h
HE MAY BE
AMERICA’S NO. 1 HITCHHIKER IN
eyeslikecarnivals.com, using the Wi-Fi at a McDonald’s in Oakland, Calif. The site added immediacy to my stories. If I was in a fix and didn’t know my next step, readers felt the suspense and waited for the next installment on my action adventure reel. Daily posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media kept my saga on people’s minds. My two most popular blogs were about hitchhiking. In one, a man living in a yellow school bus in the woods beside Pink Mountain in Canada sat for a video. In the other, I wrote about a mad-dash hitchhike from New York to Chicago for my daughter’s eighth birthday. My longest ride on one trip was with a war refugee from the Balkans. He talked about harrowing escapes that led him to America and living the American Dream. Who picks up hitchhikers? The most compelling people in the world.
My direction changed when a colorful carnival owner and former pro wrestler with the stage name Bo Paradise told me the new face of American carnivals is Mexican. About 5,000 Mexicans get H-2B visas to work each year in carnivals, motivated not by the American Dream but by survival. I learned that just as other Mexican towns send men to the grape fields of Napa Valley, Calif., Tlapacoyan empties each year, its men en route to U.S. carnivals. I vowed to go to Tlapacoyan, in Veracruz. There I attended a born-again Christian revival where carnys spoke in tongues and families told of paying protection money to “the bad men” when their own men go to work up north.
and her calf lope through camp. They stopped to look at me before SEAN COMERFORD, disappearing into a bank of spruce ARTS ’81, THUMBED and white birch trees. Depending 20,000 MILES MY SCOPE GRADUALLY on where you stand in the world, THROUGH 36 STATES expanded to see America as the moose and the cow can be conIN A YEAR AS A it looks from a Ferris wheel sidered sacred. I favor the moose, CARNIVAL ROADIE. platform and while hitchhiking and Alaska in August is carnival along U.S. interstate highways. heaven and where I became most I immersed myself in the life familiar with the spiritual side of and left my former self behind. this bruising life. Carnival work is a lifestyle. The owners of Golden Wheel Workers leave home and make Amusements in Chugiak hired their another home on the road to minister to run games. Bill Root do hard, accident-prone work preached on Sundays and held Bible for little pay. You live with your study classes along the Midway. neighbors and your work. I found a traveling apostolate of My muscles bent under the Catholic priests work with carnivals. weight of all-night “sloughs,” Father Michael Juran was a carnival the carnival slang for tear stuntman for 27 years, a stunt downs. I lifted beams above my head, scaled double for Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the poles and hauled electrical lines. I banged, Bandit II, and a stunt car driver in the James jammed and taped rides together. Rain and Bond film Man with the Golden Gun. Father wind, low pay, no pay, and heartJohn Vakulskas from Sibley, Iowa, spoke of ache morphed me into a carny. his friendship with former carnival worker It is the physically toughest job Gordon Henke. I ever worked. I slept in bunk Henke, the son of a carnival worker nickhouses that reminded me of the named Red, ran a milk bottle game. His “worst toilet in Scotland” from customers paid to knock down bottles with the movie Trainspotting. balls. He told a newspaper he learned to make Most carnival people are money in carnivals. Henke went on to make the working poor. When I ran his fortune in direct marketing of industrial rides, I lived on $225 to $325 equipment. The Henke Lounge in the Alumni a week. Jointees, the people Memorial Union, Marquette University High who run games, can make less or School’s Gordon Henke Center and scholarships more based on traffic. I couldn’t at both institutions bear his name. Red’s kid say criminally bad conditions are did alright. common. I can say I lived with them. A carny dad I knew in San Francisco said The month I started, American his son is going to Marquette this fall. Carnivals University put out a major report may be a bit retro in the digital era, but their called “Taken for a Ride” that connections live on. alleged systematic problems exist For the past year, I slung iron and pushed in the industry with housing, work hours, wage plush (carny for prizes). I worked Midways theft and unsafe work conditions. I eventually from Alaska to Florida, from California to New saw it all, including theft of my week’s pay by York. I thumbed my way, living life close to the a New Jersey carnival owner. bone. In all my writing and thinking about those hard miles, I saw the evil and the good, THE BEAUTY OF WORKING with so many but I reveled in an epiphany. I expected to see carnival companies in a single year was carnys on the make. I suspected hitchhiking seeing both the good and the bad. With my was dead — and maybe fatal. What I saw while Chicago carnival, I slept in a dirt field with 40 peering out a wide truck windshield was Black Angus cows and a bull. When it rained, America in its blazing panoramic beauty. What the living quarters along Route 30 became I heard were stories of Americans seeking “The Dirty 30,” with mud and cow dung meaning and struggling with changes in their clinging to our shins. lives. Through those vistas and those stories, Early one morning, I emerged from the in these crazy times, ran a river of people who clean bunkhouse to watch great white clouds are good at heart. ❍ tip Alaska’s Chugiak Mountains. I saw a moose 2013–14. MICHAEL
36
I SET UP MY OWN WEBSITE,
`
Marquette Magazine
27