Step Right Up!
The Maui County Fair returns with orchids and livestock and thrill rides—oh, my!
Tom Stevens
Photography courtesy
Maui County Fair
Nagamine Photo Studio
Sunshine Orchids
Google has a feature that simulates a warp-speed descent to our planet. If I could “Google Earth” to the Maui County Fair, I’d zip down from space at night, find Maui in the slumbering bulk of the Pacific, then streak toward the pinwheeling lights and colors of the fair.
Moving this fast would also let me travel through time. I’d know I’m locked onto the fair when blurry images of bygone horse races, polo matches and celebrated high-school football games flicker past the view port.
I might glimpse elegant pa‘u parade riders from the 1930s, astride their decorated mounts, and barefoot plantation kids scrambling aboard the special “fair train,” their good (and only) pair of shoes slung over their shoulders. More decades zoom by, and there goes daredevil Bully Gomes, wowing the crowd as he blasts his Harley through a ring of fire.
As time blurred forward, I’d get a bird’s-eye view of the Old Kahului Fairgrounds on Pu‘unene Avenue, a beloved grid of lively byways and quaint white buildings razed too soon by arson and progress.
