County Fairytale

Perhaps I was breaking some unwritten pact of solitude, but it felt good and I was ready to leave Turlock. So I picked him up from the Amtrak in Sacramento and we drove to his hometown—a once mining village perched up over the valley where the oak trees turn to pine, and just a few miles up from Sutter’s Mill where they first discovered gold. He took me to his favorite place for chilidogs and then we headed to the fairgrounds. It was the last day of the El Dorodo county fair.

Photo booth operator, El Dorodo County Fair

We took some pictures in a photo booth and in the top photo, I looked so uncannily like my mother in pictures I’ve seen of her from my childhood it almost took my breath away. It’s something you never really think about until it hits you; the process of changing—not only the beginning of wrinkles around the eyes but the quality of your gaze.


But still, we passed the day like children, petting goats and pigs, splaying out on the grass, and like the summer days when you are a kid, it seemed to stretch on endlessly, the light never draining completely from the sky before the floodlights from the rides and booths--a quality of light I've never seen anywhere else--filled the atmosphere and we drifted from one glowing pool of activity to another as if in a dream. Children rolled down the hill by the main stage in that perfect infectious state of being watched only from corners of eyes. We were getting giddy ourselves and our conversations drifted easily and seamlessly between our pasts and presents.




We marveled at the way the county fair seemed to exist untouched by any technological innovations of the past thirty years. But I guess you can't mess with its perfection; those rides would not have their terror if it weren't for the creaking and shifting of their joints and lulling mechanical drones. Perhaps that’s what makes you feel like you’re in this infinite space, where time cracks open and past and present mingle and collide, set off all these triggers you forgot existed.


As the sky darkened, the teenagers took over and charged the fairgrounds with their clannish prowling and restless sexuality, hairstyles tossed by the Zipper. The smaller kids began to whine, part from exhaustion and part that feeling of loss when something so exciting comes to an end.

We had a bite at Denny's then drove down toward Sutter's Mill and parked the van by the river, where there seemed to be more stars than sky, for the night. He tried to convince me to let him come along in the van for a few days since he'd been such a good assistant (and it's true, he had).