`The Life Excited'

My parents had friends whose property nearly adjoined the grounds of the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio, so we came to feel proprietary about the annual event. Even when the fair was not in session, we drove around the empty fields and barns with the grownups and felt like lords of the manor. As a result, I have always, even though a city boy, enjoyed county fairs, the more agricultural the better. They have always seemed doubly exotic -- rural (livestock, tractors, produce-judging contests) and disreputable (carnies, sideshows, white trash). Judging by our visit to the fair on Friday, the latter has thoroughly overtaken the former. The familiar smells remain -- manure, hot grease, sweat -- but more than ever the fair felt like a real-life enactment of Fox Television.

We saw an enervated Elvis impersonator in white jumpsuit perform "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You." We saw two middle-aged, ample-bellied guys in Hawaiian shirts -- one on congas, the other on steel drum -- regurgitate the Jimmy Buffet songbook. We saw corn dogs and elephant ears, onion blooms and sausage sandwiches. We saw Army recruiters using rap music to lure young men to serve their country. We saw tattoos, Mohawks, nose studs and underage girls made up like streetwalkers. The evening's big show was the Grass Roots. Remember "Midnight Confessions?"

I experienced all of this through the unlikely perspective of Henry David Thoreau. On my brother's shelves I had found a playing card-sized book, The Wisdom of Thoreau, which had once been mine. The copyright page dates it precisely -- February 1968. I had read Walden for the first time the previous year and was smitten. The pocket-sized volume -- A Little Paperback Classic -- cost 35 cents and contains excerpts from Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journals and essays. It's very much a late-sixties selection, emphasizing the political Thoreau over Thoreau as writer and naturalist.

The pages are brown and brittle but I can still read the familiar words, and I found myself envying Thoreau's sense of rootedness and connection -- not with his fellow men and women of Concord, or the United States, but with creation, especially as expressed through the cycle of the seasons. His solitude on the level of family and neighbors was negligible; as a discrete soul, it was absolute yet nonexistent. Thoreau would have hated the fair, of course -- the noise, the squandering of money and energy, the relentless tackiness. The Wisdom of Thoreau includes this excerpt from the Journal, dated Oct. 18, 1856:

"My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything. All that interests the reader is the depths and intensity of the life excited."