MUSCLE SHOALS, Ala. -- It is that hour before dawn when shooting stars still tumble dimly across the sky, farm ponds smoke with morning mist, and the acrid smell of skunk floats across dewy fields. All is quiet on this empty stretch of Alabama highway.

Then, groaning and hissing around a curve, comes the vanguard of the Great American Circus, a bit of Americana on the move in a truck convoy of roustabouts, elephants and drowsing clowns headed north for the Tennessee border, where the red lights of a radio tower flash like a homing beacon.

Miles behind the trucks, on the grassy field of the North Alabama State Fairgrounds, the rest of the circus still sleeps in a makeshift trailer village of jugglers, acrobats and animal acts. In a big blue bus are Captain Eddie and Miss Sylven, with their chimps, their birds and their bears. In a nearby trailer, the Human Volcano and his fiancee, La Donna of the flying trapeze, breathe softly on their pillows.

But the truck convoy, toting a rolled-up circus tent on two huge spools, keeps moving toward the next town, the beams of its headlights now fading in the blush of the eastern sky.

It is a throwback, this circus, with its three-ring Big Top and its one-night stands. It packs up and moves every day of every week, March through November, stopping to catch its breath only on Easter Sunday as it plays 20 states east of the Mississippi, with two shows daily in such towns as Jasper and Meridian, Cullman and Fletcher, Hickory and Shelby.

All of which provides a tidy invitation for one to sigh that, thank goodness, some things in America really haven't changed.

But, alas, after the tent is staked and set for the day under a bright blue sky, a funny thing happens that sends such thoughts to oblivion. Not a single kid shows up to nose around the lot. This circus may be true to its past, but much of its audience has run off to an age when satellite dishes spring up like mushrooms on the lawns of rural America.

"At one time on a morning like this, you would have chased 50 or 60 kids away," circus owner Allan C. Hill says, sitting in a lawn chair next to the Big Top. "Nowadays you don't find a kid on the lot to save your soul. . . . TV killed circuses. Fifty years ago, there were probably 100 traveling tent shows. Now you maybe have about a dozen."

When things go wrong

Not that Mr. Hill's circus doesn't turn a profit, and business was particularly good last year in the heart of the recession. But even without a single television set out there, the life of a tent circus would be a weary struggle in which 101 things can go wrong.

Just look at last Tuesday.

First, there was the trip from Columbus, Miss., to Russellville, Ala., a slog of more than 100 miles up rough, twisting roads after a night plagued by tornado warnings. Ringmaster Brian La Palme, who is also the resident fire eater and flame-spewing Human Volcano, rear-ended the trailer of his fiance, Donna Moos, when she slammed on the brakes.

It was either that or drive her trailer onto a narrow bridge with a double-wide mobile home bearing down from the opposite direction. (That at least wasn't as bad as the accident two years ago, when the concession manager's truck burned to a cinder in full view of everybody. He died, but that didn't stop that night's show.)

When the trucks arrived in Russellville, there was more bad news. The promised lot north of the Calvary Baptist Church was on a slope. And had tree stumps. And was a muddy mess. Three trucks were stuck before a new location could be found, which meant that Irene the elephant had to unload and don her big leather harness to yank the trucks free.

Even after the move to a grassy spot up against a patch of woods, the turnout for both shows was small and listless. At the first one a little girl fell through an opening in the bleachers. Her mother scooped her up and ran shrieking from the tent, although the girl turned out to be fine.

"Every day is a different confrontation," Mr. Hill says, sighing as he watches the meager Tuesday crowd trickle into the stands.

"Maybe you're short of drivers; maybe you're short of help. Maybe you don't have the right permits. Maybe the field's too muddy, or too small. Sometimes the town gives you trouble."

$ A rogue on a rampage

Sometimes one of your elephants goes berserk.

That happened last year, when the 7,500-pound Janet Kelly went on a rampage while giving $2 rides to a woman and five children in Florida. She plowed into the bleachers, tossing a trainer and a policeman to the ground, then charged from the tent, injuring six people along the way.

When she turned to run back inside, police opened fire. It took 40 shots to kill her.

Animal rights activists went almost as berserk as Janet Kelly, and a spectator's harrowing videotape of the incident ran on television all over the country (which, of course, made the circus all the more attractive to the TV generation, and attendance soared).

Now video cameras are banned from the tent, and the incident is far from forgotten around the lot. Employees are forbidden to speak of it to visitors, but there was some inevitable whispering last week when general manager Tim Frisco went on trial for a misdemeanor charge of failing to control an animal.

But the biggest headache is still simply the numbing influence of the tube.

How can the flying La Donna, even though working without a net as she soars to the limits of the Big Top roof, compete with the perfection of Olympic gymnasts? How can the dog act not suffer by comparison with the pet stunts on "America's Funniest Home Videos"? And those jungle cats that yawn and lick their paws in the center ring sure don't look as ferocious as those that rip into zebra flesh on "Nature."

So, the circus has come up with special instructions for couch potatoes, which ringmaster La Palme shouts at the beginning of each show:

"Ladies and gentlemen, and all the children, I'm sure that most of you are accustomed to watching television. I'd like to remind you that everything you are about to see right now is presented live and in person." And if you like something, he adds, please make some noise.

The next morning, as he sits on a bleacher board in the shade of the tent, Mr. La Palme says, "I always notice a difference in the audiences when we're near big cities. We get a better response. People are more used to live entertainment."

Thirty years ago, the reactions would have been just the opposite, with the smaller, more rural locations making the most gee-whiz noise of all, out of starvation for entertainment.

But in other ways, life on this forced march across the country -- which includes a stop in Bel Air May 30 -- is the same as circus life has always been.

DTC Each night, the workers still strike the tent with the help of Irene the elephant, who trumpets and snorts bursts of steamy vapor into the cool night air as she pulls down the four huge center poles. As the last one falls, workers scurry out from under the tent's last deflating bubble, with Irene trotting close behind.

There are also still the same regional quirks to deal with as the circus moves from state to state. A Wednesday church night in the Bible Belt still means a drop in attendance. Ditto for high school football Fridays in the Deep South.

In Connecticut, all the fire acts are taboo, nor can the chimp ride his gas-powered minibike. The rules go back to a horrendous fire in Hartford that vaporized the giant Ringling Brothers tent in 1944, causing a flaming stampede in which 168 people were killed.

(Ringling, which has since stopped performing under the big top, will bring its huge arena circus to Baltimore this Thursday for an 11-day run.)

Also little changed are the daily rhythms of circus life for the performers.

Just ask Eddie Steeples, a.k.a. Captain Eddie and his Chimps, a.k.a. Eduardo and his Gypsy Bears, a.k.a. the assistant in the bird act for his wife, Sylven.

He's easy to spot. He's 61, although he looks younger, with a deep tan, hard-looking muscles, a shaved head, a gold ring through his left ear and a tattoo on his left biceps.

"I've been traveling in one show or another since I was about 4 months old," he says. "My grandfather was a bear trainer, my father was a bear trainer, I'm a bear trainer and my son is a bear trainer."

The line of work may go back further in his family, for all he #F knows, but there's no written record. "Most of my people are illiterate," he explains matter-of-factly. "We're Gypsies."

Captain Eddie's bus is a rolling menagerie. He and Sylven have a small apartment up front. In the middle is a room for three chimps, smelling none too sweet. Above the chimps are the birds. In the back are three bears.

Doesn't this lifestyle, with its daily travels, get a bit hard to take after a while? "Ask me again after I've lived some other way for a while," he says. "Then I'll be able to tell you."

Finding a family

That answer could apply to several of the performers who have grown up with one circus or another. Because they know no other way of life, this one seems as run-of-the-mill as suburbia. The only ones who seem to acknowledge hardship are those who joined later in life, such as Mr. La Palme.

He hooked up with a circus fresh out of high school 16 years ago, as a cook and a $75-a-week clown. Twelve years after that, he learned fire-eating on his own one winter at a trailer park in Valdosta, Ga. And though he has learned to love this vagabond existence, two previous wives didn't take to it at all. "My first marriage lasted six months," he says. "The second one was four years."

The third should last longer. His fiancee grew up in a circus family.

One employee genuinely weary of the road is Poindexter the Clown -- or, to you, Doug Kranz. He started clowning at age 17, self-taught. Now, four years later and in his second year of circus work, Mr. Kranz is decked out in a sad-faced hobo rig, a la Emmett Kelley, and his mood fits the makeup.

He has to do too much selling of programs and coloring books, he says, and that leaves little time for clowning. Nor does he like the crude four-level bunks built into the semi trucks for the general population, although he says the food isn't bad.

His comments point up the sharp divisions of labor that can exist around a circus.

The performers, with their private trailers, their families and their bigger paychecks, tend to keep to themselves. Then come the clowns, considered lucky if they make $200 a week along with room and board.

At the bottom are the roustabouts, starting at $85 a week. Some save the money and send it home. Some drink it up. They seem a likable bunch, even if rough around the edges with a few nasty scars and missing teeth. Few will offer their full names when asked.

"There are not too many people among the roustabouts who aren't running away from something," says one, "whether it's family stuff, legal stuff, bill collectors, girls, whatever."

The circus owner, Mr. Hill, has a wisecrack about them, having grown up in a circus family: "I've always said the government should pay us for keeping people off welfare."

But even the most disgruntled and downtrodden among the workers talk about the family atmosphere that tends to prevail in a circus. With 90 or so people traveling together, this is a mighty big family.

On Easter, the solitary chance for a day off, most of them chose to celebrate together, setting up the tent for a covered-dish supper and barbecue in the rain and mud of Columbus, Miss. Later, the roustabouts and some of the others squared off for a sloppy game of football. Juggler Nicholas Souren quarterbacked the Tent Team to another win.

One of the few absent was Mr. Kranz, the clown who checked into a small motel to mull his future. He decided that this week would be his last with the Great American Circus.

He'll go back to street performing, probably in Nashville.

The show, however, will go on.

And on.