Final Preparations Underway for Fair

By Delphine Schrank (Contact)

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The llamas are Hula-Hooping, the pigs are on a diet and the smashed-up cars are getting their final coat of Ninja Turtle-green paint. Something’s afoot in Loudoun, and it has contestants big and small, fuzzy-tailed and fine-limbed abuzz with anticipation, with the possible exception of the pound cakes.

Could it be? Yes! Here it comes again, starting Sunday — the 72nd Loudoun County Fair, in all its hay-bale-tossing, mule-jumping, hog-smooching splendor. For countywide members of the 4-H program, ages 5 to 19, the fair is also the culmination of year-long efforts to raise and care for their animals of choice.



But it’s not all about the kids. For Rodney Monroe, 38, and his trusty Chevrolet Cavalier, the fair’s a fool’s paradise. Car and man will be angling for Monroe’s seventh trophy in a demolition derby — or bumper cars for the junkyard set.

“Best way to get rid of road rage there is,” said Monroe, a Leesburg mechanic who doubles as head of the 4-H swine club. “You can hit people and get away with it.”

To Monroe falls the credit for bringing the derby to last year’s fair; his love affair with the event began in a neighboring county fair.

The rules are simple. One: There are no rules. Except, “you can’t play possum,” Monroe said. In each 20-minute heat, cars zoom around a ring, trying their very best to smash contenders into metal carcasses while maintaining their zip and pep. Last to survive wins.

Two: To compete, cars must be pale shadows of themselves. Monroe’s rumbling beast has been declawed, defanged and punctured — windows and air conditioner removed, wires protruding and a gaping hole punctured into the hood. Why? So firefighters can pour in water if by chance the thing should burst into flame, said Monroe, a touch blase. The radio, naturally, stays put.

To fit this year’s derby theme, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” the wreck also has been decked out in green and flaming yellow to look like a John Deere tractor.

So, any tips on strategies? “Nah,” Monroe said. Then, after a moment’s pause, “Just hold back, and don’t head in at 90 miles per hour immediately.”

The kids in the 4-H program, meanwhile, are polishing up their beasts for the shows ahead.

Near Lincoln, Sammi the llama was still dripping from a morning shampoo as she daintily stepped through the Hula-Hoop held up for her by 14-year-old Alexandra Beard.

Slender-necked and doe-eyed with comically large ears, Sammi is part of a 13-member llama herd on the Beard family farm. So Alex, a veteran member of 4-H and the 2006 Miss Loudoun Fair Senior, had her pick of animals for this year’s fair.

Jack, a black-fibered creature lazing on his side in the dust and aptly dubbed “the farm joke,” would hardly have been a suitable contender in the assorted obstacle courses and pageants in which Alex is scheduled to compete. Nor would Jupiter, who has an inopportune tendency to break into buckets of feed and walk around with the feed bag on his head. It just wouldn’t do for him to go nuzzling inside a judge’s pocket.

But Sammi has been trained for competition ever since Alex bought her with her earnings from refereeing soccer.

“It’s really hard,” Alex said of balancing schoolwork and other activities with caring for the animals — feeding, mucking out, washing, brushing, vaccinating and training them to march up and down ramps, over hay bales and through the hoops.

With another llama, Charlie, Alex won a title at the Madison County Fair. Sammi is a novice, and Alex has been working on getting her accustomed to life in the spotlight. She doesn’t yet respond to the sound of Alex’s voice, but her “confirmation,” or bone structure, is good and her personality is charming, Alex said.

“You can tell she’s looking forward to it. She likes it. She likes seeing new things,” said Alex, stroking Sammie’s white-and-chocolate wool.

As for Alex, the excitement of the fair hasn’t yet worn off. “I love the fair,” she said. “It’s always fun.” Best of all, she doesn’t have to sell Sammi off at week’s end.

Not so for steers, pigs and sheep, who might finish their week at the fairgrounds as ingredients in a skewered kebab.

For the Beamer kids, just north of Purcellville, that outcome wouldn’t be half bad. It has been a long, tiring slog for 10 months, the siblings said, and they are ready for the fair to come and go so they can auction off their critters and finally take a break from the weight of their responsibilities.

“It’s more fun once they’re gone,” Tyler Beamer, 14, said of his two steers, two sheep and two pigs. Tyler won’t name his animals until the day of the fair.

Ashley Beamer, 11, tends to her two sheep, Bo and Peep, a pig and Hokie the steer, a tribute to Virginia Tech. But she said she really got attached to her animals only in her first year with 4-H, which was two years ago.

On a recent afternoon, Tyler and Ashley were measuring out the precise grams of feed to keep their charges within the requisite weight range. Too heavy and they risk being disqualified; too light and they might be classified as sick.

With the sweltering heat, Tyler’s steers had lost their appetite. And at $3,000 apiece, they are not a commodity to be treated lightly.

The sheep were less temperamental.

“They’re done already?” Tyler asked no one in particular shortly after dumping some grains into the trough. “They were inhaling!”

Exhaustion aside, Tyler and Ashley, multi-year champs at the county and state level in various categories, are forces to be reckoned with. Tyler won a Reserve Champion Angus Steer title at the Virginia Beef Exposition. As last year’s champion junior showman, Ashley is no less a rising star.

“Potential. A lot of potential,” she said of the qualities she seeks in her charges. “Calmness. And balance between muscle and fat.”

No prizes this year for 4-H poultry club members, however. They were sorely disappointed to learn that they are barred from showing their birds at the fair. The statewide ban on all poultry shows follows detection of antibodies to a nonlethal strain of avian influenza in a flock of commercial turkeys in the Shenandoahs. So Loudoun fairgoers will have to make do with a rubber duck regatta instead of a pageant of feather-footed critters.

But for the rest of the fairground contestants, the days are dwindling, and the competition, in all shapes, colors and sizes, promises to be stiff.

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