The Dark Carnival (part 1: How it all Connects)

Growing up in small town America, the word "carnival" for me still evokes memories of rusted Ferris wheels. Carnival came to town a few times per year, sprouting up overnight in empty fields along the city limits. For a few days’ time it offered a mix of genuine-fear-induced adrenaline (would the makeshift rides finally rattle themselves apart?) and indigestion—deep fried everything with soft serve and cotton candy on top. Getting sick afterwards on the rides. There were the odd, bartered conversations with traveling carnie folk at their booths, the occasional recognition of a local picked up overnight to hustle one of the games. I wasn’t necessarily an enthusiastic fan of the carnival, but as a kid, it offered a welcome distraction from the monotony of small-town life. Carnival meant extra hours of spontaneous, socially-sanctioned fun: Running around under the crackling lights after dark. People watching. Watching people you knew puke. Trying to bend the rules. I certainly never gave much thought to where the word itself came from.

I first experienced a different kind of #carnival pretty haphazardly in the jungles of #Bolivia and Northern #Brazil. It was by no means the expressed destination of my journey. Fresh out of college, brimming with enthusiasm, curiosity, and nightmare-inducing antimalarials, my college bestie and I had been living and traveling in the Andes for the better part of four months. We'd recently dropped elevation, slowly acclimating to the heat and already stifling humidity in Cochabamba, before continuing on to Santa Cruz de la Sierra. We'd recently graduated from there after all. And here it was again, another #SantaCruz, somewhere on the flipside of the world.

[if you're still around Santa Cruz de California, check out said buddy's epic shapeshifting slow food projects based out of Humble Sea Brewing Co. on the West Side / this isn't a paid ad, it's just a pump because I really like good people and great food]

Those were still the early days of wiki-available, digital knowledge—I followed the occasional online travel forum, read National Geographic (or mostly looked at pictures) online, but the vast majority of my cultural knowledge still came from acquaintances or guidebooks read and left at home. Absent smart phone or regular access to the internet of any kind and lacking in a proper Catholic upbringing, I knew only vaguely of the samba-induced excesses of Brazilian carnival from friends. I didn't really know where or when or how or why the city-wide celebrations would take place.

We were in Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Santa Cruz de la Sierra. During the weeks leading up to carnival... the weeks before the Catholic fast of Lent. Also during an outbreak of #denguefever. In the evenings, we watched the same streets we'd explored during the day on TVs through shop windows. They were being fumigated for mosquitoes by soldiers in hazmat suits. We also watched a costumed parade. In Santa Cruz, they start celebrating Carnival a few weeks early, somebody explained. Dancers streamed past, decked out as if for a masquerade ball. Glitter, sequens. Feather boas. Brass music: horns. Now and then, smaller processions followed after the larger groups. Wooden jaguar masks. Feathers and the carved figures of stylized jungle animals. A local tradition from the #Amazon, another local shook her head. #Voodoo.

The dengue outbreak was in the local papers now, too. And there were a lot of mosquitos buzzing around. We decided to cut our stay in Santa Cruz short and booked an indirect couple of flights for Iquitos, #Peru. My friend came down with dengue fever on a river boat somewhere east of Tabatinga, and two weeks later, carnival caught up with me in the muddy flood plains of the Amazon. The rawness of the experience on the streets of São Luis is something I won't forget: the sheer mass of sweating, dancing, stinking, laughing humanity. Impromptu dance parties on street corners. Drum circles. Fried balls of cornmeal stuffed with shrimp. Hot sauce. The arbitrary violence. Cachaça. Drunk drivers speeding through pedestrian filled streets. Honking horns, pounding drums. Bottles breaking. Sex and drugs and samba in gyrating clouds and waves. Recovering from a two-week boat passage down River, newly alone, and following a post-Amazon detox hike to the Atlantic and another chugging boat and bus ride onward to the state capital, I was in poor shape both mentally and physically to process the sheer sensory overload.

Honestly, I tried to block some of it out. The sound of screeching tires became like a soundtrack. The thud of impact like the crash of bodies in a high school football game. The pop of breaking bones was something from a violent movie I'd wished later that I hadn't seen: nothing real. The body itself, inside its costume—visibly broken. Neglected on the roadway after the fact but for one frantic, screaming friend among the throngs of dancers. The utter helplessness—that remained. It was my first up-close brush with death, and a sobering conclusion to the first stint of a year spent on the road.

* * *

I left the New World for the Old. It must have been at least a year before I thought of Carnival again. One further continent away from home. I was already living in #Germany by then. Teaching English in #Heidelberg and hitching my way for kicks on a long weekend along the skirts of the #BlackForest: down the A5 autobahn to visit a friend in Freiburg. A friend I'd made the year before in São Luis.

I’d caught a good ride with an entertaining driver. He was a former hippie from the urban Ruhrgebiet, recently married and relocated. Converted to sedentary office-dweller in a small provincial town. Late 30s / early 40s. Liked to talk.

He'd been an exchange student in his college years in Denver, CO, he said. He told me how he’d bought a street-legal dirt bike and had wanted to make it overland to Tierra del Fuego.

Had I read Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Die Reise des jungen Che [Diarios de motocicleta / Motorcycle Diaries]?

Yes, I had. Along with his considerably less bourgeois friendly La Guerra de Guerrillas and several of his other memoires from the Cuban and Bolivian wars. I was a child of the 80s; I grew up on Rage Against the Machine.

Did I ride dirt bikes myself, growing up in California?

I didn’t. Maybe the occasional Honda 50 with my brother as a kid. I'd sat on a moped once or twice, but I hadn't inhaled.

No, he hadn’t made it quite to Tierra del Fuego. But he’d ridden all the way to Panama City, Panama.

From Denver, Colorado to Panama on a dirt bike in the early 90s. And he sold his stories well.

And did I know German Karneval was about to happen?

It must have been winter. January or February 2010. No, I mean, yes. I’d been to Carnival in Brazil.

Rio? Salvador?

No, São Luis.

So I'd been to Carnival, but never #Karneval in Cologne? Düsseldorf? Mainz?

No, not yet. Maybe next year. Maybe this year, still. Who knew? Big street parties weren’t really my thing. Especially not Carnival.

But did I know about schwäbisch-alemannische Fastnacht? The Southern German Carnival? No, it wasn’t quite like the big ones in the Rhineland. Well, ok, it kinda was. But had I ever seen the wooden masks? Hadn't we talked at some point about the summer solstice and Stonehenge? If you asked him, #Fastnacht was probably of #pagan origins, too: a spring fertility festival, the death of winter, driving out the ghosts and darkness, all that kinda thing. Some of the wooden masks were generations old. Local museums had them dating back centuries. His wife’s family belonged to a local Narrenzunft [fools’ guild]; they had some masks at home. Her younger sister had recently inherited his father-in-law’s. By rights it should have gone to his wife, but, well, they didn’t live in the village anymore. TBH this small town life wasn’t really his cup of tea, either. Sure, Freiburg was pretty close and he liked organic vegetables, but he missed the pulse of the big cities on the Rhine.

I was intrigued by the masks. Anyone who knows me knows my quiet fascination with the occult. Ritual and mystic places. Temple ruins, stone circles, pictographs. Future [and Past] of an Illusion. Remnants of human belief.

What else he could tell me about Fastnacht? It was about #tradition. They called it ‘the upside-down world.’ The fifth season, down here, really, just like back home on the Rhine. And just like back home, it was a good excuse to take a break from work. Let loose. Really, I’d have to ask his wife; he was just a transplant after all, couldn’t really tell me all that much except he liked the masks. Pity I couldn't ask her myself…

He dropped me off at a lonely station a few miles away from #Freiburg, the end of the local line. Wished me well; went on his way.

It took me almost ten years to make it to a proper Fastnacht celebration, but certainly not for lack of interest. I did make it to the summer solstice at #Stonehenge a few more times.

(See Part 2: Fastnacht for more!)