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.