Do you like going to THE FAIR? If your answer is YES, then do we have a hearty recommendation for you! The Clark County Fair is a yearly exhibition that goes on for a whopping TEN DAYS in beautiful Ridgefield, Washington, just north of Vancouver.
The Clark County Fair traces its origins back to 1868, making this fair older than the state it’s held in. For some reason, presumably good stewardship, time hasn’t really dulled the mass or the impact of the Clark fair, which still manages multiple days of fun (the Multnomah equivalent is only three measly days) for a pretty reasonable price (12 bucks a ticket, with a discount if you take one of the shuttle buses positioned at free C-Tran Park and Rides around Clark County), year after year after year, aside from brief recesses during World War II and the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But while this year’s fair is quickly coming to a close, there are still a few days left, as well as a bunch of fun stuff to see and attend.
For instance: Do you want to see a litter of baby piglets lounging in a pile of sawdust, alternating between napping and brawling with their siblings while feeding? Yes, you do.
Or you can see dogs, one after another, jumping off the bed of an industrial truck and into a gigantic pool of water, competing to see who can jump the furthest. Honestly, we can’t entirely understand the psychology of what “competition” means to a dog. They get absolutely wild out there, regardless.
If you think goats of all sizes are terribly charming animals, there are a lot of goats you can see at this bad boy. They bray, prance, and have strange, vertically oriented pupils whose dark energy pulls you in. Some of them even find time to haul ass at the farm animal races, which go down four times a day at the animal racing pavilion! Sorry folks, no betting window.
Speaking of animals exhibiting the spirit of competition, it breaks my heart to inform you that you’ve already missed this year’s edition of ‘Mutton Busting,” an event where children are made to ride sheep for the amusement of a small arena full of people.
Some of the kids managed to ride for a while, but most get tossed the fuck off in increasingly hilarious ways. Sooner or later, you forget your allegiance to human domination and begin to root for the sheep to throw the children in the dirt and walk over their small, helmeted, exhausted personhoods. Sometimes after they throw the child off, they do several little sheep hops before returning to the herd—a gesture that looks a lot like they’re taunting the child for being such a crummy sheep rider. This is supremely amusing, every time. In the herd, they presumably have a sheep-language conversation where they try to suss out exactly why this is happening.
At one point this year, the herd of sheep walked to the other side of the arena to, I guess, be a herd somewhere else? This delayed the event for like a minute or so. It made one wonder: Why don’t the sheep bind together with the chains of solidarity and rise up against mankind? But, as my friend Ryder pointed out, sheep are famously programmed against rebellion… so the jaunty little hops will have to do.
If you’re looking for another grandstand event to attend, I always go out of my way to recommend “Tuff Trucks,” a demolition derby-adjacent race where older, busted-ass trucks and cars drive through gigantic dirt courts. Last year, an SUV running the course flipped on the first turn. The recovery crane arrived and listed the car back into position, at which point the driver sped like a madman through the rest of the course. I recall him getting insane air on the final jump, but this might be a mental projection after seeing him recover from a glass-shattering flip-over. That truck might be Superman to me, now.
There are exhibitions featuring every type of farm animal you can imagine: geese, ducks, llamas, cows, horses, dogs, etc, etc, etc. Most animals were raised by 4-H kids, who do this so they can learn about the processes of raising animals for food, work, or fiber so they can, if they choose, raise animals for a living, thereby perpetuating the craft of agriculture that our society/all societies are ultimately built upon. This is the most valuable experience you get at the fair—an opportunity to really see, up close, and partially understand what “raising animals for profit” means, to give just a little bit of visceral context to the things you eat and wear every day. City life makes this alien to us, and a return to a controlled environment that sort of resembles the farm is a good way to put it all back into context.
Also on display in the relatively new convention hall: local handicrafts! Here’s a fabulous quilt by Savanna Watson, a handsome mother and child pair of crochet whales by Nicole Hayes, a wire-frame bone-cat familiar by Abby West, and a remarkably groovy chunky knit sweater by Monica Hopkins.
I was talking to my mother about the fair recently, and she said that some of the event’s offerings have remained the same for most of our lives. I mention this because it’s difficult to share the feeling I have every time I visit the Clark Public Utilities water booth, which has looked and operated in the exact same way from time immemorial. It stirs a maybe-too-profound nostalgia in me, taking one of those cups of water and tipping it back in my gullet. It will continue like this unless there’s some profound disaster that wipes it out, like, for instance, a fully engaged fascistic American government descending on Washington state and making public utilities illegal.
Because of this nostalgia that clouds my usually-very powerful mind, I can only really make two food recommendations for people attending the fair. The first is the Smokehouse Grill in the food pavilion on the fair’s main drag. The food pavilion is a freestanding wooden structure that is older than dirt itself. It also has not changed since I was born. The Smokehouse is a staple onion burgers/fried stuff hut that’s run by a variety of surly and surly-adjacent teens. It was where I had my first elephant ear, and therefore, is the only place that really does elephant ears correctly. You will certainly feel differently, being that you don’t have a lifetime of small memories to back it up, but I had the food there recently and I swear it is still great.
Also of culinary note: The Clark County Dairy Women’s ice cream and milkshake hut is THE Clark County Fair staple. They make a mean milkshake AND you get a swanky commemorative cup. This year’s cup celebrates the United States’ 250th year, which you are currently living through. Normally, you would have gone to big celebrations and wrestled with the good and the bad of this country, but unfortunately, political life in America has stripped any positive feelings you might have for this country or its culture from your mind. However, if you get one of these cups, you may be able to look at it someday and say, “Hey, America’s 250th birthday could have been cool, if the entire country—even the reactionaries who pretend to like America in public—wasn’t mired in a very profound sense of self-loathing at the time.”
A final recommendation: For reasons I don’t understand, the Clark County Fair has remarkable sunsets. It was the first place I ever noticed that the night falling could be beautiful. If you get the chance, stand on the main thoroughfare at dusk and let it wash over you. It is a lovely, small pleasure in any year.
The Clark County Fair runs through Sunday, August 16. Tickets, directions, hours, and event schedule here.