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Before it begins, everything is unfamiliar.

I’ve never heard noise like this. The revving engines, like ten thousand chainsaws starting and stopping at random, soar over the cawing rhythm of a skid steer in reverse. The crowd rumbles and jeers. The announcer does not stop talking, thanking auto body shops and lumber companies and Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 562. He tells us that we’d better get ourselves ready and be sure to get our friends over to the arena quick because we’ve never seen a show like we’ll be seeing tonight, yessir, we’re in for a real treat here in Washington, Missouri.

When I look closely, I recognize some of the crowd, the occasional school board member and city attorney. But most are anonymous faces who’ve never met me and who wouldn’t recognize me in person, even if they’ve seen my name around. They wear Cardinals red and denim blue. Every ball cap except mine is mesh in the back. People drink Busch, mostly. Many haven’t touched Bud Light in almost two years.

The tractors lining up in front of us bear names like “Hay Bales and Hand Grenades” or “Deere Hunting,” painted yellow over forest green. Their tires kick up thick brown dust as they move. Each brush of color seems foreign — even, ironically, that 40-foot tall American flag, twitching in the feeble breeze.

Least familiar of all is this relentless heat. Perspiration waits high on my back and scurries down to my waist without warning, my stainless steel water bottle sweating right alongside me. This afternoon, when I covered the market hog show, the 80 percent humidity pushed the RealFeel® up around 110°F. I switched shirts in my car.

I’m standing on a huge mound of dirt that separates parking lot from circus maximus and fiddling with the stubborn buttons of a weatherbeaten camera. I’m trying to remember lessons I half-learned during my sophomore year. I didn’t really intend or want to take photos for work, but at newspapers as small as mine — at most newspapers, increasingly — everyone handles every job.

A drop falls from my nose and wets the camera screen. I swallow an expletive.

I moved to Missouri last year during Earth’s hottest month on record, and I’ve learned quickly how this climate affects me. I lose patience quicker, make more mistakes. I’m tired the moment I step outside the door. This summer has been more manageable than its predecessor, but that’s not a huge consolation this very moment.

We had heat in New York, too, without a doubt. Summers could get sweltering, especially in the crunch of the city. I remember boarding outdated, uncooled trains with smells that rivaled the pigpen where I spent this morning. But we also had endless stretches of beach along the Atlantic, countless parks along the Hudson, and just north the Catskills and Adirondacks for a couple weeks of summer camp refuge. Meanwhile, the world in and around my suburban home was so dense, so full of buildings and cars and people and stuff, that heat felt more like little pools filling in the cracks between sturdy walls of air conditioning.

Things are different just a few dozen miles west of St. Louis, where residential sprawl surrenders to corn in the blink of an eye. Long stretches of Interstate 44 pass without a manmade structure in sight. The car is the only oasis in weather like this, unless you turn the engine off for longer than 5 minutes, which is all the time it takes to become a sauna. Nobody swims in the Missouri River. I guess some areas have small lakes with public beaches, but I’m yet to find one in Franklin County. The heat out here is a tidal wave that crashes over everything without mercy.

Locals seem to relish the heat. They lean into it. Here they sit unbothered on sizzling metal, breathing exhaust fumes, waiting with rapt attention to watch, as I understand it, a tractor try and fail to drive 100 yards. I expected a culture shock when I moved, but sometimes these differences feel written into DNA. It’s more than politics or values. It lies beneath the skin. Each degree Fahrenheit quantifies the chasm between me and those people in the stands.

And then it begins.

I’m pulled back to my surroundings by the announcer’s frantic voice climbing in tandem with the whine of a tractor engine. There’s something tangible in the air as the pitches rise. I don’t need to understand anything about this machine or the fuel it burns to feel the raw suspense, made manifest by that noise and by the darkening smoke pouring from the tall exhaust pipes.

Those massive wheels spin furiously, and the crowd swells. The wheels catch hold of dirt. The tractor begins to move, at first reluctant, then finding its footing. In a moment, it’s sprinting. Its front end bucks and lifts off the ground. The announcer whoops. The two flags on the tractor’s hood, one Missourian and one American, whip back toward the driver. The tractor doesn’t follow a straight line, although I think it’s meant to, in theory. But that doesn’t break the spell.

Hundreds of pairs of eyes are glued to this thing, this chimera of Iowa engineering and backwoods tinkering, as it careens down the track. Nobody looks away. I’m so caught up in it that I forget to take pictures. It’s like watching a 3-pointer sail toward the basket or the last few strokes of the 4x100-yard freestyle. It’s the final belted note of the soprano’s solo. It’s what we’ve been waiting for — all of us, even me. And it’s actually pretty enthralling.

The tractor stops as suddenly as it started, with an abrupt lurch that’s met with cheers. Just like that, the moment has passed. Particulate matter and Kenny Chesney fill the air. The next tractor lines up, a pattern that will repeat countless times before I leave. Sometimes the engine gives out with a theatrical explosion, other times a lucky driver sets a new record for the night. I take photos. I scrawl names. The effect wears off.

But so too does the heat. Oppressive day gives way to breezy night as the sun dips behind the hills. The rides on the midway start up and remind me of Playland, the small amusement park in the next town over from where I grew up, a summertime staple since as far back as I can remember. Although we didn’t have livestock pens along the Long Island Sound, other details in this picture are exactly the same: crowds of middle schoolers shuffling between carnival games, the smell of greasy Kraft singles bubbling to viscous liquid over a hot griddle.

The night is almost pleasant. The Missouri sunset shines brighter in the fairgrounds parking lot, where it’s not filtered through engine exhaust. While I pull my car out of its spot on the grass, I think about last year’s fair, when I didn’t know breeding swine and market swine were judged by different standards. No such mistake this time.

I’m not sure if I’ll be back at the fair next summer working this job. Small newspapers close every week. It seems like the journalism industry keeps getting more and more fragile, just as the climate grows hotter. Projections for both are bleak. A year from now, I could very well be working someplace different, facing some new kind of discomfort and cursing it under my breath.

But maybe I’ll return, assigned to cover another agricultural contest rooted in some alien tradition that my friends from Westchester wouldn’t believe. I might find another fleeting moment of clarity hidden inside. Or maybe I’ll be tasked again with taking pictures of the tractor pull, if these ones turn out any good. I decide I wouldn’t mind that, especially if the weather’s a little cooler.

After all, despite its best efforts, this scene is no longer half so unfamiliar.

Chris Parker’s essay was one of five honorable mentions of this magazine’s 12th annual Young Alumni Essay Contest. Parker is a staff reporter at Missourian Publishing Company.