We learned to make balloon animals at the Kid’s Stage of the Southeast Alaska State Fair this year, the secret being a small plastic pump to inflate those long balloons that defy most everyone’s blowing capacity.
So some knowledge was gained amid the chaos that results from combining sugar-addled youngsters with tempera paint, glitter, and hot glue. Also, my apologies if you suffered the wrath of the legion of half-pints we armed with cardboard swords and shields.
Take my word on this: Paper weapons are preferable to potato guns falling into the wrong hands.
Despite COVID, near-constant rain and Gov. Dumbleavy’s failure to provide extra ferries for fair weekend (the first such failure in 30 or 40 years), our fair seemed to have come off just fine. People turned out and had fun.
The fair is like Christmas down in Whoville. You could take away all the attractions and folks would still gather at the fairgrounds in late summer and have a ball. Someone would start playing a jug or a zither on the Main Stage and everyone else would begin to jump around like they’d just won the lottery, and they’d be right. Being in Haines in July is a grand prize.
That was evident on the fair’s opening night as Moontricks – a band with only a synthesizer and a banjo – jammed the Payson’s Pavilion dance floor with twentysomethings. The faces of some local high school girls stood out amid the sea of groovy, swaying strangers and they were beaming.
Events that can cast that kind of spell are rare here.
One reason the fair works is because so many people have contributed to it over the years. Most everyone in town owns a little corner of it, one way or another, so everyone looks after it. I can remember Erwin Hertz digging up electric lines the eve of the fair and Bob Henderson on his tractor grooming Raven Arena for the annual Horse Show.
As fair director years ago, Joanne Waterman had the genius to dedicate the fair’s grassy southwest corner to young people, an area for rides, crafts, carnival games, a sandbox and jungle gym, plus room for families just to spread out on the lawn.
The park-like effect is a magnet that holds youngsters and adults at the fairgrounds for hours.
A middle-aged mom from out-of-town arrived at the craft stage about an hour before the fair’s end Sunday and said, “Omigod. I love this. Why didn’t I find this place sooner?” Many devoted crafters are not children, it turns out. Other moms come and sit to take a load off their feet.
Free crafts dates back to 1995, when a fair director exasperated by complaints that the fair only robbed children of pocket money asked: Can we do something with kids that doesn’t cost them any money?
The craft stage blossomed with the arrival of Diane Arnold, an annual visitor from California who can create more with cardboard than all of Sicily makes with semolina. Besides providing five or six craft stations, Arnold always enters an outfit in the Wearable Art Contest and masterminds the ensemble floats for Saturday’s state fair parade.
Arnold is the ultimate fair insider, a critical piece of infrastructure that few people see or even know about. But her involvement speaks volumes about the magic provided – and received – by being part of the fair scene.
The fair is a fairytale tucked inside our fairytale town, an extra treat like vanilla cream inside a doughnut. You can’t blame a person for gobbling it up.
P.S. For reasons that confound me, judges scored my Weird Al Yankovich mash-up of the fair theme, “Salmon Chanted Evening,” as tops in the Southeast’s Got Talent competition Thursday. A fairgoer asked that I post my lyrics, so here they are, with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein.
Salmon Chanted Evening
Salmon chanted evening, you may see a sockeye,
You may see a sockeye across a mountain stream,
And somehow you know, you’re going to know even then,
That somehow you’ll see her again and again and again.
Salmon chanted evening, some fish may be swishing,
You may see her splashing across a mountain stream,
And night after night, strange as it seems,
The sound of her splashing is going to haunt all your dreams.
Who can explain it, who’s going to say why?
Fools give you reasons, other men never try.
Salmon chanted evening, when you find your true fish,
When you feel her biting the Pixie on your line
Then fly to her side and make her your own,
Or all through your life you’re going to fish alone.
Once you have caught her, never let her go,
Once you have caught her, never never never let her go.
Never never never never … Never Never let her go