Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
It’s fair time in rural Iowa.
My county’s fair was last week. It was the hottest week of the summer so far, and I was trying (unsuccessfully) to ignore my dread over boiling oceans and ecological collapse.
But as I drove through the fairgrounds gates, I caught a whiff of the unique, commingled aroma of farm animals and funnel cakes, which took my mind off more recent disasters. There is no candle that replicates that smell — and I wouldn’t buy one if there was — but it will live in my body’s memory until I die.
I was three when I took my first exhibit to the county fair: a plate of green onions that I picked and entered (with a little help) in the kids’ horticulture class. I got a pink ribbon for participation, which delighted me — I still cared more about liking the color of the ribbon rather than the status it represented. Three-year-old Sara was a softer creature.
At age six, I entered a piece of artwork. I was awarded the champion ribbon, royal purple and larger than the rest, for the kids’ crayon class. This was very exciting! My drive to win champion ribbons was born. But then the judge complimented me on my excellent drawing of a clown, and I responded that it was a self-portrait. My visual arts career ended there.
When I was old enough, I joined 4-H1. In the early 1990s, there were at least thirteen 4-H clubs in the county — now, we’re down to five. My old club, the Benton Busy Bees, still survives.
I took exhibits to the county fair every year from age 10-17, except for the year we lived in Ukraine2. I also skipped the year that I did a strange six-week college-style summer program on utopias (tl;dr: utopias don’t work, but I drank my first Italian soda and found out that Stanford existed, so the summer program was good for me).
During my 4-H years, I sewed things: a green and black plaid romper with a matching hair bow. A pair of shorts. A throw pillow with ruffled trim. A few quilt blocks that I turned into a wall hanging. I also baked cookies and desserts, stained and finished a doll’s cradle and a hanging shelf, and did other projects that fit into a classic old-school definition of homemaking. There’s still a stash of 4-H awards at my parents’ house — rosettes and ribbons from the county fair, and a few special ribbons for projects that went on to be judged again at the Iowa State Fair.
I made a lot of home ec projects, but I never showed livestock. While I dropped off cookies and cross-stitch, my peers weighed in their cattle or herded swine into pens. They had their own rituals — dark, pressed blue jeans and crisp white 4-H t-shirts for showing their animals; daily chores in the livestock barns; and livestock auctions at the end where the champion animals fetch premium prices from local businesses who support the fair and the kids involved.
My friend Veronica3 came from San Francisco to visit during fair week. We skipped the rodeo since neither of us are into that, but we did go to the fair to see the tractor pull.
Before the show, we wandered the exhibit buildings. In the main 4-H building, I kept thinking that there must be another building we had somehow missed. Gone were the endless rows of projects and exhibits that I remembered from the 1990s… which were probably a shadow of what the 4-H exhibits were in the 1960s, although I didn’t know it at the time.
This year, the kids had made a few culturally appropriative handmade dream catchers, some Lego kits, an assortment of photographs, and a handful of blankets and brownies. The adults had brought quilts, canned goods, and cut flowers for the open class competitions, but not in their old quantities or qualities. Projects were still judged and ribbons awarded, but it was minuscule compared to the fairs I remembered.
Stepping out of the exhibit building and into the livestock barns, it was better, and worse. There was more activity in the livestock barns. But it still felt muted — partly by lack of participation and partly by oppressive heat. The swine were particularly stricken by the high temps, and I heard stories of hogs who refused to follow the kids into the show ring because they wanted to go toward the cooling-off water hoses instead and could not be compelled to change their minds.
It felt a little like an uneasy dream, verging on nightmare — wandering barns that should have been full of animals and kids, smelling/sensing the ghosts of past fairs, and wondering where everyone was.
Veronica and I left the livestock barns and grabbed food. I introduced her to her first walking taco — taco meat dumped into a single-serve Doritos bag, topped with cheese, and eaten with a fork. We split an order of fried Oreos, which were delish. We saw a cousin of mine, who recently split the sheets4 with his wife; he said hi, but didn’t introduce me to his new lady friend. We grabbed cans of hard seltzer to take into the bleachers with us, although I made a rookie mistake and forgot to bring koozies with us to keep our drinks cold.
The tractor pull includes various classes of vehicles (tractors, trucks, etc.), each with varying rules about modifications. Each vehicle pulls a weighted sled across an arena to see who can pull the farthest — although in this case, “arena” is an overstatement. Our fairgrounds has old-school metal bleachers, four or five rows tall, on either side of an empty oval of dirt, with a little room for people to set up lawn chairs if they feel like it.
Veronica and I climbed into the bleachers and sat next to my favorite former English teacher. I talked to her son and his wife, and thanked the wife for supporting my appointment to the library board (oh, btw, I’m on the library board now). A man named Galen sang the national anthem, as he does every year; he’s a brother of the lumber yard owner, whom Veronica had met earlier in the trip. Veronica could probably pass a basic genealogy test based on my town, although the intricacies of third marriages and double cousins might still elude her.
We watched the trucks and tractors, pushing ear plugs deeper into our ears as each vehicle roared through its pull. The sun set behind the funnel cake stand. The temperature became more bearable. A toddler fell backwards through the bleachers to the ground below; a stranger jumped down to scoop her up. She was fine a minute later, although the dad went and bought a new funnel cake to replace someone’s treat that she’d knocked off the bleachers as she fell.
There’s a lot of downtime during a tractor pull. The crew smooths out the dirt after every run to make a level playing field, and they reset the weighted sled and usher the next vehicle into position. I looked around during one of those pauses and realized…I didn’t see a single person looking at a cell phone.
People chatted with their neighbors. They watched the field being leveled. They gave instructions to roving bands of kids, who ran up and asked for money or permission before running off again. Or they simply enjoyed the evening, and the slight breeze that cleared the diesel exhaust and swirled through the dust.
Fairgrounds and festivals have always held magic. There are hundreds of folktales and fairy warnings related to fairs and festivals — those special, liminal places that show up for a day or week, create magic, tempt humans into making bad decisions, and then move on and disappear.
We still crown a Fair Queen, who presides over the event and is then forgotten. We bring items to be judged by our peers and accept ribbons as payment. We eat festival-only foods and exchange news/gossip, before school starts and harvest kicks in and no one has time for entertainment. And the Fair Board makes sure, even with limited funds and an all-volunteer staff, to bring in magical moments for the kids — balloon animals, face painting, magic shows.
Many of these kids can’t afford to go to any other kind of show. Even the Fair Board has been forced to raise ticket prices beyond what a lot of people here can pay to bring their families to an event. They’re attempting to balance the first-world economics of hiring tractor pulls and rodeo companies with the rural economics of poverty and volunteer-run organizations.
How do you hold a rural county fair in 21st century America, with all the liability issues and permits and inspections and licensing? How do you pay for those urban-influenced costs with tickets that a rural paycheck can barely afford?
How do you push through all the distractions that keep kids from participating and adults from making time? How do you find enough kid exhibitors and adult volunteers to make the fair happen, when there are other, newer things (and economic pressures) to occupy everyone — and when all the messages we get these days would encourage us to turn inward and stop participating in the communities around us?
I still felt a glimmer of magic at the fair this year. It wasn’t the magic of getting ribbons as a child. And it wasn’t as busy as it used to be. But there was still some magic in how the fair lures kids into caring about balloon animals instead of YouTube. It lures adults into watching a tractor pull or rodeo, sitting patiently and enjoying the evening air rather than seeking out a screen.
My hometown always feels like it hovers between hope and oblivion. The fair adds another layer of liminal space. During fair week, we still have a foot in the modern world — food inspectors at the concession stand, increased ticket prices, fewer exhibits, and a surprise appearance by Ron DeSantis5.
But we also have a foot in the magic of an older world — where children run unattended, no one feels rushed, and ancient festival rhythms still hold on, at least for one more year.
Cheers,
Sara
4-H is a youth group organization primarily affiliated with the land-grant colleges — in our case, Iowa State University. Kids learn skills related to ag or home ec, and do projects for the fair, as well as engaging in community service.
If you missed it, I wrote about our year in Ukraine in From Ukraine, With Love.
Veronica Wolff is also a writer! You can find her on her website. We had a great time writing on my balcony, driving around abandoned places, and going to the fair. She has promised to come back, if only to eat my tater tot casserole again.
“Split the sheets” is common slang for divorce here.
I didn’t meet DeSantis, but I’ve seen photos from the event. If Howard Dean’s scream in 2004 was enough to end his candidacy, I don’t know how Ron DeSantis survives the absurdity of wearing a puffer vest to a county fair when it was 100+ degrees. But my feelings about the current election cycle could fill an entirely separate newsletter, and I’d have to call it something other than “Rural Magic,” so I’ll let the subject drop.
Piercing, this one. Elegiac. I can smell it from here. In Pueblo, they crown a Fiesta Queen, and the taco is a Navajo taco on fry bread, but yes to 4-H. My heart is aching for summer nights when I took sticky boys to the rides.
Here in Bandon, it’s the Cranberry festival, coming in September. They crown a Queen and her court, all dress in cranberry satin, and the pictures are in all the local crb shacks and diners.
Lovely... simply lovely.