American Oz: An Astonishing Year Inside Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs and Festivals: Hitchhiking California to New York, Alaska to Mexico by Michael Sean Comerford

Author:Michael Sean Comerford [Comerford, Michael Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781952693007
Google: ZBKbzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Comerford
Published: 2020-07-14T21:24:45+00:00

I stood beside the road and watched one of the biggest boom times in history. The Patch at the time contained a third of the world’s natural oil reserves. Alberta and British Columbia were rich in gold, diamonds, tar sands, oil shale, lumber, and other resources. It’s backcountry work until it makes its way to the highway.

I watched rigs with thirty wheels hauling logs, oil, gas, water, drills, pipes, cranes, engines, and generators all roll by in a boom-time parade.

My first two rides out of Calgary came from men employed in work camps. A diamond miner and a tar-sands worker both lived in luxurious modular trailers with free food, a gym, and a pool. Both said they couldn’t turn down the money, but the isolation from loved ones was a high price to pay. A twenty-four-year-old mechanic told me he made forty dollars an hour. He didn’t have a wife or family, but he was investing in mini-mansions on vast plots of land.

When I told drivers that I was hitchhiking to traveling carnivals, they told their own stories of hitchhiking and carnivals. A mining trucker named John talked about his cousin who hitchhiked around Canada blind. His blind hitchhiking cousin was infamous in family lore for getting swizzled and picking bar fights with his cane.

A bulked-up, oil-patch trucker named Aaron said Charles Dickens set some of his books in his hometown of Gravesend, England. Dickens should have written about traveling carnivals, he said, and turned the Artful Dodger into a fast-talking jointee.

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