I like the Fair best that first day, that Friday early afternoon when the flowers are still fresh, before the crowds become so thick it's hard to find old friends among all the strangers, the old friends who remember when Fair time was fists first and the fights went on from sundown to sunup. As did the drinking, and Deputy Squires had to be reinforced by all the available deputies from all areas of Mendocino County.
Slim Pickens said Boonville was the roughest town he ever called a rodeo in, which was probably a reference to Boonville circa 1949-50 when the mills were going strong and recreational drinking and fighting was the primary weekend recreation. Fair time was still pretty rough through much of the 1970s, as Deputy Squires will tell you, but The Valley has been considerably blanded down since, its collective personality not nearly as vivid, but one must suppose, musn't one, that an ice cream cone is preferable to an empty Bud bottle to the side of the head?
At the bargain rate of two bucks for seniors, my first act, once past the seductively placed ATM machine just inside the gate, was to buy $5 of chances for a quilt sewn by The Yorkville Ladies Sewing Circle, just about the only raffle I've ever entered that I really wanted to win. I had a purely utilitarian quilt as a kid. My grandmother made it during The Great Depression out of whatever she had at hand which, for the quilt I grew up with, was discarded men's suits, old neckties and random pieces of cloth she would stitch together for warmth not beauty. But it was beautiful all the same as handmade things usually are, and I've been a quilt guy ever since.
Inside the Home Arts Building quilts become an art form, quilts of a whole other order, stunning things so colorful and so meticulously crafted, well, I'm sorry I didn't win one from Yorkville. Further in, I noted a blue ribbon on Ann Fashauer's apple cake and made a note to beg one from her when I see her at Trivial Pursuit.
I know it's me, but I don't see much photography that I like, and you can take Ansel Adams but leave me the Weegees, so I hustled through what seemed like miles of photos of dogs, children and seagulls without distinguishing the three species, and almost fell over Roy Laird's captivating found art sculpture of a giant insect made up of scrap metal the talented Laird had lying around his Navarro shop.
Not to be too negative or, the goddess forbid, inappropriate, but the art exhibit, especially the paintings, needs a fundamental upgrade. Mendocino County has quite a few talented artists, but few, if any, are on exhibit at the Fair, and the gifted Marvin Schenck a resident of Navarro just down the road.
Another Trivial Pursuit teammate, Barbara Scott, was in charge of the floral exhibits in June Hall, and the flowers never looked better, humbling to the writer whose dahlias seldom bloom and whose coreopsis never did show up this year.
In the Apple Hall, Rob and Barbara Goodell, reinforced by Willie Schmitt, presided over an array of this splendid and versatile fruit, which included varieties now mostly extinct in a valley where they were once the dominant export crop, and another reminder that the Anderson Valley has changed so often and so fast in the 150 years since the Indians succumbed to typhoid and mass murder it's at times downright disorienting.
I was holding this sanguine thought and a piece of incomparable apple pie prepared by Joanadel Hurst and crew, Joanadel carrying on the Fair time pie baking tradition of her mother, Joan, the late Grandma Pie, Ruby Hulburt, and the Methodist ladies, past and present, when the irrepressible Hayes Brennan, whose economic history of Anderson Valley should be required reading for all locals, walked by, only slightly diminished by the stroke that nearly finished him off, but upright, mobile and as pleasant as always.
Emerging sober from my office high atop the Farrer Building at dusk Saturday night, remembering the Fair weekend when I woke up with knots on my head and a major hangover unable to recall how I got from the Lodge to my bed, and no memory of who inflicted the knots, hoping I inflicted some too, I thought I saw a touring balloon come down less than a mile northeast of central Boonville. An aerial Fair visitor or a figment of my failing eyes and pedestrian imagination?
Merry families were still streaming into the night time Fairgrounds and the parking lots were full for the rodeo with Dean Titus and the Coyote Cowboys tuning up where only minutes before bull riders had been tossed like rag dolls from the backs of plunging beasts as big as Dick Sand's Senior Shuttle. I remembered the rodeo night when a local kid, Scott Anderson, got on a bull but never got out of the chute as the bull went wild right were he was, hurling Scott laterally in the pen so violently the boy's rescuers had a hard time getting a grip on him to save him. That was far back enough for the rodeo callers to tell wildly funny jokes about hippies, much less amusing jokes about ethnic targets of opportunity.
Sunday morning I was able to get my breakfast at Alicia's just before she and her irreplaceable restaurant were nearly overcome by waves of hungry Fair goers. A diner on the stool next to me remarked, “I always stop here when I'm over from Ukiah. I love this place. Best breakfast in Mendocino County. You come here often?” Yep, and if you'll take your thumbs off my tortillas I will resume enjoying it.
Joining Bob and Bebe Buckhorn for Sunday's parade on the stairs of the late, lamented High Pockety Ox, wondering if the original home of Boonville beer would forever remain an unoccupied, ghostly hulk, a man of some years asked me, “Are you Mike Shapiro? I haven't seen Mike for years. You look just like him. I thought I had Mike's cell phone number but I don't.” I said I wasn't Mike but I'd sell him the building if he had the cash, but the man walked off in a cloud of Magoo-like mutterings about “Mike” and “Where the heck is he?” as I watched Bob from Star Automotive carefully maneuver two mis-parked cars from obliques to laterals to make room for the parade.
Morgan Baynham was helping direct traffic. I heard him say to a passing motorist, “I know I'm standing in the road,” and down towards the high school an air horn blared and here came the American Legion color guard with the parade's grand marshall, Eva Holcomb, and just behind them the Fort Bragg High School Marching Band, about 50 strong, and quite good, too, as a nitpicker noted, “They're walking, not marching,” and you can't please everyone, can you?
The Anderson Valley High School football team, as yet unbloodied by actual grid iron combat, roared past with chest thumps and fierce roars. And there was Amanda Hiatt's little boy as at home on a big Palamino as most kids his age are on training wheels.
Then, in no particular order, a horseback harem girl, Dave Severn in the Anderson Valley Meat Wagon, an impressive contingent of maybe 30 Mexican horsemen who could have been Pancho Villa's body guard if Villa had had uniforms, a lady in pioneer regalia – bonnet and hoop skirts – riding a kind of bicycle.
There were pygmy horses and a woody station wagon containing, in the words of a Boonville man who shall go unnamed, “Old Bats For Obama.” Val Muchowski and Rachel Binah are not old bats, I replied indignantly. Bats don't drive.
Uncle Sam, aka Bruce Hering, passed by on a tractor and trailer with a bunch of children in it that said “Buy Local,” which caused me to wonder if the kids were (1) for sale and (2) organic. Another Uncle Sam, this one on stilts, was followed by a group of fetching young women, one of whom was even more impressively agile than Sam had been on his stilts as she gyrated to the arrhythmic drumming of trans-generational male hippies in some kind of motorized bathtub.
A Jeep festooned with American flags and containing, presumably, Americans, drove past. The Boonville Brewery's dramatically beautiful team of Belgian stallions or whatever they are – perfectly groomed, large black horses – moved sprightly down the road pulling a wagon full of moppets, and then John Voelker and Doug Mosel's restored harvester, another reminder that Anderson Valley once produced enough grain to supply itself with enough left over for export, and we once had a bank, a drug store and even a used car lot, and I'm fully prepared to buy local and never leave the place except maybe for an occasional Giant's game as we go rapidly back to the future. Voelker and Mosel, incidentally, brought in a grain crop this year just off Lambert Lane, and bless them both and the slow food movement that brought them here to the land of big, fast eaters.
The ever ebullient Sheriff Allman brought up the rear, often stopping to leap from his command vehicle to shake hands with a constituent. Riding with the Sheriff was a person in full clown costume, the juxtaposition prompting the inevitable, “Which one is the Sheriff?”
And that was it, a most amusing little parade for the last best little fair in America.
Brian Wood wondered, “No Bobby Beacon, no Eight Balls, no supervisors?” The renowned Beacon, Elk's first citizen, usually appears on horseback but was not present. Also among the missing was the Rossi Family's popular Eight Ball Band float. They're getting older, we're getting older. Maybe next year. The supervisors? They probably couldn't figure out a way to get the taxpayers to pay their per diem.
The Fair days had been warm but not too warm, the nights cool but not too cool, and the Anderson Valley, sun kissed and fog blessed was a happy place when the full moon rose up over Ukiah to chase the setting sun into the sea at Manchester. The 81st Fair had come and gone, and all was almost like it had always been in the Anderson Valley.
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