Every August this newspaper prints the ribbons, the gate count, and the weight of the largest vegetable. We do not print the other list, because it cannot be verified and because the people on it would not thank us. But it exists, and this year, standing near the Tilt-A-Whirl at about nine-thirty on Saturday night, we thought it deserved a paragraph or two before another fair closes.

Consider what the midway actually is. It is the only five acres in this county where everyone between the ages of thirteen and nineteen is in the same place at the same time, at night, without their parents standing next to them, under lights bright enough that nothing much can happen and dim enough that it feels like it could. It is loud enough that you have to lean in to be heard. It costs money, which means somebody has to offer to pay. It has a Ferris wheel, which stops at the top, which it has been doing on purpose since the invention of the Ferris wheel and which no operator will admit to.

Ask around this town and the stories come out immediately, and they are all the same story. A woman in her eighties told us last week that she met her husband in 1961 in the line for the swings, that he had a friend with him and she had two, and that the friends were dispatched within twenty minutes by a process none of the four of them ever discussed again. They were married fifty-four years. A man at the beer garden Saturday said he proposed behind the poultry barn in 1988 because it was the only quiet place on the grounds, and that his wife said yes and then made him do it again the next week somewhere that did not smell like poultry. Walt and Carol Sorensen, who this month marked forty years, will tell you they met at school; press a little and you learn where they first talked for an hour, and it was not at school.

And it is still happening. It happened Saturday. We watched a boy of about sixteen spend eleven dollars failing to win a stuffed animal at the milk-bottle game while a girl of about the same age watched him fail with an expression of complete and undisguised affection, and then watched her hand the operator two dollars, knock the bottles down on her second throw, and hand him the prize. If you want to know what this town is going to look like in fifty years, that is the sort of thing to watch, and not the gate count.

The fair is five days of ribbons and one long, humid, badly-lit adolescence conducted at high volume in front of the whole county. The ribbons get printed. The rest of it goes into people’s lives and comes back out at anniversaries and funerals, forty and sixty years later, still specific: the swings, the line, the friend who was sent away, the bottles knocked down on the second throw. It is the most durable thing the fair makes. It is not in the premium book, there is no purple ribbon for it, and it will be back next August at nine-thirty on Saturday night, in the same place, doing the same thing to a new group of people who think they invented it.