Then it was off to the various barns. Every kind of farm animal has its own distinctive smell. The Cow Barn, for instance, features a dusty, earthy smell that's rather mellow. On the other end of the spectrum would be the Swine Barn, which houses a sharper odor, very sour and pungent.
It's not so much the hogs' smell that bothers most city folk as it is the sound. There are few noises more disconcerting to the uninitiated than the screams of a distressed sow: Reeh! Reeh! After 10 seconds, it begins to sound damn near human. Mostly, though, the swine remain calm and lounge about on their sides like old, defeated winos.
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Soon enough, I spotted an empty pigpen and fixed up an idea. I climbed inside the pen and lay in the finely ground woodchips and pretended to be sound asleep. It reeked something fierce, but was surprisingly comfortable. No one said a word. A passing animal-rightsist could be forgiven for assuming the stunt to be some kind of performance-art commentary on the terrible conditions endured by doomed-for-slaughter swine, which, to be perfectly honest, it was not.
Of course, there was nothing funny when news came out later that swine flu had infected four 4-H members, which compelled fair officials to send 120 4-H'ers home early. I grew convinced that I had the H1N1 virus, even though I know damn well you don't get it from pigs. Due to hypochondria, I came down with a slight fever the next day. (Turned out to be a very mild case of sunstroke).
Wednesday
One of the things about the fair, and any mass gathering of people for that matter, is that it brings into focus previously unconsidered forms of human behavior.
By the fifth day roaming about the shuffling herd, I began to take notice of a particular breed of pedestrian. While in the miniscule minority, they're verily unavoidable in too-tight quarters. (By that afternoon, it appeared quite possible to crowd-surf the three-block span of Carnes Avenue.) When passing by a fellow foot traveler heading in the opposite direction, most people—probably 95 percent of the human population if one had to guess—make a subtle shoulder shimmy to avoid contact or, at the very least, cushion the blow.
But not these assholes. They stride straight ahead, effectively playing chicken with those brushing past them, as if to acquiesce in the slightest to oncoming foot traffic would be a sign of some sort of personal inadequacy.
I had never noticed this phenomenon before, at least not consciously, and the more I speculated as to the offenders' mindset, the more irked I became at their belligerence. I consequently vowed to hold my ground the next time one of these bee-liners came through.
Sure enough, that afternoon, a blockish, sunburned oaf in a purple Brett Favre jersey stared me down on Judson Avenue. The crowd parted for him as if he were Moses. I resolved to hold my ground.
"Asshole," he muttered.
I plopped down on a set of sun-baked green bleachers outside the WCCO building and turned this over. Staring absently into a trio of TVs tuned to WCCO—the din of melodramatic soap opera dialogue clashing preposterously with the ooga horns and carnival music—I realized that it was quite possible that the guy was, like me, fed up with the same wankers whom I myself had declared war on. Maybe we were brothers-in-arms in the same cause. I reckoned this same misunderstanding plays out along all of human interaction, up to and including foreign policy. From there on out, I got out of the way of any and all passersby, including bee-liners.
If there's a point here, it's that once you've run out of Midway tickets with hours to burn at the fair, your mind tends to wander. Realizing that this kind of boredom-induced navel-gazing was apt to breed more madness and not lessen it, I headed back to the Midway Men's Club for some final rounds.
Two beers in, I struck up a conversation with a gaunt, hawk-faced man who looked about four decades too old to still be smoking. His name, I gleaned from his yellow nametag, was William. His blue Wal-Mart jacket was a function of his being a fair employee; the retail monolith sponsored the Grandstand concerts. William worked on the sanitation crew, a position he'd held down for the past six years. And why shouldn't he? He lived only two blocks away.
And so, every night, after all the fairgoers have vacated the premises, William and his compatriots comb the grounds with their clasping sticks, picking up literal tons of trash. The work is unheralded, the pay nominal—$8.50 an hour.
"I'm 73 years old; I don't give a shit," he chuckled, a plume of cigarette smoke escaping his mouth. "What the hell else am I gonna do?"
For whatever reason, William's words stayed with me as the fireworks began to pop off over the Grandstand and families strolled up and down the neon Midway and young couples ducked mischievously into Ye Old Mill. His words were still with me two hours later as I exited the grounds for the last time. The sun had been down for more than three hours by this point. The air had chilled.
An autumn breeze began to blow. Goddamn it, an autumn breeze began to blow.
