Twelve days of fun ending at Labor Day.
As far as I was concerned, the highlight of the Minnesota State Fair was to be the butter sculptures. In a world of miserable health foods and confusing abstract art, what could be more refreshing than a human likeness carved out of a ninety-pound block of pure butter?
It was this — the promise of dairy art — that carried me through the nine-hour drive over Labor Day weekend. The stated purpose of the trip was my sister’s move to her new apartment. In contrast to my one-day moves of numbered plastic boxes and rigid schedules, Caroline had shoved all of her worldly belongings loose into a Ford Fusion and, after I drove her the nine hours from Holland, had unloaded it in the middle of the night on a tree-lined street in Saint Paul.
“How nice of you to do something like that!” people would say of the drive. I spent the night in a sleeping bag on the floor of the laundry room in my sister’s apartment (a cruel place to make someone who has never realized the dream of having his own washing machine sleep), which added to the sense of martyrdom.
Whatever martyrdom there was came to an end on the morning of Labor Day, when Caroline announced her intention to go to IKEA. Specifically, the IKEA next to the Mall of America. On a holiday. At the beginning of the school year. In a college town. With no shopping list to speak of. The hellish vision was so vivid that Dante himself could not have conjured it up. I called up my friend Cate and, as Caroline went off to her doom making a false promise to join us at the fair later, Cate and I set off for the bus.
I had heard about the Minnesota State Fair for years. As a child who consumed lots of public radio on weekends, I would hear it mentioned on A Prairie Home Companion as the great pinnacle of Minnesotan-ness. Every Minnesotan I know had spoken very highly of the event. Staying at a hotel in the Twin Cities months earlier for Caroline’s graduation, I had clicked on the TV only to find it tuned to a local news segment counting down to the Great Minnesota Get-Together. Like the Viennese Neujahrskonzert or the northern lights, I had accepted for years that, while the Fair was a bucket list item, I may never have the chance to see it. Then Caroline scheduled her move.
Veterans of the fair were quick to offer advice when they learned about my plans. “Make sure to get sweet corn at the Corn Roast! And apple cider freeze pops in the Ag building!” “The State Fair offers ‘bottomless milk’ for $.99 (it may have gone up in price) outside the dairy booth and that with the cookie bucket is truly a magical experience,” offered a colleague who grew up going to the fair. As a note of caution, she added, “Go halfsies on all food purchases… A rookie mistake is to eat them all yourself. You’ll burn out by noon.” (Experience proved this to indeed be a key strategy.)
There is plenty of time for quiet self-reflection on a bus that is stuck in Minnesota State Fair traffic. A person has the opportunity to consider that perhaps staking their idea of contentment on the possibility of eating cheese curds while standing in direct sunlight might have been unwise, that the packed bus (which has now begun to bypass stops with still-waiting passengers who stand no chance of fitting on board) might be but a foretaste of the crowds to come, and that their insistence on romanticizing these sorts of things places them under such an obligation of happiness that they might never realize true joy.
The Minnesotan relationship with happiness, it turns out, is well suited to this sort of thinking. Minnesotans, like my family and the people around whom I grew up in West Michigan, are uneasy with the idea of happiness, pleasure, and good fortune. They are the sorts of people who, watching a game show contestant win a trip to one of those resorts that get advertised on daytime television, turn their thoughts (as they have been trained to do for generations) to the resulting tax obligations.
Where other large amusements might call themselves the “Happiest place on earth!” the Minnesota State Fair’s slogan, which appears on the website and many banners throughout the fair, promises a very reasonable “Twelve days of fun ending at Labor Day.” (A period — not an exclamation point — is the punctuation of choice.) If “The best time of your life starting on August 25!” was ever on the table, it never went to print. The people of Minnesota know the truth: that fun is best when it is finite, not overpromised, and has a clear end date.
But they do make the twelve days count.
I have never parted so easily with seventeen dollars as I did for my general admission ticket when I stepped off the bus. It seemed such a reasonable value and, like so many things in the Twin Cities, the process of buying a ticket is executed immaculately, such that long lines are all but eliminated. What follows in my memory are only dim flashes of euphoria. There was a tent of some kind and then, suddenly, a vast expanse with thousands of Minnesotans (156,985 Minnesotans that day by the official figures, and 156,984 Minnesotans when you consider that I am a legal resident of New York State).
The State Fair exists as its own small city, though it is technically nestled in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. It has a police department, named streets, and a public transportation system composed of two ski lift-style apparatuses that whisk fairgoers from one end to the other for eight dollars. I do not know what goes on at the fairgrounds the rest of the year. I have little evidence to suggest that they do not vanish into an ethereal mist as the clock strikes midnight on Labor Day. Whatever happens, the promise of twelve days of fun ending at Labor Day seems enough to justify holding the land.
(532 miles away in Detroit, the Michigan State Fairgrounds have been subdivided and are now home to a Meijer, an Am*zon warehouse, and the bus station where passengers must change from city buses to suburban buses because of willfully terrible regional planning. What passes for the State Fair is now held at something called the Suburban Showplace, which is but one circle of hell higher than IKEA on Labor Day.)
If the State Fair was its own city, it would certainly have some of the nation’s highest per capita dairy consumption and average cholesterol levels, which is good and proper.
“I went to three different drugstores to find Lactaid,” Cate explained as we stood in line for our fried cheese curds, “and there was none anywhere. The whole city is out. People were getting ready.”
If there is a dairy alternative scene at the fair, it is not particularly popular. We saw, at one point, a small booth peddling soy milk. There was no line, and the few people who were there shielded their faces in shame. We, following earlier advice, went to the unlimited milk stand, where the price had indeed risen to $2, which is still a bargain if you keep the wax-coated paper cup with you and return regularly for more. So popular was the unlimited milk that it necessitated a special insulated plumbing system with separate lines for chocolate and “white” milk.
This small investment permitted us to explore an entire section of the fair while refilling our milk cups. (I drank, in total, three cups of chocolate milk and two cups of white milk, reducing the price per cup to forty cents.) The highlights included drinking milk among the prize cows and, some time later, drinking milk with a tremendous quantity of chocolate chip cookies.
The cookies are another legendary aspect of the fair. Sweet Martha’s sells fresh-baked cookies at several locations across the fairgrounds, most famously in overfilled buckets, though an economy size (still too large for two grown adults to finish, even with the aid of unlimited milk) is also available. In 2019, Sweet Martha’s sold five million dollars worth of cookies in twelve days. They reportedly use 197,000 pounds of sugar each day which, using the best available data, adds up to well more than a pound of sugar per fair visitor.
“How does one get into this field?” I asked the high schooler responsible for carefully stacking our dozens of cookies high above the rim of the small paper cone that was meant to hold them.
“My brother has always done it,” she explained, “and now that I’m old enough to work…” she trailed off.
“Do you enjoy it?”
“It’s fun, but every night when I get home, well, if you offered me a cookie, I wouldn’t take it.”
The cookies turn most fair attendees into ticking sugar crash time bombs. The kids are the first to go and, by mid-afternoon, the children who were walking beside empty strollers just hours ago suddenly have a glazed look in their eyes. Then go the adults, each in their way.
Cate and I, knowing that our time was limited, took a spin on the ski lift apparatus (with a round-trip discount) and then spent some time looking at the various blue ribbon crafts on display, where I saw the most impressive handmade wooden canoe I will ever see. Then the sugar crash started to set in.
We had prepared contingency plans, which came by way of the Hamline Methodist Church Dining Hall. The dining hall has been a fixture of the fair since 1897 and is to the dazed fairgoer a place of peace and respite competitive with any house of God. Few things exhibit the Lord’s mercy to someone on the verge of a cookie-induced meltdown than Swedish meatballs served with proper china on a checkered tablecloth for $16 payable by credit card.
“My sister missed this for IKEA today,” I told the woman serving the meatballs, “can you believe?”
“IKEA meatballs can’t even come close,” she replied. The meatballs were flawless.
Caroline, for her part, never got lunch. The IKEA trip had gone on all day and had not included the cafeteria. She complained of her hunger hours later as I sat, catatonic, on the floor of her dining room, trying to muster what little strength I had to do my brotherly moving duties.
It was only that night, assembling a chest of drawers, that I was struck by the realization that I completely missed the butter sculptures.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“A State Fair Classic: 125 Years Later, Hamline Church Dining Hall Still Cooking” by Sam Stroozas from Minnesota Public Radio.
Don’t just take my word for it — the Hamline Church Dining Hall didn’t earn the “Grandest Stand of All” award for nothing.
“His Medium, Salted Butter. His Craft, Sublime.” by Christina Morales in the New York Times.
Yes, the Minnesota State Fair has a new butter sculptor after the last one retired from her fifty-year career. Yes, he got a profile in the Times. Yes, it’s hard work, he says, “especially when you’re in a forty-degree refrigerator.”