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The first person I noticed as I entered the Albion, Nebraska, fairgrounds at dusk was a lean teenage girl in jeans riding hers with serious elan. She galloped past me on a quarter horse, and soon I became aware that dozens of horses and riders were about—some teenagers but most of them older men, raw-boned or heavyset, all sitting comfortably in their saddles. I came upon a holding pen full of Black Angus steers, none yet a year old, docilely shuffling their hooves. There was no gamboling about the premises for these mute beasts—whose most powerful attribute is their placid incomprehension of their pending doom. To my right was the grandstand that stretched alongside the dirt oval of the fair’s main event, the stock car races. And then there were the twinkling colored lights of the Ferris wheel. I’d seen higher and more fearsome looking Ferris wheels even in traveling carnivals. But this wasn’t a carnival. It was the Boone County Fair, an annual celebration of a way of life.
