Backstory: Blue-ribbon America

I stagger over to a 30-foot metal ice cream cone, which houses an amiable woman pumping soft-serve into cones. "Don't you get sick of all the noise?" I ask her. "Oh, I love it in here," she says. "It stays cool and I can't hear a thing." I lean in and discover she's right: The Cone Lady has her own oasis in the middle of this spinning, blinking chaos. I consider taking her next shift.

Instead, I slouch over to Pioneer Hall – and fall asleep on a worn white bench waiting for the couples' square-dancing lessons to start. Friday begins on the bench where Thursday ended (though no, I didn't sleep at the fair). It's drizzled on and off all morning, and the bottom of my ankle-length skirt is muddy and soaked.

About 85,000 ribbons, banners, and rosettes are awarded each year at the Iowa State Fair, including several in the next contest I watch: ladies' husband-calling. It's like an audio catalog of women's grievances through the ages: shut the TV off, come help with the cleaning, get in here, dinner's ready, and finally, a simple high-pitched scream. The winner is Savanna DeJong from Oelwein, married eight months, who reminds her husband in the octave of a referee's whistle that he's married to her and not the motorcycle.

The mom-calling competition operates on a similar concept: Children scream into the microphone that it's time for lunch, dad hit them with cow pies, Emma's in the cookie jar, the bathroom's flooded, and anyway, why can't they get a tractor? Exactly one child says "please."

For lunch, I get a "Giant Smokie" minus the smokie – onions, peppers, mustard, and sauerkraut on a foot-long bun – and settle in for livestock shows. A man in suspenders sees my notebook and asks if I'm a judge for Ponies of America. "I don't even know if these are ponies," I say, but I'm proud anyway. I could be an Iowan.

In the barns, livestock owners camp among their animals, with cots and blankets and bags of Fritos. I'm wandering through the stalls, crooning to the baby goats, when I spot a pig as big as a Volkswagen. It's Waldo, the prize boar, weighing in at 1,199 pounds. His ears are the size of infants. Waldo's security detail, Jerry Hunter, explains in a hushed tone that the boar will go to market soon, and when he does, he's good only for pepperoni. Any other meat would be tough and smelly, he says, coming from pigs like these.

***

"You will find that conditions at a fair will surpass your wildest dreams," the old sheep tells Templeton in "Charlotte's Web." And for me, as for Templeton, they did. It wasn't the 200 food stands, or the butter sculptures, or the 1,818 miles of toilet tissue. It was the emotion everywhere – kids fighting over who gets to sit in a tractor, the 5-year-old who placed in the joke-telling contest and was too excited to remember his name, even the woman who stormed out after the refried-bean contest, muttering that she liked her cooking even if no one else did.

I get home early Saturday morning and have never been so happy to pull on a Spam T-shirt and climb into bed. I went to the fair as a voyeur. But as I left this place where dill pickles are fried without irony and where I'd heard "ornery" used four times in two days, I found myself already longing to return – with my mother.

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