Addison County Home and Farm Field Days is widely considered one of the Vermont county fairs that has stayed truest to these events’ agricultural roots. This year’s signal event was a hand-mowing competition attended by the contest’s founder, now 100 years old but still capable of swinging a scythe. The day he meets the Grim Reaper, the latter will probably ask him for advice.
It’s been said, and I would agree, that the most important product of Vermont’s farms is farm kids. A downstate cousin who came to Field Days said they were like gods and goddesses. Speaking of the way the teenage girls cared for their horses, he said “I wish I was a horse—or at least a saddle.”
One year the organizers of the armwrestling competition couldn’t pull it together, but so many of the young bucks insisted on having some sort of contest that they announced a no-weight-class winner-take-all event. It came down to a body-builder who could bench-press 330 pounds and a thin, fresh-faced, stripling farm kid. In the final pull, the farm kid won.
I asked him afterward if he had done anything to prepare. “No,” he said, then thought and said “I helped my father with the haying.”