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07/23/2007: "At the Fair!"

Nate, Channa, Channa's friend Bob, myself and two daughters went to the Oregon Country Fair last weekend. Here are some photos and thoughts on the experience.



We started our Fair experience watching a Carnival of circus acts. One of the early ones was this one featuring Mistress Emasculata and her Trained Males. She had them doing traditional tiger tricks (jump over the whip, sit up, beg). Her proudest moment was shen she forced them to reveal their innermost feelings: "You never listen to my needs!"



Clowns and mimes rumble, a la West Side Story.



The two-headed singing alien, picked up cheap on Craigslist:



My favorite in the carnival was this family act of gymnasts, who swaggered out on stage with their cheeks hanging out (the daughters loved this!), and then proceeded to perform a perfectly mediocre set of tricks with tremendous gravitas.



The world's oldest knife thrower practicing his craft on a hapless shill from the audience - thwong!



Nate shares my appreciation for Baby Gramps, the blues/novelty performer from Seattle. I used to hear him playing on the grounds of Folklife after dark for years. I've been hearing him for so long that he really has aged into his name; when I first shook his hand in the old East Avenue Tavern and looked him in the face 20 years ago I saw a surprisingly young feller with a long beard.



There was a lot of family-friendliness at the fair. Here my older daughter is having her face painted by a volunteer in one of the child care / play centers on the grounds.



You can't go to the Oregon Country Fair without encountering the iconic Big People (my own term, I don't know what they're really called). Here you can see my younger daughter on the shoulders of the very tolerant Bob, as she gets up close and personal with this Big Person.



So-o-o, perhaps you wonder what I made of this experience... first off, I want to say that I had a good time. It was crowded, it was hot, it was huge, but it was also well organized and there were genuinely interesting things to see. I had worries that my daughters would have poor manners if there were people in states of undress (there were, but the daughters handled it well). In one sense, there was a sense of joy and freedom of expression reminiscent of the Gran House scene described by John Michael Greer in "Nawida 2150." Overall I was pleasantly surprised that the distribution of age favored the young over the middle-aged and up, despite this being the 39th year of the Fair's operation. I think that one could almost say that the dominant demographic group was the under 30 group. And clearly the Fair is thriving.

On the downside, I was a bit taken aback by the abundant opportunity to shop. I had planned to keep the shopping expectations low for my daughters, maybe buy them each something small, but that went out the window when my youngest daughter found an orphan ten dollar bill on the ground. Suddenly they had Real Money, though of course not enough for their dreams. We ended up spending much more of the afternoon than I would have liked wandering through endless boutiques looking for something that they each could afford.

Still, I could not put away my "Peak Oil" glasses. I coined this term for myself when we were back in Illinois at the start of July, and we were attending the wedding of my cousin at a large hotel. At one point I was helping out my uncle, the father of the bride, by bringing some luggage up to the bridal suite. I stepped into an elevator at the hotel occupied by a family that was clearly on vacation: baseball caps, luggage, tans; they were talking about what they were planning to do the next day, and it struck me that hotels like that are selling an experience. Resources like energy and food and liquor go into a hotel, and people go there to consume and have an experience. No goods are produced, no lasting changes are made in lives (well, perhaps the wedding counts as a lasting change). Nothing about a hotel is sustainable, it is a sink of time and energy and resources.

So, too, is an event like the Oregon Country Fair. Although the organizers clearly have awareness (and the ticket I purchased included an extra dollar donation for waste disposal), at the core of it, it is an opportunity to have "an experience." The food resources are trucked through the fair grounds on nifty garden carts; the refuse is trucked out on nifty bicycle powered trucks; certain stages are even powered by solar panels! I could not shake the feeling, however, that out of sight of the public pathways there were tractor trailer vans with refrigeration units keeping tons of food fresh.

I was kind of hoping that I would come around a corner, and there would be someone handing out leaflets with radical slogans on it - "Grow your own food!" "Disconnect from the money economy!" "Protect your topsoil - every civilizational collapse has been preceded by topsoil depletion!" I'm certain that many of the good people walking the crowded paths of Oregon Country Fair have these thoughts... I just didn't happen to see them expressed, and that was a disappointment.

Amanda from OSU commented:

Although I can see your point when discussing the hotel experience, I can not understand why you would want to apply the same critique to the OCF. Did you spend any of your time at the fair in Energy Park? The views you seem to cherish are alive and healthy at the Fair. The crafts for sale are almost entirely handmade and family owned. I can't think of any that are not. Next year you may want to go back and explore the recycling operations and read about the donations the OCF makes to better the local communities. They are miles ahead of the rest of the state fairs. I know of no other place where thousands upon thousands of people can get together and share in so much creativity and joy while wasting so little resources. Sure we all can do better on conserving our valuable time and energy, but on occasion we need to play together, unwind and enjoy ourselves. Hope you can see it for all that is good next year and just have fun.

Kurt responds:

In retrospect, I was probably a bit harsh in my assessment regarding the Fair as primarily an experience to be consumed. Thanks for setting me straight.