There will be no fair this year, a casualty of the virus that has closed our midways.

No horses, cattle, or pigs in barns you can smell before walking through them. No games of chance, no rides, no haunted houses along a midway you can stroll. It will be another year before you can set your sights on winning a stuffed bear or taking a spin in a Tilt-A-Whirl.

There will be no grandstand shows of magic or country music — no demolition derby. All that noise and dust will have to await another day to settle on you and your friends.

This year, the bleachers will be empty.

All this and more will be sorely missed. But the thing I would miss most if I were yet young would be none of that — it would be finding a way to sneak in.

I can’t go into detail. Reputations are still at stake and I wouldn’t want vital information falling into the wrong hands, but I can tell you this much: We never moved on water.

During those years of prime sneaking form, we did all our work on land.

However, I knew one who did drift. Like a wildflower seed thrown into the wind. We called him “Slick”.

Slick was no buddy — sneaking or otherwise. A few years older, he had struggled through circumstances my friends and I never had to navigate, was tutored in things we never were. Slick followed divergent paths.

On this occasion, it wasn’t a path at all, nor did it lead to the fair.

Alpena Furniture is on the north side of the river now, and it was then. Slick lived on the south side. In order to enter that business establishment after hours without permission, he had to get to the other side.

Rather than make a surreptitious crossing of either the 2nd Avenue or 9th Avenue bridges, Slick — fully clothed — decided to swim across, and that he did. There, he accomplished what he swam for before swimming back to the south side, where he was apprehended.

They sent Slick up the river — poor kid — he had no friends in high places, and, being all wet, lacked a suitable cover-up.

Before they shipped him out, they asked him why? Why did he swim across, why not amble over? Slick gave them an answer they didn’t expect — an honest one. He made no attempt to obstruct their investigation.

Slick told them swimming across transformed a caper into an adventure.

These days, no one jumps a fence or swims across a river — seldom is a bridge involved. No longer is a sneak a form of adventure. Arrangements now are all underhanded, moving along greased tunnels that run through sewers where the passage is bought and paid for.

It’s a subterranean quest for power in a form that makes people sick ethically and morally causing physical illness in others — even death.

I’ve come to the conclusion that sneaking into the fair is, comparatively speaking, a noble undertaking. One that can, as it did with my friends and me, prove entirely satisfactory in avoiding travel on lower levels.

I think Sunday schools should consider teaching sneaking into the fair. They could highlight the innocence of the endeavor and emphasize the morality of an above-ground approach. They could promote an emulation of Slick’s lack of equivocation when a jig is up. And they could contrast all that with the venality, graft, and sleaze, the dishonesty, intolerance, and hate we are witnessing today.

They’ve got no class — let alone a Sunday school one.

Teaching fair-sneaking in Sunday school may not be a perfect approach, but the path to perfection is elusive in the best of times, not to mention these times in which we live.

It’s too bad the fair isn’t coming this year — but it’ll be back.

Doug Pugh’s “Vignettes” runs weekly on Saturdays. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.