Jack Knox
Slightly Skewed
Hmm, what to do this weekend? Maybe go see Eat, Pray, Love at the movies.
No, better to wait for the guy version: Eat, Prey, Shoot. Julia Roberts and Sylvester Stallone, together at last.
Better idea still: The fall fair. Haven't been in years. Draft horses, midway rides, Phyllis Diller chickens, pumpkins as big as your first apartment. And then, at the end of the day, the always popular car-finding contest.
September is fair month. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the community, the better the fair. It might not have the glitz, but at least you don't come home with a $36 plastic pen like that fast-talking guy sold you at the PNE.
My favourite remains Metchosin Day, because Metchosin, being sheep-farming country, has a mouthwatering lamb barbecue. (The farmer who raised the lamb once peered at my plate and said "I think that's Buttercup.") Fair fare generally reflects the community: Beef in the Interior, fish on the coast.
Saltspring Island has barbecued tofu, just because it has a stereotype to live up to.
All fairs focus on food. Driving a distant road the other day, I passed a series of hand-lettered signs promoting Shirley Day (not to be confused with Doris Day; Shirley is a real place), where a pancake breakfast and a salmon barbecue were sandwiched around the pie-eating contest - the latter event marrying two of my passions, spectator sports and pastry. (Only better combo: bacon-flavoured hockey fights.)
Pie-eating is just one of the traditional competitions, of course. Go to a country fair, you'll find solemn-faced Solomons judging everything from alfalfa to zucchini. (The Sooke Fall Fair has 59 categories for quilting alone - and that's not even counting the Golden Age bracket.) Prize-winning canning methods are secrets on a par with who killed JFK, which is why people who would have no qualms demanding to know your personal health history or the details of a stranger's sex life turn pink at the ears while stammering out a request for a dill pickle recipe.
The farther from the city you get, the earthier the fairs become. Corporate logos give way to cow-pattie bingo. Get barfing drunk at an urban event, you get arrested; do it at a country fair, you get a mop. I once took some English friends to a country fair up the North Thompson River, where they looked on in horror as a nine-year-old entrant in the Li'l Britches Rodeo was thrown violently from a sheep, landing face-down - whump! - in the rodeo ring, where he lay, unmoving. "Get up, you little sissy," sneered the voice over the public address system. My English friends haven't been back to Canada since.
Other visitors take away fonder memories. My pal Carla Wilson waxes on about the Smithers fair and the legendary fruit pies of the Quick Women's Institute - a name that, alas, derives not from any moral laxity among the membership, but from the community of Quick, just down the road from Telkwa.
(Brings to mind that story out of England where the Ugley Women's Institute was retitled the Women's Institute of Ugley. But I digress.) My colleague Darron Kloster gets all misty at the memory of his boyhood in Violated Livestock, Sask., or whatever it was called, where the highlight of the fair was guessing the weight of the fattest guy in town. (Again, not making this up.)
At least Darron has a farming background. Many city dwellers, wandering through the 4-H displays and homecrafts, go to fairs to reconnect with a past they never had.
Trapped on the urban treadmill, they romanticize a kinder, simpler time when rural neighbours helped each other raise the barn, or harvest the crops, or kill the bank manager and throw his body down a dry well. The farther we get from our roots, as it were, the more we yearn for the solace of the soil.
This is what fairgoers are really searching for as they poke through the pickles and preserves. Julia Roberts should star in the movie.
