Away from the circus.

June 5, Benicia.

I stayed in Dallas from the end of February to early May, when my mother and I made the road trip to California with the two babies. I stayed with Sheyla, Fridman's sister, and her in-laws, a circus family from Brazil who settled in Dallas four years ago.
Sheyla's boyfriend, Alain - a French name they pronounce the English way, Alan, - is their youngest son, a quiet lanky boy of eighteen, with long, jet-black hair he wears loose, an aquiline nose, and a soft smile that came out often when he held his then four-month-old baby son, Fridman (Sheyla named him after her brother, not out of tradition or respect but because she just liked the name; it's a stranger name yet on a baby.) Alain has an adult's eagerness and seems mature beyond his adolescent's years; his patience with his baby is endearing. Fridman's cries coming from the house soon became familiar but they would be less frequent once Alain would come back from school; Sheyla, at her wits' end, would hand him the baby as soon as he got out of the car and he wouldn't put Fridman down for much time after that, rocking him, talking to him, letting go only for him to nurse.
Sheyla met Alain by accident, as these things happen, as she was looking for a place to stay after deciding to leave the circus in order to study and try and get ahead. Alain's parents, Sandro and Margarida Ordoniz, we call don Sandro and dona Maigo in the Latino custom of addressing people who are older than you in a respectful way. They are both circus performers, but whereas dona Maigo (her real name is Margarida) comes from a circus family, don Sandro became a circus artist after his mother, unwed, abandoned him as a young child, leaving him with relatives, who didn't take care of him. He was rescued by a dwarf who worked in a circus; the man raised him and taught him what would become his livelihood: don Sandro did a hand balancing act and was once famous for it in Brazil. Later, when he worked in her family's circus, he met dona Maigo; they had two sons, Narley and Alain.
Don Sandro is in his fifties and on his way to lose the body of a life-long performer for the beginning of a beer belly. Like his youngest son, his smile is gentle and he has an easy way about him that makes you instantly like him, an inviting nonchalance and generosity.
People tend to take advantage of him time and time again but he doesn't toughen up. Yet luck is often on his side too, and he has a way to get out of a bad step by sheer chance. He now earns a living buying and selling used cars although his honesty, bordering on naivete, makes him an unlikely candidate for that occupation. Once when I was there a man who had bought him a car with a forged check returned two weeks week later to buy another car, just as don Sandro was about to give up on getting the police's fraud department to help him. The man had left the stolen car parked a few blocks away so don Sandro got it back and recouped his loss, minus the hundred bucks he spent when he couldn't find the keys anywhere and had them made (only to have dona Maigo find them under the driver's seat the next day.) He likes to recall the time at the border with Paraguay in Brazil when he and dona Maigo went swimming in a river, leaving the car parked nearby, and dona Maigo kept telling him the area was full of thieves but he kept saying she was too distrustful, their usual quarrel; they left the water to find the car gone. The next day as don Sandro was waiting to cross the street in town he spotted the car at the light, shouted at its occupants that this was his car they'd stolen, getting them to run and leave the car behind, keys still in the ignition.
Now that she's living with the family, Sheyla acts as kind of a guard dog between don Sandro and the endless cohorts of people, mostly from the circus, where his reputation for being soft-hearted is widely known and sometimes derided, who stand ready to take advantage of him in every way, from leaving their cars or trailers parked in the yard for months on end to coming to live with the family rent-free with three meals a day in one of the other trailers that dot the landscape around the house awaiting repair.
Sheyla is the kind of girl that people say doesn't take any rap from anybody. She has big, long-lashed hazel eyes and very full curves. She laughs often and heartily. She is very short and always wears impossibly tall platform shoes so that you'd miss that about her entirely, which is her intention. She used to do contortion in the circus but her figure doesn't allow that anymore. She misses the circus intensely, as dona Maigo does, as most people raised in the circus do, and is busy making plans to return with Alain once the baby is older.
Even though he grew up in the circus, Alain, like his brother, was not taught a circus act; his father likes to tell him that the circus left him with nothing, not even a pension, and that he should study and find another way to earn a living. Fridman keeps saying the same thing to his sister; it is the reason she stayed behind in Dallas, to study and get herself a good-paying job, to take advantage of this country's possibilities and secure a better future for herself than working in the circus could ever give her.
But it seems it is hard to escape the circus: both Alain and Sheyla are well on their way to ignoring that advice.

Sheyla, Alain and their four-month-old son, Fridman in the Ordoniz' home, Dallas, May 8.
Don Sandro Ordoniz, Dallas, May 8.

A trailer with a view - close quarters.

June 5, Benicia, California.

The trailer is again parked in reverse mode, this time because the lot is so small the trailers had to be packed like sardines in a can and our front door would have hit the next trailer over had we stayed that way.
Parking was delayed last night as it took Fridman a while to figure out how to accommodate all trailers, and now with two extra ones. We are all not more than five feet apart from each other.
The circus tent was still being raised when I took the picture this morning.

Quiet time.

June 4, Santa Rosa.

There are now five children in the circus, up from two last year. They are Jose Ivan, 17 months old, the son of Edith (office) and Chivito (set up crew,) Allyson, 2 years old, the daughter of Raul (juggling, contortion and chiffon) and Gabriela (chiffon,) Svetla, four years old, Gino (roller-skating and globe of death)'s daughter, and then my two monsters.
I can't wait for Jose and Dylan to be a little older so they can play soccer together. It might be a way for my tornado to blow off some steam. They say in book after book on toddlers that you should have quiet times with them, say, before a nap during the day or before bed at night. It has been a puzzle to me, this quiet time business. Forget quiet time, the kid never slows down, he wakes up running; the only time he's quiet he's asleep.
Quiet time with Dylan? I might as well wish for eternal youth.

Sweet cookies.

June 3, Santa Rosa.

The bustle of the circus on week ends; the cookhouse opens at eight with coffee and pastries and a few people trickle in, then by nine o'clock the traffic increases under the cookhouse tent and by ten thirty everybody is up and getting ready for the long day of three shows, starting around noon as most of the performers double up as greeters and have to be at the doors by 12:30PM. The trailer is facing the tent, a front row view of the activity throughout the day, the little girl Svetla, Gino's daughter, back with her Dad with her mother now too, running to the door of the motor home next to us, her face painted, Andrea calling her to dinner but she runs off following Jose Ivan, Edith's baby a month and a half younger than Dylan, Gino and Lyubo warming up the motorcycles for what seems like an eternity before the globe of death act, the last one in the show, the noise drawing Dylan to the window to watch time and time again, finger duly pointing, the women in their successive costumes, clad in a robe against the cold, dashing to and from the tent; by the end of the day Richard, a circus fan who lives in the Bay Area and a once financial backer of Circus Chimera, guiding a group of people on a backstage tour of the circus, as he does every year, the group standing near the artists' entrance, "What you hear now inside the tent is the crew vacuuming the stage to get it ready for the next show," he is saying as I make my way past them to the car carrying Nicolas on my way to run errands, and by the end of the day Gino, and I know it's him because he likes to whistle loudly and shout "Hey chamaco!" whenever he sees the kids, is starting a barbecue now in front of the motor home next to us, and the smell of meat being grilled soon drifts over, as others stop by the cookhouse to unwind, watching the inevitable TV, and today munching on the home-made cookies Richard always brings over, a sweet end note.

Travels with Dylan.

June 2, Santa Rosa.

It's now been two weeks since I joined the circus, again, armed with two babies. I wanted to put the road trip into words so that I would remember it in all its glory, I wanted to talk about Sheyla and her in-laws, don Sandro, dona Maigo, the house in Dallas, the wait for Nicolas to be born there, Nicolas' birth, my mother's visit. Instead I traveled down memory lane and wrote about Dylan being born.


Travels with Dylan.

Dylan was born naturally and when the midwives put him on my chest I didn't feel anything at all except relief that the unbearable pain was finally over.
Much later Dylan, softly, came into my life.
Women are not born women, much less mothers, they grow into it, wrote French writer Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking essay, The Second Sex. Motherhood was anything if not elusive for me until much later, when he'd started to walk and I saw in him a little man, until it finally, imperceptibly came upon me that this was my son, this unfathomable little person, unlike me (Dylan is the portrait of his father,) a world of his own I can never hope to break in, unlike me, I the vessel of his passage to life, the provider, not owned any love except that which he chooses to endow me, so unlike me, not my own but his own, now and forever, until after I'm gone and he's gone and we are both returned to the great mystery, life bursting in, life continuing and then out like a candle, Dylan an old man one day and then gone, much later, after I'm gone too, if I'm lucky and he is, Dylan and his big baby eyes still, looking at me from that faraway world none of us can hope to claim.
It was raining when Dylan came into my life, early in the evening on a winter day in Savannah, Georgia. November 14, 2005, a Monday. I kept the To-Do list I had made that day, as on every day, a necessary attempt at keeping my messy life from verging out of control. It ran, in order: "scan film; finish portfolio; eBay auction; call dealer; oil for car; cook/rest."
I've long since forgotten what the first four items were about.
I was a photography student in a graduate program at the Savannah School of Arts and Design, a short-lived attempt at reinventing my life once again. The To-Do list for that Monday went undone. I woke up early as usual but feeling odd; I was two weeks from my due date and as I drove my boyfriend to the airport we decided to go on instead to the birthing center I had chosen to have the baby at; it was down the road and if he was going to be away for a few days, better to check that that odd feeling in my gut was not what I both wanted and dreaded it to be.
The midwives sent us home to wait it out; it could be it or it could be a false alarm. I called my Mom; she was staying at a motel in town with a girlfriend of mine, the both of them visiting from France, where I'm from. Within four hours my waters broke and we rushed to the birthing center, my boyfriend speeding on the highway, sliding in and out of lanes at eighty-five miles an hour and I in the passenger seat writhing in pain, unable to speak already for the pain, moaning, a scene from a bad TV show.
Labor was two hours long - very short, agonizingly long. Dylan met us at 6:22 that night. I remember they told me it was raining outside.
It would months before I realized my life had irrevocably turned a corner, and yet it remained much the same.
I still live in a travel trailer, only I hit the road with it to go work with my boyfriend in the circus where he performs as an acrobat. I still make To-Do lists every day and they still go mostly unchecked. My boyfriend and I got married, and that didn't change anything either. I still love to read alone in the quiet of the advancing night after the day is done, only now that means after Dylan is finally asleep.
And now six-week-old Nicolas, too.

Balancing acts.

June 2, Santa Rosa.

There were trailers parked in the wrong place near the tent when I woke up this morning. I knew the new group of performers Roy had mentioned had arrived. Not sure what they do, it seems there are the trappings of a pendulum act packed on a trailer behind one of the motor homes. The pendulum act consists of someone trying to maintain his or her balance on a gigantic wheel as it turns and there perched executing an array of additional acrobatic figures ranging from rope jumping with a blind on to juggling, with or without the blind, depending on the performer's number of hours practicing.
More additions to the circus then, after the Fusco family from Argentina came over two weeks ago. The Fuscos are the family of Gabriela Cubillos, the acrobat who works with her husband in the chiffon act (he does contortion and juggling as well.) They perform an act called malambo, which involves much loud beating of drums and a sort of rope handling that reminds me of the cowboys I used to see covering rodeos for small town newspapers.
I'm hoping some day I'll have the time get the two monsters somehow fit and ready at the same time, and then I'll get out of the trailer, balance one on my back and the other on my belly and go try and see the show.

A trailer with a view.

June 1, Santa Rosa, California.

(The trailer is parked in reverse so that it could be level.)

Two months old.

May 31, Petaluma.

Nicolas, my Peanut, turned two months old today.
Just that.

Nicolas, May 29.

A dogged party.

May 31, Petaluma.

My back's been hurting more than usual and it's painful even to pick up Peanut and rock him. Staying up until the middle of the night on Sunday night at Mike and Michelle's party probably didn't help.
Mike and Michelle, and that's as much as we know about them, are devoted circus fans, at least Circus Chimera fans, in addition to pinball machine fans - they line the wall in their living room, all lit up, the only time I could play and consistently lose without losing all my change either.
Every year when the circus is in Novato, near their San Anselmo home, they come to the show and invite the artists to a party afterwards, and it usually runs through the night. This year it was different, there was none of the performers they've come to know throughout the years, the Chimals especially, and the party was reduced to Saul, Alexela and Vanessa and the two of us plus assorted kids, and the inevitable Angelo (can't miss a party) and his girlfriend du jour. It was only three o'clock in the morning when I started keeling over from fatigue and asked for the keys to drive home with the babies, and as the dancers followed there went the party. No group plunge into the jacuzzi out on the deck under the midnight star, no dancing til the morning light comes up, the odd sleeper out on the couch, next to the cat, who'll be avoiding the neighborhood of their new bull mastiff, 130-poud puppy.
The "puppy," the true star of the party, surely looked more like an elephant to 24-pound Dylan, who unfortunately for him kept running for his life the minute he saw him, thereby triggering a mad dash from the dog, in turn triggering more desperate running from Dylan, who'd soon fall and be overcome by the dog, its face bigger than that of the baby, its body the size of an overfed pony. Much licking and crying would ensue, until one of us would come to Dylan's rescue - the whole thing enfolding again within minutes as it is as hard to prevent a toddler from running than it is a dog.
Dylan was asleep before his head hit the car seat, and I wish I could do the same.

A trailer with a view.

May 29, Petaluma, California.

Sometimes the view doesn't reflect the location. Here we are, in Petaluma, again in the same lot as last year, the fairgrounds, and it's a flat, immaculate grassy lot - flat a godsend, a nice clean lawn the Hilton of circus lots - one of those you dream about in circus traveling life and all that can be seen from the trailer are ugly fences and electric poles. Life isn't fair, even to perfect circus lots.

Good moves.

May 27, Novato.

The circus is moving early today because of Memorial Day, same as last year. The shows will be at 1:30 and 4:30PM and we'll leave after that. It felt like a party when we arrived on the lot early evening last year, like a school kid out on a snow day. Hurray!
What's changed from last year is that we now usually move on Monday nights instead of Sunday, and that makes a world of difference: there are only two shows on Mondays, not three, the performers are not exhausted from the week end's marathon schedule. Hurray!

A year later.

May 27, Novato.

A year later we're again on the grounds of the Saint Vincent School for Boys, a tall mission-style church towering over the tent and trailers. Last year it was a beautiful lot with lush grass; I remember arriving in the field, there was nobody ahead of us, the moon was almost full and it was peaceful and quiet as it can only be in the dead of the night, and the scent of the grass when I stepped out of the truck, it was thick and green, and there was a minty fragrance in the air.
This year it's dry as a tinderbox, the hay stalks to thick they make you stumble. Dylan cannot walk in this field, so he's been cooped up in the trailer most days, pobrecito.
What a difference a year makes.

A trailer with a view.

May 25, Novato.

Dark fog.

May 25, Novato, California..

I'd forgotten how it feels to travel for several hours at night with the circus. Or maybe I'd never done it while caring for two babies.
Last night the circus moved from Scotts Valley, near Santa Cruz, to Novato, a town some 20 miles north of San Francisco. We drove right through the city; tractor-trailers careening along the up-and-downhill streets of San Francisco, mercifully late enough that traffic was not a problem, on to the star of bridges. The Golden Gate bridge was enshrouded in fog, not unusual but very beautiful.
We arrived short of three in the morning and Nicolas woke up on cue. The trailer was a mess after its maiden trip, a teapot and mugs broken after a rotten highway, too many a pothole taken at 65 miles an hour.
Today my back aches and I have trouble keeping my eyes open. So what else is new?

Mad maneuvers (continued.)

May 24, Scotts Valley.

Here's some of the less good part. We left in a 36-feet trailer with two slide-outs, came back in a ten years older, 6 feet shorter one with no slides, total square footage around 150. It's nice and cozy.
It was my home in southern California, a few years back when I was working as a newspaper photojournalist there. I just loved living in it, went crazy decorating it, painstakingly planted a garden in the pocket-size patch of solid-packed dirt in front (neighbors told me the last renter was a car mechanic who used it as a shop.) Coach RV and Mobile Home Park in Rubidoux (gotta love the name) became my little piece of paradise, a unique community of odd people bound by a common worry (the cost of rent in the area) that went from a Vietnam vet and his disabled son to a retired country singer. I only regret not having taken the time to do a story about them while I was there.
It was my little paradise and mine only then; there's four of us living in the trailer now. Most days it looks more like hell than paradise.
In the evenings Duracell-Dylan often starts running the length of the trailer's "living-room," about 15 feet, back and forth, back and forth, banging against the cabinet door at one end and me at the other, and it's rather obvious he'd be happy with a lot more space, although I'm not sure it would make any difference in his behavior an hour later.

(From left) Vanessa, Alexela, Yvonne and Pablo on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz this morning (mimicking Dylan.)

Staying zen.

May 23, Scotts Valley.

Whoever said being zen was the answer never had to take care of Dylan today.

Mad maneuvers.

May 22, Scotts Valley.

The circus, once again, is set up here exactly where it was last year, smack in the middle of the small town north of Santa Cruz up in the hills on highway 17. We can walk everywhere, which I did yesterday to go grocery shopping with the two monsters while Fridman was working.
It was the first time I attempted such an outing; as I walked the aisles of the store with a squirmy Nicolas in my arms (he'd started crying the minute I got there,) with the other pushing the double stroller, enormous, where Dylan sat asleep, hoping to stave off the screams until we got safely back home so Dylan wouldn't later on be a screaming feast himself from lack of sleep, and incidentally hoping to shop, three people in a row commented upon passing me by: "You've got your hands full!" displaying a look that went from frankly amused (it must have been my hat) to slightly preoccupied (was I going to veer off and come crashing into their caddie?)
It sinks in on me a little more with every day that passes (I'm a slow learner) that I'm back traveling with the circus, which as I remember I vowed not to do again as I left last year, with now not one but two kids under two. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I decided to do this. Not of maneuvering a Humer-stroller among the aisles of a grocery store with one hand, I wasn't. And that's the good part.

A trailer with a view.

May 21, Scotts Valley, California.

The view from my trailer's back window.
I've thought for a while of photographing it in each new location the circus parks; here's the first installment.
Better late than never.

One day at a time.

May 20, San Jose.

I left the circus late in February, in the McAllen area of the Texas-Mexican border. Almost three months missing and a 800-mile road trip from there to New Mexico, countless other, shorter but no less exhausting trips between towns across New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California, miles and miles of highway barreling through towns and country in the dead of the night, ghost towns, imagined country seeming to stretch forever beyond the glass panes of the truck, the children sleeping behind me, the noise and rattle of the diesel engine lulling me, sleepiness creeping in, a long day awaiting still, the night much too brief to rest.
All this lies ahead of me now, with two babies instead of one, nights a brief moment between feedings, days long with nursing, playing and cajoling, the day's labor done if I've bathed them and cooked a decent meal, one day at a time, a woman said at a deli counter in Dallas when I asked her how she had coped with raising three kids much closer in age than Dylan and Nicolas, one day at a time.

One of these days.

May 19, San Jose.

Four shows today. Three tomorrow, two on Monday, and on to the next town that night.
Anybody wanna join the circus?
The smiles will be on all day but the costumes might be a little rumpled by the third show, and the muscles sore. Tired feet will ache, backs will hurt, each step taken infinitely slower, before laying down to rest, to rest for tomorrow's smiles.
That might have been the real reason behind the otherwise rather titillating sortie of the two clowns from San Francisco.
The story goes that they were caught in an embarrassing position by pretty much the whole Mexican crew having a beer late at night at the cookhouse, and came by the office the next day a letter in hand from a freshly-hired lawyer requesting a break of their contract and subsequent departure.
I think they just couldn't take the seven days a week routine, the traveling late after a day's work deal, the portable toilets out in the boondocks treats, the cookhouse regimen of S and F (salt and fat galore,) circus life on a daily grind basis in all its delicacy on both body and soul. So they bolted at the first scandal, albeit an admittedly saucy one.
That they couldn't stand the heat is obvious. Which heat is the question.

The pursuit of happiness.

May 19, San Jose.

A few moments ago I was looking at Nicolas; he was looking back at me and suddenly he broke into a big wide smile.
Nothing simpler yet nothing better.

Dylanese.

May 17, San Jose.

I'm back with the circus and it feels as if I'd never left. We are at the Children's Museum in downtown San Jose, same as last year. Dylan was too small then to enjoy the museum; now he'll run wild.
He does that, he turned 18 months just three days ago. He's doing as good as an 18-month-old who's just been uprooted once again in a long list of once-agains, gone through a marathon five days road trip across the country and is having to deal with the arrival of a baby brother could possibly do. He's running wild, he's my love.
He's talking his own talk, lalala, la di da, and we're waiting to see what it turns out to be: French, Spanish, Dylanese sprinkled with English?

Dylan, May 2, Dallas, Texas.

Peanut.

May 15, San Jose.

My mother left today for France, she went back home and left me missing another set of precious arms, a soothing voice for Nicolas, she would hold him for hours at a time, talking to him, laughing, and I miss her so.
Nicolas is a more difficult baby than Dylan, sometimes hardly sleeping during the day, needing to be held and soothed long after he's nursed. He does that with gusto, he weighed 9'5 already at his last pediatrician visit before we hit the road. I wrap him in a burrito-style swaddle, rock him and sing, use a tototte (my Mom's lingo for a pacifier,) whatever it takes to calm him down. He's an adorable burrito.
My mother stayed with me a month and a half, planning her trip for Nicolas' birth. He was born in a birthing center in Dallas similar to the one where Dylan was born in Savannah. Labor was half the time it took for Dylan, only an hour - "only" for all those who have never been through labor pains.
Still. An hour labor, a natural birth without a hitch and a healthy baby, miraculous all.
Nicolas opened his eyes the moment he was born and sometimes it seems he's not shut them since. Always his eyes wide open, dark blue still, taking the world in. The other thing that struck us the moment he arrived were his fingers, incredibly long and fine, like a pianist in the womb.
He was tiny, and seemed tinier. I named him my Peanut, although when he was born I thought he rather looked like E.T., the friendly little alien; his face had that long, triangular shape, all bones and big eyes. Just a couple of weeks later my mother thought he looked more like a Buddha, double chin and all.
My Peanut, my little Buddha, Nicolas, welcome to the world.

Nicolas, 6 weeks old.

We're back.

May 14, San Jose, California.

We're back, plus one.
Nicolas was born on March 31 in Dallas.
He weighed just 6 pounds 2, a tiny creature I was afraid to handle, another miracle of life continued, life unfolding, where there was nothing, only there was, and he's here now, my Peanut, my love.

Nicolas Hadrien Torales Berta, April 12, 2007.

La piste aux etoiles.

Feb. 21, Weslaco, Texas.

Shot this year's Chimera program photos tonight between the two shows - and Dylan running around in his brand-new outfit.
I l-ike it!
As someone told me back in the spring (seems like twenty years ago) upon seeing Dylan in a rather funny hat, you gotta have some payback. There's a great children's clothing store in town, they even carry the French brand Petit Bateau, and one after another drop-dead outfits, if you like bright colors and not-nursery-blue styles (beats Wal-mart anyhow.) Who would have thought, way out in the Texas boondocks?

Feb. 17, McAllen.

The Argentinians' daughter, Allyson, turned two today, and they threw her a birthday party in the tent. All the performers were invited, so the lineup was as cosmopolitan as you'd expect maybe a gallery opening in New York City to be.

Suburbia, U.S.A.

Feb. 16, McAllen.

The lot we're in will be the McAllen Convention Center some time in the future, or so say the billboard. Now it's just a large building the ocre color of the earth surrounding it, cement sidewalks and paved entryways leading nowhere, newly-planted trees and shrubs, chunks of lawn grass neatly packed along them like so many carpet samples, big tractors and trucks endlessly going to and fro, spurning clouds of dust, more palm trees going up every day but the dirt still winning.
Walking with Dylan on my back I wanted to go to the park across the street but gave up; the six-lane avenue light ran about 30 seconds, or just the time needed for a couple of cars to go, barely enough for a pedestrian to reach the center divider. Nothing new here.

Showers (not that kind.)

Feb. 15, McAllen.

This afternoon I was getting to go out when Fridman told me they needed me in the tent for pictures. So out I went, the whole lengthy routine of dressing Dylan up, putting his shoes on, putting him in the backpack carrier, struggling to my feet and into my own shoes with 22 pounds on my back and some ten pulling me down on the other side (I'm eight-month pregnant today,) I stepped into the tent and... "felicidades!" they all chanted, all the women of Circus Chimera, gathered to surprise me with a baby shower.
They'd planned it all, brought in a table to put all the gifts on, bags and bags full of presents, they'd bought a cake, they'd enlisted Fridman's help, they'd planned it all, and they gave me my first baby shower, a baby shower I'd never even thought of getting as it's only a tradition in this country, as far as I know (the rest of us are really missing out, here, I've realized today.)
When I got back to the trailer it took me almost an hour to unpack, unhook, untape all the baby clothes and accessories.

Dylan, tout simplement.

Heroics.

Feb. 13, McAllen, Texas.

The daily heroics of circus life are often played out in the dead of night.
The idyllic country-feeling field we were in when we arrived in Harlingen having been turned into a giant sponge by last Saturday's deluge, and two days of somewhat drier weather having done little to restore normalcy, leaving the lot proved to be an epic battle, fought with semi tractor-trailers and two-inch chains.
I was dozing off on the sofa after putting Dylan to sleep sometime after the show ended last night, waiting for Fridman to come back and hitch the trailer, when the persistent, whiny roar of a truck engine revving up in vain woke me up and got me outside. Gustavo's truck was stuck in the mud. Another truck pulled up, Jose the mechanic at the wheel, a simple metal chain was hooked up between them, one try, two, the third one did it, the clowns cheered.
One after another each of the circus trucks got stuck, and the struggle went on all night. To make things worse, the weight of the trucks broke a water pipe, causing more flooding, if that could be possible. The last truck made it out of the lot around five in the morning, the field a lake of a mess, the drivers exhausted.
Meanwhile we drove onto the lot in McAllen and discovered another dirt field, ripe for mud contests should one drop of rain fall onto it.

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.