My buddy Tyrone was at the office trailer window last week at this time talking to a microphone and the owner, who was behind a bullet proof window. It was the last carnival of the year in Waycross, Ga., at Okefenokee Fair.
“Be wise, be truthful, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes, envious time will have already fled, seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next day.”
Horace, Odes Book 1, Chapter 11
This morning’s line held so many stories ready to play out. The line held together for pay but with the last dollar paid it would bust-up and blow away.
Carpe Diem is a phrase used in a poem by Horace advising that we all live for today and drink our wine because tomorrow is not certain.
Tomorrow is not certain for many people in line and some of us were already high.
One young woman was smoking a cigarette in line as she laughed about having all season to plan but she had no idea where she was going after payday and a bonus last Monday in Waycross, Ga., at the Okefenokee Fair.
I came away with about $300. Some people would be getting more than a thousand dollars – the year’s bonus and two weeks work.
Numerous men were going home to families in other states and needed to hitch rides with carnival trucks but hadn’t secured a ride yet.
All would have some money but some will be homeless before the carnival season starts next year (April, May or June for most).
The guy who lives in the Mardi Gras house of mirrors is staying in Waycross. He hooked up with a townie and he agreed to be a handyman on her family trailer for the winter.
There are stories every year about carnies deliberately getting arrested so they are in jail, with three hots and a cot, during the winter months.
At Amusements of America, those without felonies were offered jobs in Peru. For the first time in its history, one of America’s biggest carnivals is shipping a large portion of its rides and games to Lima for four months before the season starts in March.
Nevertheless, there’s three weeks between now and departure time and many of the Peru-bound are not sure where they are going to spend their time.
I hitched a ride with a woman-beater and his victim. He drove a pick-up and she drove my van. We drove eight hours down to Fort Lauderdale and “seized the day” by talking about our pasts. I heard a lot about nightmare abuse and dreams of escape. About buying a truck with her Peru money and getting free.
I got out at Alligator Alley and she drove away on I-95, her man still yelling at her on the phone for dropping me off along the interstate.
I was hitchhiking Alligator Alley later when I got a cellphone call from Tyrone. He was on a Greyhound bus bound for Dallas. He was going to see his first grandson and said he was finally going to a V.A. hospital to get a festering wound of his leg fixed. But this Navy vet has promised that other years and hasn’t had his leg fixed in three years.
He knew his call would be a surprise.
“Coming back next year, Mike?” he laughed.
I could just imagine all 400-some pounds of him laughing and jiggling in the night as he called from that tiny Greyhound bus seat.
I was just sitting on a picnic bench at a Alligator Alley rest stop, thinking about that morning line that scattered to the winds in a chaotic blast.
A year of carnivals gone. Carpe Diem, a dead Roman poet’s advice for the beginning of the day, start of the season, not the end. An empty field now, I thought.
“Me?,” I told Tyrone. “Today was a trip. Tomorrow. I don’t know.”
——————————————————————- My year working in traveling carnivals isn’t finished until February. I’ve worked traveling carnivals in California, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas and Georgia. I’ve hitched between jumps, about 13,000 miles. I’ve also visited a carnival worker feeder town in Mexico. I might work another carnival but most of my time now will be trying to publish a book on my year.
Osvaldo Guzman drives along Alligator Alley as he talks about survival.
“If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially those who did not bring flour.”
Jose Marti
Osvaldo Guzman picked up this hitchhiker Wednesday near Alligator Alley in Florida after I had spent a few days sleep deprived, sick with the flu and all day without food or water.
In a thick Cuban accent, he said he somehow recognized me.
See, three times Osvaldo attempted to get the United States via makeshift boats from Cuba. Each boat was a hodgepodge of discarded tires and wood, overcrowded and without enough to eat or drink.
He knows that look, he said. I believe he meant, “need.”
On one trip he started out with 17 people on a floating deathtrap and set sail for 10 days without food or water. Just 10 people were alive when the US Coast Guard picked them up and escorted them back to Cuba.
Osvaldo got his legal immigration papers about seven years ago. He’s married to an American woman, has a five-year-old boy and lives in a Cuban community, where he says he mostly speaks Spanish to his pals.
At 40 years old, he’s got his own heating and air conditioning business which he supplements with an Amway dealership.
He gave me an Amway energy drink, vitamins and dropped me off at a roadside rest stop on Alligator Alley – just picnic tables, information boards and parking spaces. A gate separated the stop from the Everglades but a large opening with fan boats was at the end of the lot.
He dropped me off after several harrowing stories about crossings and exuberant stories about living the American dream, via family and Amway.
I watched him drive away from me on Alligator Alley, with vitamins and a drink in my hands and thought about …
“God damn immigrants.”
Sleeping bait
An Albanian refugee, Nick said he had to decide if he wanted to stay and save his business or leave Albania and save his family.
After Osvaldo left me at the rest stop, I was rousted by two cops. The first, a state trooper, kindly brought me more than 15 miles down the road to the Miccosukee Indian Reservation along Alligator Alley.
There I was asking truck drivers and others at the gas station for rides when a second cop, a heavily tattooed, short but buff reservation cop came up from behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and threatened to throw me in jail.
Little did he know, a prison post would be an interesting Eyes Like Carnivals read.
He forced me to leave the gas station and walk to I-75, Alligator Alley, to hitchhike at 10 pm at night, in the rain.
Instead, I threw down my sleeping bag and slept in the mangrove beside the road, with an open pond on one side and thick everglades on the other. In an area known for alligators, Black Bears, snakes and even a few panthers, I knew the risks but was beyond weary.
I was sleeping bait.
I dreamt I woke fighting a black animal, a Black Bear or an alligator. But a real animal, an incredibly strong shadow. I grabbed it and I was losing because my legs were caught in the red sleeping bag.
I woke alive. Collected my sleeping bag and pack, went back to the road at 5:30 am and was miserable again.
Thinking, as I so often do, of being homeless, having little prospect of selling this project, of once having young promise.
Now standing wayward.
Five hours of that, then a white van and a wondrous story pulled up in front of me in the form of another refugee from a tough landscape.
Nick came from Albania eight years ago, after political opponents burned his business and threatened to kill him and his entire family.
“People would see you and say you are a hobo, but I knew you no hobo,” he said. “I left home when I was 15, I learned how to read faces. I know 99 percent of the time, I see a face, I know him.”
Songs so often go through my head and when Nick went on and on about me looking like a hobo, I thought of all the writing I’d done on hoboes when I was a journalist and a song sung by Woody Guthrie, “Hobo’s Lullaby.”
“I know the police cause you trouble
They cause trouble everywhere
But when you die and go to Heaven
You’ll find no policemen there.”
An extravert, Nick told me “Albanians are fighters” and it “is good to fight, it makes you feel young. Young people are fighting all the time. You fight you feel young. Don’t cry. Crying is for losers. Sometimes I feel like crying but I think crying is for losers. You must fight.”
He’s fighting for legal residency. He’s now owns a successful home painting business with employees in Naples. But a judge rejected his immigration status THIS WEEK. It means his son is losing a college scholarship. He has to appeal to federal court, a long shot which is going to be King Kong expensive and another year in court.
But he says he’s a happy man, “with money or no money.”
“This is your lucky day my man,” he said.
Nick drove me an hour along Alligator Alley to Marco Island, across the island and to the front door of my parent’s home, where I intend to spend Thanksgiving with my daughter.
My ‘lucky day’ ride brought me from dark thoughts to a new point of view, a new landscape.
Driver is a happy man
I was finishing a two day hitchhike from Waycross, Ga., on the border of Okefenokee Swamp, working for Amusements of America.
I road the first segment with a carny woman who is trying to leave her carny boyfriend, who beats her. She’s so jaded about life she said she doesn’t know if she can be kind to people anymore, “they just sh*t on you.”
She left me off in Fort Lauderdale, far from Alligator Alley. I was on foot and lost.
I spent the Monday night outside in an office park grove. I was rousted by three separate cops on Tuesday. I slept in the Everglades and was picked up by two remarkable immigrants, one from Cuba and the other Albania.
When Nick left me on Wednesday, I had essentially hitched from the doorstep of my Georgia carnival to the doorstep of my parent’s home on a Florida island.
Nick and I had shared our live stories and though he’s younger than me, he had advice for the hitchhiker who talks “smack” to himself while waiting for rides.
“Happiness is not about being taller or shorter, or skinnier or ugly. Happiness is in the spirit. It is from within. From God or somewhere. I don’t know … I am a happy man. You should be happy.”
I’d gotten rides from two happy men from another landscape. I know these rides will carry me. No loosing to the swamp creature. No crying. Fighting.
—————————————————– I’ve completed a season of working in traveling carnivals, living on carnival wages and hitchhiking almost 13,000 miles between spots. I’ve worked carnivals in California, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas and Georgia. I’ve followed Mexican carnies to their hometown in Mexico. My year ends in February and I may work a couple more carnivals. Mostly, I’m now attempting to find an agent or publisher for a book on my year and my new perspectives.
“The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.”
Bertand Russell
I do share a brotherhood of weariness this morning after an all night “sick slough.”
I suffered the flu during this tear-down (slough) at the Okefenokee Fair and now keep falling asleep at the McDonald’s as I try to describe the feelings of a person sleep deprived and ailing.
I can say, yet another carny last night said, “You are a true carny” as I jumped on top of the carousel with more stamina than most. He obviously was complimenting me, while all I thought was, “True carny? Truly, who cares.”
It’s not a moniker of pride when talking to cops or a pretty girl. Landlords and employers aren’t going to light up when they hear me described as a true carny.
Nobody is a carny for the glory.
Add to that the poor housing, poor pay and poor working conditions, at times like these one wonders why anyone is a carny.
Still, I’m not the only one who will walk the empty fairgrounds this morning and see an empty field where a carnival stood for five days and feel some pride. Pride that I built it, worked it, tore it down and now it is blowing away with every truck leaving the lot.
I feel the futile cycle that I’m in, of poverty and set-ups and tear-downs.
I feel anticipation too, because it’s the end of the season and time to go home but to what.
The Japanese poet Basho lived a life with few material comforts in the 1600s, traveling town to town. Around the age of 50 (around my age that is) he wrote about home.
“And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? But enough of that-I’m off to bed.”
“Fog everywhere.”
Second paragraph of Bleak House, Charles Dickens
A carnival is rising and slowly coming to focus as tired men working all night walk around like ghosts with feet of clay.
A carny reaches from one arm to another as the Century Wheel is still a half moon during set-up Monday morning in Waycross, Ga., at the Okefenokee Fair.
The mist curls the rigging, so thick it is more like miasma. Clanks and yells came out of the fog from unknown directions. Pot belly pig squeal. Donkey bray. Rooster call. All from the muddy air on the edge of the great Okefenokee Swamp.
I thought of those men on the Century Wheel, the wheel named after a segment of time but its origins so much older. The dew made the grassy field muddy and workmen feet were slippery on the wheel.
Carny lore is rich with stories of the old timers setting up wheels and then walking the top, singing as it spun.
The first time I heard the story the carny said he was drunk when he did it because, “I balances better when I’m drunk.”
A recent study once again showed the elements of the human body are also found in water and clay. The Bible and the Qur’an both have creation stories about clay and the mist.
When the sun burned off the fog, the fairgrounds lit up as if from behind a curtain, an alive, magical town. Carnies setting up the last of the rides. Practicing magic and circus acts. Stocking games and food wagons.
I’ve worked carnivals in nine states now in a full carnival season and this is the most mystical opening.
Sunday it will blow away, leaving temporary footprints and tire tracks in the muddy, grassy field. Leaving memories in the minds of those who were here and those too will blow away. Not gone, somewhere else, maybe recorded and nestled in a Higgs-Boson.
————————————————————– I’ve now worked in traveling carnivals in California, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas and Georgia. I’ve hitchhiked more than 12,000 miles between jumps. Visited Mexican carnies in their hometown. My year working in traveling carnivals won’t end until February so I’m seeking a new jump.
Yellow electrical lead lines cut a path through the early morning grass and fog to a power generator and carnival rides, as carnies work to put up the rides at the Okefenokee Fair, Waycross, Ga.
“When I die you will find swamp oak written on my heart.”
Henry David Thoreau
Monday morning fog engulfed the Okefenokee Fair grounds on set-up day as lead lines led the way to unfinished rides. I worked all night and all day till 11 pm. I slept in a sleeping bag under the tin roof of the outdoor livestock arena.
I’ve learned a few things about the area already. Waycross, Ga., where I am now writing from in a McDonald’s, is the closest town to the biggest blackwater swamp in America. Its name in Native American means, “land of the trembling earth” because of the 438,000 swamp prominently features peat.
It does my Irish heart good to be so near so much bog, but the ‘swampers’ who live there are mostly of old English stock, retaining Elizabethan syntax and phrases.
I’ve yet to tour it but it is home to many carnivorous plants and alligators. I have a picture in my head of the wading birds, including herons, egrets, ibises, cranes, and bitterns.
I have toured the local library – like an ugly friend, ordinary on the outside, beautiful on the inside – and was struck to find out Henry David Thoreau is considered by some to be the “patron saint” of swamps.
Thoreau wrote a lot about the fog and miasma I’ve witnessed this week, surrounding a carnival so bright and spinning, filled with laughing, happy creatures.
Pop culture references to Okefenokee include the cartoon strip “Pogo” who lives in the swamp. It’s also the residence of “Scooby-Dum” the slow-witted cousin of Scooby Doo.
On set-up day, I set-up kiddie cars with a 17-year-old kid with a full beard. He looked like he spent his allowance on beard oils every week. His family lives on a farm on the swamp’s border and raises everything from chickens to hogs.
His step-daddy chided him about being a ‘hog farmer.’ it was cold so he wasn’t wearing overalls like L’il Abner but that kid was so strong, he lifted ride cars like a Chicago grifter spins quarters across his fingers.
These people are so interesting and I’m listening for the colloquialisms but my mind is also other places, specifically … Peru.
Amusements of America, one of the top two biggest carnival companies in the country, is sending games and rides people to Lima, Peru for the winter to earn money.
If I go with them, I’ll miss Christmas with my daughter. But I’m thinking of going, as a pursuit of another angle to the carnival business.
The games boss talked to me last night about it. I don’t speak Spanish and I don’t see how I’d get Peruvians to play games without using language to bamboozle them into loosing more money than they can afford for prizes nobody needs.
Two carnies came up to my KiddyLand ride on Monday and one young man said, “You got to watch out, it’s dangerous in Limer.”
His carny girlfriend then slapped him over the head, like Moe hit the stooges. Bang!
“It’s Lima, you f***ing idiot,” she said. “It’s like the capital – or something – of Peru. A lemur is a monkey, you big monkey!”
Big A, as it is called in the industry, is having trouble finding American carny help, as one old time carny said, because almost everybody has a felony record.
This is the time of year many carnies are asking themselves similar questions. Last night, I listened to a carny tell me he is going to retire and go back to being a cook, “I think,” he said.
I need to sell my year in traveling carnivals to an agent or publisher, I could use these winter months to track down leads and write that book.
In the meantime, my passport is in my pocket. I’m surrounded by walking felony records and one ‘big monkey.’ And I ain’t afraid of no lemurs.
Still, out of that swampy fog that comes at morning these November days I hear a distant voice, my own, “Where next.”
——————————————— The carnival season ended in recent weeks, this is one of the final carnivals of my year in carnivals. I’ve hitchhiked more than 12,000 miles between jumps in California, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas and Georgia.
Any suggestions on whether I should go to Lima, Peru would be appreciated.
When I woke at 6:30 am in the dirt by the livestock arena, I walked out to the fairgrounds of the Okefenokee Fair.
There was nearly a dozen men already waiting. One large black man with a purple Afro-comb in his hair was in the middle of a conversation.
“There are millionaires on the chain gangs,” he said. “I know, I’ve been on them. One guy died and we found his debit card and he had $50,000 on the card … Don’t let anyone hold your money on the chain gang.”
Stories flooded forth from others about how people on the chain gangs had money stolen from them.
I didn’t know how many rich people work on chain gangs, I mused, but kept my wiseacre mouth shut.
People have been telling stories of accidents here in other years. I’ve been talking to Jerry, who has promised to show me how to hop a freight train down to Florida after this week’s show.
Guys are playing cards on the main stage, others are walking fast toward trucks as they pull onto the lot of the Okefenokee Fair grounds.
It’s 2 pm Monday and the fair starts tomorrow at 5 pm. Amusements of America, known in the industry as “The big A,” tore down last night in Charlotte and is rolling south to the border of Florida, to Waycross, Ga.
I’m standing around with 20-some unemployed locals. One says there could be closer to a hundred men around here by end of day looking for work, but I doubt it.
With all this help around, it means I might have made a mad dash via bus and hitchhiking to make it here last night in time to be passed over in favor of locals.
I slept at the fair grounds, under the tin roof at the livestock show area. It smelled like livestock shit but there are no walls there so fresh Okefenokee swamp air blew through.
I rode a Greyhound bus from Mexico, via Juarez, to Jacksonville, Florida. Then I hitched the last 80-some miles in the back of a Ford pick-up truck (video to come).
I’ve been on buses for more than 5,000 miles since the end of my last job at the State Fair of Texas.
After this post, I’ll stock up with food at the local Walmart for tonight. I suspect we’ll be working until early morning and then all day, to be ready for opening.
I don’t want to miss the mad dash for hiring later today so I’m cutting this post short, here at the Wifi-equipped Chic-fil-A.
I want to see the mad dash for work. I want to see the season end in the Okefenokee swamp.
Will I work? These Georgia boys looked angry this morning at seeing an outsider and they look ready to fight for a hole (carny job). I’m going to fight too.
Every carnival is different, right now I feel anxious about food, work and the unknown in this swamp town.
“I’m a greedy, selfish bastard. I want the fact that I existed to mean something.”
Harry Chapin
I am on a Greyhound bus with internet posting this from Interstate 10 on the border of Texas and Louisiana.
After visiting Mexican carnies in Tlapacoyan, Veracruz, I took the long way back via Mexico City and Chihuahua. I’m now on my way to a carnival in Okefenokee Swamp at Georgia/Florida border. I may have to hitch the last miles.
I’ll be showing up to this next carnival cold, asking for work. Don’t know what will happen.
Buses are common ways for carnies to get spot to spot but an internet search reminded me of this beheading of a carny on a Greyhound.
He too was on his way to another carnival. It occurred in 2008 but on a route I hitched earlier this year.
I’ve been on buses for days now and it reminded me of the chiding I get from my sisters about listening to Harry Chapin when I was supposed to be studying in high school.
His “Greyhound” is a classic for fans and rings true as I bump along listening to the ramblings of other passengers, trying to sleep, thinking about my life and its meaning.
Salvador Garcia Alvarez and his brother Rodolfo, right, are surprised to see me in Tlapacoyan, Veracruz, Mexico, the center of Mexican migration to U.S. carnivals. Rodolfo at the end makes reference to me quitting and them missing me working on the swing ride called the Lolly.
“The witch grabs me, she takes me to her home, she sits me on her lap, she gives me kisses (she says) ‘I only wish to eat you.’”
Classic Son Jarocho song, La Bruja, “The Witch”
Clouds tipped the foothills shrouding the small town cutout from the thick semitropical forest.
Drizzle just began as I got off the regional bus in Tlapacoyan and walked up to the official at the gate, handed him pictures of locals and said, “Hable English?”
Such was the extent of my Spanish. Without Spanish. Without an address. Without the last names of the people I was seeking. I began showing the same pictures to the local barber, pedestrians and, finally, a person walking out of a the nearest church.
“Butler?” he said as he continued walking, and I followed.
The people in the pictures were all wearing Butler Amusements shirts and standing in California carnivals.
Along a short street of faded and chipped cement buildings, he led me to the only new, bright tropical pink building.
I didn’t know it, but as I suspected, I stumbled upon the headquarters of Victor Apolinar, the man behind the remarkable transformation of Tlacaloyan into the center for Mexican migrants to U.S. traveling carnivals.
A cell phone call later, I was seeing my former carnival boss Salvador Garcia Alvarez, his brother Rodolfo, and their extended family at their childhood home.
Salvador was so surprised, he dramatically faked he was fainting, and then fell to the floor.
They acted as if I had found them in a lost city in the Amazon.
I was there to reunite with “Jarocho” carnies and dip my toes into the mysteries of Tlapacoyan.
Carnytown Mexicano
I quit Butler Amusements in April, after two months of working rides in open lots, malls and churches in the San Francisco Bay area. More than two thirds of our traveling carnival unit came from the foothills of this mountainous region of the Sierra Madre Oriente.
People often wonder who carnies are, in what kind of subculture they exist. Mexican migrants are a subculture within that subculture.
Yet in many parts of the South and West in the United States, they are the majority of workers and the no-so-new face of American carnivals.
Last weekend, I was at the source of Mexican carnival ride workers for U.S. carnivals and they recognized me.
It was a 33-hour bus ride from my last job at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas to Veracruz. It took another six hours via bus along the Costa Esmerelda and back into the hills to Tlapacoyan.
I found a town newly alive after being nearly dead during carnival season, from February to October.
A fraternity of carnies was back, kissing their families, spending their dollars and at the same time wary of being watched by those who stay behind, “the bad men.”
Salvador invited me in to meet his parents, children and his father’s mad parrot – Toby, who bites.
We went on an all-carny tour of the town, as Salvador brought me to see more family, friends and neighbors who worked in carnivals. Some I knew and some I was meeting for the first time, asking where they worked, which ride they ran.
I walked the wet, busy Saturday market (called tianguis) with its carts of fruit, hanging meat, cantinas and games. Got schooled in local Tocanoc culture. I wanted to go out at night for local Son Jarocho music but was told, in the streets of Tlapacoyan, nights are not for gringos.
The weekend ended with a born-again Christian revival. Alongside carnies in the congregation, I listened to their preacher portray their town as a biblical drama come to life.
People spoke in tongues and fainted as the preacher jumped and yelled into the microphone about Exodus, Moses, the “Promised Land” and violence in town, “that is like a plague.”
Past alive in people’s faces
The town I found nestles near the end of the trans-Mexican volcanic belt, steeped in a history of being a corridor between the plains and the gulf coast.
Rivers, gorges and waterfalls nearby draw tourists every year but fewer due to security concerns.
The most significant cultural draw is El Cuajilote, a nearby Totonac archaeological site where ancient Totonac people played their violent ball games and made human sacrifices to the gods.
In a town with roots so ancient, one looks for connections to an earlier time.
Tlapacoyan is still a geographic corridor for fruits, coffee, vanilla and other agricultural trade between the plains and the coast. Now it also is a corridor for people headed to traveling carnivals.
I found it interesting that the Totonacs believed that the soul comes from the mother, much of their art is of a mother goddess. The two main churches in Tlapacoyan are dedicated to the ascension of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and feature her prominently behind the altar. As far I could tell, that is their main public aesthetic.
Totonac ceramic masks differ from Aztec and Mayan art in that many of their faces feature broad smiles. The centuries of mixed cultures means nobody knows who is Totonac or Aztec. In Tlapacoyan, they call themselves Jarochos, a moniker for people from the state of Veracruz.
Yet I saw many smiles around town I thought doppelgangers for the smiling ceramic Totonac masks.
The only connection I saw to carnivals was the ancient ceremony of the Danza de los Voladores, “dance of the fliers.”
On special occasions and for tourists in nearby towns, four traditionally dressed ‘voladores’ swing around a tall pole while a fifth dances at the top with a drum attached to a whistle.
Without the dancer at the top, it resembles a carnival swing ride. A pal of mine at Butler, Marco, also from Tlapacoyan, ran the YoYo in California, Oregon and Washington this year.
Now that I think of it, Marco too can smile like a Toconac mask, with a mix of mirth and menace.
Family thoughts at a family meal
Salvador and I caught up with each other in his kitchen, in the two-room former attic in his parents’ home.
Salvador’s wife, Guadalupe, wore a bright red KP Concessions apron with pictures of cotton candy and a corn dog on the front as she made chicken picante with avocados, cactus and tortas.
She travels north with Salvador, working in concessions and living in an even smaller space in the mobile bunkhouses.
I sat at the dinner table and joked that I wanted cotton candy, funnel cakes and corn dogs for dinner.
Hands still in the sink, she laughed.
“Then I quit,” she said.
It was over dinner Salvador said how sorry he is for American families he sees up north.
“We do not have a big house. We don’t have new clothes or a new car. We have happy families,” he said.
“I live in the same house I was born in. I am 47. My children, live with us (when not at college) … People tell me American children leave at 18.”
Salvador is a happy family man, no mistake. His home is filled with laughter, college dreams and a mad parrot. He says his happiness is his wealth. Here is where Cortez would have found his Totonac gold.
His son, Ricardo, 20, is studying to be a civil engineer and daughter Rosario, 19, is studying to be a radiologist. All Salvador and Guadalupe’s carnival money goes to their education.
I ask Ricardo if he would consider going north to earn extra money in traveling carnivals.
More laughter.
“I hear,” he said, “the work is too hard.”
Future weaves with past
The future hangs over the town like the dramatic low clouds I saw getting off the bus.
Butler bosses told Salvador that “Republicans” will be trying to restrict H-2b work visa laws so they may work fewer months next year.
The town needs the money, he says, it is already a poor and tough place.
Ricardo says the town is so dangerous, he only comes home periodically and rarely goes out at night.
Salvador, a positive guy in general, adds that he doesn’t go out at night but why would he, after being away all year he’s happy to be home.
Yet it is worse than he says.
Rodolfo later tells me returning carnies wear a “blanco,” on their backs, a target. Local crime bosses know they have dollars. When they are gone for the season, carnies pay protection money to the criminals to leave their families alone.
“It is awful,” Rodolfo said. “This was a safe town when we grew up.”
Behind the mask
After a couple hours at the born-again Christian revival on Saturday night, Rodolfo walked me back to my $15-a-night Hotel Valencia.
I’d been invited into homes, businesses and churches. I saw where these carnies were born, went to school and got married.
I knew them by their carnivals rides up north but the reality of these people took shape walking their streets.
These were profound experiences and at the door of my hotel I thanked Rodolfo with my hand over my heart.
The weekend rain let up once again but left Calle Ferrer looking like an en pleine air painting, simmering in the wet night and under dim street lamps.
Perhaps still overwhelmed by the revivalist fever, Rodolfo looked at me and said I should come back next year when carnies return home again.
“Because people love you here.”
That adds another layer to things, I thought, closing the door.
On Sunday, looking out the window as bus rolled out of Tlapacyan, I wondered what I just saw.
I never met Apolinar, who recently was elected mayor. I never saw the violence. A weekend isn’t long enough.
All that came to me were impressions, of a Mesoamerican people living between worlds. More urgent for them is feeding their families and safety.
I thought of American traveling carnivals so dependent on these tough men, who come back to the states year after year with the knowledge of how to safely set up a Giant Wheel or a rollercoaster and seemingly in a snap.
Tough men, I’d say, but having seen their hometown I’ll forever think of them as if dancing on a high loose pole with a whistle and a tiny carnival drum.
Maybe because it was the superstitious week leading up to Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Maybe the undeniable power of Rodolfo’s revival got to me too.
I wondered, will these men eat the witch or will the witch eat them.
Then I relaxed and watched the surf as the bus hobbled along the bumpy coastal road of Costa Esmeralda, because there are no witches, only traveling carnivals.
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This is the tenth month of my year in traveling carnivals and the end of the traditional carnival season. I’ve hitchhiked more than 12,000 miles and worked in traveling carnivals in California, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. I’ve written about carny life from Alaska to Mesoamerica. I’m writing from Veracruz and may make one more carnival before writing a book on this remarkable year.
I tracked down my former Butler Amusements carny boss to his small, tropical mountain hometown of Tlapacoyan, now the center of US carnival migration from Mexico. The agent who arranges for these legions of Mexican temporary workers on their trek norte was recently elected mayor of Tlapacoyan, in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
Interviewed Saturday, Salvador along with family and neighbors now face an off-season of being targets for local organized crime bosses who know they have a year’s worth of US dollars saved.
Salvador laughs that his town would be dead if not for American carnivals. Butler warned him and others that US immigration laws may change next year, which he says worries the whole town.
We spent a day touring the town and surprising my former co-workers at their homes. They couldn’t believe their eyes.
I also attended a born-again, fundamentalist church revival with carnies and the readings were from – no kidding – Exodus.
