Sometimes a summer in South Bend is a hectic thing. First, it’s reunion weekend, and boomers who can’t quite drink like they used to are nevertheless drinking like they can. Then it’s the soccer camps and softball programs, so the dining hall is swarmed with elementary and middle schoolers, and suddenly North Dining Hall starts to feel like fourth period lunch in a linoleum-floored junior high cafeteria. Next, it’s Notre Dame Vision — essentially the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s take on Vacation Bible School — so the quads are swamped with zealous high schoolers who have resting Carlos Acutis face and chatter away about just how much that evening’s Eucharistic Adoration affected them. Last, it’s the Summer Scholars, a cohort of Common App and LinkedIn-oriented zoomers who call to mind those studies about how our generation isn’t misbehaving enough.
Sometimes a summer in South Bend is a lonesome thing. The campers’ parents pick them up and drive them home. The football players wrap up their football player courses called stuff like “Shakespeare on Film” and “Descriptive Astronomy.” The dining hall closes, and now there’s an empty month before school starts. “Lonesome” is the best word for it. Country singers used to be obsessed with the word “lonesome.” To Hank Williams, everything was always “lonesome.”
Boredom is the mother of all invention, and eventually I got bored enough to head to the Indiana State Fair, which ran from Aug. 1–17 in Indianapolis. Specifically, I was heading to the Indiana State Fair’s “Farmer’s Day.” The event was sponsored by Corteva, Inc. (an Indianapolis-based agriscience business specializing in herbicides, fungicides, insecticides and nematicides) which, like Lexus, has a faux-Latin name. It’s a bad faux-Latin name at that, meant to evoke “heart” and “nature” but accidentally evoking the real Latin word “caterva,” which means “troop” — in classical Latin, usually a band of barbarians, and in medieval Latin, usually a horde of demons. Corteva, Inc. branding was posted everywhere. The 6,500-seat arena, formerly named after Indiana Farmers Mutual Insurance Co. and the site of a 1963 gas explosion which slayed 81, is now the Corteva Coliseum.
Having left South Bend before dawn, I arrived at 8:15 a.m., parking on the lawn of the Indiana School for the Deaf. The fairgrounds were still sleepy. There were farmers heading to the livestock show which started at 8:30 a.m., and the carnies were starting to stir, but there weren’t many others. I was ogling at the stellar New Deal architecture, every column decorated with ears of corn and sheaves of wheat, every wall adorned with bas-reliefs of boys with hogs and girls with hens.
As I surveyed the landscape, I peeked into one of the animal pavilions. The cows and their keepers had vacated the premises, and a crew of burly men in yellow jumpsuits were sweeping up the soiled straw — yellow jumpsuits are the Indiana Department of Corrections’s standard uniform for “outside offender work crews.”
Slowly, the fair came to life. The Governor’s Cup harness races started at 11 a.m., attended by an even mix of young horse girls and elderly gambling addicts. The Still Kickin’ Cloggers (an all-seniors clog dancing ensemble from Indianapolis) performed at 3 p.m., and the Common Ground Urban Line Dancers at 6 p.m.
I grabbed a grilled cheese from the American Dairy Association of Indiana’s Dairy Bar, which is shaped like a round barn, and I washed it down with a cup of whole milk. I ate sweet corn and drank sour lemonade.
There was a cheese carving by Sarah “The Cheese Lady” Kaufmann. There were exhibits of cookies and canned goods, of counted cross stitch and quilting, of woodcarving and beekeeping, of wildflower and gourd arrangements. There was an exhibit by the Calligraphy Guild of Indiana. In the hall of merchandise, there were flavors of Protestant I’d never heard of proselytizing with gusto.
The attraction that stole my heart, the attraction that had me sitting on a bleacher in a barn totally transfixed for four hours, was neither something flashy like “Reptiles Rule! LIVE Reptile Program” nor something as fascinating as “Live Chats pres. Indiana Soybean Farmers ($25 giftcard giveaway).” It was the sheep show.
This wasn’t the 4H competition, mere kid stuff — this was the open category, the pros. Why watch Little League when you can watch the MLB? I think I was the only one in the audience who was not either competing himself or related to someone who was, and I was one of a very few who was not wearing cowboy boots.
Suffolk after Suffolk and Dorset after Dorset in round after round, some ewes and some rams, some young and some old, some “fitted” and some “slick” — sheep breeder speak for different styles of grooming. They were lined up in the ring for the judge to feel their bones, their muscles and their teeth (and sometimes to cup their testes) while their handlers constantly adjusted the stance of their legs and the posture of their neck and the set of their back to maximize their beauty. Even after four hours, I still had a poor grasp on what made one sheep better than others; my expectations about the rankings were consistently shattered. To be fair, the judge several times prefaced his rankings by reflecting upon the inherent subjectivity of the sheep breeder’s art to the crowd.
The sheep show, more than any other event, was an idyllic pastoral fantasia. Virgil’s “Eclogues” and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 6” aren’t about swineherds, harness races or cheese carvings — they’re all about shepherds.
X.com — Elon Musk’s “everything app” — is convinced that I’m a tradwife homesteader, or at least that I aspire to be, and it tailors my algorithm accordingly. Along with posts about raw cheese and how to handle butchering your meat goats with equanimity, I get pummeled with videos and articles from an outlet called Michigan Enjoyer. It’s a new-right sort of publication: “Michigan media for those who relish the beauty of life here and are tired of apologizing for it … here to breathe vitality back into a state that used to overflow with it,” the website reads.
Their coverage of the Kent County Youth Fair (called “Want Resilient Kids? Put Them in the Fair”) leans hard into the pastoral fantasy of livestock shows. Michigan Enjoyers starts to sound like John Gay singing about “the pleasures of the plains” and “happy nymphs and happy swains, harmless, merry, free and gay” who “dance and sport the hours away.”
“If you want to raise kids with grit, confidence and a solid work ethic, forget the sticker charts and parenting experts — just put them in the youth fair,” the piece advises. Farm kids are free of all the ills of modern city and suburb. At the show, “Kids as young as 5 are independently caring for animals, hauling buckets, prepping pens and heading to early morning showings — all without parents hovering or reminding them what to do.”
Bucolic images of perfect lives led in the countryside are nice for poetry and symphonies, but let’s not pretend 4H is a messianic solution for Generation Z and Generation Alpha’s problems. Fairs are fun, but like everything else in America, they’re subject to the cultural disintegration and corruption Michigan Enjoyer claims is in need of fighting.
FFA kids are making Instagram Reels and saying “aura.” At the Indiana State Fair, I even heard one say “rizz.”
Two women sat in front of me at the sheep show. One kept falling asleep, her limp head and neck falling back into my knees. The other was complaining about how swine showmanship competitions just aren’t the same anymore, spoiled by money and changing tastes. “Back then you raised your hogs, didn’t buy ‘em,” she kvetched.
“Yep,” her drowsy neighbor affirmed.
State and county fairs are good because looking at lambs and eating funnel cake is a nice way to pass an afternoon. There’s no need to make them into something they’re not, into “Triumph of the Will” B-roll.
