But holy mackerel are there sweets: Fried Dough; Black Walnut Taffy; Fiddlesticks; Hot Crackerjack. Caramel apples for a felonious $1.50. Angel’s Breath, known also as Dentist’s Delight. Vanilla fudge that breaks a kind of weird sweat the minute it leaves its booth’s freezer. The crowd moves at one slow pace, eating, dense-packed between the rows of booths. No ag-pros in sight. The crowd’s adults are either pale or with the pink tinge of new burn, thin-haired and big-bellied in tight jeans, some downright fat and moving by sort of shifting their weight from side to side; boys minus shirts and girls in primary-colored halters; littler boys and girls in squads; parents with strollers; terribly pale academics in Bermudas and sandals; big women in curlers; lots of people carrying shopping bags; absurd floppy hats; almost all with ’80s-fashion sunglasses — all seemingly eating, crowded together, twenty abreast, moving slowly, packed in, sweating, shoulders rubbing, the air deep-fried and spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone, jowl to jowl. Picture Tokyo’s rush-hour subway on an epic scale. It’s a rare grand mass of Midwest humanity, eating and shuffling and rubbing, moving toward the Coliseum and Grandstand and Expo Building and the Livestock shows beyond. It’s maybe significant that nobody looks like they’re feeling oppressed or claustrophobic or bug-eyed at being airlessly hemmed in by the endless crowd we’re all part of. Native Companion cusses and laughs when people step on her feet. Something East-Coast in me prickles at the bovine and herdlike quality of the crowd, though, i.e. us, hundreds of hands rising from paper tray to mouth as we jostle and press toward our respective attractions. From the air we’d look like some kind of Bataan March of docile consumption. (Native Companion laughs and says the batons aren’t ever till the second day.) We’re Jr.-Beef-Show-bound. You do not want to know what appalling combination of high-lipid foods N. Companion lunches on as we’re borne by a living river toward prizewinning beef. The booths keep rolling past. There’s Ace-High All-Butter Fudge. There are Rice-Krispie-squarish things called Krakkles. Angel Hair Cotton Candy. There are Funnel Cakes, viz. cake batter quick-fried to a tornadic spiral and rolled in sugared butter. Eric’s Salt Water Taffy. Something called Zak’s Fried Ice Cream. Another artery-clogger: Elephant Ears. An Elephant Ear is an album-sized expanse of oil-fried dough slathered with butter and cinnamon-sugar, sort of cinnamon toast from hell, really and truly shaped like an ear, surprisingly yummy, it turns out, but sickly soft, the texture of adipose flesh, and undeniably elephant-sized — no one’s in line for Ears except the morbidly obese.
One food venue we fight across the current to check out special is a huge high-tech neonated stand: DIPPIN DOTS—“Ice Cream Of The Future.” The countergirl sits on a tall stool shrouded in dry-ice steam and is at most thirteen years old, and my Press Credentials for the first time make someone’s eyes widen, and we get free samples, little cups of what seem to be tiny little ice-cream pellets, fluorescent BB’s that are kept, the countergirl swears to God, at 55° below 0—Oh God she doesn’t know whether it’s 0 °C or 0°F; that wasn’t in the DIPPIN DOTS training video. The pellets melt in your mouth, after a fashion. More like evaporate in your mouth. The taste is vivid, but the Dots’ texture’s weird, abstract. Futuristic. The stuff’s intriguing but just too Jetsonian to really catch on. The countergirl spells her last name for us and wants to say Hey to someone named Jody in return for the samples.
08/13/ 1310h. “Here we’ve got as balanced in dimension as any heifer you’ll see today. A high-volume heifer but also solid on mass. Good to look at in terms of rib-length to — depth. Depth of forerib. Notice the depth of flank on the front quarter. We’d like to see maybe perhaps a little more muscle mass on the rear flank. Still, an outstanding heifer.”
We’re in the Jr. Livestock Center. A lot of cows move in a ring around the perimeter of the dirt circle, each cow led by an ag-family kid. The “Jr.” pretty clearly refers to the owners, not the animals. Each cow’s kid holds a long poker with a right-angled tooth at its end. They take turns prodding their cow into the center of the ring to move in a tighter circle while its virtues and liabilities are assessed. We’re up in the stands. Native Companion is smitten. The Beef Show Official at the microphone looks uncannily like the actor Ed Harris, blue-eyed and somehow sexily bald. He’s dressed just like the kids in the ring — dark new stiff jeans, check shirt, bandanna around neck. On him it doesn’t look goofy. Plus he’s got a stunning white cowboy hat. While Ms. Illinois Beef Queen presides from a dais decked with flowers sent over from the Horticulture Show, the Beef Official stands in the arena itself, his legs apart and his thumbs in his belt, 100 % man, radiating livestock savvy. N.C. seems less smitten than decapitated, frankly.
“Okay this next heifer, a lot of depth of rib but a little tighter in the foreflank. A bit tighter-flanked, if you will, from the standpoint of capacity.”
The cows’ owners are farm kids, deep-rural kids from back-of-beyond counties like Piatt, Moultrie, Vermilion, all County Fair winners. They are earnest, nervous, pride-puffed. Dressed rurally up. Straw-colored crewcuts. High number of freckles per capita. They’re kids remarkable for a kind of classic Rockwellian U.S. averageness, the products of balanced diets, vigorous labor, and solid GOP upbringings. The Jr. Livestock Center bleachers are over half-full, and it’s all ag-people, farmers, parents mostly, many with video cameras. Cowhide vests and ornate dress-boots and simply amazing hats. Illinois farmers are rural and kind of inarticulate, but they are not poor. Just the amount of revolving credit you need to capitalize a fair-sized operation — seed and herbicide, heavy equipment, crop insurance — makes a lot of them millionaires on paper. Media dirges notwithstanding, banks are no more keen to foreclose on Midwestern farmers than they are on Third World nations; they’re in that deeply. Nobody’s in sunglasses or shorts; everyone’s tanned in an earthtone, all-business way. And if the Fair’s ag-pros are also stout, it’s in a harder, squarer, somehow more earned way than the tourists on the paths outside. The bleachers’ fathers have bushy eyebrows and simply enormous thumbs, I notice. Native C. keeps making growly throat noises about the Beef Official. The J.L.C. is cool and dim and spicy with livestock. The atmosphere’s good-natured but serious. Nobody’s eating any booth-food, and nobody’s carrying the Fair’s complimentary GOVERNOR EDGAR shopping bags.
“An excellent heifer from a profile standpoint.”
“Here we have a low-volume heifer but with exceptional mass in the rear quarter.”
I can’t tell whose cow is winning.
“Certainly the most extreme heifer out here in terms of frame to depth.”
Some of the cows looked drugged. Maybe they’re just superbly trained. You can imagine these farm kids getting up every day so early they can see their breath and leading their cows in practice circles under the cold stars, then having to do all their chores. I feel good in here. The cows in the ring all have colored ribbons on their tails. The lows and snorts of other cows on deck echo under the stands’ bleachers. Sometimes the bleachers shake like something’s butting the struts down there.
There are baroque classifications I can’t start to follow — Breed, Class, Age. A friendly ag-lady with a long tired face beside us explains the kids’ pokers, though. They’re called Show Sticks, used to arrange the cows’ feet when they’re standing, and to prod, scratch, swat, or stroke, depending. The lady’s own boy took second in the “Polled Hereford”—that’s him getting congratulated by Ms. IL Beef Queen for a Livestock Weekly photographer. Native Companion isn’t crazy about the smells and bellows in here, but she says if her husband calls me up next week looking for her it’ll mean she’s decided to “up and follow that Ed Harris fellow home.” This is even after I remark that he could use a little more depth in the forerib.