It’s the first sign of autumn, birds getting drunk on mountain ash berries and diving into the living room window.
More proof that drinking and diving don’t mix.

Got to love fall, particularly when the weather’s fair. Got to love fall fairs, too, particularly the traditional ones, with the 4-H displays, cow-pie bingo and dog fights at the pet parade.

September is fall fair month all over B.C., except in Kamloops, where the Provincial Winter Fair begins Sept. 23, the second day of autumn. (In Kamloops, stores erect Christmas displays in August. Back-to-school ads start running on the May long weekend.)

The Saltspring Island and Luxton fairs are on today. The Sooke Fall Fair and Cowichan Exhibition were last week. So was my favourite, Metchosin Day.

Metchosin Day has hay rides, Irish dancers and an excavator, a real one, that the kids get to dig holes with. Corn on the cob, Parry Bay lamb slow-cooked over coals, and Galloping Goose sausage with red-onion marmalade. Wasp-covered Lions sell sno-cones for a buck a pop. (Or is that lion-covered WASPs selling pop for a buck?)
Sometimes, local fairs insert local flavour. Metchosin has sheep shearing, the Comox Valley has logger sports and Saltspring has barcecued tofu. I don’t even want to know what happens on Lasqueti Island. (“Mom! I won the biggest-bud contest and came second in sensimilla!”)

On the coast, you get cedar-plank salmon. In cattle country, it’s barbecued beef and rodeos.

I once took some cousins from England to the North Thompson Fall Fair and Rodeo, where they got to see a nine-yearold boy thrown from a sheep. He landed face-down in the dirt — whump! — where he lay, motionless. “Get up, you little sissy,” boomed the voice on the PA.

I think this gave my cousins a whole new appreciation of Canadians.

The best thing about the fair is that everyone is in such a good mood, except during the judging, when you can cut the tension, if not all the pies, with a knife.

Some judging is straightforward — “Let’s try the raspberry wine again to be sure (hic!)” — while some is shrouded in mystery, with bunny-breeders or graingrowers or whoever hovering anxiously as a high priest of the arcane pokes and prods their produce like a Sotheby’s expert going at a van Gogh.

A few years ago, at the Armstrong fair, I made the mistake of asking a man in a cowboy hat how you judged hay bales. “With bullshit!” he barked, as his wife tugged nervously at his jean jacket. “They judge them with bullshit!” Turns out he had placed second in alfalfa, or whatever, and wasn’t happy about it. I think he had tractor rage.
That aside, there is something comforting, something grounding, about a country fair, wandering through the pickles and pies, the sumo-sized pumpkins and the little Silkey chickens, the ones that look like Rod Stewart in his disco phase. I’m told there are still Prairie fairs where you can win fabulous prizes by guessing the weight of the fattest guy in town. It all makes a feller want to raise a barn, or tip his hat to a lady, or maybe become Amish like in that movie Witness, only without the gunfire.

This is particularly true for those who spend their working lives behind a desk or a deadline. The farther up the corporate ladder you climb, the greater the desire to get back to the land.

I talked to my newspaper editor friend Susan Duncan last week. She said she felt great, had spent the day canning 30 quarts of peaches.

Now, I grew up down the street from Susan, have known her since I was two years old. In all this time, I have never seen her can anything other than a reporter. But it does not surprise me that she should find solace in a sealer, where the fruits of one’s labours are, well, fruit. There are no judgment calls with canned peaches, no grey areas. (If there are, don’t eat them.) Susan likes putting up preserves, I like chopping wood.
This all makes me think we would do well to hold the urban equivalent of country fairs in the city. Contests featuring Lunchables and Big Macs in place of cucumbers and cakes. Taxi-whistling instead of hog-calling. No sheep-shearing, but suit-and-tie guys could demonstrate the fine art of fleecing a customer. Needle in the haystack out, syringe in the gutter in.

Best of all: goodbye “stranger danger,” hello “howdy, neighbour.”