MISQUAH — The Minnesota State Fair opens Thursday and runs twelve days through Labor Day, and Misquah, as it does every year, will be substantially represented and thoroughly opinionated about it.

Going down: eleven 4-H members with State Fair trips earned at last week’s county show, seven animals including the Vekved triplets’ three dairy champions, the Ladies’ Aid’s “Chain of Lakes” quilt for exhibition display, several advancing open-class entries, and one giant pumpkin on a borrowed flatbed leaving Wednesday night at fifty miles an hour.

Also going down, at various points across twelve days and by no coordination whatsoever, will be a large fraction of this town. The Klatch estimates “most of us, one day each.” The Daybreak has posted its usual sign-up sheet for rides, which is less about carpooling than about ensuring that everyone who goes on a Tuesday knows who else is going on that Tuesday. The resort reports its remaining guests ask about it. Even Harold Aas, who has said for eleven years that he has been to enough state fairs, has been observed studying the parking map on the wall at Tim’s.

What the town will bring back is what it always brings back: a strong opinion about the price of things, an insistence that the crowds were worse than last year, at least one item purchased at the Machinery Hill end that the purchaser cannot fully justify, and a story. The Pilot-Independent will print what it can verify and reminds readers that photographs of the butter carving are welcome and that we have received one every year since 1971.

The fair closes Labor Day, September 7. School has, this year, already started by then, which is covered elsewhere in this edition and is the sort of collision that only happens when a holiday falls late and a legislature gets involved.

---