A Blue-Ribbon Day

Of all late-summer harvests, one of the most enticing

omes late summer, come the country fairs. They appear along the branches of rural roads and byways like the very harvest fruits they display. They are perhaps the oldest village shows on earth, these local contests and exhibits of what man and earth and season can produce. But with their golden age clearly in the past by the first half of the 20th century, country fairs seemed forsaken by the American love affair with the city. And yet, as the 21st century approaches, the country fair is once more alive and well and multiplying.

The New England air in season fills with a special blend of sounds—of lowing cattle and squawking Ferris wheels, of barkers’ shrill badgering, of trot and gallop and clank of chain on pickup. And, oh, the smells from all those shedcovered, improvised kitchens offering wholesome and wellbalanced country meals set before you with motherly smiles or enticing junk food served up with more worldly looks from hustlers’ eyes.

We Were Right All Along

tiny Vermont, who happens to believe that I have a responsibility to make this world a better place.” Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her efforts to destroy and ban land mines. Her memoir, My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize , was published in 2013.

Vermont’s “Great Lake” compiled by Julia Shipley

6.8 TRILLION gallons of water: Champlain’s estimated volume

400 feet: Champlain’s maximum depth

120 & 12 miles: Champlain’s length and maximum width, more than three times the size of New England’s secondlargest lake, Moosehead in Maine

FIFTY-FOUR public beaches

1609 year French explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed into the Lake Champlain region THREE HUNDRED documented shipwrecks on the lake’s bottom

4000 canal boats plying Champlain’s waters between 1819 and 1940

450-480 MILLION years: age of Champlain’s Chazy Reef, one of the oldest in the world illustrious and oftsighted lake monster, “Champ”

27 daily round-trip summer ferry crossings between Charlotte, Vermont, and Essex, New York

SEVENTYONE islands (including one that’s an entire county) eighty-one species of fi sh in the lake

300 recorded sightings of “Champ” since 1609