My friend A. came to visit from Texas. I'm not sure why I'm abbreviating her name since she's not running from the law or anything, but it does give her a certain air of mystery that seems to suit her so I'm going with it. A. arrives periodically in my life at each of our new postings like a much needed rain, a very polite rain that leaves no puddles but graciously nurtures everything and cleans off the dust. This time was no different.
I picked her up at the airport in Oakland (which was an adventure in itself because apparently no one in south Oakland trusts credit cards as a means to pay for gas. In fact, they laugh at them and say, "Nah, honey, you got to have actual money.") Then we drove the three long hours back to the Central Valley, a trip which is only interesting if you challenge yourself to make a whole crushed salad with your tires.
California's Central Valley is like the produce section in the grocery store of America (South Texas is the discount beer section, and the Florida Panhandle is the religious greeting card section), and the land is laid out like a giant food quilt stretched flat and tucked in at each horizon with roads for seams. Right now is the tomato harvest, and the whole way out to Oakland I shared the road with double-trailer trucks piled high with small rosy tomatoes. Full trucks going north, empty ones going south. Occasionally I'd pass a truck full of yellow or purple onions, and even more rarely, a garlic truck shedding its garlic dandruff all over my windshield. The best parts are the on and off ramps and the odd bump or curve in the road, where these trucks lose some of their load. It seems so incredibly wasteful, like there's a perfectly good set of ingredients for a simple spaghetti sauce, but whee!-- there it goes. Lettuce season was earlier in the spring, and it was fun to see the leaves take to the wind like little green wings.
Anyway, A. and I managed to find a few things to do in the Central Valley despite her San Francisco friend's warning, "There's nothing out there!" We went to a Portuguese bakery, found good Thai food in Fresno, saw an old Taoist temple and Chinese boarding house, visited an art museum hidden way out in a corn field, and went to a county fair where we got to hold baby pygmy goats. Beat that, Most Gorgeous City in America.
I'd never been to a county fair before, so the whole animal husbandry element was a real novelty. I mean, I've seen my share of sketchy carnivals where the games of chance are as rigged as real life and the carnies make me suddenly remember every cautionary threat my parents made about eating vegetables and staying in school, not to mention that weird undercurrent of popular fatalism it takes for people to get on the rides knowing that they were assembled only hours ago and will be gone tomorrow regardless of whether or not you've still got all your limbs. I'm not a fan of carnivals-- at least, not for the usual reasons. I like them because of their tawdriness, because of all the pretty lights, and because there's always at least one kid there who's having so much frantic, over-stimulated fun that he pukes, fantastically, athletically, all over something.
But a fair? That's apparently a whole different thing. It wraps a carnival in a folksy cloak of legitimacy because it gets people to bring out the things they're proud of-- their quilts, their glossy, angular dairy cows, their fat and sleepy rabbits, their buttermilk pie, their giant zucchini, their pygmy goats, their 800 pound pig. The 800 pound pig, by the way, was named Sean. Just Sean. Lots of the animals had funny names like Little Paris Hilton or Ricky Bobby or honorary titles reflecting the family who raised them or the farm they were raised on, but this monster pig was just Sean, like maybe he chose it and everyone was too afraid to argue.
I went on a photo binge in the rooster tent (which, come to think of it, has got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've ever written) because they were all so beautiful, so ceremonial and war-like, and yet so tourettic and jerky that it was almost impossible to tell which of the four poses they hit during the time it took my camera lens to open and shut would be the one in the picture. Plus, it was evening light, all slanted and golden, and it hit the roosters' combs from behind and made them look even more like weird little dinosaurs with flame faces.
While I was on my photojournalist kick I took a few artsy shots of the lights and the rides and all the shitty prizes, and I'd gotten into that mode where I was seeing things only for form and color and negative space when this short little man with a spiky blond mullet and apparently a raging eye infection came up and asked me who I worked for. When I gave him a blank look, he clarified:
"Like, are you with the newspaper? A big newspaper? Are you going to publish those?"
"Oh. No. I just take pictures for fun."
He seemed greatly relieved. A. suggested later that perhaps the terms of his parole stipulated that he not be in contact with children, which was how I photographed him from 30 feet away, surrounded by kiddies. Or maybe he was on the run. Or maybe he believed that a published photo stole some of his soul. So that was a little bit of the carnival aspect peaking through. That and the little girl who became a fountain of half-digested funnel cake in the middle of the women's restroom and then promptly burst into tears.
We rounded out the night by stopping by to see some very out of place lions yowling and pacing around in cages on the back of an 18-wheeler, waiting to get fed hunks of ground beef. They were supposed to perform the next day in some show called "Walking With Lions," which frankly didn't sound too demanding or stimulating from a lion's point of view. What struck me was that they acted exactly like Linus when he's hungry and pissed off-- lots of throaty moans, slit-eyed glares, and swipes at nearby people. I was invigorated by them and went on another photo binge, but they depressed A., and she stood against the wall in the shadows their cages made. I guess that's the British Imperialist in me-- "Look at these magnificent beasts! Let's hold them up for scrutiny and ignore the question of how they got to be here!"
The highlights of the night for me were holding the baby pygmy goat and seeing the lions, which is ironic when you consider that one highlight could have been fed directly to the other.
My laptop is getting suspiciously hot and Blogger has refused my last 9 attempts at uploading pictures even though they would clearly add so much more to your experience of this post, so I think I may give up for today and take another whack at explaining my fun-filled absence tomorrow.
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