Some days you wake up, take a shower, dress yourself, and set a determined foot out the front door with a set list of aims you intend to achieve. Some days, those aims are outside of your comfort zone. You imagine you’ll encounter a person with a daily routine and daily expectations knowing that you’re going to have to ask something of them they might find silly or unusual.
Most of the time, that last bit is just your imagination. Doing something you usually wouldn’t is odd for you. That doesn’t make it unusual for the people you imagine you’ll have to ask for help.
As I turned left out of the neighborhood, my plan was to visit the old “stacks” at the community college in pursuit of a piece of writing I’d had published in its student literary journal. I imagined having to visit campus security, perhaps having to surrender my driver’s license in exchange for a visitor’s pass. Maybe I’d speak with a student employee in the library who’d be more than happy to meet some guy with a cowboy hat that fancied himself to be a literary type. Maybe I’d run across some professor I’d taken a class with. I might even photograph the murals in the Student Union Hall downstairs on my way out, assuming they were still there.
Such thoughts seemed to grow more and more complex and detailed. They grew more and more filled with information I could recall from my days on campus. Not in an excited way or an anticipatory way. More in the way that stoicism teaches one to avoid- the way where you’re imagining the future in some futile, pointless attempt to prepare for it, only to inevitably be encountered with a simpler and less predictable reality that is based on other people’s real lives, not your own narcissistic delusion that the world is made up of your beliefs about it.
It was then that I realized I was stuck in traffic.
Unusual traffic. Not that I typically passed near the Lake County Fair Grounds on Saturday afternoons. In fact, I don’t even typically depart from the same house I left this morning, as I am staying at a house I’m watching for someone who is out of town.
Looking to kill time in the line of vehicles slowly working it’s way through the stop sign at the far end of the block, I reminded myself that it is always becoming of a person to phone ahead before driving any distance and hoping to achieve anything upon one’s arrival.
The university’s phone menu had a clear subtext: “Most of the campus is closed, you should call back during the week, and no one has answered the phone.” Actually, it wasn’t all that subtextual, those facts were stated fairly clearly.
Finally arriving at the intersection in front of the fairground entrance, it became clear to me that I had been stuck in traffic caused by people arriving for the Vintage Tractor and Farm Festival.
Long story short, I decided that investigating and photographing this annual event (which I’d never previously attended) was just as productive a use of the next few hours as a visit to my alma matter was likely to be on a Saturday afternoon, especially with nothing solid on my schedule the coming Monday.
Farm equipment is the alleged focus of this festival, but don’t be naive- an event organized around heavy machinery invites creative interpretation of what is being celebrated and sold to the public, doesn’t matter if that event is a slow weekend at the fairgrounds in Indiana or at an expo center in a major city.
For all of the farm equipment, pony rides, pie sales, and adjunct raffles for quilts, there was one attraction that would have brought my camera and I in that was visible from the street way back when I was caught in stop-and-go traffic: An incredible array of historic automobiles. I’m not exaggerating. These weren’t muscle cars from the 1960s or vehicular oddities like the Volkswagen Thing (though there might have been one of those back by the military surplus area). These were plated-by-state-regulation-as-historic automobiles.
The hood ornaments, after-market details, and decals alone were well worth the visit. 
The professional thing to do is to tell you that the Vintage Tractor and Farm Festival runs from July 9th -11th in 2021 at the Lake County Fairgrounds, located at 899 Lake Street in Crown Point, Indiana. Admission (which signage characterizes as a donation) is $5 per person. Children admitted free with an adult. Check for dates and hours in subsequent years and decades.