We're off.

March 16, Idabel, Oklahoma (44 miles, rodeo grounds.)

Opening day was yesterday; I wanted to see the show but couldn't, stuck in the trailer with three babies; Sarah leaves Gigi with me when she goes to work.
Short of people Jim asked Fridman if he could drive a truck over to the next location after finishing the second show and helping to take down the tent. He said yes. I felt him slide into bed some time after two in the morning, We woke up at five thirty to drive to the next town, Idabel, fifty miles away, the first in a long list of travels: the Kelly Miller Circus travels each and every day during the eight months it is on the road. It reminds Fridman, and me with him, of the first circus he worked at in the United States, Carson and Barnes, the circus in which we met when it stopped in Jacksonville, Illinois, and which also moved every day. The one good thing is that they travel in the morning, not at night like Circus Chimera; seeing the sun rise every morning I couldn't be happier, and then there is getting to see the country as we travel across states all the way to the east coast and back, I can't wait, I feel like a kid in a candy store.
It was pitch black still when we started out today but we had to wait a long time for Fridman's truck to be ready and when we drove into town the reddish pink arc of the sun was appearing above the tree-lined horizon in front of us. Highway 70 east was a straight shot through the southern Oklahoma countryside, pine trees towering along the road a little before Valliant, a small town dominated by a paper mill, smaller towns yet, lopsided houses, a run-down gas station and a brand new corrugated metal church building, long horns sitting in the grass, and then Idabel, "dogwood capital of Oklahoma." Why this obsession with being the capital of something in all these small towns? To make up for all that's not there? Lucky this was not dogwood capital of the world; Gilroy, now a suburb south of San Jose, California, bills itself "the world's capital of garlic" (and what of baseball's World Series, for a sport that is by and large restricted to an American public.)
Same two shows again today, and again the call for help to drive a truck over to the next town down the road.
Finally, the first trip already brought a serving of circus fare: Sarah got stuck in the soggy terrain leaving the lot in Hugo, and had to be towed by one of the tractor trailers, only to get stuck once again upon entering the fairgrounds here.