In Video Era, Some Circuses Refuse to Fold Their Tents

The pasture on the outskirts of town is green and lovely and far too soft for men who show up with elephants.

Their bright and merry trucks sit mired in the sponge-like turf or parked on the side of the road. It’s 10 a.m. And the Carson & Barnes Circus is running behind.

They’ve got stakes to drive, lions to feed, a trapeze to unpack, a donkey to comb. One of the nation’s last traveling tent shows, the circus has 175 years of American tradition to preserve. And a one-day stop to do it.

The wind howls. The biggest big top on earth bucks like a wild animal. The ground is too soft, but by the will of 196 circus men, women and children, the show always goes on.

“This is nothing,” says a man who leads an elephant to the tent to help drag the poles in place. “You should have seen the mud in Texas.”

From March to November, the circus packs and unpacks in a new town almost every day.

On this spring morning, 11-year-old Josue Roberto Adrinzen basks in the sun on the steps of his family’s trailer, now parked in the heart of cow country. He can’t imagine anywhere else he would rather be.

The boy, called “Tito,” sees a clear advantage over the stationary schoolkids back in Hugo, where the five-ring show winters: “I have really big muscles.”

Tito’s lean arms bulge like peas in a pod when he shimmies to the roof of the big top on a pole balanced on his stepfather’s forehead. He does handstands up there and likes the “tickles” he gets in his stomach.

“Sometimes my mom says when I grow up I might change my mind and be a normal guy,” says Tito, whose mother swings from a pole by her neck. “But I don’t know.”

It takes two dozen roustabouts and four elephants, but the big top is up by noon. Its stripes stretch the length of a football field. Finally the circus can nap.

Elephants doze in great gray heaps behind a fenced enclosure. A caged tiger lolls on its back, one sleepy eye half open. Workers flee to the rolling RV park called home.

But all breaks here are short.

By midafternoon, Gabriela Cavallini is inflating toys in a souvenir stand. Like everyone else, she has more than one job. The other is doing quadruple flips through the air to land on the shoulders of other Cavallinis.

With a shake of her long auburn mane, the petite 21-year-old explains why she has no envy of the quiet homes they pass on the road. Her Peruvian family traces its circus roots through six generations.

“We marry in the circus. We have babies in the circus,” she says in broken English. “All my life is the circus.”

At 4 p.m., she’s applying glittering eye shadow in the family trailer. There’s a dog food bowl on the kitchen floor and family wedding photos on display. The static comforts stand out in the circus camp’s world of wheels.

But the tickets selling for $6 and $12 at the gate buy into another world.

Muscled roustabouts emerge for the 4:30 p.m. show wearing oversized clown pants and toting enormous clown heads. Women in fishnet stockings and sequins wear their hair in tight ponytails.

A nun, one of three who minister and work with the show, distributes feathered head wear. She herself wears a T-shirt and a cross around her neck.

“Ladies and gentlemen . . . ,” ringmaster John Moss III thunders to the half-filled bleachers. Then they are through the curtain. Climbing ropes. Dangling by heels and hands.

Moss’ father, a circus press agent, ignited his hunger for the ring. Now he is married to it, with a wife who twirls on a rope and a toddler who already lines up the family’s shoes like a pachyderm parade.

They’ll probably start the boy on a pony next year, Moss says. The 34-year-old wouldn’t mind at all if the boy followed them in this disappearing way of life.

“There’s something magical about the idea that at 6 a.m. there was nothing here,” he says.

At 7:30 p.m., a second show. A packed house. Elephants spin their thousands of pounds like tops. The Cavallinis fly through the air.

Jay Phillips’ four young grandsons emerge from the tent with shining eyes.

In a world of video games and television, Phillips says the circus is a rarity drawn from his own childhood. “It’s really good entertainment in a small town,” he says, as they push into the darkness.

The sweet, grassy odor of elephant dung fills the air. Children pat the old donkey, Pepe, who keeps his burly gray head pointed to the ground. Ace Lonergan watches as children with excited faces are helped onto the back of elephants he trains and tends.

The 42-year-old didn’t know a lick about elephants when the circus found him hitchhiking on a lonely Wyoming road seven years ago and gave him a job.

“To work with such an intelligent animal, there’s nothing like it,” Lonergan says.

Sometimes animal activists show up and turn people away. What they don’t understand, the circus workers protest, is that children in small-town America need this; they might not see an elephant otherwise.

Animal acts have been cut from traveling shows throughout the country under pressure from animal activists, says Fred Dahlinger, the director of collections and research at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wis.

But there are other threats. In 1900 the nation had more than 100 traveling tent circuses. There are no more than two dozen now, the largest of which are the Deland, Fla.,-based Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus and Carson & Barnes, which was born in 1937. Competition from television was the biggest blow, Dahlinger says.

With ever-expanding entertainment options, will families who can click on computers and unlock their own worlds still appreciate a show in a pasture?

Kristin Byrd Parra’s grandfather D.R. Miller founded this show and died with it on the road last year. The 24-year-old believes the people will come because of the fun.

“As long as there’s a place for the circus, we’ll be out there with it,” she says.

Tomorrow it’s 22 miles on to Shawnee. Then Arkansas, Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

The crews hustle away the crowd, dismantle the tent and head to bed. Morning comes at 5:30 a.m.

In the predawn darkness, Pepe’s head is raised, rigid and alert, knowing what comes next. The donkey was born into this circus 35 years ago. They tried to retire him a few years back. But as the trucks were pulling out of Hugo, something strange happened. The sedate old donkey began to bray and bawl. He raised such a ruckus, the trucks had to stop.

Once the circus gets in your blood you can’t get it out.

By sunrise, the trucks, trapeze and nun are on the road.

In the lovely green pasture all that remains are their muddy tracks.

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On the Net: https://www.circusweb.com