The best newspaper column I ever wrote in The Book Book

Notes from the Cadillac Ranch

8-21-91

Sometimes the biggest attraction isn't the one that was advertised.

Cases in point.

On Friday night the Clayton County Fair's headliner was a lively and talented little blonde named Becky Hobbs with an equally lively and talented band call the Heart Throbs. Throbs rhymes with Hobbs, get it?

She played the piano and the accordion and seemed to have written a whole bunch of songs including one of Conway Twitty's breathless hits.

The Clayton County Fair is special in a number of ways. Huge crowds come to the fairgrounds in the cornfields of National - a couple miles south of Monona on the road to Garnavillo.

One of the main attractions is the country music shows. They manage to get not quite top performers to come and put on two shows on the little stage that faces two of the more interesting loft grandstands I've ever seen.

This year tickets cost four dollars and that includes both shows. In recent years we've seen Porter Waggoner and Jim Ed Brown. John Conlee was there this year on Saturday. It's an informal "bring your own lawn chair" kind of crowd with lots of babies and little kids and older people and a bus from the county care center.

As the first show started, a young woman with a blanket, a three or four-year-old and a several month old baby walked up to the left edge of the lawn chair contingent. With a definite intention, she spread the blanket on the grass. When I looked back in a few minutes, she had covered the baby and her shoulder with another small blanket and was discretely nursing her baby in front of several thousand people.

Later, well into Becky Hobbs' second show, on the other side of the lawn chair and bench part of the audience, another couple danced. Side by side, with intricate steps, quick to the music, he wore cowboy boots, she was maybe five or six months pregnant (fertile people in Clayton County). They were very good. He was serious, she followed his lead. Each time a couple steps into the pattern she would kick off her shoes and hurry barefoot to catch up.

On Sunday of the same weekend of the Clayton County Fair, Waukon's great Threshing Days parade offered a multitude of llamas, a classy old ready-mix truck, lots of horses and steam engines and of course the Snoose Airline.

After the parade at the grounds a lot was going on, wood was being sawed, the country school was providing memories, the flea market was hopping, the garden tractors were roaring, and music was being played.

But the highlight in a quiet way was the young man with the two Belgians and the walking plow. They were making rounds of a several hundred foot long strip. With the plow in the ground and reins looped over his shoulders, the young man and the horses walked along adding a foot of plowed ground each trip.

At the end of the strip, he would drop the plow handles, and take the reins and direct Billy and his partner around the end of the strip, the plow sliding on its side across the dry grass.

At the furrow on the other side of the strip, he would pick up the plow and put the reins back around his neck, and plow another line of soil.

Halfway down the strip, a steam engine made a sudden sound that startled the horses, The plowman let og of the plow with one hand and grabbed the reins to steady the horses.

Each time the plow passed, the people watching would walk over to the edge of the furrow and look into it, to check the depth and evenness, to see the fresh earth in the air.

So simple, so basic. Think how quiet.