County Fair
The Fair Is Six Weeks Out, Which Means the Pumpkins Are Already at War
Entry books are out early this year. The new “lake crafts” category is undefined on purpose, and the giant-pumpkin rivalry remains, by tradition, a two-family cold war conducted entirely in the dark.
MISQUAH — Entry books for the county fair — held, as always, the second week of August — went out this week, released early by a fair board that wanted, as chair Verna Tho put it, “to give the pumpkins a fighting chance, and the rest of us a head start on the canning.”
The standard divisions return: 4-H livestock, baking, preserves, photography, flowers, and the open-class vegetables, where the giant-pumpkin competition continues a rivalry between the Bjornstad and Aakre families that has run, by general agreement, somewhere between friendly and the Cold War for the better part of fifteen years. Neither family will disclose its current weight. Each has, this year, declined to let the other near the patch, and at least one is rumored to have put up a tarp. “It’s a vegetable,” Tho noted. “I remind them every year that it’s a vegetable. It does not appear to help.”
New this year is a category the board has titled “lake crafts” and pointedly declined to define, on the theory that definition would only invite argument. “We trust people to know,” Tho said when pressed, and would say no more. Early speculation at the Daybreak’s corner table has ranged from decorated bobbers to painted oars to dock art to “whatever Harold’s been welding out behind his place,” a reference Harold Aas declined to confirm, deny, or fully understand. The board, asked for a ruling on whether a welded lake monster would qualify, said only that it “would know it when it saw it,” which is the board’s answer to most things.
The 4-H rolls list thirty-eight area young people this year, up slightly, with the swine and dairy barns expected full and the Vekved triplets entered, separately, in three different events. Entries close August 1. The fair board’s lone printed request, set in bold atop the first page of the entry book, is that exhibitors “read the categories this year before entering, not after” — a sentence with, Tho confirmed, “a history behind it that we are not going to get into, except to say that it involved a rooster, a pie, and a misunderstanding we’d all like to move past.”
