Carousels, Trailers and Mobility as Destiny

Text: Olga Smirnova, Praha
Photographs: Simon Chang, Praha

For some, mobility is not a matter of choice but their destiny. For some it is a tradition three hundred years old. A mobile amusement park, a nomadic theatre group, a travelling circus – traditional vagabond family businesses still follow their old paths in a world of global financial flows and advanced technology. This is a story of a boy who works, eats and dreams surrounded by carousels, swings and merry-go-rounds. His house is on wheels and he loves living “on the road”. This is also a story of a family whose job for the last couple of centuries has been bringing joy and laughter to everywhere they visit.

Photo gallery

Who he is – Vašek

Vašek is a boy of medium height, with the slender but muscular figure of an acrobat or possibly even a dancer. His dark wide eyes reveal a touch of Roma blood mixed with another, southern, perhaps Iberian. His hair is short and black. He never misses an opportunity to proudly mention that his father is Italian. He never met his parents – he was abandoned right after birth.
Vašek is 20. Eighteen years of his life passed in an orphanage in the North Moravian town of Jeseník. The primaeval nature of the mountainous North Moravian district, with beautiful landscapes and crystal waterfalls, may be a paradise for hikers and cyclists, but due to industrial decline, the region is struck with severe unemployment driving people away in search of a better fate.

At the age of 18, Vašek leaves the house for abandoned children with minimum belongings and a monthly 4000 crowns (less than 150 euros) of welfare benefit. He rents a room in a cheap hostel – a shelter for seasonal workers – lives from hand to mouth jobbing around Jeseník, changing from one construction site to another.

The room Vašek rented in the cheap provincial hostel was the last place one could call a home. Neighbours worn out with the hard labour and misfortune, often entertained themselves by sucking on bottles and bruising each others faces. In winter their company was enlarged by homeless in search of a temporary shelter from the harsh frosts. The constant threat of accidentally being beaten up on the threshold of his own room made Vašek wander from one friend’s flat to another’s, crashing there for a night or two. He did not feel good about the possibility of being a burden, an inconvenience or a beggar at the family dinner table. More and more, instead of heading towards either the hostile shelter or a friendly door his way led him to a bench in the town park, sometimes even in the middle of winter.

This summer, however, Vašek’s wheel of fortune took an upwards turn – it looks like he has found himself a stable source of food and board. A well-wisher recommended him as a hard-working and attentive young man to the owners of a luna-park being set up at the time to entertain the folk in the town of Jeseník. An additional pair of oil-stained hands to fetch and carry, hold, lift and mount is always needed in this business, and so the mobile family hired the boy. To turn metal hardware, stairs, chains, wheels, cabins and carts, piles and rails into shining attractive carousels and rollercoasters is what he is there for now. All of a sudden, he obtained not only a long-awaited job but also something he could not even dare to hope for – a family. He packed his simple belongings and moved into his new home on wheels – a Second World War military van. The prospect of travelling, living on the road, excited him further. So Vašek became the eighth member of the luna-park maintenance team – the outer circle of the large Fink family.

Who they are – the Fink
Each of the Fink brothers – there are five of them permanently travelling with their wives and kids – owns a trailer, a mobile house, new and solid, with a minimum of two windows and one TV antenna, some of them have satellite dishes on the roofs. Space permitting, they put the trailers along the perimeter of the field or town market square that will then become an amusement park for a week. The trailers are nicely furnished, equipped with all luxuries the modern lifestyle can offer: washing machines, microwaves and toasters, TV-sets with video players, CD players. And that is no surprise. Why should the house where a woman spends most of her life, where children grow up, and where her husband comes to rest after a working day not be comfortable in every possible way? Sixteen square meters may not seem like a large house for a family of five, but the size is compensated for by the four wheels under its floor – one can travel without leaving the house in the true sense of the word.

The Finks are permanently based in Olomouc – the capital of the Olomouc region, part of North Moravia. Olomouc is their winter residence. Here they spend the three to four coldest months of the year, maintaining the carousels, repairing and painting, fixing and polishing. When the first sunrays melt the snow, rivers flood the valleys and people head out on to the streets, the Finks put the carousels on the platforms, the children in the trailers and set off for a journey which will last for eight months, until the next November frosts. The Fink family’s travelling dominion is the north-west part of the historical region of Moravia, an area which they share with another thirty-nine mobile amusement parks. They are connected to almost all of them by a net of family ties, friendships and acquaintances. Their annual route leads them through tiny mountainous villages with a population of not more than 300, to the district towns such as Jeseník with around 13,000 inhabitants. The route is fixed and seldom subject of change – in order to attract visitors and, consequently, for maximizing profit, it is scheduled according to village fairs and major holidays. “People are becoming poorer and poorer every year, especially the village people” – complains a Fink woman with curly brown hair, bouncing her one year old daughter in her lap, “they cannot afford to spend 30 crowns for one carousel ride. So we go to places during a village saint’s day fair, when people do not begrudge a little entertainment. We are entertaining the poor people.” Indeed, why would those who can afford a holiday abroad spend their summer in the village instead of going to the sea side? And why would those, who cannot do so, spend 30 crowns on the carousel ride instead of buying a loaf of bread?

Luna-park is the Fink’s family business. It has been their family business for decades, better to say for centuries. They trace back their mobile life to the reign of the Habsburg Queen Maria Teresa – as early as the outset of the 18th century. The travelling theatre troupe of their ancestors performed two centuries ago in the same market squares that their great-grand children are touring in the wake of the new millennium. However, with time the family split into three: the theatre, the circus and the amusement park.

The outer circle of the extended Fink family are the workers. Over the years, various circumstances have brought them one by one to the mobile amusement park, until, with Vašek’s joining they were eight. Single, middle-aged men, they work shoulder to shoulder with the younger Vašek and the five Fink brothers, maintaining the carousels and rollercoasters, setting them up, dismantling them and fixing them over the winter. The trailers they live in are so small that they can accommodate only one bed and a modest wardrobe. The workers seldom enter the houses of the bosses, but the luna-park wives cook food for everyone. The working crew and members of the family – all of them have their lunch together, sitting on the ground in large circle.

A New Life Begun

“They accepted me as their own son. I am part of the family now,” Vašek proudly, but emphatically, repeats every time he mentions the Finks as if trying to prevent his dream from being accidentally shattered by someone’s doubtful remark. “I will stick to them from now on. And they promised to arrange my studies, my last year at the culinary college where I will get my school-leaving certificate.” He knows that without education one cannot achieve much in life. At the same time the only way to “rise up on his on his own two feet” is by hard work; yet neither it’s weight nor the amount of dirt it brings scare the young worker off. “I am a Taurus, an Earth sign. This means that my feet are firmly planted on the ground. This also means that I can overcome all the difficulties in pursuing my goal. I cannot rely on anyone to help me; I must work hard to help myself. I am patient and I am persistent. When it is hard I just grit my teeth and go on.”

At five in the morning a clatter on the metal door rises the young worker up and drives him out into the chilly grey mist. From the moment he gets up he always tries to be in the centre of the process – passing girders and lifting cars, maintaining and supporting. When one of the bosses passes by, he tightens up and concentrates on work, doing his best to show that he does not eat his bread in vain. If traditions are the rocks resistant to the hurricanes of change, the manual labour seems to be a rooted tradition in the Fink’s luna-park business. Human bodies, bare hands, muscles and bones substitute the levers and hoisting cranes used to install and dismantle the carousels. Vašek is not entrusted with tightening screws or adjusting cabins to the frames of the Ferris wheel. This work is too much responsibility for the novice. “First I have to win confidence, to show that I am capable of doing it,” Vašek is looking at the top of a tall column where one of the workers is standing on the last ladder step hooking the chain carousel seats. “But they promised to teach me, and they gave me the house to live in.” At the moment he is working only for food and shelter but once he, the novice, has obtained the necessary skills he can expect to get paid.

Vašek points to the dark-green military van which would better fit a Second World War museum or a film studio. It is parked at the far end of the village football field – the ground for the future luna-park. Inside, a divan bed picked up in a provincial second-hand shop, or perhaps a scrap-heap, occupies half of Vašek’s room inside the van when unfolded. The rest of the space is filled by the rickety wardrobe, an archaic TV-set, shelves with several books, razors and cheap soup, cups with yesterday’s tea brew, a dull grey teddy-bear, and dust idly flying in the sunbeam light.

Those workers who have proved to be hard-working and loyal – and some of them have been serving the Finks for more than ten years – get the privilege to hack around from time to time, to drink beer in the provincial pubs or enter the trailers with satellite dishes on the roofs. They are in fact part of the Fink family. Still, the lack of “the royal blood” keeps them outside the Fink family core, the inner circle.

“I am different,” Vašek casts a disapproving look at the noisy group of teens drinking beer under the self-made wooden shed by the football field. Night after night the village youth hang out there attracted by the newcomers who in turn have have nothing against being admired by the local school girls. “These kinds of things are of no interest to me.”

In the afternoon when work is temporarily interrupted due to the unbearable heat, the big family heads towards the local swimming pool. Vašek instead finds the shady spot behind his van. He reads the Bible and the novels from his modest library on the dusty shelves. His favourite book is Robinson Crusoe. “Yes, because he is the traveller, but first of all because he is the man with an iron will and desire to live,” explains Vašek. “He sailed off for the adventure, he is like me.” His large dark eyes suddenly light up “And I love travelling! And also to entertain people! It is hard to explain, but I just cannot stay in one place, it’s like something inside me is pushing me to follow the road. Maybe it is a part of me, a part of my character…”

“I like my town Jeseník, it is a beautiful place to live. Besides, my girlfriend is there,” Vašek casts his eyes down. He misses her. A silver neck chain – a present from her – gleams under his shirt. “But there is no work, no chance for me to rise up, and how can I build a family being jobless? It was a tough decision to make, I do not know if I will ever go back to live in Jeseník. And she has her family there… And my family is here now.” His roommate František takes out a half-broken CD player and two loud speakers – his only precious possession – and turns on his favourite techno tune. Vašek starts to move in rhythm. The sounds of music rise above the van, and spread over the trailers and the platforms, the carousels, over the football field suffused with the August sunlight, the motorway and the fast Moravian river nearby, over the village and over the valley, and the chain of mountains embracing it.

The Fink children are running back from the swimming pool. They are laughing and chasing one another around their giant playground where the fathers set up and dismantle the carousels and rollercoasters, and the mothers cook and wash and chat on the porches of their trailers. Years will pass, and their hands and shoulders will replace those of the fathers’; they will join the team to learn to build carousels and to give orders to Vašek and the like. Decades will pass, and the next generation will tread in their steps entertaining the folk of northern Moravia. Or will they not? Will the whirlwind of global change settle the restless Finks down?