Ruminating on responsibility at the county fair

On the final day of the Campbell County Fair, I got the chance to cover the annual youth livestock sale for a couple of hours. I had covered the event my first couple of years in Gillette, but it had been a long while since I’d come back.

Before I moved to Wyoming, all I knew about FFA and 4-H came from a single scene in the 2000s cult classic “Napoleon Dynamite,” where the main character and his friend are tested on their cow knowledge.

I was working on a Sunday, but it didn’t feel like work. I had the easiest job of anyone in Cam-plex Central Pavilion that day: Point the camera, shoot, make sure I spelled the kid’s name right. But there’s a lot more to it than that. At the livestock sale, all I saw was the end result, not the months of hard work that the kids went through to get their animals into the best shape possible. And don’t get me started on the rubric that the judges make them go through.

It’s a long day for the auctioneer and the volunteers who have to scan the crowd to look for raised hands. I talked to one of those guys the following day, and it turns out that there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

There’s the hand raise of someone who is bidding, and then there’s a wide range of other hand gestures that to the inexperienced eye might seem like a bid but is actually a wave, a stretch or a swipe at a pesky bug.

Then there’s all the work done by the fair staff and volunteers behind the scenes to make sure the sale runs smoothly. And we can’t forget the buyers, the ones who make sure no kid goes home empty-handed, who sit in the bleachers for several hours until the final animal has been shown. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and often donated the animals back to their kids.

Seeing these children walk around the ring with their animals made me think about my own childhood. When I was their age, “responsibility” was just a spelling bee word. I knew what it meant, but I definitely didn’t put it into practice. With all the negative stereotypes pushed by older generations about “kids these days,” it’s nice to see these Campbell County kids prove that wrong.

All in all, it’s always a good time when the community comes together for the kids. It’s one of the things that makes Campbell County great.