There was a shout, and the tops began to come down. Each of the two poles which formed the distinctive shape of the circus bigtop had a block at the top, and the canvas could be raised and lowered around the poles like a flag going up and down a mast.

A really, really big flag, which required the help of basically the entire circus to raise and lower.

We could have done it with trucks, of course, but the all-hands-on-the-rope moment of raising the big top and then striking it again at the end of the run was a sort of symbolic moment of collective effort. It made everybody feel like we were all pulling, literally, in the same direction.

And right now, we needed all of those we could get.

With an enterprise like the Circus, the move is the moment of danger: The Circus stops being a circus, for a little while, and becomes a small fleet of trucks, a brightly painted train, a cluster of private cars and motorcycles all moving the same general direction… where, the Gods willing and the advance team having done their job, it will all congeal, coming together again to become, once more, the Circus.

They used to do this every night. The thought gives me hives just thinking about it.

Every circus tent is made of manageable parts. The poles are the central bits, as big as telephone poles but smoother and better balanced. A lot of our newer tents use a scaffold system in place of the center poles, which is both safer and easier to manage; eventually, we’ll probably replace all of them with that system — but I hope we keep the poles in the big-top. There’s something very satisfyingly traditional about putting them up and taking them down.

The tops are their own piece: more or less oblong, they have two big holes where they run up the center poles and a rigid frame out at the edge which is held up by a forest of shorter poles; when it’s up, it makes a big canopy, basically, with pointy bits in the middle.

The sides are just a series of tarps. Our big top uses two rows of tarps, lengthwise; each tarp is painted with some gaudy pattern and has a series of metal grommets along the sides, which are used to stitch them to one another and to the tops.

The tops coming down were basically the last thing that involved the whole crew; it was a little ceremony. Everybody was supposed to be packed and ready to go before the tops came down; once the canvas was on the ground and the cheering had happened and everybody had patted one another on the back, it was time for the Parade.

The Parade is one of those traditions that seems as old as the Circus, but really it only goes back to the dawn of the train-borne era. The Circus gets off the train at the train station, then walks through town, down the main drag or whatever, and everybody cheers and claps. It’s a big show for a small town, and for us it’s a preview: Here’s what you can pay to see, later.

It got to be a huge, stage-managed production, and then a lot of circuses just went to trucks and so it went away. We still do it, though we’ve made a sort of point of returning to the roots of the tradition; a circus on the move is colorful enough without making a show of it, particularly.

I found Big Harold amongst the ropes and whatnot. The head of the roustabouts, he was basically in charge of the move; he’d be here until everything was packed up and ready to go. I shook his hand and exchanged smalltalk with him and then I and the bulk of the performing workforce of the circus walked off toward town and the train station.

The town’s Mayor was standing on the parade route, waving and shaking hands and inviting us back next year and generally being all smiles. I shook his hand and promised to see him in a year, though of course whether we were or not depended a lot on the negotiations that the town had with our advance team over the winter.

The real going-away delegation was waiting at the train station. The sheriff was there to let me know he still thought we were a bunch of degenerates; there was still a bandage on his face from his fall down the dinner-platform steps.

And Magda’s parents had finally arrived. I was expecting this, and she was expecting this; it had all been worked out… but it was still surprisingly poignant. They seemed like they were mostly here to take back a possession because it was theirs, not because they wanted it.

I told Magda, quietly, again, that there was a place for her in the Circus when she was eighteen.

And then I walked back through town to where the wagons were lined up, ready to drive to our next site.