The Circus Comes to Town

Tonight I met a group of traveling clowns in the minutes before an impromptu show at Tha Phae Gate, the tourist center of the city. They are the Cyclowns, so named because they travel only by bicycle. They have been on the road for six years, living off hat passing and strangers' generosity. In that time, so they claim, over one hundred musicicans and street performers have joined and left their group. Sometimes their numbers swell to as many as 15, when I saw them tonight they were 6.

With their muttonchops and whiny fiddle they gave off an air of old-world Europe, like gypsies. Their clothing featured horizontal stripes, which made their socks clownier and and their shirts more Frenchified. I spoke to one guy, the fiddler, who had been travelling with them for three years. He said they had no clear plans for the future. Half the group wanted to return to China and the other half wanted to push on to Malaysia. This wouldn't be the first time their group had separated- they keep in touch via myspace and sometimes reunite after many months in different countries.

Their act was largely non-verbal, no doubt honed during their last two years trekking across Russia and then China. The music was campy and their magic tricks watchable but unremarkable. I looked around at the audience and saw a large number of backpacker types in their twenties, people who also had been on the road for some time. I watched them watch the show, and I realized that the real entertainment for them was not the magic or the music. These clowns were people who had made the peripatetic lifestyle a sustainable thing. They were travelling the world and they didn't ever have to stop. That was as much something to stare at as any trick they might pull out of their pockets. The backpackers in the audience were probably the ones keeping the Cyclowns afloat. I imagined the travellers whose money was running out were the most generous when the hat was passed, sending with the Cyclowns their vicarious dreams of endless roaming.

I must admit I was taken with the Cyclowns' ambience, and with what seemed to me like a need for a group historian. I could play Tom Wolfe to their band of Merry Pranksters. I the young Cameron Crowe and they the hard-living rock stars. I would travel with them with my short hair and conservative dress, bearing the brunt of their anger at the man and at the close-minded, untravelled West they had left behind. But secretly they would be grateful for my documentation, for ensuring that their legacy lived beyond their myspace friends and the memory of the few who saw them. But the more I thought about that constant travel - two years through Asia! - the more it began to seem as confining as any static lifestyle. The fiddler who had been with them for three years, what else could he do now, after so long on the road? I thought of the Flying Dutchman, and Charlie on the MTA. There certainly is a romanticism to that gypsy way, but maybe it's something I see only with the clarity that comes from a rooted life.