Steam

At the Circus, when it's time for the tent to come down, the tent comes down. I can only remember two or three times in the year or more I travelled with the show that weather did more than slow down the work. January's in New York could get cold enough that work might stop for a couple of hours, or a day, and when we were setting up in Boston near the Atlantic, the wind was strong enough that, when the tent was unrolled and then lowered to have the seams joined, it would lift the tent fast, and a couple of people got thrown around pretty good.

But mostly, things like rain and wind and cold just slowed the process down, and not much at that. You'd look around on a cold night, everybody running around in t-shirts, and realize why everybody was working so hard: if you slowed down, you were gonna freeze to death. As long as you were working hard enough, you were warm enough.

The coolest times, though, were when the air was just cool enough, and you were just warm enough, that steam would start to rise. You'd see something up at the top of your field of vision, and flick your eyes up, in case it was something falling, and you'd just catch sight of it. Then you'd take a moment and look around, and see that everyone, while scurrying around doing the thousand and one jobs that taking down a circus tent involves, had a halo around their heads, rising from the top of their skulls. Steam would be rising, just a couple of inches above sweat-soaked hair, then vanishing. On everyone.

Then you'd put your head down and get back to work, because your sweat would start getting cold, and you didn't want to freeze to death.