Buehner Blog

Sorry, no pictures this time. We unwisely decided we wouldn't need the camera on this outing.....

We decided that, after the recommendations of many friends and co-workers, we needed to experience the local culture in the form of the Washington County Fair, and I must say we weren't disappointed. We went on Friday morning, which turned out to be a wise decision. The crowds were sparse, and later on in the afternoon it started raining, so we would have gotten soaked and my kids would have started playing in the mud. Or what they thought was mud. At a county fair. With livestock.

The first thing to surprise us after passing through the entrance gate was to have someone directing traffic so that someone else could walk two colossal oxen across the pathway back to their makeshift corral. Those oxen were trotting at a pretty fair clip, and I got the sense that you don't try to nudge an oxen in any direction other than the one they're heading in. I've been to a couple of state fairs before and seen cows, horses, bulls, donkeys in their stalls, but it's much more impressive to see these animals walking around (or toward) you.

I smiled (or maybe grimaced) as we then walked towards the tractor pull. I once thought I was more of a city boy. When we first moved to a smaller town, we thought we would really suffer from lack of conveniences, then grew to like our surroundings quite a bit. I now realize that I may not be a city boy, but I'm sure not a country boy either.

Some friends had told us that we might meet them at the fair, and to watch for their family because they'd all be wearing John Deere T-shirts. Only later did I realize we were perhaps the only attendees not to be wearing John Deere T-shirts. As we sat down to watch a few pulls, one fella was just finishing up. The announcer spoke, "Let's give a hand to young Clint Bowman; he looks just like his grandpa on that tractor, doesn't he, folks?" It was then that the charm hit me. We ended up watching several more pulls, a few first-timers, even a young lady, who drew a great round of applause. The kids were having a great time climbing on the bleachers, but held still each time a tractor fired up at the beginning of a pull and cheered and clapped as each one ended.

After making the rounds to the other livestock presentations, finding some raw milk cheese (tasty!), and dining on the hot dog cuisine from the local fire department's fund-raiser, we finally ran into our friends as we made one more stop at the tractor pull. Sure enough, they were all wearing matching John Deere T-shirts, a particular style not sported by anyone else we had seen. When I asked, one explained to me that the air horn was sounded when a competitor broke the 5 mph "speed limit" on the course. This was thrown in by the officials to try to level out the playing field, and the crowd always hates it. I was also told that these rounds were just the warm-up, that the "real" tractors pulled at night. Turbos, superchargers, nitros, the whole works. I found myself longing to come back just to see the fifty-foot billows of smoke. Maybe I am a little bit country boy.

The last experience of the country fair was deep-fried Oreos. Maybe these aren't exclusive to the area, but it was the right place and the right time. Somehow, the kids decided they didn't like them. Between Meridith and me, we managed to choke down the whole order....