Every year in the Florida Panhandle, a tiny town called Sopchoppy puts a unique local talent on display. The annual worm grunting festival draws thousands of visitors who watch kids drive wooden stakes into the ground and rub metal bars across the top. The worms underground mistake the vibrations for the sound of an approaching mole, and they wriggle up to the surface where the grunters catch them in buckets.

Previous generations of grunters would make a living by selling worms as bait to fishermen and women on the coast. Today, the tradition lives on primarily as entertainment for festivalgoers. Turning hyperlocal traditions into public spectacle is an American pastime.

The first county and state fairs were held in the early 19th century in New York and Massachusetts and quickly spread from coast to coast. Such fairs remain popular today, but the traces of regionality they once had are mostly lost. So I began my long drives along back roads, looking for pockets of the country where smaller, stranger traditions have endured.

In a field west of Lake Okeechobee, I watched a 13-year-old Seminole boy learn to wrestle alligators in an inflatable kiddie pool. In Twinsburg, Ohio, thousands of twins gather every August for a festival they treat as a family reunion. At these gatherings, even the most peculiar activities are turned into celebration.

While I was in Sopchoppy, I asked Gary Revell, 74, why he still grunts for worms. He told me that the times he goes out at dawn in the forest behind his house, the sunlight filtering through the pines, are when he feels closest to God. Nat Segebre is a photographer based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.