Ordinarily the month of June would have seen the Napanee Beaver pages filled with previews of several annual events.
The Riverfront Festival, Music by the River, the LACGH golf tournament, just to name a few. The longer the COVID-19 related ban on public gatherings went on however, the more evident it became those weren’t going to happen.
The Napanee Fair however was far enough away, there was at least a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, it would be deemed safe enough to host it. Those hopes were dashed in early May when organizers made the tough decision to cancel, likely the first time in 188 years the fair won’t be held in Napanee.
None of this is to imply the organizers made the wrong decision. Public health and safety is the number one priority and they absolutely made the right choice. The amount of planning and organizing needed to go into a four day event requires nearly a full calendar year and time was running out and a decision had to be made. Even now, with restrictions slowly being lifted, Ontario has seen a sudden spike in positive cases, jumping up by 26 cases in just a week.
It’s very likely that even if the Lennox and Addington Agricultural Society wanted to have a fair the first week of August, the province wouldn’t have let them. At its core, a fair gets people out of the house and encourages them to be social and meet with friends and strangers from far and wide. Ordinarily a good thing, but in the times of a pandemic, it’s the last thing people should be doing.
And further, none of this is to imply having to cancel a fair comes close to the devastating loss of life that has been experienced across the globe-losing a fair for one year is a miniscule sacrifice all things considered.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t still disappointing. Though no one’s to blame, the fact is the loss of a community fair is a tough blow to a rural area such as this one. The financial loss to the Agricultural Society, estimated around $15,000, is one thing. But there’s a whole host of other losses that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. The experience a young member of 4-H gets of seeing their hard work come to fruition when they present their livestock to a judge. The joy kids have racing to the midway and seeing friends they haven’t seen since school finished in June. The fun of watching beater cars on their last legs get all decorated and then smashed to a crumpled mess.
The fair wasn’t always a favourite assignment of this reporter, but a lot has changed in the last 12 years. Now with a flock of backyard chickens, a horse and more recently a toddler, there’s admittedly a lot more appeal to a community fair these days. One thing that won’t be missed however is the endless loop of a Homer Simpson-esque voice blaring over the mid-way talking about fries and asking if ketchup is a fruit-over and over and over.
Although, the thought of not hearing it this August may feel as though just another tradition of the summer has been lost.
The hope is that by following all of Public Health’s guidelines, next summer will be a lot more like those we’ve come to love and less like what we’re seeing right now. Each cancelled event serves as one more reminder of why we’re all doing our part to flatten the curve for 2021.
Adam Prudhomme