection of my father’s National Rifle Association championship medals hanging in my parents’ bedroom memorialized Dad’s youth, when he shot mink and muskrats and sold their pelts for spending money. Looking for adventure, at seventeen he yearned to join the Army to chase Pancho Villa, but his parents squelched that and enrolled him at the University of Iowa. Dad left for Army service, then to Chicago, then to Cincinnati, or he wouldn’t have met my mother and I wouldn’t be here to tell you about the 1958 Johnson County Fair.

The fair highlighted the week in Iowa. While Gramma’s entry in the strawberry-rhubarb pie competition awaited judgment, my parents ambled with her through General Electric’s Wonders of Electricity exhibit, marveled in the Quilt Arcade, beheld enormous yellow tractors and harvesters, gawked at the world’s largest Statue of Liberty made entirely of butter, and learned how to use more Crisco. Dennis and I were unleashed with five dollars of tickets each until two o’clock, when we’d meet up by the Ferris wheel.

Eating our corndogs on a stick, we scanned the day’s offerings, ranging from the elocution contest semifinals to the dunking booth to the Whirligig to the strongman’s hit-the-bell stand. We headed to the swine shed, where Dennis’ classmate Pamela was vying for a prize. It cost nothing to enter but my innocence.

Pamela grinned with braces glinting and pigtails tightly wound. With my plastic Kodak I took a snapshot of Dennis standing next to but not touching Pamela. She stretched an arm toward Dodie, an enormous hog sporting a pink lace collar. On “cheese,” the sow seemed to smile but then let loose in the other direction. This was methane contributing to climate change, but not a worry back then.

Pamela boasted that Dodie weighed about eight hundred pounds.

Does Dodie sleep in your room? I asked.

Pamela giggled. Nah, she said, but sometimes I sleep in the barn.

Dennis explained that hogs wallow. No kennel, just a fence and a place to slop. And plenty of feed to get ’em plump.

Why plump? I dumbly inquired.

Doncha know?

What?

You like bacon?

Oh, I said. Death in the country—destiny for animals hugged at the fair. I pictured Dodie as an Aztec warrior like in the book I read, waiting for the high priest to cut out her beating heart as an offer to the gods of our gluttony.

Dennis and I left for the Pizza Pop Stand. We chomped on greasy slices as we passed a ten-foot-tall ear of corn emblazoned with a red company logo and an unfamiliar word—HYBRID. Behind it was the Swine Weigh-in Booth. Next came a yellow squash-like vegetable the size of a giant beach ball atop a stand in front of the Ugly Cake Contest tent. We wandered through the Bovine Barn, divided between Beef and Dairy. The milk cows mooed last rites for their neighbors.

Here today, steak tomorrow, said Dennis, pointing at a gold ribboned cow oblivious to its fate. Its cud moved from side to side. I sneezed three times.

Back outside, a barker in a peppermint jacket challenged us to hurl baseballs at bottles, while another fellow waved us toward an array of holstered water guns aimed at targets that could win a stuffed Japanese panda. But it was a tuxedoed guy with a bulging Adam’s apple waving a cane and promising a never-to-be-believed experience who won our attention. We handed him two twenty-five-cent tickets and went inside the tent.

The first spectacle shocked—a stuffed cobra in mortal combat with a mongoose. A spotlight beamed on an enormous glass jar where a two-headed calf fetus floated. Take your seats, blared a speaker. We grabbed two in the front row. Curtains parted. A human appeared in a shocking pink dress and ruby shoes. But she had a moustache and foot-long beard. And yet, she appeared to be a she.

The Bearded Queen, the announcer proclaimed. Marvel at this wonder of nature!

Freak, you mean, snickered Dennis, eyes riveted on the stage.

I was struck dumb. Girls and boys—as different as truth and falsehood. Yet, here was a challenge to that. She stroked her beard, and it didn’t come off. Years later I would learn that hirsutism is a rare condition affecting women. But then it was sheer shock. We fled.

Hey, let’s go in this one, said Dennis, pointing to an enclosure with posters of fashion models in fur coats gracing the entrance. RICHES AWAIT!—letters above the lintel boasted—NUTRIA AND YOU!

Riches—now that gets your attention. The bow-tied man at the entrance grimaced and asked if our parents were here. 

His are, said Dennis.

Bring your folks, the guardian said, they’ll thank you. Come, learn how bright your future can be.

We entered and were enraptured by beautifully shaped panels, charts, photos, and large dollar signs. A woman who looked like an aged Doris Day asked about our parents, and when she learned they were nearby, she led us around the circle. She pointed to a photo of a statuesque woman in a fur coat with the Empire State Building in the background.

Is that mink? I asked, recalling that Dad used to hunt them here, though as Dennis had told me, none remained in Iowa. 

Better than mink, she said. That’s nutria.

What’s nutria? Dennis asked.

I’ll show you, said the woman.

She led us to a pen holding cages of nutria of several colors, most a dark brown. The creatures had blazingly orange incisors. They looked like large rodents with Halloween pumpkin teeth. 

Their pelts are worth a fortune, said the woman. Look at this, she said, stroking a life-sized poster of a model posing before the Eiffel Tower. Give this to your folks, she said, handing us a dark blue folder with gold script. Opportunity of a Lifetime, it glowed. Projections trumpeted that a small investment for a breeding pair ($200 said the fine print) would multiply to thousands in months, and profits would never end.

How can that be? I asked.

They breed quickly and often, the woman said. You sell the offspring back to us, we sell them to others, and you make money every time. Or you can use the pelts and sell the meat or enjoy it for dinner. You can’t lose. You get rich. Bring your folks!

On our way to meet my parents, Dennis and I talked over this investment opportunity. 

You know, said Dennis, we could bring back hunting here in no time.

But they’re not mink, I said. They’re ugly. They’re…they’re rats.

We stopped to use our remaining tickets to buy red velvet funnel cakes, powder wafting like a cloud with each bite. Wind was picking up.

Fur’s one thing. But eating nutria. Yuck, said Dennis. 

Bacon was one thing, rat meat another, I agreed about that. Getting rich by selling rat fur and rat guts? Something’s off, I thought.

They’d be good hunting, said Dennis. We need something to shoot around here.

Okay, what about this—freedom, I blurted, unable to picture myself killing an animal. What if we let them out? Maybe they’ll skedaddle and settle here. You get your target practice, and the nutria go free.

A siren whined. An announcement sounded—tornado conditions in the area. Dennis said this happened all the time—if we see one, that’s when to take cover.

Dennis and I ran back to the nutria booth. As the saleswoman tended to a couple who were scouring the get-rich details on a wall panel shaking from the upswell outside, we sneaked into the nutrias’ lair. Remembering the story we read in Sunday School, I pictured the rodents fleeing like Moses and the Israelites from Pharoah, scampering to the exits for a new home in Iowa’s woods and streams. They’d scurry through the animal sheds. The hogs and cows would panic and stampede, providing cover for the nutrias’ escape. Perhaps all the fair’s doomed creatures would be liberated and spared execution.

I could see the future. Nutria would flourish and restore Iowa 1900. Dennis could hunt like his father and mine did. We would turn back the clock.

Years later I would learn about nutria—how Ponzi-scheme promoters sold them to farmers in the 1920s, and the rodents were abandoned when buyers couldn’t feed them or get a cent for their fur or meat as the Depression struck, how nutria native to Peru and abandoned in America as undocumented aliens invaded Louisiana and were destroying its protective delta marshes. I sensed as a boy there was something wrong with their Iowa appearance, and I knew without proof that the nutria barkers were like snake oil salesmen out to get your money. This was a fraudster invasion into farm life, the ineffable intrusion of greed disguised as commerce into the country life of honest toil.

But a siren interrupted our plot. 

Tornado conditions in the area, blared the announcer.

Dennis and I abandoned our free-the-nutria scheme and headed toward the Ferris wheel as a crowd scrambled toward the exits. Wind scattered fliers promoting Dinocide. I thought, why kill dinosaurs? I grabbed one to read how this miracle substance saved crops and could even be used to control head lice in children. Years later I would learn that Dinocide was a tradename for DDT.

Within a minute, calm and blue sky returned. The sound system announced, Tornado warning lifted.

We met the folks and Gramma on time. She grinned with two gold teeth gleaming and clutched a blue ribbon for her strawberry-rhubarb pie. A spin on the Ferris wheel capped our visit before our return to Kimball Road, the day before our long drive home to Cincinnati.

That afternoon Gramma asked me to come with her. She unlatched the barn door and glared into its dim interior. She approached the goose, who seemed to sense its fate. She grabbed the creature’s neck just below the beak and began to swing the bird. It blared a few honks as the neck seemed to stretch the width of the barn. Then she struck with a hatchet. The headless body stumbled, wings flapping briefly before collapsing in the dirt.

Just before we sat down for dinner, Gramma had me go pick eight ears of corn. Run back with them so we can get them in the pot before sugar turns to starch, she instructed. That corn was the sweetest I ever had that night. And the goose was tender. This was different—and better—than buying ready-to-roast poultry parts at Albers or Kroger back home.

Iowa, country, would never be my home, but the visits taught me how American life began with what we could make of the land and it of us. But then doing better meant leaving the farm behind, as did my father, who moved to cities in search of progress, in search of fortune, in search of Oz. Over time the land lost its magnetism and became dollars per square foot, subject to blandishments of peddlers of pesticide and nutria. Agriculture became agribusiness.

I’m a city guy, but I can feel country deep inside. County fairs persist because of their promise of America as it was, when our country was of spacious skies above a fruited plain. When we called the land home and acknowledged we live off its bounty.

THE END

photo: Harry Rajchgot