No show.

March 18, Rhoyse City.

Shows were cancelled today as it didn't take very long for nature to catch up with the circus, exactly two days. Strong winds, torrential rains prevented the crew from putting up the tent; they halted after only a few attempts. It was doubtful anyone would have showed up in this weather anyway, as flooding and the occasional tornado warning must have kept most people in.
An this: almost all circus vehicles bogged down in mud last night following severe storms, the atmosphere turning muggy and unseasonably warm. The circus was parked in a grassy field outside an elementary school, and everybody knew what was coming, just not how messy and complete it would turn out. As for us we felt so snug in our confidence that the truck's four by four abilities would get us out without so much as a thought that we didn't see it coming at all.
So here we were, at 10 PM, ready to go; the circus was going to move out of the field and into a parking lot nearby after the show since the managers probably figured that if they were going to spend several hours pulling people out of their muddy holes they'd rather not waste precious hours of work during the day doing it; here we were and Fridman telling Dylan to wait for him as he was going to hitch the trailer then come back and pick him up so that he could ride with him in the truck, and out he goes and time goes by and soon Dylan is like a lion in a cage, he paces up and down the trailer doing his truck engine noise followed by "Papa" over and over and over again, circling the small space and getting more and more agitated until finally he gave up and snuggled up beside me, and soon asked to go to bed.
What happened was this: the trailer's front jacks broke; when Fridman was finished with the business of raising the trailer with the help of Sarah and others and started the truck he realized that the four by four didn't work anymore and got stuck in the mud trying to back up anyway. By the time he came back into the trailer Dylan was long asleep. We fell asleep too, Fridman on the couch and I on top of the bed with my clothes on, waiting for the crew to pull us out; they were doing the same with every trailer but one, that of Julio Rosales' family (their truck is a four by four and one that works, apparently,) and so by the time the voices outside woke me up and I looked out the window to see Sarah's trailer moving away it was two in the morning. The scene outside was eerie, trailers here or there on the field like beached whales, the beams of the flashlights and of the forklift in the engulfing darkness, the voices of the men shouting, and the deep gouges in the black earth, like battle scars. When they came for us I got back in the trailer to be with the babies should they wake up. As it began to move slowly, lurching forward a few feet only to slow down again and become still, the frame creaking and swaying like an old ship, it reminded me of a poem by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud called Le Bateau Ivre: my trailer "the drunken boat," indignant in its sudden infirmity.