See the Giant Snake! (A Circus Memory)
The circus used to come to around once a year back then, setting up in a big field behind the JeffersonElementary School on the south side of our little town. This was a major event in Oconto, Wisconsin, as you might imagine, and the very pinnacle of all that summer had to offer. The excitement would build when the trucks started coming in earlier in the week, each of them hauling trailers carrying rides and animals. When you drove past the field you'd see them setting up, doing this work with the efficiency that comes from repetition and necessity, and by Thursday evening the whole thing would be up and waiting, tents and booths and carts of popcorn and cotton candy, all of it surrounded by an old wooden fence of the sort that looks like it's fraying into fibers as you watch it. The booths and tents would be decorated with all sorts of swirling, garish designs, and there would be banners strung up with pictures of clowns, tigers, elephants, jugglers tossing flaming wands into the air, and women in skimpy outfits shiny with sequins. Everywhere you looked, craning your neck to see it all as you went past on the road, were vibrant colors of red and yellow and green. You couldn't wait.
Are we going? you'd ask your parents. Are we going tonight? Are we going tonight?
"Yes, we're going, I told you a hundred times we're going."
At night, once it was finally open for business, the little circus took on an entirely different feel. During the day, waiting patient and still, it looked almost sad, as if it were being denied what it had been put on Earth to do. But at night it came alive, fiery and excited with lights and noise and the constant bustle of the crowd. Children were running here and there, parents trailing after them with plastic cups of cheap beer. The smell of popcorn was strong, and there was strange music swirling in the air… the recording of a calliope pulsing and breathing like the breath of a giant beast. The contrast of the night you came from and the blazing lights you were entering made you dizzy and you felt like you were in a dream. You waited in line for tickets and scanned the crowd for friends, and then it was off through the midway to gawk at this bizarre and wonderful sight, this flamboyant oasis that had appeared in the middle of your town to kick a little excitement and mystery into the long monotony of summer.
Well, this is all clouded by the haze of sentimentality, of course. I actually remember very little about the circus that came to Oconto once a year, but it was likely small, a few tents and horses, perhaps an elephant. There were rides and ring-toss booths and a funhouse and all around the constant droning buzz of music and voices. What I do remember is getting sick on cotton-candy and feeling very overwhelmed at the noise and energy around me.
And I remember the snake.
These little traveling circuses always had weird little "sideshows," trailers with tantalizing and disturbing drawings on their sides: bearded women, wolf-boys, the Fish Lady, and other such oddities, along with things like FABULOUS EGYPTIAN JEWELS! Or SEE THE HAND OF KING TUT! These trailers would be set off around the perimeter of the circus, and you'd stare at them as you walked around eating your cotton candy and sucking down rootbeer. Most of these did not look tempting… looked rather frightening, in fact, as if you might walk up the three steps into one of the trailers and never come out. I was an easily overwhelmed child, and had never been tempted to go into one of these. I hadn't even gone into the funhouse, which also looked like it might swallow you alive. (It didn't help that this abnormally long trailer usually had a big sign that said something like You Can Go IN But Will You Make It THROUGH the FUNHOUSE?).
The only time I ever entered into the world of sideshows was a trailer whose side promised a glimpse at a GIANT SNAKE EATING ITS PREY! I pestered and pestered my sister, who had been put in charge of me, into taking me in to see this. The drawing on the side of the trailer showed a monstrous serpent with a viciously gaping mouth filled with wicked teeth, and that was too much to pass up.
"It takes too many tickets," she said, which was true, the sideshows always required more tickets than anything else, but I kept bugging her. "Fine," she said after a while, "when you're done with your cotton candy we'll go in."
She probably figured I would take so long eating the stuff that I would forget about the snake, but fat chance! I scarfed that pink shit down and dragged her back to the trailer.
We waited in line and then it was our turn. She ripped off what seemed like twenty dark-red tickets and handed them to the barker (who never said a word, as far as I can remember), and then we went up the little steps into the darkness beyond the door.
There might have been a series of tanks and cages with various reptiles in them (things like geckos and corn snakes and perhaps a green iguana or two) but I can't recall any of that. It would have made sense, though, and the whole trailer might have been called the Reptile House or something, but it was the giant snake I wanted to see.
You moved down a narrow hall toward a long tank that took up the last quarter of the trailer. It was dark in there, and cluttered, and even as a child I had to shuffle my feet along to keep from stepping on anyone, but at last we came up to this tank which everyone ahead of us had been staring down at with weird looks on their faces… looks somewhere between disgust and confusion.
"Oh jeez," my sister said. She is eight years older than me, by the way, and would have been around fifteen or sixteen then. I didn't read her "oh jeez" as anything but disgust but thinking back I know it was probably mostly a recognition of the absurdity of what we were seeing.
There was indeed a very large snake in this tank, and it was indeed in the process of eating what looked like a white rat, but… well, I can't say it was animatronic, but nor can I say it was real. The animal's big head was at our side of the tank and lifted about a foot off the ground. Its mouth was open and giving us a good view of the back end of that rat, the tail of which was hanging out limply. We were being shuffled along rather quickly, though, and so were given only a few moments to view this sight. I remember having the impression that the animal was fake… perhaps my sister said something to that effect, but I can't be certain. Certainly there was something a bit too repetitive to the animal's movements, such as they were: only the jaws were moving, a slow up and down movement that isn't anything like the way my snakes look when they're working a mouse down their gullets, although my corn snake does indeed lift her head up from her aspen bed, perhaps to allow gravity to assist her. If that big creature had been a real snake how could it possibly have been eating every time someone paid to see it? The thing would have been sick, obese, or dead.
Much more likely it was some sort of robotic serpent, like the bears that played instruments at Showbiz Pizza: electronic puppets with limited movement up and down or back and forth but nothing even remotely close to resembling the real, fluid animation of living animals. Hard to tell, though: the trailer it was in was cramped and dimly lit, and if there was a small little motor sound as the jaws moved it was masked by the murmur and drone we were making as well as the bustle and screams of the crowd outside.
Like I said, we didn't have much time to study it too closely, we were marched out of the trailer by an attendant at the exit door, where we stepped back into the loud, hypnotic madness of the circus night.
Was it a fake? I can't be certain, but either way they got our money… and made a memory.
–TmC
