Sometimes you immerse yourself in something
and you
may not understand what it is until you back up and look at it from a
distant perspective. And, yes, that’s my lead-in to a story, a
story about joining a carnival.
Now, first off, a carnival is not a circus.
No live
animals, no rings, no ringmaster or clowns. But both a circus and a
carnival have a vibrance in the air, a cacophony of sound, bright
lights and garish colors. Both have children. Each child has a
candy-apple blush on their cheeks and a dripping swirly cone.
But a circus is a static experience. People
tend to
sit on their asses, watching, laughing and generally being
entertained entirely stationary, just as one watches television.
There are staged animal acts, professional acrobats, and clowns.
Except for the smells, the experience is a lot like TV. Carnivals are
a walkabout experience, with funhouses, rides and games.
I joined a carnival when I was 23 years
old. I had
been traveling across the United States on my bicycle. I had been
very unlucky in love. I had quit my full-time job in order to attend
college, but the part-time job I still worked made keeping up my
grades difficult. As well, I also joined many of the protests against
the war in Vietnam. I attended a long trial of the Black Panther
group in Baltimore, learning a lot about them, their cause, and
criminal law. I joined protests outside the Baltimore City jail to
support them and other prisoners in there. Conditions there were
awful.
I had also been part of a month-long
protest
outside the White House and got arrested by the Secret Service one
day for not leaving when I was asked to. The protest had been
organized by the Berrigan Brothers, two Catholic priests who had
poured blood and homemade napalm on draft files in Catonsville, MD.
Dick Gregory also did a hunger fast, and spoke on the White House
lawn. Often, I also attended meetings, conferences and other events
dedicated to stopping the war, as well as addressing world hunger.
These things seemed very important to me, but as my grade-point
average suffered, I was suspended from college for six months. At
that point, I decided not to wait around anymore. I wanted a change
of scenery. I gave away a few possessions, left some things with my
brother, and split that town. I had a bicycle, 5 pounds of brown
rice, 5 pounds of soybeans, and five pounds of granola.
On the road, after quite a bit of
sightseeing and
camping, I decided to visit an old roommate in Canada, as well as a
nice woman who had helped me organize an anti-war teach-in at my
college. She was now working in Canada as a counselor in a youth
camp. However, I experienced problems when crossing into Canada. The
border guards brought in a detective who said the knife in my
backpack was considered a deadly weapon and almost arrested me for
“smuggling a deadly weapon across the border”. But, after
a careful search of my body, clothes, and food, they let me go. I was
banned from entering Canada. A friendly agent told me to try the next
border crossing to the west, while he held up the paperwork for a few
days. It was a time of great unrest in the United States, draft
resistance, race riots, gas shortages, high crime, and unemployment.
He must have decided I needed a chance to start a new life. I did as
he said, and did enter Canada, visited my friends, and then headed
west again. Along the way I met some great friendly people. A trio of
young U.S. women were hitchhiking across Canada with a tent. After
spending some time getting to know them, they invited me to visit the
farm they lived on in West Virginia, if I ever found my way there. A
farmer’s wife, out picking blueberries, invited me in for fresh
blueberry pie, and fed me sandwiches while it cooked. When her
husband came home, he invited me to the sauna he’d built in his
yard. I had dinner with the whole family, and stayed the night.
I was near Sioux Saint Marie, and found a
hostel to
bunk in while I explored the city. The hostel didn’t allow
travelers to stay during the day. I met two guys in a park along Lake
Superior. The guys were very friendly, but were drinking beer. They
offered me one. We all drank several, and then they pulled out a
bottle of wine, while I told them of my travels. I drank too much,
and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. They took me to a greasy spoon in
town for coffee. The coffee triggered vomiting, and I could not get
up from the toilet I’d ended up kneeling in front of. The café
owner told me I’d have to clean up the mess I’d made, or
he would have to call the police. I couldn’t even move, so I
told him to go ahead. So the police came. They were very nice, and
told me all I had to do was clean up the mess. I couldn’t even
stand up. They said, if I didn’t clean it up, they’d have
to arrest me. I told them to go ahead. They half-carried me to their
car.
After a sleepless night in jail, and a
visit to a
somewhat unfriendly judge, I was fined. I had left my bicycle and
gear at the hostel, so I asked him if I could go back there to get my
money. He agreed to let me do that. They are very trusting in Canada.
I got my gear and headed to the Michigan part of Sioux Saint Marie as
fast as I could pedal. I couldn’t afford to pay a fine, as I
had very little money left. Back in the States, I continued heading
west. As my limited cash ran out, I looked for work, which is how I
learned of a carnival shutting down. They would need to hire locals
for the breakdown. At first, I was only looking to make a few bucks
by helping take everything down, in preparation for the move to the
next town. I helped disassemble a Ferris wheel.
The first “Ferris” wheel, was
actually called Ferris’s wheel, after George Washington Gale
Ferris Jr., an engineer, part of a group charged with inspecting all
the steel to be used in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The Fair
was officially called The World's Columbian Exposition, in honor of
the 400th
Anniversary of the arrival of
Christopher Columbus.
Back then, that original Ferris
wheel consisted
of over 100,000 parts, including an 89,320-pound axle that had to be
hoisted up 140 feet onto the two support towers. Launched on June 21,
1893, it was a success. Over the next 19 weeks, more than 1.4 million
people paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride. 20 minutes! Can you
imagine any carnival ride lasting twenty minutes today? Three years
later, Ferris was bankrupt and died of typhoid fever. His wheel was
sold, and later dynamited for scrap metal. However, the Ferris wheel
lives on, and not only because of George Ferris’s design. At
the time, a carpenter named William Somers had been building 50-foot
wooden wheels at Asbury Park, Atlantic City and Coney Island. He
called them roundabouts,
and his design was
patented, long before Ferris’s wheel.
Ever since then, people have
gotten used to
giant spinning mechanical rides, climbing and falling, twirling,
zipping, and bobbing up and down (are you getting nauseous yet?).
People love the sensation of “...revolving through such a vast
orbit in a bird cage,” as the reporter Robert Graves wrote in
1893.
In modern times, all those rides have
pneumatic
cylinders to raise and lower the ride on the flatbed trucks that haul
them all over the countryside. First the lights have to be
disconnected, and some removed for transport. All of the “cars”
people ride in have to be removed and transported in another huge
trailer. More importantly though, is that all of this pneumatic
lifting and lowering, all those lights, and the motors driving the
ride, need power. Since the carnival is often set up on empty land
outside of town, carnivals provide their own electricity, in the form
of generators the size of a truck trailer, or two half-sized ones per
trailer. After I had finished with the Ferris wheel, I was put to
work for the carnival’s electrician.
Spreading out from each generator is a vast
network
of power cables, connected every hundred feet to a junction box, from
where another set of cables continues on from the opposite side, on to the next junction box, and so
on. Each
junction box has outlets for standard power outlets, for lights and
small appliances. The rides, however, have to be hooked directly up
to the tall terminal bolts that the power cables are already attached
to via 1" diameter crimped terminators (lugs) held in place by a
screw-on nut. In order to attach the wires from the rides, that nut
must be removed from the upright bolts, the ride wires must be placed
over the lugs, and the nut replaced, tightly.
My job, at the time, was to disconnect the
power
cables while the carnival was shutting down. Note that I said, while,
not, after. For, what the electrician needed were
lights for
everyone to see at night, which is when the carnival shuts down, as
soon as the last towny leaves. There are bright towers on top of each
generator truck, lighting the miniature city that is a carnival. So,
I could not turn each generator off before starting to disconnect the
power cables. As soon as all the rides, joints (game booths) and
poppers (popcorn, corn dogs, cotton candy, etc.) had been removed
from the last junction box in the line, and then the next, and the
next, all the way to the generator, those now useless lines had to be
pulled off their terminals, hauled off and stored in yet another
large truck trailer. However, the power was still on, and those wires
were still connected to the main terminal block, which was still hot.
So, I had to disconnect the live cables,
and then
pull them through the metal sides of the junction box. There were
holes in the sides for this purpose, each hole protected by a plastic
ring, so that a hot cable lug would not touch the bare metal. In
theory. However, as I was successfully performing this somewhat
delicate operation, I unscrewed the locking nut on a terminal, lifted
the power cable and lug up and off of the terminal, and started
pulling it slowly to and through the hole. It wasn’t until the
lug approached the hole that I noticed the hole had no plastic ring
protecting it.
I tried to back the cable up before it
could make
contact, but it was too late. The power running through the cables
was such that it could easily bridge a small gap, and that one did.
Hoo boy, did it. BANG, a blinding flash, a shower of burning sparks,
and the generator whined loudly before it shut down. Darkness. Pure
darkness. Not only because the lights were off everywhere near me,
but my eyes needed time to recover from that flash. Couldn’t
see a damn thing.
Shortly, because something like that really
attracts attention, the electrician showed up. He asked me if I was
alright. I said I was, and explained that the plastic ring was
missing and the cable had been torn right from my grip as it welded
itself to the box. My eyes slowly calmed down. Since there was no
power yet, he reached down and yanked hard on the cable, breaking the
impromptu weld. He said, “Don’t do that again,” and
walked off. I got the other cables out just before he restarted the
generator. I had expected to be fired or something, but with power
restored and everyone working, I just went back to work. It took me
the rest of the night to remove all of the cables, and then carry
them and the junction boxes to the electrical truck.
By daylight, I was exhausted, as were the
carnies.
I couldn’t think of myself as a carny yet. You had to spend a
whole season wrapping yourself in your job, and then come back to do
it all over again for another season. Would I? I didn’t know
yet. I saw people sprawled across car hoods, feet sticking out car
windows, and people propped against trailer tires and overflowing
trash cans. There were empty spots where people had already pulled
out. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Soon enough though, I had
been paid for my work, and prepared to head off myself into the
morning, happy that I had money for food.
The electrician found me and asked me if I
would
stay on. I wasn’t expecting that. Seeing as I had no other
means of support, and no clear idea where I was going, I agreed. Much
later, I found out that I might have been recruited because I hadn’t
died. Rumor was the last guy had died. After that way-too-short rest,
we were all on the road again. Sleep wouldn’t come for us until
we arrived at the next location.
Once there, after a good long nap, we
reversed
everything we’d done the night before to get the carnival up and running again. I had to haul
all of
the 100-foot long, thickly insulated copper cables out of the truck,
and get them hooked up to junction boxes. Rides, poppers and joints
had to be plugged in. There was always some troubleshooting until
everyone had power. All the rides had to be tested, run forwards and
backwards while being inspected. Every nut and bolt had to be
tightened, and every ride car checked. I still had lots to do. The
generators needed oil and water. Since they were in open view, placed
in the center of the midway, they also had to be cleaned, and
occasionally painted as well. That was also my job. Sometimes the
cables needed new terminators. Sometimes the junction boxes needed
new protecting rings over the access holes. Yes they did.
Once I finished all of that, after breaks
for
meals, it was time to shut everything down for the night. I had to
wait until the townspeople were long gone, and everyone cleaned up
and shuttered their equipment. Once that was done, I could shut the
generators off. In the morning, I had to be up before everyone else
to get the power back on.
Ten days. Then we’d be off again,
criss-crossing the country, selling dreams while the rides turned
under bright rainbow lights, surrounded by the smells of cotton
candy, corn dogs and popcorn. The marks would gamble, buying cheap
toys for the price of many chances to spin a wheel, shoot out the
stars, pop some balloons, or knock over some bottles.
In Minot, North Dakota, I met a local young
woman;
I never knew her age. We walked around a bit at first, but she was
more interested in me. We kissed a lot, snuggled, and made out. At
the end of each day, she’d go home. Soon, the carnival would
leave town. So, one day, she asked me to stay. She said there were
lots of jobs in the coal mine nearby. She hoped I would come live
with her and her mom while I worked in the mine. Her mom had already
approved. Now, that was an interesting idea. She was very pretty, and
our kissing had aroused me no end. The thought of settling down with
her was appealing. But, in the end, I couldn’t bear the idea of
working in a coal mine on purpose, raising children at that point in
my young life, or ending my travels. On our last day in Minot, she
pleaded with me to stay. I told her that I wanted to stay with the
carnival. I asked her to join us. She said no. She left and never
came back. I thought I might see her later that night as we tore
everything down, but she had been husband hunting, it seemed, and I
disappointed her dream.
As the carnival moved around, usually near
large
cities, I found that there were circus-like tents full of semi-legal
card games and crazy peep shows at night. Some real money changed
hands there. There had to be a balance between cleaning out the marks
for every dollar, and letting them win sometimes, or the cops and
sheriffs could shut the whole carnival down, forcing us to move on
sooner than expected. The vulgarity of the peep shows was
extraordinary, and sometimes they could get raided, but most often
not.
There are dreams and then there are other
dreams.
My dream had been to travel the country. I had done some of that.
Some of the traveling was with the carnival, but because of all of
the work I was doing I had no time to explore. I was often needed for
electrical repairs, so I saw very little, besides the same carnival
rides, the same food, the same crowds. We were a moveable town, and
that’s pretty much all I saw, except the passing highway
scenery while I rode or drove a rig.
When that year’s carnival season ended,
before I left, I was invited to come back the following season. I
wasn’t finished traveling just yet, but the whole experience
had been memorable. I had met some really interesting and very nice
people with the carnival. It was a lifestyle. I had already met
several women. The carnival could provide a trailer for me, with
financing to pay off. Work part of the year. Travel part of the year.
That might work. And it is hard work, work that people do that we
never see. Save my money. Marry a carny. Buy or build a few game
booths. Use the money to buy a small ride, etc. A new dream.
