To the laundry.

Feb. 10, Harlingen.

A deluge brought by a huge storm overnight left us immersed in water. Soon enough came the mud (hello again,) the grass torn up by the weight of the trucks (again) going out, or trying to.
So Fridman and I decided to walk to the laundromat, a few blocks away, instead taking the truck out, Dylan up on his Dad's shoulders in the backpack carrier and loving it, safe above Dad's fisherman's plastic boots, loving the splash of water, I trying to stay dry around them.
Behind the park where the circus stands the landscape turns industrial, a train depot, abandoned rusting metal sheds, closed-up stores and still-open ones that have seen better days. We crossed the railroad tracks and followed them to the laundry, past a restaurant called the Texas Cafe, bright red in the surrounding engulfing grey.
The laundromat too seemed out of a forgotten decade, worn machines falling apart, folding tables oddly put together, mishappen objects, in a corner a small room, the tired hues of the bric-a-brac and religious icons, an ageless lady in faded clothes lost in her chair.

Jessie Alvarez, Alvarez Laundramat (sic.)

Texas Cafe.

Feb. 10, Harlingen.

Square house.

Feb. 10, Harlingen.

Depot.

Feb. 10, Harlingen.

Landscape.

Feb. 10, Harlingen.

Tickling the ball.

Feb. 9, Harlingen.

Circus Chimera played Circus Vasquez at soccer today. We lost, 3 to 2, a charge de revanche, down the road. It was awful hot out on the field, as it's been for a couple of days, hot and humid, like a New England summer almost. It's strange, to say the least, after the kind of weather we've been having. On both sides there was a little circus troupe of supporters cheering on, and Dylan too.
Another day on the circus trail.

Fresh air.

Feb. 7, Harlingen.

What a change. Forgotten the muddy, ugly, desperatingly grey lot we were stuck in for two weeks, yesterday morning when we woke up, Dylan and I, the sun shone on a dewy field of grass at the fair park, the air quiet and country-like, and life seemed to smile at us again.
And we're parked right by the cookhouse, at the center of all the trailers, the center of the social life of the circus, for the area directly in front of the cookhouse is a little like the town green, the knot of things.

First-class traveler.

Feb. 6, Harlingen, Texas.

I'd forgotten about that - the fun of the drive late at night, driving the truck, pulling the trailer, "with all my belongings," as Fridman would say, on the mostly empty highway. I'd briefly worried about the new logistics, with now-toddler Dylan in tow, but he was what is commonly referred to as a trooper this side of the Atlantic; he fell asleep in my arms around ten as we were waiting for Fridman to come back from taking the props down, woke up when I took him out to the truck around midnight, fell asleep again on the short trip to Harlingen from Brownsville, some twenty miles, woke up again as I put him to sleep in the trailer upon arriving, close to one o'clock in the morning, and then woke up briefly once more by Fridman unhitching the trailer later on in the night. At eight this morning he was up as if nothing was out of the ordinary, his old smiling self.
But then again this is a kid who never even seemed to register an eight-hour jet lag, who took the complete and rather abrupt change of scenery he went through when I took him from his wandering Circus Chimera life in a travel trailer directly to France and an apartment for the first time in his -admittedly - short life, without showing any sign of it. We went from Colorado to Paris, then a few hours after landing took a train down to the Alps, where my mother lives, and in less than a week were in the south of France, on the Riviera, where I grew up and had accepted a job as a visiting lecturer in photojournalism for the fall semester. Travels (in planes, trains and cars, only a boat was missing, or a hot-air balloon) and upheavals, total change of scenery, food, climate and language, all new faces and habits: I can't think of many people, much less small babies, who could go through the same with such brio.
Not to mention we packed up and went through the same odyssey in reverse less than four months later.
I had dreaded the flights with Dylan like the plague, and at some point considered turning down the job on account of the prospect of going through a two-part, more than 16-hour-long plane trip alone with a 10-month-old. He slept most of the way, and was a darling the rest, the trip went so smoothly it was hard to believe. On the way back it was less restful; Dylan was walking by then and a one year old, so I had to entertain him for most of the way.
Still, he's my first-class traveler.

Reading Foucault.

Feb. 2, Brownsville.

I read Le Magazine Literaire's special edition on Michel Foucault I picked up in one of the bookstores on Anne's street, going through it bit by bit so as to not to be over with it too soon (taking care of Dylan helps the slowness of the process,) and I wish I had taken along the two volumes of Dits et Ecrits that are back at my mother's house in France, two thick books of notes, interviews, essays, courses and other material produced over the length of Foucault's career, a luxury I had indulged in after devouring Surveiller et Punir, days of frantic readings in Paris on cloudy afternoons off, I remember this café on the rue des Ecoles just off the boulevard Saint-Michel, reading Surveiller et Punir there for hours, enthralled, hooked for life on the writing, sometimes difficult but also impossibly, simply beautiful, and then a passage in particular - in Dits et Ecrits, an as-yet unpublished preface to his Histoire de la Folie, - so beautiful that for me it's just a pleasure to read and re-read it, like that, for the heck of it.
But who could I speak to here about being in love with Foucault's prose?
I miss France, although there too the candidates might be harder to find than I think.

Hats and feathers - opening day.

Hats and feathers.
Feb. 1, Brownsville.

General rehearsal with costumes this morning. The costumes were not ready until now, so here we are, having a general rehearsal on the very day the show begins. There is an effervescence all about the circus, a constant ballet of people frantically going one way and the other. It's over by one o'clock, there are three hours left til the opening.
The costumes are an orgy of feathers and polyester fabric, topped by a shocking multitude of garish hats figuring seasons and holidays, if you can figure a season or a holiday in a hat. It's all very Texas-trash couture. But I haven't quite grasped yet what seasons and holidays have to do with Happy Days. The costume designers are the same guys as last year, very gay and without an once of a sense of style. The shortest one wears a big cross on his sweater.

Starting over.

Jan. 31, Brownsville.

The show starts tomorrow - Happy Dayz! -, and so does the season.
For seven days a week it will not stop until mid-November, unless some major accident happens, presumably. The rest of the crew arrived during the night, familiar faces everywhere, Chago, Araceli, Jose the mechanic, el Chivito and Edith and Jose Ivan, "the other baby," whom we didn't get to see yet, he was sleeping, and suddenly it feels like I've never left. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll come back after the birth of Fridmanito Junior II or just stay put. Missing the circus from the visiting lecturer in photojournalism position on the sunny Riviera was easy; daily life at Circus Chimera on the road is not, much less with a toddler and a newborn in tow, and a husband who's going to be working some 12 hours a day.
Fridman will only do one act in the show this year but he will also go on with the plateful of multifaceted tasks he shouldered last year, and then some - driving one of the circus' trucks, setting up the deployment and parking of circus vehicles upon arrival onto a new lot, managing the doors crew, overseeing program sellers, plus, la cerise on the cake this year, he might also act as prop guy during the show (someone who takes care of all technical aspects of the acts) and help in taking down and setting up the props as well, thus basically having to work during the whole show every day plus the setting up and taking down and up times. Long, very long days.
Fridman: "It's still less than when I was at Carson and Barnes and the pay is better." The way I see it, it's like extolling the merits of slavery versus indentured labor. If I'm lucky I'll get to see him around three o'clock in the morning when he crashes into bed. Until now the agreement was he would be getting paid the same as last year, $ 500 a week before taxes (a shocking 30 percent in this country - for a salary that low it would only be about 10 percent in France, that high taxes socialist heaven), plus a fraction more, to be negotiated, for the prop business. Winning the lottery sounds really good.

Smile.

Jan. 30, Brownsville.

Going from a $150-a-night hotel in the heart of Paris, buttery croissants and café au lait with white cloth napkins in the morning to a cheap trailer in the muddy depths of Texas makes me smile, the Buddhist in me reaffirmed, one more (necessarily) humbling time.

Finally, the show.

Jan. 27, Brownsville.

At last sunshine for more than three minutes in a row. Time for the mud to dry a little, making walking normal again, not a trek. I'm dying for somewhere to go to breathe, be outdoors, other than the few hundred meters to the Wal-mart along soggy grass on the side of the road - forget sidewalks, this is Texas, U.S.A.
General rehearsal of the show this afternoon, which gave me an opportunity to finally go out there and see what has been going on for more than a week while I was holed up in the trailer. With Dylan in the backpack carrier I watch as long as he didn't get antsy, which is to say not much.
The cast: there are four Mexican dancers doing the opening and finale as well as little dancing routines in between each act, an Argentinian couple doing a chiffon act, the Venezuelans that arrived in Utah last year to join the show and who are doing the same acts, a roller-skates figure and the so-called globe of death motorcycle act, another troupe of Chinese youngsters, fresh from the exact same source, five boys and three girls not much older than the ones last year, two clowns, young American guys who went to circus school in San Francisco, and Fridman with the upside-down walk.
The Argentinians have a 22-month-old daughter; they leave her alone in their trailer when they're working because they have no other option; I offered to watch her with Dylan in return for babysitting favors, as I wouldn't want to have to ever contemplate leaving Dylan alone myself.
The theme of the show this year is Happy Days, the TV series I used to love watching when I was an early teen and no doubt the source of many of my fantasies about this country, amazingly enough, since it had nothing to do with contemporary U.S. society even back then. The power of television to shape one's dream world always comes as a surprise to me, still.

Feeling like a pig.

Jan. 24, Brownsville.

It's official, we at Circus Chimera live like pigs in a sty: four feet in the mud and nowhere to go.
The downpour started this morning and hasn't stopped; it's close to five o'clock. As a result the terrain around the circus looks more like a giant mud pit slash puddle with each passing minute, we're drowning in a world of water and mud, we're being absorbed, sucked in, turning back to water and earth if not ashes, the elements taking over, slowly, drop by drop.
Dylan and I stay indoor, mostly, day after day, and today all day, and I stand on the verge of cabin fever, if not another nervous breakdown (missing Almodovar, t'would be just perfect to watch his movies on days like this.)
I sit in the mudded-in trailer and the hours pass slowly, increasing the mood I've been in since coming back to the U.S., disappointed and falling out of love with this country, not in love anymore the way I'd been, always, through thick and thin, with a mix of fascination and repulsion, always, feeling pulled to this country, year after year, through my European friends' puzzled disapproval if not outright dismay, my mother's silent pleas for return.
Suddenly - I was so looking forward to coming back, and not just because I missed my husband -, I feel disenchanted, unhappy about being here. The food in the grocery stores looks unappealing, even disgusting as if I was in the throes of the first three months of pregnancy again; I miss the intellectual (the word reeks of snobbery in the U.S., not surprisingly, and for that reason I dislike it but there is no synonym that will do here) stimulation, the cultural sophistication that is still familiar and class-less back in France, where small bookstores not only continue to thrive in the age of TV and internet and so many other media dominion, but are a profitable business, and not only in Paris; the intellectual atmosphere of a country where people read, and read more, in the métro, in commuter trains, in cafés, standing up waiting for the bus to come, people of all walks of life read, and not how-to books, and the book industry thrive; for decades the most popular show on TV was a roundtable dedicated to books and literature called Apostrophes and its anchor a national star along the lines of Oprah, less the fashionista.
Maybe it's remembering the two enchanted days I spent in Paris with my friends Anne and Edgar, only two days out my whole four-month stay but I drank them in, Dylan away from me and back with my mother for the first time since he was born, drinking it all in, as if coming out of a desert, walking the streets til my almost-seven-month-pregnant belly ached and I could go on no longer, browsing on and on in the two bookstores that follow each other on the street leading to their apartment, rue de Bagnolet, in the not-yet gentrified 20th arrondissement, exchanging book ideas and discoveries with Anne, talking til late with the both of them after their three-year-old daughter, Alicia, had gone to bed, waking early and sneaking out for a café serré down the street while they enjoyed the late mornings of their winter vacation, stretching each minute and my strength, not regretting it.
Maybe it was talking to them about what is different between the two countries that made me realize, with hindsight, how much I actually missde from my own country all these years, unnoticed, and not only the priority put on health care with prevention and affordable care for all as a public policy (there is never enough money to go around yet the defense budgets keep swelling? priorities is always the key word.)
But this is today's France too - Anne and Edgar, just like a lot of other young people, yearn to leave the country, which, with its atmosphere of I-want-everything-for-nothing, self-pitying mood is also slowly but stubbornly sinking downhill, going nowhere fast but far from its once-shining, much-touted and cherished standing in the world. They are contemplating applying for a Canadian work permit, which, amazingly enough when compared the painful U.S. process, authorities there seem eager to give you if you happen to speak French and have anywhere near a college degree.
Then again, who wants to freeze their ass half the year minimum.

Absolutely dirty white.

Jan 23, Brownsville.

The meltdown left with the arrival of truckloads of bark to cover the mud and help restore a semblance of a normal life around our mudded-out circus out by the freeway next to Wal-mart and Sam's Club and a little farther the other way the new Wendy's and Church's Chicken and the usual other countless chain stores going up in the same mud we're in.
The tent is the exact color of the sky, absolutely dirty white.
The bark doesn't much help after all, the rain on and on and our big trucks too heavy, digging through it and back into the mud, struggling to move even in four by four, the tires spitting out mud and debris along the streets long after we've left the circus, cars far away behind us trying to avoid the fallout.

The mud pit.

Jan 22, Brownsville.

Days of grey but I don't mind the grey, and suddenly one shade more grey, the bottomless mud everywhere, endless, sticking to your shoes, everywhere mud inches thick, slick, treacherous, a few hours and then the rain starts again and erases any hopes of coming out of the sliding pit, where every step takes on unknown dimensions, allowing in mud, having to calibrate one's steps along the valleys of mud left by the trucks' tires, walking to the truck and back, just going out, leaving the circus which every day turns into more of a prison already. What a difference a year brings. Last year in the sunny field two exits down the highway and the cortege of rainbow-colored artists, the Chinese, the Russians, the Kenyans, Ekaterina and Guennadi, the camaraderie of practice, hanging out, getting to know each other fast, going out together, old friends, new ones, the year ahead promising, my head full of pictures and projects, Dylan three-month-old in the scarf hanging from my neck, sleeping while I worked, took it in, smiled.

Seven-month pregnant doesn't explain it all. Tears of frustration or for unknown reasons, a recipe that didn't turn out, un repas raté, Dylan that won't nap all morning and clings to my legs and falls and cries and won't ever leave me alone like the perfectly normal toddler he is, the trailer getting smaller by the hour, and suddenly so many things I can't speak, tears that will just come out and no words to take their salt away, knots in my stomach, tears for a missed shot at hashbrowns, Fridman's eyes on me feeling like two ice picks in my brain, judging the weakness, the inexplicable tears, the stubborn tears, and the man in my life infinitely far away, leaving me in my loneliness in the trailer in the middle of all the mud somewhere on the U.S.-Mexican border thousands of miles away from anything else.
Dylan finally fell asleep.

The arrival.

Jan 21, 2007
Brownsville, Texas

Il n'y a rien de plus triste qu'un hall d'aeroport plein d'inconnus qui en attendent d'autres, les yeux brillants d'une ardeur secrete, l'impatience du premier baiser a fleur de levres.
There is nothing sadder than an airport terminal lobby full of strangers waiting for other strangers, eyes full of repressed ardor, the impatience of the first kiss on their lips. Fridman wasn't there when Dylan and I arrived in Dallas on January 10th, flying in from Paris on a trip more than 14 hours long. But I was happy because he was there, he didn't make it but he did, he was just stuck in traffic outside the airport, he was there after driving in from Las Vegas stopping only to get fuel and catch a half-hour nap, the car still on.
A stranger greeted me; he'd cut his hair short. Dylan didn't seem to recognize him at first but moments later he couldn't seem to stop laughing, perched in his arms just looking at him and looking at him, laughing. It took me longer to get used to his presence after almost four months apart, the comfort of our daily gestures lost somewhere in the space of that time, the most familiar strangers.
It was unseasonably warm in Dallas. Two days later the temperatures dropped from 60 degrees to near 32 in a matter of hours, a cold rain started falling that wouldn't stop, turning to ice on the day we left for southern Texas to join Circus Chimera, and here we were in the middle of the first winter storm to hit the country. It followed us all the way down to Brownsville, the Mexican border.

Snow.

September 24, Brighton.

The weather's been bad (bad for business, good for me) here in the past few days, it's been raining and overcast, but this morning, suddenly, a clear sky revealed the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies in the distance, glowing, arresting.

Almost off.

September 23, Brighton, Colorado.

The circus is doing bad and I'm leaving for France next Wednesday (unrelated.)
It seems a series of bad locations and a spell of bad weather have taken its toll. There has been shows with less than 20 people attending, and not just one. Among one of the consequences the generator is not turned on until 11 AM and turned off earlier at night, and we're not going to get paid until Sunday, instead of Thursday as usual. Last casualty to date: Mike Gorman, who was responsible for booking out of an office in California, was fired earlier this week because of the debacle.
It's off to France for me to take advantage of our wonderful socialized health care system, where everything is absolutely free, and also to teach as a visiting lecturer in photojournalism at a university in my home region of the Riviera, in the south. The probability of my traveling again with the circus next year is next to nil, as I'd be more than six-month pregnant in January and the idea of spending the last months of a pregnancy with a toddler in tow while going through the traveling circus life is not exactly appealing.
But who knows, things change in a day in our circus life, that much I've learned.

Carol's recipes.

September 16, Longmont.

Carol and Gail left yesterday. They're on their way to Branson, Missouri, then the Amish country of Ohio, and will head back home to New Hampshire by the end of the month.
Carol left me with some recipes - she used to write a food column in her local newspaper. "Three ingredients, easy, because most people don't have time for anything else." All mothers out there surely hear you (unless they are the kind that can afford a nanny and a cook.)
Only thing - she promised to send me some vegetarian ones next.


Roast beef
1 small roast beef (4-5 pounds)
1 can tomato soup
Put roast beef in bottom of crock pot, pour soup over top. Cook on low for 8-10 hours. You can add potatoes and carrots to the beef of you want a complete meal.


Quick delicious pork roast
1 small pork roast
1 can apple filling
Put pork roast in bottom of crock pot, dump on whole can of apple filling. No salt, pepper or water is needed. Cook on low for 8-10 hours. You can add veggies same as above for complete meal.


Teriyaki chicken
One pound boneless, skinless chicken cut into bite sizes
1/2 cup soy sauce
1 can orange soda (diet ok)
Put chicken in bottom of crock pot, pour on soy sauce + soda to cover meat. You can thicken sauce a little if desired by adding water+ cornstarch. Cook on low for 7-9 hours.

Gail and Carol (Sept. 15.)

"The son of my heart."

September 15, Longmont.

Jim, Circus Chimera's owner, calls Carol Stone "Mom, " even though she's not his biological mother. Carol has silver hair, and she is all softness and roundness, like the generosity and tenderness she seems to wrap around you. This is a small window on her story.
One day about four years ago Carol and Gail decided to hit the road. They were high school friends in Tilton, New Hampshire but had not stayed in touch. "Life took over," says Carol. A chance meeting reconnected them after Carol came back to New Hampshire. Both had recently lost their husbands and felt like it was time to fulfill that dream of traveling.
Between the two of them and the few trips they took beforehand they've been in all 48 states. They travel in Carol's car, with Gail's miniature Schnauzer, Bandit, in the back, stopping at whatever motel they see when it's time to fold the day. Their trip is open to improvisation, to the suggestions of a stranger met on the road. "We U-turn a lot," says Carol. But two things they always try to do: go visit Waverly United Methodist Church in Waverly, Tennessee, where Carol went when she was taking care of her husband, who was affected by Alzheimer's and passed away in 2002, and catching Jim, wherever the circus is.
Jim was the first one of some ten teenagers Carol and her husband, George, welcomed into their home over the years. They lived on a 200-acre dairy farm in Tilton, purchased by George's grandfather in 1840, and had two sons of their own. "It was a unique environment," says Carol, "there was lots of room, and always lots of work, lots of music, George loved music, and we had strong faith."
Carol met Jim when she was working part-time at a department store to complete the farm's income and the manager asked her to look for a kid to help around the store. She called the high school and they sent Jim. "He came to the farm and I put him to work," she recalls. He didn't leave until he was in college, later meeting D.R. Miller, owner of the Carson and Barnes Circus, and starting his circus career under his wing.
Before Carol left the trailer she turned around and added, "He's the son of my heart."

The Waffle House.

September 14, Longmont, Colorado.

We stopped to get food before driving onto the lot last night. Sitting in the truck on the side of the road, the Waffle House beaming yellowish lights in a pool of darkness, the lights a feeling of loneliness, the people at the counter, a blond waitress, made me think of Edward Hopper (gone corporate.)
It also brought me back to Athens, Georgia, in the early nineties, sleepless nights at the Waffle House after a concert in town, Kris and Melissa and Matt, teaching French at the University of Georgia, fresh out of junior year at my French university majoring in English, catapulted in Athens at the height of the R.E.M. craze, the rock scene exploding, days without tomorrows, riding in the van with John and Dominic going to see a movie, jumping over potholes seating on the metal floor in the back, laughing out loud, days of insouciance, late nights at the Waffle House.

Stopping to eat (just not there.)

Rockies.

September 12, Loveland, Colorado.

Tough drive last night from Vail to Loveland, north of Denver. We crossed the Rockies, culminating at the Vail pass at 10,666 feet, the I-70 a seemingly endless succession of uphill and downhill parts, the truck struggling to haul the 13,000 pounds trailer, down to second gear going up many a times, 20, 25 miles an hour maybe (the dashboard lights are still out so I have no idea how fast, or rather slow, I'm going,) the truck heating up going up, the brakes heating up going down, and that for a hundred miles.
The baby blissfully asleep through it all.

Drops of heaven.

September 9, Vail, Colorado.

The circus is at Ford Park in Vail, and I discovered the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens on a walk between rain drops yesterday. At 8,200 feet in altitude it is one of the most elevated botanical gardens in the nation.
It rained steadily all day, and today it is gray and threatening. Rain, cool weather, so wonderful after months of sunshine without a break, dry and hot. It is in the lower fifties, heaven.

One line.

September 6, Grand Junction.

I'm a walking belly ache.

Thin thread.

September 5, Grand Junction, Colorado.

Two hundred miles in one shot last night, retracing our steps all the way back to Grand Junction along mountain roads, highway 40 West, 13 south to I-70. The last show was at 4:30 PM so we got an early start, but that meant driving smack in the middle of nursing-and-getting-to-sleep time for Dylan, adding to the stress of the trip. He finally calmed down and was down the whole way, but getting him to sleep again after nursing upon arriving lasted close to two hours, I exhausted by the trip, falling asleep while he wouldn't, struggling against fatigue and frustration.
The joys of circus traveling are wearing thin these days.

Errata.

September 4, Steamboat Springs.

Cardinal photojournalist's mistake in the entry on the new performers how joined us in Salt Lake City (check and recheck your info.)
Svetla is Gino Terrablanca's daughter, not Andrea and Lyubomir's.
Many apologies.

Peace.

September 4, Steamboat Springs.

This morning I stole an hour away from the circus, away from the baby, away. I went to the mountains, to a Steamboat Springs landmark called Fish Creek Falls, a short enough excursion so that I could be within easy return should I need to.
I went in search for peace and quiet, nature, and were it not for the throngs of people reminiscent of the Champs Elysées on a Saturday afternoon during the annual spring sales and the chopper hovering above, the picturesque little falls would have given me just that.
After ten minutes of walking on one of the trails starting at the falls I finally found the peace I'd come looking for, among the beautiful birches, my favorite trees, silence, precious silence, not that silence of Simon and Garfunkel fame but the utter silence of the forest, not even wind in the branches, only my own breathing and my footsteps disturbing it. And at the same moment the smell of the forest, transporting me in a second's time thousands of miles back home to the Alps in France, in one breath thousands of miles away, to the peace you find after hours of hiking, high up in the mountains, alone with your thoughts and the wonder of nature, in utter happiness.
It was but a minute before the chopper was back and people appeared on the trail again, the precious silence shattered, but that minute was like a glass of water for a desert hiker.

Fatigue.

September 1, Steamboat Springs.

What didn't feel like much at the beginning of the season is starting to weigh on me now.
Each time we move, and this week it has been every two days, having to wake up to a restless baby in a cramped trailer, the mess of the trip disconcerting, putting everything back in place one more time, one more time, the trailer lopsided more often than not, having to change him and feed him and entertain him in a danger zone of corners and nooks, afraid he'll bump his head every inch of the tiny, crowded way, feeling trapped. Maybe it's the end of the season approaching, the accumulated fatigue; maybe it's the growing, ever more demanding baby; or the weariness, compounded by the pregnancy.
Suddenly I am longing to be at home in one place.

Steamboat Springs.

September 1, Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

I always liked the name. Steamboat Springs.
It sounded exotic, as if it didn't belong where it was, more reminiscent of the marshes of southern Louisiana, say, than the mountains of West. It had always goaded my imagination. I was not disappointed this morning when Dylan woke me up and I looked out the window on to the mountains around. There's no mistaking we're in Colorado now, the mountains are finally there, green, beckoning, the air cold, cold even in the warmth of the sun as the morning gets late, the spruce, the fir, the peculiar aromas of altitude. There are mountain bikes on people's cars, a Jeep passing me as I was walking with the stroller with a "Life is Good" tire cover on its back.
And the green, the green, I feel my lungs come alive again, my eyes drinking it in, can't get enough of it. Somehow I had always assumed that the Rockies were as dry as the mountain ranges of California or Utah. I'd driven through Denver, Boulder, and up to highway 80 on my way to a photo job in Logan, Utah, and that's as close to the Rockies as I'd ever ventured, not wanting to go back then, disappointed, longing for the Alps at home and their baby green slopes. Steamboat Springs has finally proven me wrong.

Simplify my life.

August 31, Craig, Colorado.

Confirmation of the teaching job at a university in southeastern France, my home, I had discussed with the director in the spring. But with the new situation created by the surprised pregnancy I'd like to be teaching in the fall rather than spring of 2007; I'll know on Friday if that's going to be possible. Starting to think about all there is to do before going, the paperwork, the cats, packing for a year for two, and then the question of whether we can find somebody to drive the trailer during the rest of the season or whether I'll need to drive it back to Dallas before flying overseas. Obviously the former would simplify my life a tad.

Another missed birthday party.

August 29, Rifle.

There was a fiesta last night, BBQ and booze, for the birthday of Carlos, who is called Bemba, one of the Mexican tent workers. Still under my 36-hour sleepless challenge's exhaustion, all I could do was climb into bed, but judging from the decibel volume of the shouts and laughter coming from the cookhouse a few feet away it was a good party.

Notes on nursing badly.

August 28, Rifle.

Some nights, like tonight, Dylan nurses himself to sleep for so long my arm goes numb under his head. My back starts to hurt, and I'm acutely aware of time passing. Of course I'm in the most uncomfortable of positions, sitting at the edge of the bed with no back or leg support. Afterwards it's as if he'd sucked my very marrow, I feel hollow and exhausted.
I called the midwife center back in Savannah, Georgia, where I had Dylan today asking for advice; there is no doctor I can call for just simple questions while on the road. They told me I could go on nursing him while pregnant, which I was concerned about. They also told me there is a chance that at some point he'll wean himself because the milk will change in preparation for the new baby and he won't like it anymore.
May that be soon, or I might lose more than just weight in the game.

Moving east at last.

[Somehow forgot to post this entry, no doubt due to sleepless nights.]

August 23 Salt Lake City, Utah.

The much feared road trip from San Francisco to Salt Lake City went on without a glitch for us. Thanks to Roy, who agreed to drive Fridman's truck, Fridman came with me, a world of difference when you travel with a nine-month-old. Not only was it a relief to have around, but we took could take turns driving, plowing through the night until and then on and off yesterday. We left Newark at 11 PM on Monday night after the shows and arrived at 5 PM on Tuesday here in Salt Lake.
Dylan slept though the night, waking up at 7:30 PM, his usual time, and from then on we had to stop so that I could nurse him but he was surprisingly good for an active baby, playing, dozing off. The 18-hour-trip was not easy either being pregnant and plagued with an upset stomach demanding food every two hours, like a newborn. We took a break in West Wendoverthe last town in Nevada on the border with Utah, to have lunch in the buffet of a casino, let Dylan make an utter mess on the table.
Lunar vistas of the salt desert spreading flat from the Nevada border. the rocky hills seeming to float above it from the distance. The desert in Nevada surprisingly alive with vegetation, and surprisingly, joyfully green past Elko, with even a spot or two of snow on some peaks, the brush teeming with new baby green sprouts.
The circus left in the morning on Tuesday and drove on to West Wendover, spending the night there and arriving here this morning. Tio Tito blew a tire, but otherwise no major incidents for such a major trip, almost 800 miles. We're out of California, having spent almost four months there, and three in the Bay Area.

Driving through the Salt Lake Desert.

Showers and trucks.

August 28, Rifle.

Walking down for a late lunch in Rifle, a few blocks from the fairgrounds, a two-street downtown really but a European-style bistro (good food, refined deco and casual atmosphere,) next to the Western wear shop with cowboy hats in the window and the pawn shop with various machine guns for sale. Up the street there is an apothecary. The Winchester Motel, a small sign hanging under the name: "Showers." This is truck country, big heavy-duty trucks, or rather trucks-that-are-actually-used country.
We're not in California anymore, if not quite Kansas.
This afternoon a boy, ten years old maybe, was riding his horse in the dirt ring around the arena, and he couldn't quite hang on to his hat, a big white cowboy hat. When he rode past the second time around the hat was gone.

To Colorado.

August 27, Rifle, Colorado.

Travel day again, on Sunday, une fois n'est pas coutume, 350 miles from Salt Lake City to Rifle, a small town in southwestern Colorado, up I-70 from Grand Junction.
Dylan oblige, again, I left on Saturday night after the show and drove all night, with Ekaterina accompanying me, for Fridman had not been given the OK to go with me and couldn't drive the circus truck ahead of me either because it pulls the trailer where the tent workers sleep.
So it was driving all night again, only stopping to try and steal a couple of hours of sleep in a gas station off I-70 in southern Utah (no can do, front seats of a Dodge truck not very comfy,) the attendant an old weathered man with a mischievous grin and a friendly manner, then facing a whole day of caring for Dylan, not being able to rest because the circus had left in the morning and was slowly coming in during the day, so the trailer was not parked and the slides not open. Ekaterina went to sleep as soon as we arrived, at 8 AM or so, and I went on to feed and change the baby in the cramped space of the unopened trailer, go for a walk, nurse him, watch him go to sleep only to be instantly awaken by Gramo jumping near him and Yogi crying for food, play some more and finally put him down for a nap, but then I couldn't grab any sleep for the lack of space to lay down, and the sheer exhaustion.
The circus is at the Garfield County Fairgrounds, in a big arena amidst all the trappings of horse country. When we arrived, in the early morning, the air was cool, it felt fresh, pure, smelling of mountain creeks and grass, rejuvenating; it felt good.
The trip was good, too, straight as an arrow down 6 across utah then I-70 into Colorado, an easy drive after the treacherous curves and ups and downs of California, chatting with Ekaterina, plunging through the night, sharing that unspoken bind that seems to tie those who drive when nobody else does, seeing the sun rise on the deserted highway into Colorado, the mesa at Grand Junction grandiose in the red light of the rising sun, beautiful along the Upper Colorado River surrounded by desert cliffs, ochre and sand, wild.

John.

August 26, Salt Lake City.

Seeing an old friend from grad school again, so good to be catching up.
Chasing memories over a brie sandwich - which I did savor, a surprising reprieve from the debilitating, unrelenting stomach ache and nausea (getting worse each passing day.) John used to be a photographer, we met when we were both students in photojournalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he's now made a cozy niche for himself as an advertising copywriter, just bought a house and got himself a dog. I liked his latest photographs, from a few years back, black-and-whites taken with an old camera, nothing like photojournalism, liberating, something I never could do, unfortunately, no matter how much I wanted.

Update.

August 25, Salt Lake City.

Update on the new guys on the circus block, Lyubomir Karamitrev, hailing from Bulgaria, married to Andrea Torreblanca, of Venezuela, three-year-old daughter, Svetla, and Andrea's brother, Gino. The brother/sister couple does a rollerskating act, and the three of them together do a globe of death motorcycle act. The Russians know them, have crossed path on the circus road several times with them. They debuted in the second show last night, everybody was out watching them. Still no clue as to whether they are going to stay with us or are just here on a date.

Feeling lost.

August 24, Salt Lake City.
it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to be in the circus.
Being a Mom in the circus, being pregnant in the circus, while being a Mom, the constant pressure of traveling, even when it's not such a voyage as the one we just did, the work it entails, the never stopping to rest, not even one day, in all those months, it's not just the baby, who now that he is crawling demands constant attention and confines me in the trailer most of time, making me feel like s prisoner in my own home, it is everything at the same time, and now feeling sick. It is the isolation, too, the friends far away, my support group of the mind and heart, my friends, far away, out of reach most of the time. The smile of Dylan, his laugh, his being, are not enough sometimes, sometimes it is simply too hard to bear, and I feel as if I can't go on, can't summon the strength to go on any further here traveling with the circus.

In and out.

August 23, Salt Lake City.
Last week in Newark Corey left the circus after an argument with Roy. He had wanted to leave for a while to go to another circus anyway, with better pay. The argument went on at night in the parking lot, he was gone instantly. The Circus Chimera way.
Here in Salt Lake new performers appeared, a team from Chile and Bulgaria who does a motorcycle globe of death and a skating act.
We first saw them on Tuesday night when we were staying by ourselves at the fairgrounds and they asked us if we were with the circus, we had never seen or heard about them before, we were puzzled, not knowing what to think. There to audition? Staying?
The next day the circus arrived and rumors started to flow. The circus doesn't need other artists in the show at this point, but then again things always are in a flux here, you never know, in and out.

The Russians - Part One: Bérengere (rough draft.)

August 21, Newark, California.

[For details on the family see "The Russians" in the Glossary entry.]
It is a long way from the wine countries of France to the dusty roads of circus life in America. Not so for Bérengere Naidenkine, a native of Bordeaux, in southwest France, and a hula hoop performer married to Genia Naidenkine, Circus Chimera's clown.
Bérengere enjoyed sheltered days growing up as an only child in a relatively well-off family. Then when she was 12 her father sent her to Africa, two weeks without running water, toilets or steady food, out in Pygmy territory (the cost was relatively low for he owned a traveling agency.) "Coming out of my little bourgeois upbringing, it was a shock," she recalled with a smile. He thought she needed to see how the other half of the world lived. She thought she rather liked it, and has not stopped traveling since. "From that moment on I always wanted to travel," she said, "and I wanted to be free."
Bérengere, who is 36, has been a circus performer for a little more than ten years and was goaded into her hula hoop act by a Russian woman performer who told her spitefully she could never do it, no matter how much she tried. Bérengere's act, culminating in a fiery hoop stunt, regularly draws wild applause from the audience at Circus Chimera.
It's the classic story. Go to the circus, meet performer, run away with the circus (and performer.) It's an ageless story; it was Ekaterina's mother's, it was Fridman's mother's (somehow I realize as I write this that it is always the women who join the circus, and I wonder why: are men less adventurous, contrary to what the common fare would have us believe?)
Bérengere is not tall but seems so because of her acutely lean figure, enhanced by her bikers-inspired costume, all black, spikes and leather. She wears her hair short and dyes it a orange-reddish tone, accentuating her boyish appearance. She's garrulous, and doesn't wear her opinions under her sleeve. She'll talk about her passions for hours, her hands fluttering. When she was younger she suffered severe kidney problems, which are still an issue. She and Genia do not have children together; she talks affectionately about Vilen and Sasha, her step-sons, as "the children."
Bérengere met Genia in 1994 while visiting Cirque Amar, one of France's most established circuses, to do some decorative painting. She had been making a living as an artist, having attended art school after giving up the idea of being a wild animal veterinarian - when she wasn't traveling the world with a backpack. At Amar she was to paint the artists' quarters on a theme of Walt Disney.
She did, and then some. Some members of Genia's troupe were blocked at the border in Russia and the director was adamant about having a woman in the show, so she stepped in. Together with Genia and the rest of the troupe she did a jumping rope act that involved a human tower. "I'm afraid of heights - I was scared witless," she laughed. Over the next ten years she and Genia worked in France for Amar then for Cirque Bouglione, another one of France's most famous circuses, then in Ireland, England, and the U.S., where they arrived in 2000. Over the years she's worked a jumping ropes act, a badminton/juggling act with Genia, the Russian bars, also with Genia and two other people, a chiffon act, and the hula hoop, which she originally developed at Bouglione's.
Maybe there were signs. Both her grandfather and her father were fascinated with the circus, and her Dad once wanted to be a lion tamer. "It was the impossible dream," she said. Somehow she fulfilled it, on her own terms. And now it's almost time to move on. "This but a period in my life which is about to end," she reflects. She gives herself until she's 40, and then hopes to start her own business in tourism.
There are the passing friendships, friends who don't stay friends because everybody is on to something else, the sometimes infuriatingly closed-off quality of circus people who, for all their moving about, more often than not remain oblivious to the world around them, locally as well as internationally, moving in a sort of bubble. There are no retirement funds either, no safety net, in the circus. Working in a traveling circus takes its toll on even the toughest, and the financial future of a circus family is less than assured.
Yet "when you are in the ring and hear people applauding you, when you know they appreciated what you're ve done, there is a good feeling, not of pride exactly, but that all this was not for nothing," Bérengere said. Until the next turn in her life appears, then, she'll go on rushing in, spinning, feeling the sting of the fire as it dances around her body, the exhilaration of that moment, the roads wide open before her, still.

A mishap.

August 19, Newark.

Thursday morning while setting up the circus a stake rammed in at the wrong place ruptured a water main in the Newark Mall parking lot. No water for us, til late the next day. As with everything else in a traveling circus life, you learn to cope, and always have a gallon of water in store.
Baby wipes also come in handy.

Sasa - hair hanging act (August 17.)

In the early days - again.

August 18, Newark.

It's the constant sensation of uneasy emptiness in the belly, not quite nauseous, except upon waking up in the morning on a growling stomach, but hollow, a feeling of impending sickness, the constant need to eat but disgust at the idea of food, any food, sweets out for once (and only, unfortunately,) fat banished, the struggle to find something palatable, the impossibility to cook, the mere idea of cooking sickening. Just like the first time. And the smells, the smells, not only the smell of food sickening but any smell, insidious, and unbearable when it's bad, like Dylan's diapers, or the smell of diesels running when we move at night and all the trucks are on. Some days I go to bed with Dylan, at 9:30 PM, exhausted, and sleep til he wakes me up.
I don't want to think about taking care of an infant and a toddler at the same time, not now, not yet.

Flashback to something new.

August 18, Newark.

Here is an entry from last week that I didn't post then because Fridman doesn't want people in the circus to know yet. It suddenly occured to me that I could post it here, since this is the raw, original, unedited version of the blog. It's become increasingly uncomfortable not talking about the subject because it is such a core part of my life now, it feels like having my mouth taped shut when I want to scream.

August 11, Pleasant Hill, California.
I ate half a chicken this morning (braised, delicious even though it never saw the light of day nor had enough space to only move any one of those legs I so enjoyed ripping through.) I'm a vegetarian and I just had to have chicken, had to have some, two days of steady craving, I knew with utter certainty something was in the works because that seems to be what happens when I'm in the first few days of pregnancy.
So now it's not "Travels with Dylan in a circus" anymore but "Travels with Dylan & Company in a circus."
Au secours?

Dusty moods.

August 16, Martinez.

It's warm then it's cold. As my grandmother would have said, there are no seasons anymore in this world, y'a plus d'saisons ma bonne dame.
The circus is near the marina in Martinez, a town half an hour from San Francisco on the northern, inland part of the bay. The lot we're in is durt and with the steady wind going since we arrived everything is covered with a thick layer of dust, brown, penetrating, making you cough when you breathe it. Getting out with the stroller is a challenge, but so is staying in with a never-satisfied baby on the crawl.
Difficult days.

Off.

August 14, Martinez, California.

Dylan turns nine months old today.
Is there an off button somewhere?

Crazy show.

August 13, Pleasant Hill, California.

In-house tradition commands that every year Circus Chimera puts up what it calls a "crazy show," a unique feat, as far as anybody knows in the circus. This year's edition went on last night, crowning a three-show day of work.
In the crazy show performers and non-performers alike get to mock the show and each other, dressing up and making fools of themselves and everything else, a welcome comic relief to a regimen of seven days a week, ten months a year work. Or a fools' parody of the fools, the jesters making fun of the jesters, the circus eating its tail.
This year, among others, Corey, the only gringo working with the tent crew, and who must weigh a good 200 pounds, took the part of Ekaterina as Alice, tio Tito dressed up as Sasa, the Chinese girl who does the hair hanging act, Fridman and Sasha did the Chinese girls' diablo act, Vilen, Sasha, Vasily and Fridman the Chinese boys' Chinese poles act, and Chago, of Mexico, one of the crew workers and an old-time circus guy, dressed up in a sparkly suit to act as Roy, the ring master (and manager of the show,) swinging in slow motion to blaring cheesy Latino tunes.
It was Fridman who did all the directing, choreographing and organizing this year, the first year the Chimal family wasn't there to take charge. He ran around like a madman before the show, checking a wig here, makeup there, cracking up, running off again.

Corey and Ekaterina before the show.

Show time with Dylan.

August 9, El Cerrito.

Taking pictures of the show last night, Dylan perched behind me, taking off my hat. It was a good crowd.

To my mother.

August 8, El Cerrito.

Listening to the CD of the Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park that my mother brought me from home (showing my age) I long for her.
For the wind on a Pacific beach when I was twenty, for the freedom to be, for roughing it up in Scotland with a backpack at sixteen, for the leaves falling in the garden, for the memories of childhood climbing up tall trees, for her indomitable heart, for the wild energy of New York City at nineteen, for the music, for the fierce wanting to live in the world, in exhilaration, for her strength in letting go of me, for the solidity of her instincts, for the travels with Dylan, for the sunsets on the plains of the Midwest, for fresh snow one morning in Columbia, Missouri, for all the photographs in the world, for all the good and all the bad, all the stumbles of trying, failing, never renouncing - to my mother.

Nostalgia.

August 7, El Cerrito, California.

My mother and my friend Fred left yesterday (back to France and their respective lives without Dylan.) It is sad and strange without them.
And the circus moved from Fairfield to El Cerrito, across the bay from San Francisco, with a view of the Golden Gate bridge, soft and grey in the distance, that Fred would have loved. We took advantage of the whole week the circus stayed in Fairfield to go on a car trip back to the Northern California coast, hoping to make it all the way to Oregon but ending instead no farther than Eureka, baby oblige. Route 128 to Fort Bragg through wine country then redwood country, Route One up the coast to highway 101 to Eureka, motels all booked because of a music festival right off Route 101 drawing some 50,000 people, according to a family man we struck up a conversation with at a café in Eureka the morning we drove back; sweet to be in Eureka again, the bookstores, the waiter remembering us at Bev's Café (I would have gone all the way back to Eureka just for their spinach omelette,) people speaking fondly of the circus everywhere we went, "we wish you'll come back and perform here," the lot by the boardwalk where the circus was looking forlorn without it, feeling happy about the footprint we left there.
(Fred tried the ocean again but only put in a foot.)
Moral of the trip: it is not advisable to travel long distances with a (almost) nine-month-old strapped in a car seat who's just beginning to discover the world and wants all of it, and has all the energy for it, now.

A Proust moment.

July 28, Daly City, California.

The circus is a BART's hop away from San Francisco, and Mom, Fred, Dylan, Fridman when he can and I are taking full advantage of it.
coming back from the city tonight there was Richard, a circus fan who lives nearby in the Bay Area and is known for organizing parties for circus people every opportunity he can, and so there was a party. No can do because of the baby, but word goes it involved dancing and squares, and food galore.
It is almost cold here, there was a blinding fog the night we arrived which came back tonight, erasing everything in its white shroud, annihilating the city around us, the circus tent rising on the hill like a lost ship, floating, a vision.
We are on top of a steep hill, on the grounds of Westmoor High School, in what appears to be a predominantly Asian neighborhood from the look of the shopping center a block away and people on the street. Mom and I took Dylan along to order some dinner to go earlier tonight and shopping at the market in the small indoor shopping mall the smell of the place transported me back to Hong Kong, China, where I lived and worked for a while. The power of smells, like that of taste, to conjure up worlds long forgotten, no use trying to compete with Monsieur Proust.

Moon Books.

July 26, Half Moon Bay.

More small bookstores, and a simply gorgeous one, Moon News, unusual in its size and in that it sold only new books, unlike all the other bookstores I discovered along the coast, a jewel in the midst of the kingdom of chain book(and otherwise)stores that is America today. Half Moon Bay supports no less than four bookstores, two of which sell new books, not bad.
My hat off to the moon books.

Fred.

July 25, Half Moon Bay, California.

Another beautiful coastal town, this one I knew from previous visits to Fridman.
The ocean, again, and the wind so cold yesterday Mom, Dylan and I had to leave. Warmer today; Fred braved the waves and jumped in a water the temperature of my ice box for sure. Dylan tasted sand and didn't like it.

No direction out.

July 23, Hayward.

Killer heat continues, time to head for the coast, except not, or rather together with half the valley's population, or so it seemed.
Highway 92 stopped at I-280, tried to beat the crowds by going down to highway 84, only to get caught up in the same bumper to bumper traffic. Two hours of diesel burning amounted to two u-turns and a lot of frustration, Dylan-wise and otherwise, and no relief from the scorcher at all.
Nothing compared to what the performers had to face: today was a difficult day, a worn-out Ekaterina confessed when we met after the last of the three shows in 100-plus-degree heat.
The tired smile when you try to look for all the world like you feel good, for the audience.

Ekaterina (July 18.)

Time off.

July 20, Hayward, California.

My Mom arrived today, with a friend of mine, Fred (short for Frédérique,) whom I've known since high school.
Mom had last seen Dylan when he was one month old. Jim is letting me take time off to be with them, I've been planning to drive back up the coast we just did with the circus, Route One and then 101 to Oregon, the Sonoma valley, the cliffs of the Pacific south of Fort Bragg, the Redwoods . It feels strange being back in a city environment; I miss the small town atmosphere, the quiet, the green.
I missed my Mom. Enjoying every minute together, for the short time given us.

Shock therapy.

July 17, Cloverdale, California.

The heat wave that baked the nation hit the circus with a vengeance as we were treated to a jump from barely 60 degrees in Fort Bragg on Sunday to 110 here today. The actual readings diverge - our clock marked 108 outside the trailer, Roy's 111 - but in a word it was hot. Baby confined inside all day, short fuses again.

Tres chic.

July 15, Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg, another northern California coastal town, turned out to be nothing like Eureka and its cozily gentrified downtown, the epitomy of cute, "historic" buildings and shabby chic storefronts, tres Greenwich Village, California style, very university towns everywhere, like Athens, Georgia, in the early nineties at the height of the REM craze (nothing personal, used to live there.) The sea is rough here, and there isn't much of a downtown but for a block of old buildings on the main street that runs through it. It is deliciously cool and breezy.

Gears and fuses.

July 14, Fort Bragg, California.

Today is my national day, le 14 juillet, not anywhere but in English-speaking countries known as Bastille Day.
Much more important is that Dylan turns eight months today. He's as happy as ever and it is increasingly hard not to fall in mad love with him.
We're back on the coast after a brief stint around Clearlake and in the heat of the inland areas. The road down here, highway 20 west, would never end, curve after curve after curve, up and down and up and down we go. Going 20 to 30, 33 miles can seem like a long time.
Driving without dashboard lights, last in a series of truck mishaps that started with the brakes going out in Oregon. We couldn't move the truck in the last location we played, Lakefront, because the reverse speed has been increasingly difficult to handle. Euphemism for both hard as hell to engage, and impossible to take out if you don't get in neutral while the truck is still in motion. I thought I had when I parked but it was stuck and wouldn't come out (Jose finally wedged it out) so we stayed exactly where we were, no moving the trailer to level it or unhitch the truck, no opening the slides, two days of off-kilter living and no crawling around for a baby that turned out to have a short fuse when he's not free to roam (don't we all.)

Mistakes.

July 10, Clearlake, California.

Travel day in the circus, 200 miles of (again) beautiful road, 101 South then 20 East around Clearlake, and the rest of the day free.
Temperatures reaching the high nineties, a shock after the coolness of the coast, hard work for the muchachos who had to raise the tent in the heat of the mid-day. Jim treated everybody to a night at the movies.
Dylan and I stayed home, as a movie with a seven-month-old is not my idea of fun. He's waking up regularly at five in the morning now, and since I nurse him when I put him to bed after our late night drives, he now wants to nurse too when he wakes up during the night. My mistake, but under the circumstances of life in a traveling circus, one that could not easily be avoided.

On the boat.

July 9, Eureka.

Jim (who came back yesterday after being away for a while) treated us to a boat ride after the shows, hence creating another first for Dylan. The boat, the Magaket, apparently the oldest passenger boat still operating in the U.S.

Ekaterina (rough draft.)

July 9, Eureka.

Ekaterina likes shoes. She buys lots of them, preferably high heels. She used to like pink but this year prefers white. She giggles a lot. She likes movies like "Girl, Interrupted" and "The Notebook." And like many other twenty-year-old girls she just wants to dance and party, stay out late and have a good time. Ekaterina is a very usual twenty-year-old, only every night she puts on heavy makeup and fake eyelashes and walks into the ring in a costume, shines and twirls and twists under the spotlights of the big top, her perfect gymnast's body defying gravity, morphology, mesmerizing.
Ekaterina came to the United States from Russia two years ago on a contract to work with Circus Chimera. She's petite, cutting a waif-like figure, a mischievous doll, with a beautiful face that reminds one of the moon, pearl-white skin, delicate (and faithfully manicured) hands, and a pouty, well-defined full mouth. There is a generosity about her, and not only because she's engaging and warm and wins you over with her looks. There's also a lightness about her, the kind that makes it impossible to be mad at someone for too long. She walks with the grace of a dancer.
She's a circus child, une véritable enfant de la balle, born and raised in the Russian circus, her father an acrobat and her mother a gymnast who went to work in the circus, met him, and never left. The circus in Russia is in buildings only, there are no tents. "But every town has a circus building, it is the tradition," says Ekaterina. She remembers vividly the first time she went into the ring. She was eleven, a tiny girl, light as a feather. "I was very nervous, I wanted to go pee, to run away, anything but go in there," she says. "My Mom pushed me in. But in there I felt like a cosmonaut, it was so big, there were so many lights."
She was back with her mother at the time, in Saint Petersburg. Her parents separated when she was three, and she never saw her father again, nor kept with his family. When she was six she went to live with her maternal grandmother in a small town in the Ural mountains; her mother had to work outside the country and decided it wasn't good for Ekaterina to be traveling, she must go to school on a regular basis. At her grandmother's she went to gymnastic classes after school - she had already started on the circus road. "When I was little my Mom prepared me for the circus, making me stretch, work out," she says, adding, "She didn't have to ask, I loved the circus." Soon the routine of rhythmic gymnastics, the hoops, the balls, poles, ribbons, all became her life: "practice, practice, practice."
When she stepped into that ring for the first time she had been back living with her mother. She had met and partnered with another circus performer, Yuri, and so Ekaterina worked her acts with Yuri. She worked on hand-balancing and hand-to-hand acts, and contortions. As they started traveling together in Russia and later around the world, in Germany, Japan, Turkey, she changed schools all the time, fitting in easily, making friends, always moving on, loving it.
"You can't say you work in the circus and that's your job, no, it's your life!" she says, emphatic. "Whether you're happy, not happy, there's a show every day, and there's action, smiles, music." When Ekaterina speaks about life outside the circus she says the other world. "In the other world I'm not happy," she says, asked what she would do were she not able to live in the circus. So dreams are all cut out, she wants to join the Cirque du Soleil. "Since I'm a little girl I just dream," she says, lingering on the word, moving her hands in a circular motion away from her face, like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
The show is over, I hear the crowd applauding (there was a full house tonight.) Soon Ekaterina will come running out, and there'll be a discreet knock on the door in our trailer and we'll know it's her, the sound of her fingernails tapping, light like her, and there she'll be, freshly showered, sparkling, Come on guys!, ready to take on the night in her high heels and tight-fitting clothes, your usual twenty-year-old circus contortionist.

The chocolate factory.

July 7, Eureka, California.

It's almost boring.
Someone give me the bland, utterly uninteresting, bordering on downright negligible landscape of the Midwest, say, southern Illinois (nothing personal, just used to live there,) a change from all this, road 101 South to Eureka, the redwoods again, the plunging Pacific vistas, the breathtaking views, the sheer beauty of it all, all along this coast, falling in love with each town, Ventura, Monterey, Ashland, now Eureka and its artists' community, not one, not two, but four bookstores within a couple of blocks, the light on the marina at sunset (and again, we've set up house by the water, literally we can touch it,) all this beauty, this perfection, place after place, it's almost boring, really, like too much chocolate fudge, really. Join the circus and walk into the chocolate factory. Overdose, think about retiring to Indiana.

Not fair.

July 6, Crescent City.
Crescent City - what a shabby, utterly charmless town in the middle of such beauty.

Another round.

July 5, Crescent City.
France/Portugal World Cup match, the usual attending crowd, and the muchachos playing soccer outside their trailer, their team out.

Heaven, I'm in heaven (could have been different.)

July 4, Crescent City, California.

An apology. The folks that came to the circus today in Medford saw a truncated show, missing Fridman's two acts because he was out saving me and the baby.
Errands to run in the morning and he notices something off with the brakes, brake fluid shooting out, and the brakes going out, again. Defective part, clogged hose, the diagnosis varies but not this: had we not discovered that before the trip tonight the brakes would have given out at some point on the mountain road and Dylan and I might not have made it here in one piece, or at all.
The decision was Roy's; we hitched the trailer to the Chevy truck that hauls the quinta (as we call the circus common trailer) and Fridman followed me in our truck. Which means that he had to do no less than three 100-mile trips today, to Crescent City with me, back to Oregon and back again to Crescent City, but also that he couldn't work the shows.
For me making the trip by day was as if I'd died and gone to heaven (that special kind for agnostic French.) Not only the beauty of Route 199 in southern Oregon (enchanting Oregon,) the Smith River National Recreation Area in California, but suddenly, without warning, the Redwood National Park.
Nothing could have prepared me for them, my mind flooded with all the clichés in the world (that too a cliché,) my mouth dangling on the floor in amazement like the Big Bad Wolf eyeing the Little Red Riding Hood in those Tex Avery cartoons we used to see on French TV (my Dad's favorites.) The trees immense, terrifying, pillars of a giant cathedral, the architect gone mad, la foret improbable, the unlikely forest, strangely coming upon an expression by Virginia Woolf reading Mrs. Dalloway after hours last night, the exact words for this, a "feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating."
The finishing touch: a string of Mini Coopers flying down the road at Anderson Creek in all their stripes and colors (there even was a pink one.)


Fourth of July crowds on the beach near the marina.

Déja-vu.

July 3, Medford.
France won against Brasil in the quarter-finals of the World Cup yesterday. Can't quite believe it but here it is, eight years afterwards, and they did it again. I couldn't see the match for I had to take advantage of Fridman watching Dylan (and football) to go work in the office (still no internet in the trailer, now a running joke.) I wish I could have.
Fridman watched it at the cookhouse tent, the Russians were there, with Bérengere, bien sur, and Vasily, Gustavo, some of the other Mexicans, Rafa the cook (because he had drawn France in the raffle,) tio Tito.
I heard a roar from across the parking lot in the office trailer, we had won.
My Mom called (like all week ends) and said the match was beautiful, and that the Champs-Elysées was filling with crowds celebrating, Black Blanc Beur, 1998 World Cup win déja-vu. I can see it.

Sightseeing saucers.

July 1, Medford, Oregon.
(At a mall, unfortunately.)

News of importance yet overlooked, Dylan sat unassisted for the first time on Wednesday. And so yesterday (after the necessary wait and confirm steadiness period) was the tryout walk of the baby backpack carrier I'd bought a while ago, apparently met with unlimited success, although I couldn't tell myself, being blind to my own child perching up there behind my head (and pulling at my hair,) for Bérengère told me he had this wide grin on his face and eyes like saucers. We went walking behind the circus, where the big house with the barn and hay field was, on a trail that asked people past, present and future to "walk in strength and peace." If it didn't exist you'd want to invent Oregon. Wanting to tread softy (however difficult with a 17-pound baby on your back.)
Also, unrelated, fell in love with Virginia Woolf, or at least the Virginia Woolf of Mrs. Dalloway, into the third page.

Books, botany and discarded Valentines.

June 30, Ashland.

Thanks to Bérengère I discovered a used bookstore a few blocks from the circus. It's called the Bookwagon, we walked there on Wednesday, and so far I'm on my third visit. I bought a total of fourteen books, some looking as if nobody had ever read them, for the price of three or four new. Good thing I don't live here or the store would be depleted in a month and/or so would my bank account.
Someone who's been reading the blog was kind enough to recommend some books they had enjoyed, but I didn't find them there. Here's what I fished out instead (not in any kind of order):
- The Best American Travel Writing, 2003
- The Best American Short Stories, 2003
- The Best American Short Stories of the Century
- To the Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf (a Master's degree in English and yet no reading her)
- Mrs. Dalloway, ibid.
- Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth (another gaping hole in my literature education)
- The Counterlife, ibid.
- Open Secrets, Alice Munro
- Women and Ghosts, Alison Lurie
- Empire Falls, Richard Russo
- A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
- Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
- and finally, Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis (I've wanted to read this book since I was very young, my Mom talking about it with passion, somehow it looms big, maybe because of the classic movie.)
Some of the books have annotations in them or names at the beginning. In one of them, The Best of American Travel Writing, 2003, there is an inscription written in an elaborate hand and different inks, the lines jumping to form a puzzle of sorts: "To my dear Matt (with a red heart in the a), Happy Valentine's Day, I hope you enjoy these stories & will be inspired to follow your heart. I love you very much! Marion, 2004." Another discarded Valentine?
On the way to the bookstore there is an elementary school that you'd just as much miss because it's hidden behind a front yard that has been turned into a deliciously overgrown and just-so messy botanical garden, with a sign pole that says "Que la paz permanezca en la tierra (may peace be on earth)" in four languages. Walker Elementary School exhorts its students to "Read, swim, see a green show and imagine..." for summer fun. The usual tame school fare (albeit not a bad program) but what got me was the green show part. Dylan would be at home in a school like this one, surely, getting into fights among the daisies and the ferns.

Cumplemeses - Jose Ivan's.

June 29, Ashland.

We celebrated the six months of life of Jose Ivan, the other baby at Circus Chimera. Pie, candle, singing feliz cumplemeses a tí, the whole thing again, with Edith, Jose Ivan's Mom and Circus Chimera office femme-à-tout-faire, Jay's children (with the circus for the summer,) Ekaterina and Vasily, and Fridman. Like Dylan, Jose Ivan is the portrait of his Dad. But he's a lot smaller than Dylan at his age (either that or my baby is dodu, that hilarious little French word for plump.)

On Clouds.

June 29, Ashland.

Do you know how good 71.3 degrees feels?
At seventy-one degrees and after three months of steadily building up heat and unfaltering blue skies the cloudy horizon above the patch of scrubby grass at the corner of East Main Street and Walker in Ashland, Oregon, was my patch of heaven this morning.
It rained yesterday, and on through the evening, the rain unfortunately too little but a gift anyway. I keep waiting for more.

Fridman worked on the truck's brakes all day yesterday too, and got up early this morning to go on. The back brakes were extremely bad on the right side, where the sparks were flying off, and taking out one worn out part kept revealing another, like peeling off a Russian doll. Dylan and I are lucky to have made it here safe.

Not your elk.

June 28, Ashland.

At the Sweetbrier Ave. exit on I-5 in Shasta-Trinity National Forest: bear crossing.
The sign was a big bear followed by a cub.

Since we traveled last night today was a genuine day off for performers. The first and probably the last of the season.
As for Moms, there are no days off.

Oregon!

June 28, Ashland, Oregon.

Finally, out of the hell of the central California valleys and into the cool of Oregon.
Beautiful Oregon. In so many years in this country this is a state I've always wanted to visit and never did. This is a place that's always made me dream - of gentler ways, natural wonders and greener pastures.
The valley where Ashland sits reminds me of a valley near Grenoble, in the French Alps, not far from where my mother lives. There is a softness to it. It goes at an inviting pace, everything seems tranquil and cool. This is also a place where traffic instantly comes to a halt the minute you even look like you want to cross the street with a stroller (rarely happened that a car slowed down, let alone stopped since we started the season back in Texas,) and a woman with a big smile waves you on. There are more than one house with flowers growing wildly, wonderfully on the sidewalk. This is a place where drivers go 25 or 30, as they're supposed to, on a long, straight street that happens to go through residential neighborhoods. People actually walk on these streets, and there is a cyclists' and walkers' trail that winds through town, reminding me of another French Alps place, Annecy, where many a summer I rode similar trails with my cousin Florence or my Mom, on visits to my aunt's house.
The circus is parked at the ScienceWorks Hands-on Museum (with a light bulb instead of the "o".) Next door is the Fish and Wildlife National Forensics Laboratory. I'd listened to a story on the radio a little while ago about just such a lab, and marveled at the idea of their work. This is the part where I miss my old photojournalist job, where I could be very well be sent there on assignment, going where other people (ie, me, now) never get to go.

Another long trip to get here, 160 miles of interstate 5, an up-and-down ride that in the end did what even the infamous Big Bear descent didn't manage to do, burnt my front brakes. The last stretch of downhill did it, and there were sparks from metal grinding against metal flying from my right tire upon entering Ashland.
Again we drove at night - and hence went through one of the most beautiful areas of the country blindfolded, only the constant dry-heat lightnings illuminating the crests around us, giving us split-second black-and-white glimpses. The Shasta-Trinity National Forest, the Klamath National Forest, the Cascade-Siskiyou (love the sound of that name, Siskiyou) National Mountain, all dark fantoms around us. Roy decided to have us drive at night because he feared it was going to be too hot to set up the tent in the afternoon should we have made the trip in the morning, as was planned. What a pity. It's not even hot, the sun wonderfully mild through the occasional cloud, light breezes.
I look at the valley and imagine the beauty beyond.

Behind the trailer.

Avion wonders, again.

June 27, Red Bluff.

After a period of trailer home improvement here comes the trailer trouble again.
We discovered upon arriving here that the right wall of the trailer has come undone from the frame and was sliding down, about an inch and a half yet. The trailer is coming apart, basically. Fridman started looking around when we couldn't open the stairs outside the door. He spent all day today working to secure the pieces back together, how, I have no idea. The walls should be nailed to the frame and unable to move from it so the whole thing is somewhat of a mystery.
What is no mystery is that Avion trailers are junk disguised as Rolls-Royce, or rather, the Fleetwood company is a shameless scam. One problem after another, and we're not the only ones with big Avions and big trouble. Boycott Fleetwood!

Blessing in disguise.

June 26, Red Bluff, California.

It was predicted to be 120 degrees here today. So we were relieved to go through the day with temperatures in the high nineties range, bordering on one hundred degrees "only."
Confirmation: a lady who came to the show with a four-day-old baby in her arms and to whom we gave the cradle told us it was 117 degrees yesterday. Apparently this place gets hotter temperatures than Death Valley. Only one show tomorrow too, the 7:30 PM one. If it wasn't so hot it would feel like a vacation.

Driving up here was another Circus Chimera special treat, 177 miles at night after a day's work.
The unbearable heat was a blessing in disguise - there was only one show and not the usual three, so the trip was not inhuman and dangerous, just long. Fridman was tired, but not exhausted.

Jose, the mechanic, spent the night in jail after he was arrested without any form of ID on him, somewhere between Antioch and red Bluff. He'd stopped to help another circus vehicle in trouble and here came the police to check it out. No driver's license, no ID, no nothing, on to jail.

Can't resist.

June 24, Antioch.

Another day at the water park, another scorcher.
Can't resist, more pictures.

Genia and Fridman playing with Dylan.

Pour en finir avec BHL.

June 24, Antioch.

Or the devil is not only in the details, but in the big picture, too.
The details: "the deeply, totally criminal nature of this country," in an epilogue actually defending the United States against the accusations of anti-Americanists, as they're called in Europe. For this is the irony of this book, how it would sound pro-American in Europe in general and in France in particular. How it defends the ideas of the neo-conservative wing of the right with surprising vigor, and hence the politics of the Bush administration, where neo-conservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, have had great influence, as everybody knows (their most notable contribution the war in Iraq.)
The details. The "desert" along Route One in California between Carmel-by-the-Sea and Santa Barbara: : "Highway 101(...) Heat and speed. Desert." Later: "An entire décor reminiscent not of the beginning but of the end of the world (...) that inhuman desert that threw itself into the ocean." California does have deserts all right, but I'm not sure they're along Route One, exactly.
The big picture: the recurring gimmick of starting with a list of counter-affirmations, a litany of repetitions affecting to be a style, to finally hammer in the proposed theory, and always, this temptation of drawing sweeping philosophical judgments from an isolated fact or conversation or event.
A style that turns unreadable when it tries to wax philosophy, admittedly a recurring problem with French intellectuals far more serious than this one (Derrida, anyone?) Lévy exemplifies the sorry state of French intellectuals today - so-called philosophers masking the emptiness with complicated, unreadable prose, offer a gaping lack of substance on a bed of convoluted mannerisms, the narcissism of writers endlessly "watching their navel," as the French say, or the obscene parading as literature.
And yet I ran through the book, enjoying the ride (with driver) more than I like to admit (the French in me,) learning a thing or two in the midst of the platitudes and rehashed information it presents as if they were fresh. The history behind Mount Rushmore, some interesting tidbits about famous prisons like Rikers in New York or Angola in Louisiana (and I think Lévy's analysis on the prison system of the U.S. is actually relevant, even though prone as always to the too-broad conclusion.)
My Mom liked the book but my Mom always falls for a glamourous man, even in writing. I'm glad she sent it along.

Fiesta!

June 23, Antioch.

Fridman came back from the last show with news we can't quite believe yet: there will be no afternoon shows tomorrow as well as Sunday.
Unheard of in Circus Chimera world, at least the one we've known for four years. Four cancelled shows. And a welcomed and much appreciated break for artists and workers alike, as temperatures continued into the hundreds today and are predicted to reach 106 degrees over the week end.
We beat the heat going to the pool before the shows. It was only a few hundred yards from where the circus is parked, but I was glad I'd brought an umbrella along for walking them would have been intolerable otherwise.
Dylan had his first "swim" and was, well, of course, grand, splashing and kicking as if he was born in the water (which he almost was, only he came too fast and there was no time to draw the bath.)
Fiesta at the circus tonight.

Fridman and Dylan at the pool.

BHL revised.

June 23, Antioch.

Finally over with American Vertigo, the BHL book in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville in America (see BHL entry.)
A French friend of mine had a good laugh reading a scalding review of the book by one of my favorite journalists, Garrison Keillor, in the New York Times online, and passed it on (Anne is the mother of the most adorable two-year-old, Alicia, and lives in Paris with her Colombian husband, a sequence artist. She's my trusted resource for advice on the many stumbling blocks and potholes on the motherhood road - my own private baby consultant.)
I still found the book enjoyable (can't undo the French in me?) as it is easily read, divided in short vignettes on a place, a person, a theme, themselves grouped into chapters along the path taken by Tocqueville one hundred and seventy years earlier.
But (to paraphrase the author.) A travel book intended for foreign audiences, it does fall into that easiest of all trap, mainly focusing on the extreme, the freakish, the weird, and foregoing the million nuances in between the types altogether. It is rather as if I went around France presuming to explain the country to foreigners by stopping to chat only with presidential candidates, celebrities and pundits, visiting brothels, prisons, hipsters and famous writers.
Keillor's view is that Lévy, besides being a self-agrandizing snob, doesn't get America because he only stops to chat with the afore-mentioned pundits, politicians and celebrities ("Nobody tells a joke in this book; nobody eats a meal,") only focuses on the extreme and unusual (the gated communities of Sun City, Arizona, the Texas gun show,) turns every little mundane fact into some grand metaphor (pouring rain at the Clinton Library inauguration prefiguring the demise of the Democratic party,) and is a book more about the French than America. All true on all counts.
And then the grandiloquent, pompous language, the painfully long sentences (Faulkner, yes, Jim Harrison, yes, Lévy, definitely not) full of sub-sentences, the affectation of the style, the pompousness, again, of the whole thing, as if Lévy was listening to himself write (and I cringe when reading my entry on Rancho Cordova's public park as it seems I'd caught the bug myself.)
And the details, again. Los Angeles spreading over the Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties no less, thereby reaffirming that French editors are geographically challenged, at least when it comes to the North American continent. And there I thought Americans' notion of geography was a safe laugh. Los Angeles, the "unreadable city," the un-city because lacking a center, a limit and a vantage point from which you can embrace its view (sic), Los Angeles, then, "a city without History" and thus without "historicity," and because of that a city Lévy says will soon die.
Last time I was in LA it seems pretty alive to me and nowhere on the road to impending demise but what do I know, I only lived there (since I lived in Riverside...) a couple of years as an average photojournalist going to the market for bread and paying my trailer-park rent, as opposed to driving through for a couple of days with a bunch of assistants in tow to sit down and talk with Sharon Stone in Beverly Hills.
(To be continued.)

104 in the shade.

June 22, Antioch, California.

It was 104 degrees Farenheit in the shade here today. I don't even want to imagine what it was under the tent at the height of the afternoon scorcher. Setting up the tent, I know, was a killer.
It reminded me of Riverside in the summer, getting in a car that had been sitting in the sun for a couple of hours after shooting an assignment and you couldn't grab the wheel, locking up the trailer at 8 o'clock in the morning to keep in the little freshness there was during the night, living in an oven. No getting used to this.
It's supposed to reach even higher tomorrow and settle into it over the week end. I don't know how many people will brave the heat to sit down in a non-air-conditioned tent, but I do know the bosses around here will make the show go on no matter what the conditions, no matter how few people show up.

Summertime.

June 21, Woodland.

Today is the first day of summer.
Just saluting the shortest night of the year. We'll spend ours taking down the tent, traveling on and getting to bed very late, another day on the circus road.

Circus telenovela.

June 20, Woodland.

Angelo telenovela heating up, reaching climax, temporarily suspended.
Telenovela unfolding with all the necessary stuff. Fights and breakups, tears, resolutions and much more. It's been a hot week, supposed to be reaching a hundred degrees tomorrow.

Nothing to do with the telenovela, just a picture of my two men sleeping late.

Late news on Fuji.

June 19, Woodland.

Missed news: Fuji came back on Friday and is doing great. He looks ten years younger, having lost a lot of weight, and the paralysis is not overwhelming. He walks with a cane, can now move his arm more and more, and has regained some feelings in his affected side. His wife, Eduarda Torres, is with him.
I didn't know he was here until yesterday when I walked right by him and didn't recognize him.

Gil.

June 19, Woodland, California.

On the farm there was also Gil.
Gil is young and tanned, wears his hair very long and walks around the farm without a shirt or shoes on. He is originally from Israel, went to school at the University of California at Davis and graduated in child development. He now lives and works on the farm, and he has built his own room in the common building there out of materials from demolition and abandoned construction sites. He's found red fur, old-growth redwood, pine, maple. He talks about insulating the roof with redwood bark, cools his room with a custom-made system consisting of storing cold air from the night in the foundation space under the building and blowing it inside with a fan during the hottest hours day. It works.
Matt, Dawn's boyfriend, is an engineer. Together with Gil it turns out they made up a good deal of engineering smarts. What a day at the farm will bring.

Gil in his room.