STATE FAIR
My community is tucked into the American prairie like a single tuft on a large green pillow. But for all the rolling fields around us, we are cut off utterly from this lovely landscape. I do not know when barley goes in. I could not tell you when sorghum comes out.
The state fair allows for a glimpse of the world that lies beyond the warehouses and the refineries, where 4H kids fatten pigs for auction and a good-looking silage bundle signals a healthy yield. I like to talk to the kids who come to the fair. What is it like to see a prize hog trussed? How can you tell one palamino from another, when, to my untrained eyes, they all look the same?
The fair is now a heavily commercialized affair, with plenty of small-time hucksters and high-performance gluttony. A single corn dog may be one corn dog too many? But I don't pretend that that the world behind this screen is a green Arcadia of sturdy farmers with pristine values. I do not know enough to say.
What I see, especially at the edge of the fair, is work, exhaustion, the raveled edge of poverty, and a way of thinking about domestic animals that is powerfully, brutally unsentimental. At the end of the day, the prize chickens are gone, and all that's left are the seed husks and the feathers.
