Would You like a Stick with That?

I often read the Des Moines Register. I lived in Des Moines for a couple of decades before emigrating to Canada and reading it is an old, probably odd now, habit. I still think it's rather light on actual news, the unbiased just the facts kind, but I like to know what is going on there. Over the last week or so news of the impending Iowa State Fair has been popping up with some regularity. It is "the" thing to do for rural and central Iowans in August, and I have heard that it is even a vacation destination for some outside the state as well.

I lived in Des Moines for a bit over a decade before checking out the fair for myself. I was one for leaving town for the duration to avoid the jacked up gasoline prices and the hordes of "country folk" wandering the malls with glazed looks and their tongues hanging out.

But I never missed one after my first visit in the late 90's. I often went once or twice with friends and at least once on my own. I loved early morning when the crowds were sparse. and I could wander without wading through waves of sweaty people. People who were usually eating things off sticks. Deep-fried things of questionable nutritional value and a calorie count that even running as much as I was back then, I couldn't have worked off in a month.

I eventually made it a rule to never eat at the Iowa State Fair if I could avoid it. And just watching people eat as they elbowed through the throngs was enough to put me off. Everything was dipped and perched precariously on skinny rods of varying length with greasy lips chewing round it like a vertical corn cob. There just wasn't enough Tums to induce me after my first year or two of feeling greased from the inside out, and every year I spied more sticky foods.

This year, according to the news item, will be no exception. If it can be skewered and dipped, someone has found a way to offer it to the mindless munching masses.

S'mores on a stick? The Oasis Concessions has it covered. Carmel dipped marshmallows, on a stick of course, awaits one and all at Zag's. Double meat wrapped pickle dog, sadly stick-less, joins the other pickle dogs at ... wait for it ... Pickle Dawgs.

There is the brat version of the corn dog and key-lime pie dipped and proudly perched on - yes - a stick. And let's not forget the Henry the VIII inspired turkey legs of unusual size - which doesn't need a stick at all but there are 45 variations of sustenance on a stick at the Iowa State Fair, so no one will go wanting.

Food alley runs the length of Grand Avenue, the fair's main street and an additional, and considerable, distance along and past the Agriculture Building where one should make sure to drop in on the butter cow as it keeps alive the ancient Tibetan art of butter sculpting and is inexplicably keeping company with Michael Jackson in all his buttery goodness this summer.

There was a little train that used to run past the old giant slide, but it passed away with the sweet old gent who took care of it several years ago. I discovered this in 2006 when I tried to take my daughter for the first time and found only tracks in the concrete, but the slide is still there and worth the rather hair-raising climb to the top. As of 2008 it has tallied 103, 296 trips to the bottom on burlap sacks. I still remember my nephew being slapped onto his back by the velocity of the ride. He was none the worse, but I spent a few hairy moments wondering how I would explain his whiplash to my sister when I returned him.

I skipped the midway - always - unless I was there with nieces or nephews but would go for a watery spin at Ye Olde Mill, an authentic "tunnel of love" built in 1921, I rode it only once with an actual, but rather disappointing, love interest. He was the guy before the man whom I would marry during State Fair time the following summer. Some of our wedding party and I wandered the grounds the day before the nuptials in 1999. 

I made sure to tour the grounds from aloft via the old sky-lift too despite my fear of heights, and at some point I perused the vendors' exhibits at the Varied Industries Building. That was a ritual instilled in me by my parents when I was a little girl at the Dubuque county fair. My siblings and I would collect paper hats, rubber coin purses for holding bus tokens and pencils for the coming school year. As an adult, I skipped the everything but the pencils - and pens if I could get them - and scooped up as many pads of note paper, stamped with the various business logos, as I could. Sometimes I could score a bit more if I told whoever was manning the booth that I was a local teacher. But I always had fair goodies supplementing the supplies I was forced to purchase for my classroom each fall.

They have county fairs up here in Alberta. I don't know if there is a provincial one. I have lost my taste for them now at any rate. Hot. Crowded. With washrooms where questionable levels of cleanliness are the norm. And food on a stick, the ubiquitous fair fare. But I have memories, and they are tasty.

This is an original 50 Something Moms piece by Ann Bibby of anniegirl1138.