Ten years and three days left.

June 29, Newark.

So this is it. Last set up. Last time this morning the tent was raised, last time the circus rose from the depth of trucks by bare arms, stake after stake, board after board, tent and seats and everything in between and around, on Monday they'll take it down and there will be no more Circus Chimera.
Ten years of sweat and joy, of routines and thrills, of friendships and love and fights and laughs, ten years of hard work, seven days a week and ten months a year, ten years of ups and downs and the down finally won but it's the good times you'll remember, the full houses, the cheering, the awe of the circus. Ten years and three days left.
It was like family after all, Circus Chimera, Circus Chismera they call it, a play on words, "chisme" meaning gossip in Spanish. I'll miss my circus family, all these people I've come to know, I'll miss the road and the late nights, but I won't miss the cold and the heat and the fatigue, nor all the ugly lots, like the last one, and I'll miss even less the cookhouse food (but I'll miss tio Tito, the cookhouse manager.)
The electricity is about to be cut, I'll rush and post this (I won't miss that either.)

Saul waiving.

A trailer with a (last) view.

June 29, Newark, California.

The ants.

June 27, Vacaville.

They've been dogging me since Texas. The ants.
They trek around my kitchen, a solitary soldier mostly, only rarely a group of them, and I squash them and there's another one, and another one, endlessly they appear, unfathomably, one after the other and here's another, but where are they coming from, an under-keyed invasion, they keep coming, here's another taking a stroll on Peanut's pajamas, and one on the kitchen counter, the solitary searchers, since I left Texas they've been here, coming from the depths of the trailer or from outside I do not know, did I provide a free pass to Texas ants to go west or are these locals quick to the task?
Le mystere reste entier.

Welcome to the city of Vacaville.

June 27, Vacaville.

The city of Vacaville police are an interesting case of 21st-century small town fascism, made in the U.S.A.
Yesterday, the first day here, all performers are laborers were summoned to the cookhouse to have their picture taken, jail mug shot style, and their passport checked by the local police. Later on they came back with badges bearing the City of Vacaville police seal (a deceptively sunny logo,) "Special Event Permit, Circus Chimera, each person's Name, Expires 6-28-07," and the aforementioned picture. The reason officially given was that "vagrants" and other undesirable people had infiltrated traveling shows staying in the city.
So it seems you need a permit to stay if you don't own a home here. I didn't know it was a crime not to own a home, whether because you're homeless, or a transient, or simply traveling through, in the United States or in any other self-described democracies. Isn't this "a free country," as is often claimed (the meaning of this another debate altogether)? The badge of course makes one think of the uber-infamous token of identification, the yellow star Nazi Germany made all Jews wear.
Vagrants, homeless, gypsies, untouchables, circus people, the faces change, the societies change, but always it's the Others, whoever they are, the old human frailty born of ignorance and fear. We don't exactly know who you are but we don't like you.

Spikes and screams.

June 26, Vacaville.

The lot is full of tiny razor-sharp spikes, so taking Dylan out to walk around is not possible. Just stepping out of the trailer is out of the question. One feels like a fakir walking on a bed of nails. This is one of those lots that makes you rejoice over the circus closing.
Dylan is going to miss the last couple of days, when Peanut, he and I were spending time by the performers' entrance at the back of the circus, during the last shows, when the heat has waned and it's nice being out, and there Dylan ran and danced and played, with Jose Ivan and the performers, and it was a joy watching him, his boundless energy, his glee, the expressions on his face.
No such thing here, the poor kid's been cooped up all day and by early evening the wailing and the screaming was reaching burn-out levels, for both of us.
Two more days of this.

Chinese performer, "Rawhide" lasso act, June 25.

A trailer with a view.

June 26, Vacaville, California.

The circus.

June 25, Pleasant Hill.

A week to go and circus life is over.
Some of the Mexican laborers are going to work for carnivals. Some are going back to Mexico. Another circus may open, no details, no set date, no more than conjectures and rumors.
I've often wondered why the modern circus is confused with carnivals. I found the answer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, under "carnival" states: "A traveling entertainment combining the features of both circus and amusement park (...) developing out of the same roots as the early 19th-century circus - the 'mud shows'."
No confusion then, circus and carnival are in a sense the same thing. But the modern circus has evolved so much since its mud show ancestor that the two can barely be compared today. The ongoing similarities: they are both traveling entertainment. One day here, the next gone, although circuses in the United States nowadays tend to stay in one place for much less time than the carnivals do, and some, like the Carson and Barnes circus, travel from town to town each and every day.
And here the similitude ends. For a circus is an artistic creation, not just an entertainment business. At its best it is acrobatics, dance and visual art combined - and sometimes, in the elegance of a gesture, the confluence of inspiration and the perfection of a routine's execution, in a fleeting moment, an etat de grace*. The circus is a performer's creation, a creation born of the body enabled, in sweat and repetition, in someone's perseverance and sore muscles and blisters, and as such it is like all performing arts.
Like all other performing arts it is ephemeral and transient. Only it takes this fugacious state and makes it its essence. The circus performance is there for you to see today, the circus tent is there, imposing, yet in a few hours it is gone, like a figure drawn in the sand, impermanent, passing, like a Buddhist's trick.
Tomorrow we'll be gone, and gone for good. Circus Chimera, "A Creation of the Imagination," is shutting down, not just passing on.
But it is, too.

*A state of grace.

You said what?

June 23, Pleasant Hill.

Last year's chicken.

June 22, Pleasant Hill.

Last year here morning sickness kicked in; Nicolas was on his way. I remember eating a rotisserie chicken bought at the Safeway down the street, my usual pregnancy sure thing symptom.
He's asleep in his rocker now.
(Here was where we did the Crazy Show last year too.)

Roadside religion.

June 22, Pleasant Hill.

On Route 4 near Brentwood, a church sign: "Let us pray for you, submit your request at www.deltachurch.org."

A trailer with a view (next to last one.)

June 22, Pleasant Hill, California.

A trailer with a view.

June 19, Brentwood, California.

This is the kind of landscape I had in mind when I started the Trailer with a View shots, the kind of landscape I was looking at in town after town last year, especially before we hit California, suburbia spreading, towns expanding into the seemingly endless land, a new mall, dirt fields turning into more shopping opportunities, open country about to be covered by more new homes, next year this lot will not be available anymore and somebody will be living in my trailer's backyard.
Except of course now there will be no next year.

Uncertainties.

June 18, Antioch.

No more Circus Chimera. Everybody in the circus was flabbergasted, we're all a little dazed now. More than ten years wiped off with a few words, in a few minutes.
The future, which lay for months ahead in innumerable drives and towns and states, California for a while more, then Oregon and Washington, New Mexico and back to Texas, in show after show, in good weather and bad, in good lots and terrible ones, the shifting and routine future of the traveling circus, the future is now looming wide and uncertain, a vague threat.
For us there is nothing solid, just a void to be filled, quickly. The days are counted.
I wanted to postpone going back to work full-time until Nicolas was a year old and breastfeed him all the while, as happened for Dylan, but that may not be possible now, and I feel immensely sad. But things can turn out for the best; the only certainty is that everything can change at the drop of a (circus) hat.

My husband, the clown.

June 17, Antioch.

Fridman Torales Rios, acrobat, clown, assistant show manager and then some, truck driver. Going to work, Circus Chimera, 1:30 PM show.

And again.

June 17, Antioch.

Again.

June 17, Antioch.

Dylan.

June 17, Antioch.

Here, along with Peanut bien sur, is the most important thing among all the turmoil.

Peanut talks.

June 17, Antioch.

Speaking of families, we have lengthy talks, two-month-old Peanut and I, and laughs too. In the quiet morning hours before Dylan wakes up, we talk and talk. He's a talker, my Peanut, and such a flirt. I can't believe he's so beautiful.
After a period of restlessness that unfortunately coincided with our road trip, he's also turned into a wonderfully "good" baby, sage comme une image, "How do you keep him so quiet?" asked Richard the other day when we visited and Peanut was in the car seat being shuffled around without so much as uttering a peep; he nurses and kicks and talks awhile and then falls asleep, and if he fusses at all, a swaddle, a gentle rocking and maybe a totote to the rescue will do the trick in no time.
Thus the days fly by.

Late breaking news.

June 16, Antioch.

The circus is closing in two weeks.
Not a word of explanation, nothing, just Roy going from performer to performer during the last show. Looks like we're all going to have to scramble and find other plans to feed our families.

Bundles.

June 16, Antioch.

Looking for examples of Navajo cradle carrying online.
In a Walmart store in Gallup, New Mexico, during a mid-day stop on our road trip to California my mother spotted a woman carrying her baby all bundled up and ran to me: "Not only was the baby swaddled, he was all laced up!" I've wanted to look it up ever since.
Most if not all the people I know think it's vaguely barbarous to swaddle your baby like this, although they also remember how their grandparents used to do it. The combination of swaddling and/or carrying in a sling close to the body can be found in cultures all around the world since times immemorial, and for obvious reasons: the baby is reminded of the womb and thus soothed and calmed, the mother can carry him/her easier and go on with her tasks. Dona Maigo's mother in Brazil; Alexela's mother in Mexico, the old Albanian aunt in the Ismail Kadare novel I'm reading, what was surely a Navajo Indian woman at Walmart in New Mexico, those of us sharing in what appears to be the latest hip-Mom fad are only going back full circle, following the trail she in the wisdom of her people never left.