Ho for the Fair!

Rain or shine, expect Martha’s Vineyard to heat up today. Ovens across the Island will yield to tins full of batter — cakes, cupcakes, brownies and muffins — mixed and poured by small hands (washed first, of course). Along with entries in almost all categories, junior baking samples are due tomorrow at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society and Livestock Fair. By the time adults trip in with their potentially prizewinning perishables on Thursday morning, ribbons will have been hung on disposable plates and on artworks and displays and flower arrangements throughout much of Agricultural Hall. Come Thursday, children will map the hall in their minds using the landmarks of their own work. “Come see mine, Mom! It’s over here.”

The record shows that, despite the grumblings of many Islanders about the remote location of the fair in the early years — all the way to West Tisbury! — “young people sang as they rode along in hay carts or truck wagons or carriages.” Nobody arrives in a carriage anymore, but they do sing, or squeal, all the way there. In the inland heart of the Island, there’s a rising tide of noise and laughter that builds until gates open Thursday and does not subside until they close on Sunday.

It comes from the supa-slide and the skillet-throw, the fried dough and the dog show, the pigs and cows and chickens and goats, whose image on this year’s poster provided the theme, Kiddin Around at the Fair.

Much has changed on the Island and in West Tisbury — in 1971, the town population was less than five hundred; in 1986 it was more than fifteen hundred, and more than a thousand year-round residents have joined the town since then — but the joy of the fair never does.

No wonder Timeless Treasures already has been selected as the theme of next year’s fair, the one-hundred-and-fiftieth fair on the Island. It was a year after it began that Richard Pease wrote in the Gazette, “Martha’s Vineyard — The first white men who visited its shores found it covered with fertility and swarming with inhabitants; they tested the soil and pronounced it fat and lusty; the display of products at the fair affords ample evidence that its virtue has not departed — that labor, directed by intelligence, will meet, here as elsewhere, with abundant recompense.”

And so today, we wish intelligence to direct the last labors of all involved, and on Thursday we all will marvel at the abundant recompense of it all.