I’ve been thinking a lot about a childhood friend recently. The warm, sticky summer air keeps bringing her memory to me like the honeysuckle I smell along the creek out back.
Her name was Quackers. She was a duck.
I raised her from a downy, yellow chick into her beautiful, fluffy magnificence.
I won Quackers at the ring toss tent1 at the little street fair that came through our town every summer.2 This yellow ball of feathers was dependent on me for everything: food, shelter and love. (That’s everything, right? That’s all anyone really needs, anyway.) She trusted me, as her surrogate mother, to supply it.
Quackers followed me everywhere, waddling through the house, behind me while I did my chores, her webbed feet slapping the floor with a charmingly awkward rhythm. When I would rest, she would too, climbing up to settle in a fluffy heap on my lap.
Summer fairs gave small-town kids like me a glimpse of a world with horizons wider than we could ever imagine.
Carnies with missing fingers and Navy tattoos would help us onto The Scrambler and buckle us in. The Tilt-A-Whirl would whip us around until it changed our perspectives, turning our world upside-down and sideways. Moments later, as we slowed to a stop and were unbuckled to exit, the world was different somehow. Our faces were flushed, our hearts pounding. With our spin art masterpieces — blurred colors whipped by motion and looking like a still life of the universe — tucked under our arms, we were alive in a way our small-town lives couldn’t give us. We had not wanted it to stop. We all felt the inevitable pang of disappointment as the carnie dropped the ride into low gear. The ride was never long enough.
These strange, hardened carnies, chain smoking and smelling of adult beverages, came from exotic, faraway lands like Iowa and Oklahoma. They would give us dangerous, uneasy feelings, but we surrendered to it. These guys had put all these rides together in one night as we slept, and they would take it all apart the same way — with tools that were heavier than any one of us — reassembling everything in another town some 50 miles away. This was their life, so mysterious to us locals, born and raised as we were within a stone’s throw in any direction. Those summer fairs were my first tastes of wanderlust, watching these carnies appear magically before us, only to disappear days later to God knows where.
As a boy, I remember going to the larger state fairs with my cousins. At 50 times the size of the smaller fairs I was used to, the state fairs had bigger budgets and, therefore, a better variety of attractions. Bigger rides, better food and star power. I was fascinated by The Freak Tent, an intriguing, if not insensitive, title for an exhibit of oddities defying what we know of our natural world. There were conjoined twins, bearded ladies and various things in jars, backlit with eerie green and blue lights.
My favorite attraction was a man who could make his eyes bulge out of their sockets. He was called Popeye (of course), and his 10-minute, $1.50-per-ticket act was well choreographed, narrated by his Vincent Price-ean monologue, complete with jump scares that guaranteed the teenage girls in the audience would scream at just the right times. That summer, I spent every penny of my lawn mowing capital to witness Popeye scare a tent full of locals again and again. Popeye knew, as I was figuring out, it was the screaming girls — not just his eyeballs — that were the real show.
As I entered my teens, the street fairs would become another sweet backdrop for summer love. I learned that walking down the midway was even more magical when holding the hand of a pretty girl. And if she was carrying a stuffed animal I had procured through my dart-throwing prowess, all the better. Who cares if I spent three times what the toy was worth? It was a small price to pay for a stuffed animal that would sit on a pretty girl’s bed as a constant reminder of my undying love. Forty-seven darts3 at a quarter each? Not a problem.
Just moments later, or so it seemed, I was taking my own kids, then between the ages of 5 and 10, to a county fair. I watched their faces as we entered the midway, their eyes as wide as saucers, their mouths open but unable to form words about what they were taking in. To go from the relative quiet of our family car to the sensory explosion of a county fair’s midway is quite an experience for a child.
As we rounded a corner of the midway, I was excited to see the freak tent. It was a smaller and lower-budget version of the tents I had spent my money on as a kid, but I paid for the family and escorted them under a hand-painted banner announcing, among other oddities, “The Incredible Snake Woman.” We marched single-file with our neighbors, up some steps to peer over a wall where a woman’s head, alive and blinking, looked up at us from the center of a coiled snake. The snake was fabricated from patterned material as close to snake skin as one could find at a JOANN store and appeared to be stuffed with someone’s old socks.
The Incredible Snake Woman greeted us through chicken wire with a casual, “How y’all doin’?”
I tried to stifle a chuckle. My 5-year-old son, however, wailed as if in pain and tore away from me with the strength of a hundred men toward the safety of the midway outside. I followed to find him clutched to a pole, still white as a sheet. It took three clumps of cotton candy and a corn dog to calm him down.
I have more memories than there is room to include here, but hopefully I have sparked some of your own and maybe even prompted you to take a summer Saturday and visit a favorite fair near you. I’ll be going, holding the hand of someone I love, where old memories wait to stir and new memories wait to be created.
I might even board The Scrambler again. Or the Tilt-A-Whirl. I’ll ride, feeling like I’m 12, watching the small-town streets dart past me in a blur of color like the spin art tucked under my arm. Life can move past me just as fast, it seems, tilting me and whirling me through another calendar month with crossed-off to-do lists. But I hold on. I hold my breath. And when the carnie shifts the ride into low gear, I’ll get that pang of disappointment in my stomach.
The ride is never long enough.
