Deep Connections at the Fair: Rooted in Maine
My brother Ben died when I was a sophomore in college, in 2007. He was traveling across the country to live in Maine, and work on a farm when he got in a car accident and passed away.
Upon returning to school in the fall, I decided to go he Common Ground Country Fair in Unity, Maine. The Common Ground is a pretty amazing place. It is a country fair with none of the rides or games, but instead it is full of lectures about organic farming, contests on largest or most beautiful vegetables, women spinning yarn straight from enormous Angora rabbits and friggin INCREDIBLE food. Like, you can’t decide what you want to eat because there are so many amazing options. I will get into those a bit later.
The Common Ground is also INSANELY busy. There are huge throngs of people
(40,000 heads went to the 3-day fair last year) moving around, most of them shoeless and pretty dirty. There are long lines, and it is expensive, and it is sometimes super hot. Like a lot of Maine, when there are crowds of people, you tend to always be scanning to see if you know someone. This actually leads to lots of wonderful moments throughout the year where you incidentally make eye contact with someone and you smile at each other, or other moments when you run into a friend you haven’t seen in forever and then end up spending the day together. I think this is one of the reasons Maine is my place. People are generally happy and open, and you can really connect with those you only see infrequently. I often have interactions on the street with total strangers where we just smile at each other, both of us knowing that we are in a place of comfort and enjoyment.
The Common Ground the year my brother died was hard one for me. When Ben was planning on moving to Maine I had convinced him to go because he would have loved it. It is full of happy, dirty farmers with unkempt beards and antiques-shop glasses. There are lots of interesting wares and cool things that people are building or making, and he would have found such inspiration from these people finding meaning by making things with their hands (specifically, the live blacksmithing sessions would have been right up his alley).
That year when I visited, I inevitably was scanning the crowd for people I knew. A few times, someone with a big smiling, bearded face caught my eye in the crowd and for a split second, without thinking, I thought it was he. I would then have a realization that it couldn't be him, and then a moment of deep sadness. It was a surreal, and overwhelmingly sad thing to constantly be reminded that someone you love so much is no longer there. But then it morphed into a completely different thing, where I began to think that a piece of Ben was inside each of these bare-footed, scraggly bearded young farmers. They were all inspired to live in a world where they were creating what they needed and learning from and living off of the land. They were content, and they had some adorable little babies running around.
I have visited the Common Ground many years after Ben’s death, and it continues to provide me consistent joy as I remember him and participate in things he would have loved. My relationship with the Fair began to change after I left college and began to work at a local organic gelato shop, Maple’s. Every year, they drove hundreds of gallons up to the fair, built a temporary wooden stand with tin roof, and sold so much delicious gelato. The pace is frantic, sticky, and the entire weekend is often a whirlwind.
I began to manage the booth and was able to hire my good friends to work beside me. It is so satisfying to have the people who fill you with joy working their assess off and goofing around next to you. We were known as one of the most enjoyable booths at the fair because we used to cheer for every milkshake order. People literally would go through the line twice so we would cheer for them. It was always a blast and truly one of the best weekends of the year.
Every year I ran the booth, I would wake up early, enter the fairgrounds before they opened, and slowly walk for 15 minutes to get to the booth. I would always stop to buy coffee with maple syrup and cream from the dude with enormous dreadlocks, and work my way organizing the gelato from the day before. It was always such a peaceful and joyous experience; walking up to this booth and making sense of the chaos that had ensued the previous afternoon as I prepared to do it again. It was often the weekend of the first frost in Maine. The silence and chill that permeated the fair was placid and a harbinger of the changing season.
As the fair began to wake up and before we actually sold any gelato (besides me, who wants to eat gelato before noon anyway?), old friends who I hadn’t seen for weeks, months, since last Fair, would come up and we would have deep, happy reconnections. I would slowly sip my coffee before the throngs of people stood in line to shell out for our delicious treats.
Having the experience working during the Fair was always so great. Friends would work for various periods of time, taking breaks to go out and explore the talks or sheepdog demonstrations for short periods and retreat to the relative calm of the gelato booth to observe the insanity outside the booth. We would also have one of the best items up for barter with the other food vendors. Our milkshakes and scoops were the exact things people slaving over a hot grill all day needed. We had our pick of the 10+ incredible edibles, among them:
Fish sandwiches with spicy slaw on homemade tortillas
Beef sundaes (like an ice cream sundae but with beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a cherry tomato on top)
Falafel or gyros made right next to our booth – we would sometimes turn them away because we had all had too many
Fried haddock, scallops, shrimp
Tempura battered fried shiitake mushrooms made by an amazing Japanese family who grew shiitakes solely to sell at the fair
It was a sometimes-excessive experience, enjoyed while we were unthinkingly scooping thousands of scoops of gelato, all done while surrounded by the people you loved and customers who were genuinely happy to be there (and who got excited when we would cheer after someone ordered a milkshake).
Since local organic milk became nonexistent, Maples has stopped going to the fair. It has been two years since I have scooped gelato there. It makes me endlessly sad that I won’t get to have those happy, exhausting times with my friends, or the peaceful solitary times with my morning coffee, or the times staring out into the crowd thinking about Ben and being so happy that so many people the world are carrying on his spirit and doing the things that he would have loved.
Yet, I remember that the fair this year will be just like the fair last year, and the fair 5 years from now will also be the same. It will continue on, and keep preaching the benefits of caring for you planet and doing things the right way, and enjoying time spent with the ones who inspire you.
This year, around Common Ground time, I had a bee land on my tattoo (which is of a bee making a letter “b,” which I got in honor of Ben. The bee hung around for maybe 5 minutes and was very gentile and adventurous. I felt Ben looking over me and connecting with me as I contemplated the big life changes in the last year. I was immediately filled with joy and was reminded that Maine is Ben's place. We would have shared so much joy here, spending time hiking or late summer nights on his farm. Even though I missed the fair this year, I will always think fondly about the days taking in the chaos, behind my gelato booth, with a smile on my face and thoughts of a happy young man with a scraggly beard and antique shop glasses, who is right there with me in everything I do.
Henry Powell appreciates Sharon Jones (RIP), his new house and dj-ing on WMPG with his Dad.