The White River Valley Herald

Meet Me at the FairFree Access



Charlie the carnie poses by his booth at the Tunbridge World’s Fair. (Photo by Kathi Terami)

On any other day, the pungent aroma of fryer oil, fresh cow manure, and sweat from tens of thousands of bodies in close quarters is something I would deliberately avoid. Only during the ‘Tunbridge World’s Fair’, when mingled with notes of maple cotton candy, fried dough and roasted sweet corn, is it something I relish. It’s the kind of smell I wear home with me, absorbed in my clothes, hair, and skin. At home, after a long night of sugary indulgences, pavement-pounding, and stomach-swooping carnival rides, it lingers while brushing my teeth, showering, and tucking into bed.

The juxtaposition of the World’s Fair and the town of Tunbridge itself is fascinating. Having lived here all my life, I have seen the four-day fair come and go each mid-September exactly seventeen times. A sleepy little town of just over a thousand residents, Tunbridge has a post office, library, general store, and more dirt roads than paved. When the fair comes to town, it’s like giving a child caffeine; in less than a week, the town transforms and energy percolates throughout, finally settling into a rhythmic beat that never rests.

The fairgrounds sprawl across a small valley on the west side of the village that is so round it looks sculpted. The ground’s indigenous protectors, the trees, slope upwards around its parameter in differing levels of viridescence to form a great oval like a natural stadium. They belong to a variegated mosaic of species; sugar maples and oaks that verge on the edge of play-dough green, conifers that hang out in shadowy cliques, and poplars that stand tall and upright like flagpoles.

My memories of the fair are mostly random, but stick like cotton candy mustaches. They assemble themselves to create one happy picture book: my winning a dinky pink made-in-china trumpet from the duck pond game as a child, drinking fresh-pressed cider from a Dixie cup, and begging my parents for one last ride on the infamous Tug-Boat. Turn the page and you see me putting in my order with Buddy the Clown for a white pony balloon animal, then getting an airbrush tattoo of a rose entangled in thorns on my collarbone and thinking myself a rebellious tween.

I remember clinging to my Dad’s mint green Calvin Klein jeans as he barters in jest with a carnie who has a withered half of a cigarette hanging loosely from his yellowing teeth. I win a purple and blue foam-filled unicorn with plastic cartoon eyes from a game and keep it on my bed at home for years. We go on rides, and I keep my neon polyethylene wristband on for the next few weeks as a statement. I went to the fair…did you?. I eat pho out of an Asian takeout box and watch the pig races, a questionable–yet enticing–form of entertainment.

The carnies earn their paycheck from one woman, Betty Gillette, who travels from fair to fair in a cozy mobile home. Betty, a confident and opinionated woman, treats her workers well. My Dad and I visit her trailer every year the night before the fair and I listen to them banter about contemporary political topics for an eternity. We both leave at the end of the night with smiles and I, with a stack of pink ride tickets that read ‘THIS COUPON GRANTS ONE FREE RIDE ON THE GILLETTE MIDWAY’.

Most of the carnies know me by now and we exchange niceties; Charlie, with his dirty blonde mustache  and signature tie-dye tank top, runs the squirt gun game, Ali operates Rock-n-Roll, and Reagan mans the turkey leg and baked potato booth. Besides the carnies, my family has forged relationships with vendors like JJ, who gives us free fried dough and wears a gold chain around his neck, Lee, who makes candied pralines with his wife, and Bob and Brenda who own Sambels seafood restaurant and decorate their camper and dining area to a different theme each year with plastic streamers and hanging flower pots.

Three hundred and sixty-one days out of the year, I can walk down to the fairgrounds in Tunbridge and hear only the scuff of my shoes on the cracked, gray pavement. If I squint hard enough and breathe deeply I can sense the energy of the fair and the smells return. I can’t imagine I will ever grow out of the childish excitement when the fair comes to town–even when I am the parent and my children are the ones gazing upon the fairgrounds from the top of the Ferris wheel in sheer delight.

(Submitted by Rose Terami, age 18, of Tunbridge)