THUNDER BAY -- Everything's crisper at the Canadian Lakehead Exhibition just before dusk settles in. The high-pitched screams from the rides fall on laughter and the rattling sound of toy machine gun lead. They meet above the carnival lights, where the smell of sugar mixes with greased steam.
As the sun gives way, a faint whiff of kerosene wafts by when Eric Miller's face becomes bathed in firelight. He cracks a furry smile from under his bowler hat, then spins a flaming torch once before he tosses it into the air.
This element belongs to Eric The Juggler. This is the spot where, three years ago, he finally decided to ignore all doubts and made a career out of doing what he loves.
"It’s the age-old story where you want to do what you want to do but there’s pressures on you," the 31-year-old says.
"‘Don’t take a year off after high school. Go to university first.’ Then you’re in university and now you’ve got to finish university. Then you finish university and you still can’t do what you want to do because now you have to get a job and build up experience. Then you get a job."
For Eric, that job was teaching math and career studies in Sioux Lookout. The math made him consider accounting, wary the professional juggling dollars wouldn't add up. But teaching careers to high school students when he'd never even really left school only galvanized his deeper calling.
It led him back to the CLE.
"As the hometown favourite, I would always get booked and they’d bring in another juggler, a professional or whatever. I’d meet other jugglers who were making a career out of it and I thought, 'if they can do it, maybe I can do it.'"
Under his company, Cirqueworks, Eric bought hacky sacks in bulk for two dollars and sold them for five. Then he started offering workshops alongside his juggling shows. With inventory moving and his business growing on seven years of hobby experience, keeping those balls in the air was starting to bring in money.
Eric the Juggler was making almost a dollar an hour.
“I’m a juggler but I’m a businessman as well and I like getting a paycheck because I like to eat and drive and... live," he says.
"The sore point is, I always get asked for discounts --which sometimes I do and that’s fine -- but it’s like, ‘you enjoy what you're doing. Come do it for free.’ And it’s true, but if I keep doing that, I’ll have to get a full-time job and I won’t want to do your event in my off-time because I’ll want to do other stuff or I’ll want to juggle with friends.”
He wouldn't be able to make it in Thunder Bay alone but his reputation throughout Northwestern Ontario began to carry him. Trips turned into tours. A week on the road grew into three.
As he played schools in every small town and grew to become part of communities like Laird or Kenora for a few days a year, he became a better teacher than he'd ever been. He realized he didn't need to seek out bigger markets where other jugglers were going.
He needed to bring juggling to places no one was going.
"If I was a math teacher, I could teach them math. If I’m not a math teacher, that school will hire someone else to teach those kids math and they’ll still learn math. If I’m a juggler and I go to Nakina to teach these kids how to juggle and a couple of kids really like it and they go on to do other things with it -- there was a kid in Red Lake where the principal said that was the first thing he was engaged in all year, was devil sticking at my one of my workshops.
"And If I don’t do this, no one else is going to do it."
That attitude is why more than a third of elementary school-aged children in Thunder Bay know Eric The Juggler. Their interest motivates him in turn and now that he's earning enough to pay HST, he's taking yet another risk his doubters say can't be done in Northwestern Ontario: he's moving into a van in October.
The Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation helped him renovate a 24-foot, high-topped van where Eric and his fiancee intend to live. She quit her job with the city in March to make balloon animals, ride a little circus bike and live the dream along with him. They've already saved $5,000 on travel accommodations and are about to kick off the cost of rent.
"I’ll have a home. It’ll just be on wheels. We have plug-ins. It has a furnace that runs off propane. We have sleeping bags. We have candles... Yeah, all right. I’m a little nervous about the winter but it can be done," he says.
"I kind of thrive on it (doubt). I wonder if I would have gotten this far if I’d had positive encouragement the entire time because I would have thought, maybe it couldn’t be done."
