AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — The grandstand was full at seven Saturday and still full at nine-thirty, which has not happened at a Misquah rodeo before. The stock contractor brought thirty head up from Iowa, the announcer worked from the crow’s nest with the same records he has used since 2019, and the arena, dry all week, held up until the last event.

Saddle bronc went to a rider out of Bemidji on a horse named Kettle that has now bucked off eleven of the last thirteen men who have gotten on it, which the announcer mentioned each of the eleven times it came up. Barrel racing went to a seventeen-year-old from Hinckley by four hundredths of a second. In the local classes, the mutton bustin’ drew twenty-two entries, an all-time high, and produced what the announcer called “the most determined four-year-old I have ever put on a sheep” — Wyatt Knutson, who rode to the far cone, let go on his own terms, stood up, and put both arms in the air like a man who had planned it, which his mother reports he had.

The fireworks went up at 9:40 from the ballfield end, launched by the fire department with the Sheriff’s substation on the road and Chief Sundberg standing where he has stood for this since 2011. The show ran about twelve minutes against a budget of nine, a discrepancy Sundberg attributed to “the finale, which got away from us a little,” and which drew a noise from the grandstand that people at the landing four miles away reported hearing.

What most people who were there will remember, though, is the intermission before it — the arena lights down, the grandstand quiet, and the announcer reading the names of the four Legion seniors and the eleven 4-H members going to the State Fair, one at a time, into the dark. It took ninety seconds. Nobody was on a horse. It got the second-loudest sound of the night.