The Strawberry Girls.

One Sunday last February, a young woman named Kristen Smith left the parking lot of Bethany Baptist Church, in Plant City, Florida, and drove along a two-lane country road with a large gold crown on the seat beside her. The mossy pasturelands around Plant City--the winter strawberry capital of the world--were exploding with ripe fruit. Kristen was two weeks into her reign as the 2008 Strawberry Queen, and the crown was already causing severe headaches. It weighed nearly a pound and, even bobby-pinned on top of her thick chestnut hair, left a mark on her forehead, an affliction known among generations of Plant City Strawberry Queens as "the queen's dent." She was on her way to a lunch where she would be making her official debut, and she was nervous.

Kristen, who is nineteen, was not a regular on the beauty-pageant circuit. She could eat a plate of ribs and two hours later be craving pork rinds or red-velvet cake. When her spirits flagged, she read Scripture. She drove a pickup truck, attended a Christian college, worked part-time as a waitress, and wanted to spend the rest of her life in Plant City, raising a family. Kristen Smith disproved the theory that the Strawberry Queen had to be the well-connected daughter of a town scion; her father repaired washing machines for a living. She looked like a young Bobbie Gentry, and she was just what Plant City was looking for in these modern times.

Along the road, mom-and-pop operators were selling flats of berries from tents and campers. One of the fruit stands favored by tour buses was doing such a business in shortcake that the whipped cream was pumped out by nitrous tanks. Fifteen per cent of the nation's strawberries are produced in Eastern Hillsborough County between December and April. Still, the Outback Steakhouses and the stucco subdivisions were getting closer, and the life that Plant City celebrated was vanishing, acre by acre. The coronation of a Strawberry Queen had come to seem almost an act of defiance.

Kristen pulled into the Red Rose Inn & Suites, a motor lodge off Interstate 4, whose marquee said "Queen's Luncheon." The purpose of the luncheon was to introduce Kristen, along with four other young women, who had been chosen to serve as members of the 2008 Strawberry Court, to the thirty or so women whose husbands run the Florida Strawberry Festival, in Plant City. These women are called "directors' wives," and, unofficially, they represented the traditions of the town.

The queen and her court made their entrance. Their dresses were modestly cut, their hair was teased, and they wore strawberry pendants, strawberry charms, strawberry bracelets, and strawberry barrettes. With white satin pageant sashes, they stood at the edge of the dining room, more tentative than triumphant. They seemed to grasp the magnitude of their role when one of the luncheon guests clasped her hands and, in a loud voice, said, "Are these our girls?"

I grew up in central Florida in the nineteen-sixties, barefoot half the time and running around the orange groves where my father worked. I remember flocks of white birds that would lift from the backs of cattle, disturbed by the jackhammers and bulldozers clearing land for Walt Disney World. Disney would never have what Plant City's Strawberry Festival had; we had the smell of hay and manure, the crepepaper float that, on parade day, carried five young women through archways of Spanish moss. I must have been seven or eight when I got to ride in the parade, holding a tinfoil wand and wearing tap shoes from Jackie's School of Dance. The closest I came to true royalty was when my cousin Susie made the Strawberry Court, in 1984.

Returning home last February, I saw that the little country fair had become a six-million-dollar extravaganza featuring Top Forty country acts, like Alan Jackson, and drawing half a million visitors during its eleven-day run. Plant City still had the First Baptist Church, with its white-columned grandeur, but the Church of Scientology had recently moved in next to the old train depot. The mayor wore Prada slip-ons and lived in a gated subdivision that had a huge tiki bar. On the interstate, a three-story Tyrannosaurus rex, constructed out of fibreglass, hovered over the exit ramp, urging tourists to visit Dinosaur World.