It’s a grand old fair

Anyone silly enough to schedule houseguests during the last couple of weeks of August deserves the trek to Palmer and a day at the Alaska State Fair. I should know: having encouraged an easily amused Canadian friend to extend her visit by a week, I found myself gassing up the minivan and hitting the Glenn Highway on the fair's $2 admission day Aug. 27. We arrived at the Purple Gate with three minutes to spare before bargain pricing ended at 2 p.m. That day, parking cost more than the chance for two to pass through the turnstile and enter that madcap, bread-bowl packed, hairspray-encrusted, cheese-curd tossing world of State Fair 2009.

Since I first started attending the fair - with or without guests, alas - Alaska's annual gathering of the tribes has held out promises to "A-moose Yerself" (the fair's theme in 1989); have "The Time of Your Life" (in 2000); and, in 2001, partake in a "Moose Odyssey," a groaner so existential that even the fair's poster artist was unsure of its meaning.

No matter. At the state fair - where we're urged this year to "Get Up and Get Happy" - literal meaning and any search for it are irrelevant, and probably impolite. What does it say about a people drawn year after year to ogle white radishes the size of bowling balls, who are transfixed by competitive pea shelling? Knowing full well that we can't resist watching athletic cloggers and gazing at self-satisfied big pigs, why do we Alaskans do it? Why drop one more ten-spot when, let's face it, many of the roughly 300,000 annual fairgoers will leave pooped and far from a-moosed?

Taking my seat in tentative sunshine at the lumberjack show, it came to me: from the emcee's voice to jokes about stealing off with Betty Lou to the chainsaw-carved rabbit, every tic and shtick is familiar. That immutable show was a real-life re-run of fairs gone by when I'd sit in those very same bleachers, husband and toddler in tow, prepared to "yo-ho" on cue. No matter that in our family, I was the only enthusiastic yo-ho-er; no matter that I was the only one with high tolerance for repetition and really bad puns.

Year after year, there we sat, the three of us, sometimes baking in late-August heat but usually bundled against glacier-fresh breezes, gamely cheering our lumberjack (would we be unlucky enough to be assigned to Team Wasilla again this year?) while he sawed, climbed and log-rolled to applause. Leaving the show last week, watching as someone else's pre-schooler walked off with the rabbit-eared chair, it was impossible not to adore the fair for its ability to conjure beloved ghosts. Here is where our son grinningly rode the ponies; here is where we took a cookies-and-milk break; here's where, as a family, we indulged our annual Ferris wheel ride that always churned my stomach on the downhill glide.

And here, in fading afternoon light, is where my 17-year-old son said an offhand "see ya" and walked off with buddies - not all of them known to me - to pull an all-nighter, to camp at the fair and, I suppose, to begin composing traditions of his own.

Alaskans like me, who outwardly wince at the prospect of A Day at The Fair, are big fakers after all. Sure, the midway is too expensive, too frantic, too crowded. The fair is too full of people who show up in shoes not meant for walking and sweats not meant for leaving the house. Too many children are tugged too long and too far. Too many extra-large bags of kettle corn are consumed.

But to concentrate on externals is to miss the fair's true promise, a message too wistful to appear on any poster. For here at the State Fair, for a few chilly weeks in late summer, is the enduring chance to touch the past, to recall a little boy's soft hand in mine, to forget just for a bit that real life - with tuition payments due and meaning to be discerned - always waits beyond the Purple Trail

Rosanne Pagano is an Anchorage writer and teaches at Alaska Pacific University.