The bizzarity of my brain is something you’ve all most likely grown very accustomed to by now, at least I hope you have. You come here for a lot of different reasons, I know this because you’ve told me so, and there’s some part of me that hopes that one, maybe just one of those reasons is for this bizzarity and for the random paths it can take you down. Every Sunday, I imagine most of you have absolutely no clue what the Signal Fire: The Sunday Edition is going to be about. Is it a rant about something in pop culture? Is it a lyrical meditation on the natural world? Is it something that could almost feel like advice from somewhere bigger than me, and I’m only translating? Maybe. Probably. Could it also be a weird ramble about a single strange thought that permeated all other white matter in my skull and just demanded a spotlight for a few minutes, and could that single strange thought be about how when we were kids the circus, and a wandering life spent working for said circus carried some unbelievable allure and weight and almost felt like something we secretly wanted when our elders would joke about how we may as well just “run off and join the circus?” Yeah, it could. It really could, and the photos above and below should show you that, dammit, IT IS TODAY.
I think it was on the drive home from when these photos were taken, sometime at the end of last July when Helena, Montana hosts its annual Stampede & Fair (not a circus, but you get the point, carnies and circus folk are pretty close to the same thing, I mean I think maybe circus folk are like the more fully invested of the two, but who cares) and it’s swelteringly hot and everyone shows up to the massive dirt and asphalt parking lots of our Fairagrounds and wanders around and smells funnel cakes and watches kids almost barf on extremely unsafe and probably unregulated spinning rides and herkajerk ferris wheels.
Roaming around with
, , and a pile of teenagers including Henry, Addie, and my niece and nephew, Winnie, and Griffin, I toted my 35mm lens and just got completely lost in the entire feel of the place. It hit me the whole time I was walking, snapping photos, observing more the people that worked the rides, the booths, the games, than the people paying to get swindled by them, but it wasn’t until I got in the car and pulled away from that small ribbon of neon light (see the final photo at the end of this essay) that it sank in to its deepest rooted place inside:There is a ferociously strong romance to a life in the circus (or carnival) and I am so confused as to why.
This is a thought that’s circled my brain drain many times, but the images I captured that night really sped things along. Since I was a boy back in the 1980s, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, the circus, a life spent hopping railcars and setting up big tops and smelling shitty popcorn and hearing the din of alarm bells and prize horns, had some commanding magnetic pull over this heart of mine.
I’ve always known my brain was a different sort of brain than those around me, and perhaps part of why I’m writing this piece today is to see if this is another in a long and ever-expanding list of ways this is true, or, OR, if this is this magnetic pull the circus has is a universal one, and you’ve all felt the same way. Maybe you still do. The origins of this, for me at the least, could have been any number of things in pop culture, it could have been the time my Mom played the 1961 classic Toby Tyler, in which the luckiest little shit of a kid of all time gets to spend 10 weeks traveling with a circus, and even gets a new best friend out of the deal, a cheeky chimpanzee named Mr. Stubbs. If you haven’t seen it, do, because it’s brilliant and will re-ignite whatever circus life lust you ever carried in your heart of hearts.
*Hang on, I’m calling my Mom on the phone right now to confirm something. I don’t know why I’m telling you to hang on, as this is all happening a long time from when you’ll be reading it, but it makes it better because now you feel like you’re INSTANTLY in on the drama!*
Having just spoken to my Marmalade, I can now confirm that she believes that a major, if not the primary reason, she chose Tyler for my name when I was plopped out into the universe, was that Toby Tyler was, is, and always will be her favorite film. Her love for it was so deep that she even bought me a stuffed animal in the form of a monkey that she told me was also named Mr. Stubbs, and I carried that little rascal around my entire toddlerhood. Imagine my delight when I watched the movie and found that his monkey was also named Mr. Stubbs. Mind blown. Anyway, perhaps it was here, this was the genesis of it all. Maybe most kids watched the film and when the credits rolled and Toby Tyler found his way back to his Uncle and his “true home,” actually believed the actual moral of the movie: There’s no place like home. Maybe. When I watched it, I couldn’t believe he’d go back to that boring life, to that normal existence, to those rules, to that place. Why didn’t he stay in the circus with his friends, with Mr. Stubbs, why didn’t he just stay?
I should say here, I don’t even know if circuses still use railroads to get around, I’d imagine not, I’d imagine they have tour busses and semi-trucks, and they hang out at sad 7-11s on their way across a country that is so divided it’s hard to imagine that there will even be an audience agreeing to clap together when they arrive to wherever they are going. Nevertheless, I digress.
All of this has me confused partially as to why I’ve been so long drawn to this strange peripatetic lifestyle, when in truth, I grew up moving more than almost any other kid I knew. I didn’t want to move on from that life, but still, the pull was there, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to be all from said pop culture, all from the representations of circus life that had been displayed in films and television shows of my youth. I remember watching Big Top Pee-Wee, Dumbo’s Circus with the puppets in the 80s, Big Fish, books like Water for Elephants, The Night Circus, and probably dozens of others, and feeling the same pull. There’s something there, dammit, and I want to know what it is beyond just the freedom from the stifling prison that is an ordinary life.
Perhaps it’s this, a life less ordinary, or to quote one of my favorite films of which I have the line tattooed, The Brother’s Bloom: An unwritten life.
An unwritten life. I have been pulled to this since I was a boy, since I last had a job that had a real boss when I was 15 years old, and I think I’ve been trying to carve it out the entire time. I’ve always known my brain was “broken” in conventional ways, and so perhaps the circus, a life spent living with others that felt like misfits and riff raff, cast-asides, runaways, was a temptation I couldn’t possibly resist. To be surrounded with so many others that didn’t see life the way everyone else did, that didn’t want to spend their days chasing the same ends, that wanted something else, even if that something was only make-believe and only really true in the films I saw them depicted in, it didn’t matter. I wanted this, and always wanted to run away to find it.
Maybe I have. Maybe I found it, after all. Maybe this place, surrounded by all of you that feel the same way, is the circus I’ve been dreaming of finding. Maybe we’re the misfits, the riff raff that finds home in one another. Maybe we’re the reason to stay, instead of being like my namesake, Toby Tyler, and returning to a home we never felt we fit into. We’re the circus, we’re the sideshows, we’re the chimpanzees wearing dungarees, we’re the big top and the neon lights that shine from miles away.
Point is, I don’t know if kids will ever have this feeling again, maybe my generation is the last to find a strange romance in a life in the circus, or carnival, to think it strangely beautiful to pull up the stakes each week, hop on the train, and wash up somewhere new. Maybe it’s no longer portrayed this way, or maybe it is, and we’re all just so distracted anymore, we don’t need to run away from anything at all? I don’t know these answers, this isn’t an essay to answer questions, but to ask them. Perhaps you know, perhaps you’ll share, and perhaps I’m entirely unique in this entire thread.
Let me know if you’ve felt it, too? Let me know if you’ve ever walked around the dusty parking lot of your hometown, stared up at the glowing lights on some hot summer sky, and wondered, just for a moment or two, what it’d be like to throw it all away, and when they pull up the stakes, disappear into the great big everything with them.
Let me know, and let me know if you agree that after all this time, maybe, just maybe, we found the circus right here.
Oh to run away,
live a railroad circus life.
Become the mystery.
Do People Still Run Away To The Circus? | 7.28.24