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The Geauga County Fair is an incredible piece of Americana. Due to its location near the pseudo-civilization of Cleveland, it can have its modern influence. However, much of it is a world away from that environment and still strongly shows its old ties to the land.
I guess the modern realities would mean that Geauga County is where the meth-heads can meet the crack-heads.
The man pictured here was the judge in the main riding arena. As you can see, his presence is incredible. Watching him work was fascinating to me as I have no idea what he is evaluating. I’ve never been around horses at all, nor the farm equipment with which they were used, so any differentiation between contestants appeared random. I mean, the horses seemed to be well appointed, went where directed and did not eat one small child in the course of their duties. Seemed like accomplishments to me. But this guy had a countenance–and the obvious respect of those participating–that made me appreciate his skill.
This made me think of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws, one of which being that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Standing around the ring that day showed me another aspect of this idea. These technologies of horse-work are incredibly rich and dense. We think of them as simple because they have been replaced with mechanized contrivances. But this has it backwards. Things are complicated and it is a natural human instinct to simplify them. Our modern life becomes increasingly simple we just have to learn the interfaces to the black box used to solve the problem. Thus the solution to the problem becomes more remote from our experience.
Do you bake your own bread? If so, do you know how to mill the grain for it? Do you know when to seed for that grain, what the soil needs to be like, how to harvest it? All of this knowledge is nicely replaced by the grocery store and mass production and specialization. Now we are all incredibly well trained and efficent at our specialized task but yet we do not have a grasp on the basic blocks of our daily existence.
Which leads us to another author’s quote:
Christ, what the hell am I going on about? I sound like I just finished reading Walden. I blame it on all the lentils I’ve been eating recently. I’m going to go burn some tires using super-conductors and a nuclear reactor.
