CABIN FEVER

What tradition means at the historic Neshoba County Fair.

- PAIGE WILLIAMS

The Neshoba County Fair calls itself Mississippi's Giant Houseparty, because every year the same families return, antlike, to five hundred and ninety-seven individually owned, festively painted cabins there. For a week at the end of July, even many who live nearby move to the fairgrounds, creating an instant community of twenty thousand people, three times larger than the population of the county seat, Philadelphia. The fair, founded in the late eighteen-hundreds in the remote east-central part of the state, has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the coronavirus pandemic because the cabin owners could not bear to give it up. After spraying for bugs, touching up the paint, hanging porch swings, washing linens, changing light bulbs, making beds, and stocking refrigerators (some cabins have four), the families hold the equivalent of Thanksgiving-seven times. There are food hangovers, and hangover hangovers, and children everywhere, only nobody goes home.

A lightly occupied fair cabin sleeps twenty-six; some sleep sixty. Upper floors resemble bunkhouses: bed after bed after bed. The fair is not the place for introverts, neat freaks, sensitives, or anyone who cannot tolerate unrelenting, bone-deep heat. Central air-conditioning is heresy, as is television. Did the fair's founders watch "American Ninja Warrior"? They did not. Indoor plumbing and electricity are acceptable-fans and window units blow wide open. This year, during the hottest month in human history, I stepped into a frigid, empty-looking bedroom and was startled when a teen-ager rose from an upper bunk in a ghillie suit of blankets.