Under the Electric Sky (14 page)

The one fundamental component of the Bill Lynch Shows, the vital fluid upon which it ran, was always the people of the Maritimes. It was their fling. The carnival lives and dies with them. It was always theirs, whether they wanted to indulge in what it was offering or not. That's the way Lynch wanted it and that was the way it was run.

At some point between 1925 and today, the carnival ceased to be the meeting place for entire towns on lazy summer afternoons and hot evenings. Now, like the first midway back at the Chicago World's Fair, the carnival is a lower form of amusement for the poor. The less-fortunate people of the Maritimes have always taken a keen interest in the carnival, as if they were the ones who needed the escape from the real world more than anyone else. The workers understood this. Welfare cheque day was always the busiest and in sometimes rushed fashion, the rides would be in place for it, even if it meant constructing them all night.

Adams has increased prices on the carnival by about two dollars for the all-day bracelets and one dollar more for the games out of necessity, to keep up with escalating operation costs. He says it's a risk, considering people can't afford to have fun anymore. That will be the death knell for the carnival here, he thinks.

“For sure it will kill the carnival,” Adams says. “People only have so much. They just can't afford it.

“But I'll be dead by then.”

Out on the midway in New Minas, a few people are staggering around between the damp rides and the games, trying to get their kicks any way they can. The exhaust from the machines is wheezing in the distance as the afternoon rolls into bright night, reflected by a gleaming atmosphere that sparkles with old-fashioned electrical-filament coloured light bulbs. The rain has cleared and a cool breeze blows through the lot.

Looking around the midway today, it could be 1956. For all of the changes over the years, a lot of it remains the same. The rides still spin, the people still come for their own reasons, the air smells the same, the sounds are like echoes of years ago. The Merry-Go-Round still rolls uninterrupted through the hustle of routine life. As much as time and reality eventually caught up with the Bill Lynch Shows and the people who operated it, the real magic was always too electric to contain and there was never any way to own it. What Lynch created here and Soggy continued was bigger than both of them. They were lucky, on good nights, to channel it and share it with the people who wanted it. The magic of the midway itself is oblivious to any one person. It is that place out of time that waits for no single man, that belongs in the hearts and spirits of anybody who's felt it for that brief time of year when they could almost smother it in their arms. Kids understand this concept better than most, whether they know it or not. They are the ones with the ingenuous, unsophisticated urge to ride the magic as it stretches out further than they've ever been to the place where everything seems possible, where the imagination drifts through clouds and back again, where there is no status and it hardly matters who owns what or how much money is in their pockets.

I wandered around the midway after talking with Adams and encountered a four-year-old boy as his father hoisted him aboard the airplane kiddie ride. He took off in a single plane to unknown destinations as it lifted up through the sounds of exhaust to run its cycle. He had never felt anything like that before; a mortal energy rushed through his veins with such force and intensity all he could do was break down in tears. His father smiled reassuringly from the ground, attempting to calm the child's nerves. Near the end of the ride, he had accepted that everything would be all right. He sat back and took it all in. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. Crying was the natural impulse.

The carnival played out its magic until ten p.m. or so, when Adams shut it down for the day. The lights flicked off quickly and the trailer doors jammed closed, as they do every night. The workers rushed through the shadows briskly, with some sort of inherited night vision, on their way to the bunks which were lit by the generator light. But the rides were still and sullen in the darkness. They were too isolated on the lot to be affected by any streetlight or parking lot din, sitting naked in the moonlight.

There is a haunting sensation when the lights go out for the night on the carnival. An eerie spectre lurks in the shadows of the midway – not of death, but life. It is overwhelming and subdued at the same time. There's an energy to it that is almost chilling. In the day, life had exhibited itself freely throughout the lot, unconcerned with the trifles of existence. People gathered to feel the sounds and hear the tastes and whisper to the air and dirt the miraculous secret of what it means to be alive and human. In the dark now, it is as if the rides are glowing from the inside, the sounds of ghosts scorched on the fibreglass and metal, resonating through space, as if you could put your ear to the curve in the Tilt's tub like a seashell. The calls of the carnies, the screams of the people on scary rides, the smell of the candy and food – all of it flooding back in one last illuminated blaze through the senses.

The fear has never been death. It was life all along.

© 2012 Christopher A. Walsh

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Walsh, Christopher A.

Under the Electric Sky: the legacy of the Bill Lynch Shows / Christopher A. Walsh

Print ISBN 978-1-897426-17-3

E-ISBN 978-0-988119-40-6

1. Bill Lynch Shows-History. 2. Lynch, Bill, 1903-1972. 3.Carnivals-Nova Scotia-Halifax-History. 4. Carnivals-Maritime Provinces-History. 5. Halifax(N.S.)-Biography. 6. Maritime Provinces-Biography. I. Title

GV1835.3.B54W24 2010 791'.109716225 C2010-905615-9

Cover design by Gail LeBlanc

Front cover photo by Thomas Burke

Author photo by Chloe Jones

E-book conversion by Human Powered Design

From the Print Edition: Pottersfield Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We also acknowledge the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We also thank the Province of Nova Scotia for its support through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage.