Fair Warning

Time for the State Fair. Perhaps that’s what we really need in Point Roberts, assuming we need something else. I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion this morning and he was singing the praises not only of the actual Minnesota State Fair but also of his memories of that fair. I wonder if people ever have memories of fairs that they attended as adults? They seem, to me, to always be about being a child in that wonderful maze of events and animals and food. As an adult, I once read an essay by Calvin Trillin that advised me to eat as much as I possibly could when attending a state fair because none of the goods on offer would ever taste as good anywhere else. It was good advice, but not memorable advice, insofar as I don’t remember much of anything I ever ate at a state fair.

Garrison Keillor, however, would have different memories, perhaps. This morning, he was checking out blue ribbon corn relish and plum jam from the canning competition and, memorably, chocolate-covered bacon as well as macaroni and cheese on a stick. I’ve been to fairs in Minnesota and eaten deep fried curds and the like, but never MC on a stick. I’m sorry to have missed that. Not so sorry about the chocolate-covered bacon, though, but if I’d been there I would have tried it.

Still, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever have a fair here. Too small, too hard to get to, no organizing body. Also no animals crossing the border, willy nilly. So we will just have to do with the apple harvest as a stand-in. We have a bunch of apple trees. Pretty much everybody in Point Roberts has a bunch of apple trees. The early Icelandic settlers, I believe, are responsible for many of these apple orchards whose remnants, even now, are ripening on long abandoned properties. Our own apple trees were planted by someone else, not us, not Icelandic folks. They came with the house and without labels. One of them has three or four grafts, producing transparents, which ripen in August; what I think are Jonagolds, which ripen in early September; and a truly undistinguished variety of red delicious, which ripens some other time, or not at all. In addition, there are three other trees whose variety I have no clear ideas about. Two ripen in September—one might be some variety of golden delicious-- and the third in November and none of them is a spectacular apple, though they are certainly pretty enough and adequate for eating, given that they are above all fresh.

The Jonagolds are the really the most exquisite of apples. We missed the transparents--which are very fine cooking apples--this year because they started to ripen just as we left for B.C., so we left them to our neighbors and when we returned that part of the crop was finished. The Jonagolds are stepping up now and, last night, we had the first apple pie of the season. That is truly like going to the state fair and eating gastronomic splendors. We have had the pie both with and without ice cream, and either way it is toothsome, tart, sweet, spicy, crisp and crumbly, even though it is made with slightly under-ripe Jonagolds. They will be riper soon and more pies and tarts and eventually apple sauce will follow.

The first apple pie is the big treat: three or four pies after that, we begin to be inundated with apples and soon we are dumping them into our friends’ cider press, running them through an applesauce press by the bucket, and finally, at the end, when we are having dozens of apples a day, letting them just fall under the tree where they serve as delights for the slugs and sow bugs or are moved over into the compost.

Early fall in Point Roberts belongs to the apples; to be followed, in equal abundance, by plums and pears. What Eden this? No snakes in sight.