Down to Earth Comman Ground Fair changes many visitors through the years

More than a harvest festival, more than a Maine tradition, the Common Ground Fair is a Maine phenomenon. For some, it’s a yearly pilgrimage to life as it might be. For others, the fair’s abundant harvest of brilliant red and gold tomatoes, orange pumpkins, deep green squashes, even the temptation to dowse away one’s worries, is a reflection of life as it is being lived at this very moment.

Born 27 years ago and held first at the Litchfield Fairgrounds, later at the Windsor Fairgrounds and more recently graduating to its own land in Unity, Common Ground has some other names. It’s also known as the organic fair, the green fair, but many still know it as the hippie fair. Visitors watching kids gallivant through corn husk mazes and grown men and women walk in 10-foot-tall stilts, dancing to huge drumming circles, surely will recall another, earlier, era, with its dreams of wide possibilities and living lightly on the land.

It is hard to imagine Maine without this annual gathering and meeting place, this celebration of farming and energy efficiency, this influx of ideas of all kinds. Perhaps because it’s such an institution, it’s also hard to gauge the true impact of the fair. Clearly, as the fair has grown over the years, so has the state’s organic industry. But so has the nation’s interest in organic foods and alternative medicines. Much that once seemed odd, even possibly unique to Common Ground, has now become part of common culture, even if some early ideas of the environmental movement seem to have been run over by an onslaught of SUVs and McMansions.

Life has changed over the past 27 years and the Common Ground Fair has been a part of that change. Barbara Luce, this year’s fair director, is not alone in saying that the fair is where she learned many techniques for living off the land. Take composting, she says: “Instead of throwing a whole bunch of stuff in a pile, I learned how to turn it and water it. I now go to the dump once every three months.”

If she has a moment this year, she’s going to attend the session on human logging, how to harness a log to one’s body to pull it out of the woods. Why? “I don’t have a horse,” she says. Someday, she might need to pull a log out of the woods. “How can I do it myself otherwise?”

For others, the fair has caused more internal changes. Barbara Balkin, who helps out at the Whole Life Tent, where alternative means of health are explored, credits the fair with returning her to Maine. Though she grew up in Bar Harbor, she left Maine for Boston when she was young. Returning to visit family in 1978, she went to the fair. Her experience there convinced her to move back.

She also credits the information and processes she experienced in the Whole Life area with helping her move on from the sexual abuse that marred her childhood. In the years since, she says she has seen people be introduced to a healing technique one year only to return to the fair a year or two later as practitioners of the method. She has no doubt that the fair has changed people’s lives. She’s seen it first-hand. So have I. Years ago, a friend spent her day at the fair learning to felt. She evolved into a sculptor, showing her work at Maine galleries.

But one needn’t have one’s life changed to enjoy the fair. Some think of it as a grand shopping spree. Maybe it’s where they get their yarn for the year, or their spring bulbs, or their holiday gifts, spending their money locally, at the fair’s extensive craft section. For many, it’s a place to meet people from across the state, folks they’ve known and loved and lost touch with.

Some come to show their kids the animals, music and earthiness of the land. When my son was young, I tried to do that, but he would drag me straight to the kids’ area and I would spend most of my time pasting together scraps of fabric and paper, making all sorts of creations. I surprised myself in loving my time there as much as he did – the variety of found objects available to us was that amazing and abundant. We would leave the area to pounce on the lunch section, which had an expanse of food that was just as wonderful and wild as the materials with which we had been playing: falafel, curry, hot potatoes, and always, always, sundaes topped with maple syrup, blueberry sauce and soft whipped cream.

While the vendors, craftspeople and entertainers are all Mainers, and even the food must be mostly grown here, one keynote speaker this year is not even from this nation. Juvelina Palma is Salvadoran. With a translator’s help, she will be giving the keynote speech in Spanish, a first for the fair. Palma will be speaking about small farmers in El Salvador, and how free trade agreements affect small farmers everywhere.

The other keynote speaker is Sandra Steingraber, whose book, “Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood,” explores the impact of toxins on fetal development through her own experience with carrying, nursing and weaning her daughter, Faith. Also coming will be Democratic presidential hopeful Denis Kucinich. Among the entertainers are The Humble Farmer, Inanna and Dave Mallett.

This is a fair of dreams, a place to dance, sing, strut and learn how to “eat your lawn,” fix a bike tire, preserve constitutional freedoms or ease premenopausal stress. Then again, your dream might lie in visions of glory. For open to you may just be the top prize in the Common Ground Fair’s world-famous, one-and-only, Harry S. Truman Distance Manure Pitch-Off.