An enduring attraction.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Rick Reno, director of the Lane Events Center, is optimistic that attendance at this year's Lane County Fair will set high marks, not despite the condition of the economy but because of it. This summer's fairs in other counties have attracted good crowds, apparently because people are looking for a relatively inexpensive diversion close to home.

The affordability is important, but there may be another reason many people will attend the fair, which opened Tuesday and runs through Sunday. County fairs have been a colorful thread in the fabric of American life for long enough to have become deeply interwoven with the culture. They are familiar in a way that makes people feel at home - the fair is a place where everybody belongs. In a time of economic anxiety and rapid change, the fair is a refuge, a place of stability.

Familiar does not mean dull or predictable. There are always surprises at the fair - as E.B. White wrote, "Anything can happen at a county agricultural fair. It is the perfect human occasion, the harvest of the fields and of the emotions. To the fair come the man and his cow, the boy and his girl, and wife and her green tomato pickle, each anticipating victory and the excitement of being separated from his money by familiar devices."

White wrote those words in 1944, and the description seems dated - particularly its casual assumptions about gender. These days, the winning tomato pickle might just as well have been entered by a man, and the prize steer could easily have been raised by a 4-H girl. But White captured the flavor of a county fair, and it hasn't changed. The combination of the novel and the known, the intermingling of innocence and risk, are constant.

There may be families attending the Lane County Fair instead of taking a more expensive out-of-town trip. Keeping the fair affordable and accessible to people on tight budgets should be a continuing goal. Equally important is to hold on to those things that make a county fair an instantly recognizable part of the American landscape - the animals, the exhibits, the rides, the food, the entertainment, the human kaleidoscope. The fair must always offer something new, but it must also be changeless.