Mike's journey to the 1900 Fryeburg Fair

Mike Noonan's journey to the 1900 Fryeburg Fair is a supernatural crossing in which a search for Sara Tidwell draws him out of 1998 and into the living past. The journey makes history more than something Mike can observe across a temporal divide: he must risk crossing that divide, and the fair becomes the place where his longing to see Sara meets the danger of being stranded there.

The crossing from 1998

The journey begins in a landscape Mike recognizes but that has slipped backward in time. He asks the Yellow Lady where and when he is, and considers whether he is dreaming. A loon calls twice from the lake; recalling the one-tap/two-tap code, Mike takes the two calls as a denial. The answer establishes that he is not in a dream, even though he cannot explain the experience beyond calling it a form of spiritual time travel.

The surroundings supply physical evidence of the change. The house at Sara Laughs has none of the wings or second story it will have in Mike's own time, and Jo's studio has not yet been built. The trees and the shoreline remain recognizable, but buildings and roads belong to a future that has not arrived. The familiar property is therefore not simply a setting for a memory: Mike stands in an earlier historical landscape, where present-day features are missing and the past is unfolding around him.

The lake also links this crossing to a previous danger. Mike approaches the birch over the water expecting the drowning sensation to return, but it does not. Instead, he sees a gold-headed Boston Post cane on the lake bottom, wrapped in white ribbons edged in red. Recognizing Royce Merrill's cane, Mike understands why Royce has stopped answering the phone: Royce's life is over. Mike also realizes that he has arrived before Royce was born. The cane fixes the time-slip to the history of the place through an object from a death already known in Mike's era.

Following the fair's sounds

From the lake, Mike follows music and the sounds of a crowded fair. The scene reaches him first as a gathering of impressions: the calliope, the bell struck by a lumberjack at a strength game, shots from a gallery, the noises of prize animals, and the smell of fried dough, grilled onions, cotton candy, manure, and hay. The mixture of celebration and farmyard roughness gives the fair an immediate physical presence, distinguishing it from an image assembled at a distance.

The approach also announces the fair through its public spectacle. A sideshow barker calls out the attractions, and Mike hears guitars and double bass growing louder as he walks toward the performance. Past and future overlap in the names of places: the track that will become Lane Forty-two leads toward a dirt road that will later be known as Route 68. Yet the people and entertainment belong to another era, while the familiar geography guides Mike toward them.

A broad flight of wooden stairs rises beyond the place where the Washburn property will be. Lanterns glow despite the daylight, and Sara is singing "Jimmy Crack Corn." At the top stands an arch bearing the words "WELCOME TO FRYEBURG FAIR" and "WELCOME TO THE 20TH CENTURY." Its two messages make the threshold explicit: the fair is both a local attraction and an entrance into a historical world. As a boy and a woman walk beneath it, they shimmer, become translucent enough for Mike to glimpse their skeletons, and disappear. The crossing is not presented as harmless nostalgia; the vanished figures expose the death beneath the fair's bright surface.

Choosing to enter

At the arch, Mike hesitates. He fears dying or disappearing if he passes beneath it, but his deeper fear is that he will be unable to return and will remain a visitor to the turn-of-the-century fair forever. The possibility of permanent displacement turns an extraordinary experience into a consequential choice: staying outside preserves distance, while entering means accepting a risk he cannot control.

Sara is what finally draws him forward. Mike has heard her singing and knows she is present in this earlier time, but hearing her is not enough. He wants to see her with his own eyes and watch her perform. His decision converts the time-slip from a strange encounter into a deliberate passage toward a person whose life belongs to the past.

Stepping beneath the arch changes the quality of his experience. Mike feels a tingling and hears what seems like a million distant voices sighing, though he cannot tell whether the sound expresses relief or dismay. He describes the difference as that between looking through a window and actually being present: on the far side he is no longer merely observing. The colors become startling, and smells that had seemed sweet and nostalgic by the lake turn rough and immediate among the fair's food stalls and crowds. Sensory details mark a change in Mike's relation to the past: he has crossed from the position of a modern visitor into participation in the scene.

Sara and the unexpected companion

Once inside the fair, Mike passes attractions that would ordinarily command attention: shooting and ringtoss games, penny-pitch, a snake dancer, Freak Alley, a corn-roasting pit, the Ghost House, a strength-test pole, a quilting booth, and a tent where people play Bingo. The Ghost House gives the fair's liveliness a pointed contrast: children laugh and squeal inside its darkened rooms, while the attraction's painted signs promise images of death. Mike notices these surroundings, but they cannot hold his attention. He is absorbed by the stage at the foot of the Ferris wheel.

There he sees Sara Tidwell alive and in her prime, performing with the Red-Tops. She stands at the front with a guitar, singing and throwing her head back to laugh at the October sky. For Mike, this is the purpose that has organized the whole crossing: the singer whose voice he followed through the altered landscape is no longer an unseen presence or a historical fact, but a living performer before him.

The spell is interrupted by Kyra Devore calling Mike from behind. She runs through the crowd in a white sailor dress with red piping and a straw hat decorated with a navy-blue ribbon, carrying her stuffed dog, Strickland. Mike catches her when she throws herself toward him and straightens her falling hat. Her arrival brings a child from his own time into the fair's past, making the crossing more than a private encounter with history and placing an immediate personal bond beside the spectacle of Sara's performance.

Narrative significance

The journey is structured around a threshold and a change in value. At first, the past is something Mike can approach from safety: its lanterns, music, and smells beckon from the other side of an arch. The skeletons glimpsed beneath the faces of passersby and the risk of being unable to return give that invitation a deathly edge. Mike crosses anyway, not because the danger has been resolved, but because seeing Sara matters more to him than remaining a protected observer.

The passage also makes the past materially present through contrasts rather than explanation. The future house has not been built; the modern road is still a track; Royce Merrill's cane rests underwater before Royce's birth; and Sara, gone by the time Royce is born, is singing onstage. These details give Mike's impossible journey a chronology he can read even when he cannot account for its mechanism. Objects, absent buildings, and the fair's living crowds each disclose a different layer of time.

The fair's two welcome signs encapsulate the experience: this is simultaneously Fryeburg Fair and an entrance into the twentieth century. Crossing that boundary changes Mike's senses and his role, but does not erase the danger of temporal displacement. His arrival at the performance fulfills the desire that led him into the past, while Kyra's sudden appearance opens the encounter onto another relationship and another set of stakes. The journey ends, in the evidence presented here, not with an explanation of how Mike traveled, but with the past made immediate around him and a child from his present reaching for him in the crowd.