Spent several hours cleaning house today, tucking into those hidden corners Mbak Ning never will for fear of upsetting something.
Came up with an old brown wallet, literally fluffy with some kind of sporous Jakarta growth, and packed with cards n stuff.
And so, Grinchtour Productions takes you on a tour down memory lane: hop aboard the way-back machine, set the dials four years back?..
And we walk into a department store (location unknown) where, the Grinch being in need of a new wallet to store his millions settles upon a brown leather Nautica model, with a flash green and gold strip of stitching round the middle (now deep in tropical fluff and mushrooms at the bottom of a waste basket).
Your basic model wallet: five sleeves on the left side, four in the right, a couple of places to tuck various and sundry, and two, separated Canadian-bill-sized folds.
Inside I find:
- 2 HSBC Interact Cards (that?s where they got to!) expiring in 09/04 and 05/05, only one of which is signed.
- A Best Western Hotel (Medan, North Sumatra) business card with the name Heruna (front desk clerk) and her cell-phone number inked on.
Stateless Ming and I spent a night there in 2001, on our way back from Aceh. We?d flown into Medan at least two weeks earlier, and bussed it out to Bukit Lawang, the orangutan ?sanctuary? near Leuser Park. The place was buried under meters of mud and millions of board feet of uncut tropical wood in a flash flood in the fall of 2003, an improvement as far as I?m concerned.
Leuser is one the site for orang ?rehab? in Sumatra but basically very little rehab actually goes on. Rescued animals, mostly too young to be on their own, are brought there and turned into the park?s main tourism draw. Every evening the people who run the place bring loads of food down to a deck in the ?wilderness? and upwards of a dozen oranges swing down to eat. Because they?re unable to forage for themselves. Because its not in the interests of the hotel owners, ?guides? and the rest of the Leuser mafia to actually rehabilitate the animals because then they might leave the area and all those tourism dollars would disappear.
In other words the ?rehab? center isn?t. It?s a zoo. I asked the head ?ranger? what would happen if the orangutans stopped visiting the feeding station and the tourists dried up.
?We?d log the whole area and sell the monkeys to the biologists,? he said.
And every day minibuses disgorge packs of mostly young touristas looking for an authentic wild orangutan experience. Funny thing is that when I got back to Jak at that time I pocked around the Lonely Planet?s on-line ThornBush and found the number one issue among the women who visited was another kind of monkeying around. Seems the buff, long-haired young ?guides? (none of whom actually come from the area, but drift in from Batak tribal areas to the south and urban Medan) provided a wide variety of ?services? on those overnight explorations into the jungle in search of ?wild? orangutans (which don?t actually exist there).
Stateless Ming and I stuck around for a night and booked out for the actual conservation area where we were scheduled to hook up with a group of EU researchers who?ve been based there for many years, studying all manner of flora and fauna and trying in their own way to ?protect? Leuser Park from the tiger and elephant poachers, landless masses of disposed Javanese migrants driven from their homes in Aceh and now squatting in numbers inside the park, and omni-present illegal logging interests who will eventually drive a four lane (logging) road through the heart of the park.
This is going on a the moment despite the opposition of every environmental group in this country and abroad, and the EU (who?ve pumped something in the order of Euro 30 million into the park in the past decade), the current Environment Minister, the Minister of Natural Resources (similarly named) and anyone with a synapse still firing, because the project enjoys the support of the Indonesian president. Which is to say, that her evil husband has worked out a system of mutually beneficial business arrangements with the powers that be in Central Aceh (the only place you find pro-Jakarta groups in the separatist province) and the army to allow Leuser Park to be logged without actually, officially logging it.
A four hour dugout ride upstream we came to the camp. The biologists were earnest and bitter and we spent a couple of nights wandering around and admiring the elephants the local mahouts use to patrol for illegal loggers. They?re amazingly quiet we were told, and able to navigate the smallest jungle paths. And they really put the fear into the loggers when they come crashing into their camps.
I rode one of them for about 90 minutes. Several things struck me. The top of the Sumatran elephant?s head looks like a big walnut; their hair is incredibly coarse and stiff, and their skin wrinkled like a newborn baby; their trunks are incredibly effective at picking things up; they kinda walk through things unfortunate enough to be in their way; and if you ever, ever have a chance to sit on an elephant while its walking into a deep, cool river to bathe at the end of the day, DO IT! Wow. Too much fun sitting atop a couple tons of living, breathing animal that just wants to loll about and have fun. One of my all time favorite moments anywhere, anytime.
Back to the wallet?
- 1 chipped Quantum Athletics Daylight membership card. My one vanity when I was even poorer than today was to join this gym. I?m still there though not nearly enough1
- 1 2x2cm black and white photo of Antonio do Santos, the head of army intelligence in Gleno, East Timor. One of five or six photos I took from a looted army barracks in that mountain town in October 1999. Do Santos and several others were identified by local residents and the local Falantil as being involved in the rape, torture and disappearance of dozens of people both prior to and immediately following the independence v autonomy ballot.
In an odd coincidence, Stateless Ming was there that day as well, bungeed to the back of the two-stroke 150cc trail bike I bought in Dili from fleeing Indonesian soldiers for $200. It was a pretty horrible place Gleno. The smell of death and decay was everywhere. The few people who?d returned to the village looked utterly shell-shocked. Every night they returned up the riverbed to the hideaways where they?d lived for many weeks, too afraid to return to their homes and bury their dead. We found several bodies with their hands bound behind their backs, throats cut.
The worst were the rape rooms. In the final days before their withdrawal the locals told us, Indonesian soldiers abducted a number of local women and brought them to several houses belonging to policemen, or the off-base homes of senior military officers. It doesn?t bear thinking about. But I?m still haunted by the dried pools of blood on the floors and mattresses, and the bloody handprints on the walls.
I kept the (studio) picture in the back of my wallet, because Do Santos, a Timorese himself, is the most unremarkable man to look at. Kinda chubby looking, high forehead, slick, black hair parted to the right, the beginnings of a handlebar moustache. He?s wearing informal army attire, the top button open and you can just make out his name badge. He banality personified but for the people of Gleno he?s the Devil.
- I?ve also got a color, 3x4 cm photo of Jihan in a lovely flowered, purple shawal kamiz. She looks beautiful and fresh
- There are several cards: an expired British Columbia Care Card, which I would show on visits to the doctor. The last time was back in 98 when I stripped the ligament in my knee while hiking in Washington State. I got a basic x-ray and ultrasound. It took over four months to get an MRI done and several more months before the results were ready. Needless to say it was all a bit late. I still have trouble with my right knee especially after a long run, or if I turn hard on it playing tennis.
- BC Tel Calling Card, which I got for free and never used.
- $20 Singapore Calling Card with a photo of coy looking woman in some kind of trampy Indian dress. Must have bought it during a trip to Mustapha for electronics and tacky shirts.
- One Mustapha bill which I obviously used to claim $158.23 (Singapore) GST refund back in 2001 when I bought the PD-150. $5432.50 Sing. Gulp! Well, it has pretty much paid for itself already in rentals alone so?
- Indonesia International Bank (BII) ATM card I picked up in Banda Aceh in 1999. I needed it because the idiots at HSBC halted all transactions off my Vancouver account because I?d used it to withdraw money in Jakarta. Got to Banda, ran out of money and then ATM rejected my HSBC card. So, I had to get an Indonesian bank account and have the money wired in order to pay my hotel bills.
It is interesting only because of the contradiction between what is and what might be. Banda Aceh is pretty much as far north and west as you can get in Indonesia. Yet here I was able to get a functioning card processed in 30 minutes that included a digital photograph of myself on the front. To me it is quietly symbolic of the huge potential here in Indonesia, and the many wasted opportunities?
- Colorful Shwe Wa Thein handicrafts store business card from Bagan, Burma. Tripped there in November 2000. Bagan is awesome and I?ve no memory of this shop What more can I say.
- 1 Dua Musim Priviledge card which I got after the last visit there? in 2000/1 sometime. Nice restaurant, decent food, great rooftop and a fine pool table. But the food?s overly expensive and the staff slow to pull cold grog. After three visits I never went back. Still open though so obviously they?ve got some sort of a market.
- 2 plain white business cards for Gilles Lordet, Managing Director of something called the Indonesian Press Review. I?ve no idea?.
- 1 business card from Serge Quirion at the Sony Store in Fairview Plaza in suburban Montreal. Apparently he?s a ?Conseiller-Expert?.
- $15 Canadian! Money!
- $38 US! More Money!
So there you have it. The things one tucks away, memories and money.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Spent several hours cleaning house today, tucking into those hidden corners Mbak Ning never will for fear of upsetting something.
Came up with an old brown wallet, literally fluffy with some kind of sporous Jakarta growth, and packed with cards n stuff.
And so, Grinchtour Productions takes you on a tour down memory lane: hop aboard the way-back machine, set the dials four years back…..
And we walk into a department store (location unknown) where, the Grinch being in need of a new wallet to store his millions settles upon a brown leather Nautica model, with a flash green and gold strip of stitching round the middle (now deep in tropical fluff and mushrooms at the bottom of a waste basket).
Your basic model wallet: five sleeves on the left side, four in the right, a couple of places to tuck various and sundry, and two, separated Canadian-bill-sized folds.
Inside I find:
- 2 HSBC Interact Cards (that’s where they got to!) expiring in 09/04 and 05/05, only one of which is signed.
- A Best Western Hotel (Medan, North Sumatra) business card with the name Heruna (front desk clerk) and her cell-phone number inked on.
Stateless Ming and I spent a night there in 2001, on our way back from Aceh. We’d flown into Medan at least two weeks earlier, and bussed it out to Bukit Lawang, the orangutan ‘sanctuary’ near Leuser Park. The place was buried under meters of mud and millions of board feet of uncut tropical wood in a flash flood in the fall of 2003, an improvement as far as I’m concerned.
Leuser is one the site for orang ‘rehab’ in Sumatra but basically very little rehab actually goes on. Rescued animals, mostly too young to be on their own, are brought there and turned into the park’s main tourism draw. Every evening the people who run the place bring loads of food down to a deck in the “wilderness” and upwards of a dozen oranges swing down to eat. Because they’re unable to forage for themselves. Because its not in the interests of the hotel owners, ‘guides’ and the rest of the Leuser mafia to actually rehabilitate the animals because then they might leave the area and all those tourism dollars would disappear.
In other words the ‘rehab’ center isn’t. It’s a zoo. I asked the head ‘ranger’ what would happen if the orangutans stopped visiting the feeding station and the tourists dried up.
“We’d log the whole area and sell the monkeys to the biologists,” he said.
And every day minibuses disgorge packs of mostly young touristas looking for an authentic wild orangutan experience. Funny thing is that when I got back to Jak at that time I pocked around the Lonely Planet’s on-line ThornBush and found the number one issue among the women who visited was another kind of monkeying around. Seems the buff, long-haired young “guides” (none of whom actually come from the area, but drift in from Batak tribal areas to the south and urban Medan) provided a wide variety of ‘services’ on those overnight explorations into the jungle in search of “wild” orangutans (which don’t actually exist there).
Stateless Ming and I stuck around for a night and booked out for the actual conservation area where we were scheduled to hook up with a group of EU researchers who’ve been based there for many years, studying all manner of flora and fauna and trying in their own way to ‘protect’ Leuser Park from the tiger and elephant poachers, landless masses of disposed Javanese migrants driven from their homes in Aceh and now squatting in numbers inside the park, and omni-present illegal logging interests who will eventually drive a four lane (logging) road through the heart of the park.
This is going on a the moment despite the opposition of every environmental group in this country and abroad, and the EU (who’ve pumped something in the order of Euro 30 million into the park in the past decade), the current Environment Minister, the Minister of Natural Resources (similarly named) and anyone with a synapse still firing, because the project enjoys the support of the Indonesian president. Which is to say, that her evil husband has worked out a system of mutually beneficial business arrangements with the powers that be in Central Aceh (the only place you find pro-Jakarta groups in the separatist province) and the army to allow Leuser Park to be logged without actually, officially logging it.
A four hour dugout ride upstream we came to the camp. The biologists were earnest and bitter and we spent a couple of nights wandering around and admiring the elephants the local mahouts use to patrol for illegal loggers. They’re amazingly quiet we were told, and able to navigate the smallest jungle paths. And they really put the fear into the loggers when they come crashing into their camps.
I rode one of them for about 90 minutes. Several things struck me. The top of the Sumatran elephant’s head looks like a big walnut; their hair is incredibly coarse and stiff, and their skin wrinkled like a newborn baby; their trunks are incredibly effective at picking things up; they kinda walk through things unfortunate enough to be in their way; and if you ever, ever have a chance to sit on an elephant while its walking into a deep, cool river to bathe at the end of the day, DO IT! Wow. Too much fun sitting atop a couple tons of living, breathing animal that just wants to loll about and have fun. One of my all time favorite moments anywhere, anytime.
Back to the wallet…
- 1 chipped Quantum Athletics Daylight membership card. My one vanity when I was even poorer than today was to join this gym. I’m still there though not nearly enough1
- 1 2x2cm black and white photo of Antonio do Santos, the head of army intelligence in Gleno, East Timor. One of five or six photos I took from a looted army barracks in that mountain town in October 1999. Do Santos and several others were identified by local residents and the local Falantil as being involved in the rape, torture and disappearance of dozens of people both prior to and immediately following the independence v autonomy ballot.
In an odd coincidence, Stateless Ming was there that day as well, bungeed to the back of the two-stroke 150cc trail bike I bought in Dili from fleeing Indonesian soldiers for $200. It was a pretty horrible place Gleno. The smell of death and decay was everywhere. The few people who’d returned to the village looked utterly shell-shocked. Every night they returned up the riverbed to the hideaways where they’d lived for many weeks, too afraid to return to their homes and bury their dead. We found several bodies with their hands bound behind their backs, throats cut.
The worst were the rape rooms. In the final days before their withdrawal the locals told us, Indonesian soldiers abducted a number of local women and brought them to several houses belonging to policemen, or the off-base homes of senior military officers. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But I’m still haunted by the dried pools of blood on the floors and mattresses, and the bloody handprints on the walls.
I kept the (studio) picture in the back of my wallet, because Do Santos, a Timorese himself, is the most unremarkable man to look at. Kinda chubby looking, high forehead, slick, black hair parted to the right, the beginnings of a handlebar moustache. He’s wearing informal army attire, the top button open and you can just make out his name badge. He banality personified but for the people of Gleno he’s the Devil.
- I’ve also got a color, 3x4 cm photo of Jihan in a lovely flowered, purple shawal kamiz. She looks beautiful and fresh
- There are several cards: an expired British Columbia Care Card, which I would show on visits to the doctor. The last time was back in 98 when I stripped the ligament in my knee while hiking in Washington State. I got a basic x-ray and ultrasound. It took over four months to get an MRI done and several more months before the results were ready. Needless to say it was all a bit late. I still have trouble with my right knee especially after a long run, or if I turn hard on it playing tennis.
- BC Tel Calling Card, which I got for free and never used.
- $20 Singapore Calling Card with a photo of coy looking woman in some kind of trampy Indian dress. Must have bought it during a trip to Mustapha for electronics and tacky shirts.
- One Mustapha bill which I obviously used to claim $158.23 (Singapore) back in 2001 when I bought the PD-150. $5432.50 Sing. Gulp! Well, it has pretty much paid for itself already in rentals alone so…
- Indonesia International Bank (BII) ATM card I picked up in Banda Aceh in 1999. I needed it because the idiots at HSBC halted all transactions off my Vancouver account because I’d used it to withdraw money in Jakarta. Got to Banda, ran out of money and then ATM rejected my HSBC card. So, I had to get an Indonesian bank account and have the money wired in order to pay my hotel bills.
It is interesting only because of the contradiction between what is and what might be. Banda Aceh is pretty much as far north and west as you can get in Indonesia. Yet here I was able to get a functioning card processed in 30 minutes that included a digital photograph of myself on the front. To me it is quietly symbolic of the huge potential here in Indonesia, and the many wasted opportunities…
- Colorful Shwe Wa Thein handicrafts store business card from Bagan, Burma. Tripped there in November 2000. Bagan is awesome and I’ve no memory of this shop What more can I say.
- 1 Dua Musim Priviledge card which I got after the last visit there… in 2000/1 sometime. Nice restaurant, decent food, great rooftop and a fine pool table. But the food’s overly expensive and the staff slow to pull cold grog. After three visits I never went back. Still open though so obviously they’ve got some sort of a market.
- 2 plain white business cards for Gilles Lordet, Managing Director of something called the Indonesian Press Review. I’ve no idea….
- 1 business card from Serge Quirion at the Sony Store in Fairview Plaza in suburban Montreal. Apparently he’s a “Conseiller-Expert”.
- $15 Canadian! Money!
- $38 US! More Money!
So there you have it. The things one tucks away, memories and money.
Came up with an old brown wallet, literally fluffy with some kind of sporous Jakarta growth, and packed with cards n stuff.
And so, Grinchtour Productions takes you on a tour down memory lane: hop aboard the way-back machine, set the dials four years back…..
And we walk into a department store (location unknown) where, the Grinch being in need of a new wallet to store his millions settles upon a brown leather Nautica model, with a flash green and gold strip of stitching round the middle (now deep in tropical fluff and mushrooms at the bottom of a waste basket).
Your basic model wallet: five sleeves on the left side, four in the right, a couple of places to tuck various and sundry, and two, separated Canadian-bill-sized folds.
Inside I find:
- 2 HSBC Interact Cards (that’s where they got to!) expiring in 09/04 and 05/05, only one of which is signed.
- A Best Western Hotel (Medan, North Sumatra) business card with the name Heruna (front desk clerk) and her cell-phone number inked on.
Stateless Ming and I spent a night there in 2001, on our way back from Aceh. We’d flown into Medan at least two weeks earlier, and bussed it out to Bukit Lawang, the orangutan ‘sanctuary’ near Leuser Park. The place was buried under meters of mud and millions of board feet of uncut tropical wood in a flash flood in the fall of 2003, an improvement as far as I’m concerned.
Leuser is one the site for orang ‘rehab’ in Sumatra but basically very little rehab actually goes on. Rescued animals, mostly too young to be on their own, are brought there and turned into the park’s main tourism draw. Every evening the people who run the place bring loads of food down to a deck in the “wilderness” and upwards of a dozen oranges swing down to eat. Because they’re unable to forage for themselves. Because its not in the interests of the hotel owners, ‘guides’ and the rest of the Leuser mafia to actually rehabilitate the animals because then they might leave the area and all those tourism dollars would disappear.
In other words the ‘rehab’ center isn’t. It’s a zoo. I asked the head ‘ranger’ what would happen if the orangutans stopped visiting the feeding station and the tourists dried up.
“We’d log the whole area and sell the monkeys to the biologists,” he said.
And every day minibuses disgorge packs of mostly young touristas looking for an authentic wild orangutan experience. Funny thing is that when I got back to Jak at that time I pocked around the Lonely Planet’s on-line ThornBush and found the number one issue among the women who visited was another kind of monkeying around. Seems the buff, long-haired young “guides” (none of whom actually come from the area, but drift in from Batak tribal areas to the south and urban Medan) provided a wide variety of ‘services’ on those overnight explorations into the jungle in search of “wild” orangutans (which don’t actually exist there).
Stateless Ming and I stuck around for a night and booked out for the actual conservation area where we were scheduled to hook up with a group of EU researchers who’ve been based there for many years, studying all manner of flora and fauna and trying in their own way to ‘protect’ Leuser Park from the tiger and elephant poachers, landless masses of disposed Javanese migrants driven from their homes in Aceh and now squatting in numbers inside the park, and omni-present illegal logging interests who will eventually drive a four lane (logging) road through the heart of the park.
This is going on a the moment despite the opposition of every environmental group in this country and abroad, and the EU (who’ve pumped something in the order of Euro 30 million into the park in the past decade), the current Environment Minister, the Minister of Natural Resources (similarly named) and anyone with a synapse still firing, because the project enjoys the support of the Indonesian president. Which is to say, that her evil husband has worked out a system of mutually beneficial business arrangements with the powers that be in Central Aceh (the only place you find pro-Jakarta groups in the separatist province) and the army to allow Leuser Park to be logged without actually, officially logging it.
A four hour dugout ride upstream we came to the camp. The biologists were earnest and bitter and we spent a couple of nights wandering around and admiring the elephants the local mahouts use to patrol for illegal loggers. They’re amazingly quiet we were told, and able to navigate the smallest jungle paths. And they really put the fear into the loggers when they come crashing into their camps.
I rode one of them for about 90 minutes. Several things struck me. The top of the Sumatran elephant’s head looks like a big walnut; their hair is incredibly coarse and stiff, and their skin wrinkled like a newborn baby; their trunks are incredibly effective at picking things up; they kinda walk through things unfortunate enough to be in their way; and if you ever, ever have a chance to sit on an elephant while its walking into a deep, cool river to bathe at the end of the day, DO IT! Wow. Too much fun sitting atop a couple tons of living, breathing animal that just wants to loll about and have fun. One of my all time favorite moments anywhere, anytime.
Back to the wallet…
- 1 chipped Quantum Athletics Daylight membership card. My one vanity when I was even poorer than today was to join this gym. I’m still there though not nearly enough1
- 1 2x2cm black and white photo of Antonio do Santos, the head of army intelligence in Gleno, East Timor. One of five or six photos I took from a looted army barracks in that mountain town in October 1999. Do Santos and several others were identified by local residents and the local Falantil as being involved in the rape, torture and disappearance of dozens of people both prior to and immediately following the independence v autonomy ballot.
In an odd coincidence, Stateless Ming was there that day as well, bungeed to the back of the two-stroke 150cc trail bike I bought in Dili from fleeing Indonesian soldiers for $200. It was a pretty horrible place Gleno. The smell of death and decay was everywhere. The few people who’d returned to the village looked utterly shell-shocked. Every night they returned up the riverbed to the hideaways where they’d lived for many weeks, too afraid to return to their homes and bury their dead. We found several bodies with their hands bound behind their backs, throats cut.
The worst were the rape rooms. In the final days before their withdrawal the locals told us, Indonesian soldiers abducted a number of local women and brought them to several houses belonging to policemen, or the off-base homes of senior military officers. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But I’m still haunted by the dried pools of blood on the floors and mattresses, and the bloody handprints on the walls.
I kept the (studio) picture in the back of my wallet, because Do Santos, a Timorese himself, is the most unremarkable man to look at. Kinda chubby looking, high forehead, slick, black hair parted to the right, the beginnings of a handlebar moustache. He’s wearing informal army attire, the top button open and you can just make out his name badge. He banality personified but for the people of Gleno he’s the Devil.
- I’ve also got a color, 3x4 cm photo of Jihan in a lovely flowered, purple shawal kamiz. She looks beautiful and fresh
- There are several cards: an expired British Columbia Care Card, which I would show on visits to the doctor. The last time was back in 98 when I stripped the ligament in my knee while hiking in Washington State. I got a basic x-ray and ultrasound. It took over four months to get an MRI done and several more months before the results were ready. Needless to say it was all a bit late. I still have trouble with my right knee especially after a long run, or if I turn hard on it playing tennis.
- BC Tel Calling Card, which I got for free and never used.
- $20 Singapore Calling Card with a photo of coy looking woman in some kind of trampy Indian dress. Must have bought it during a trip to Mustapha for electronics and tacky shirts.
- One Mustapha bill which I obviously used to claim $158.23 (Singapore) back in 2001 when I bought the PD-150. $5432.50 Sing. Gulp! Well, it has pretty much paid for itself already in rentals alone so…
- Indonesia International Bank (BII) ATM card I picked up in Banda Aceh in 1999. I needed it because the idiots at HSBC halted all transactions off my Vancouver account because I’d used it to withdraw money in Jakarta. Got to Banda, ran out of money and then ATM rejected my HSBC card. So, I had to get an Indonesian bank account and have the money wired in order to pay my hotel bills.
It is interesting only because of the contradiction between what is and what might be. Banda Aceh is pretty much as far north and west as you can get in Indonesia. Yet here I was able to get a functioning card processed in 30 minutes that included a digital photograph of myself on the front. To me it is quietly symbolic of the huge potential here in Indonesia, and the many wasted opportunities…
- Colorful Shwe Wa Thein handicrafts store business card from Bagan, Burma. Tripped there in November 2000. Bagan is awesome and I’ve no memory of this shop What more can I say.
- 1 Dua Musim Priviledge card which I got after the last visit there… in 2000/1 sometime. Nice restaurant, decent food, great rooftop and a fine pool table. But the food’s overly expensive and the staff slow to pull cold grog. After three visits I never went back. Still open though so obviously they’ve got some sort of a market.
- 2 plain white business cards for Gilles Lordet, Managing Director of something called the Indonesian Press Review. I’ve no idea….
- 1 business card from Serge Quirion at the Sony Store in Fairview Plaza in suburban Montreal. Apparently he’s a “Conseiller-Expert”.
- $15 Canadian! Money!
- $38 US! More Money!
So there you have it. The things one tucks away, memories and money.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Here's an unedited bit about the Indonesian elections that Al-Jazeera ran pretty much 'as is'.
Tomorrow? "Converting To Islam For Dummies"
Jakarta, Indonesia
There’s still thirty minutes before the polls in Jakarta open and the men wearing the orange vests of Indonesia’s national election commission have struck just the right absurdist chord.
Blaring from massive concert speakers beneath a polling station tent in a quiet, working-class neighborhood is a recording of one-hit-wonder Ray Parkey Jr. banging out the catchy opening lyrics of a twenty-year-old best seller:
“There's something weird,
In the neighborhood,
Who're you gonna call?
Ghostbusters!”
It was not the sort of wake-up call Indonesians normally associate with election day, the so-called “dawn raids” by candidates who swap bags of rice, packaged noodles and hard currency for votes. Then again, with reputable pollsters reporting up to one-third of the country’s eligible voters undecided a week before the elections, there may be plenty of surprises in store as results roll in from what has been billed as the most daunting logistical exercise in the recent history of democracy.
An estimated 147 million Indonesians are eligible to punch ballots for the 550-seat national parliament (DPR), local and provincial legislatures in this first round of a reformed electoral process. The country’s first direct presidential elections follow in July.
The month-long election campaign culminated with massive rallies of paid participants in party colors. Motorcycle taxi drivers and housewives publicly advertised their willingness to participate in exchange for the equivalent of $6 US, lunch and a new party T-shirt. Candidates offered platitudes not platforms, and a cynical electorate brooded that their votes for reform five years ago had fallen on deaf ears.
And yet, early results suggest that not only couldl projections of a 90 per cent-plus turnout be reached, but an interesting reworking of the political landscape is taking place in 600,000 polling stations in the world’s third most populous democracy.
A carnival-like atmosphere pervaded the backstreets of Tanah Abang, a poor, melting-pot neighborhood anchored by what was once Asia’s largest textile market. Streets normally clogged with vehicles became impromptu playgrounds for swarms of children on rattletrap bicycles and lounging parents who pretended to ignore their appeals for cherry-flavored popsicles.
“I made up my mind (who to vote for) after talking with my friends this morning,” said Antonius Utomo, a 37-year-old tax consultant from South Sumatra. “I know there is very little chance my vote will change the way the candidates behave because they are all corrupt. But with help we will have a good democracy in Indonesia by the time my daughter is old enough to vote. I also hope it will be more simple for her.”
It is an oft-repeated complaint at polling stations across the sprawling capitol. Some voters were clearly confounded by the daunting stack of up to four ballot sheets, each the size of an unfolded broadsheet newspaper, covered with the names, photographs and party affiliation of each of the hundreds of candidates from two dozen parties.
“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do,” says housewife Li Pao Liem, pacing nervously beside a rotting pile of garbage near a polling station in a shanty neighborhood in East Jakarta that disappears beneath the polluted waters of the Ciliwung River every February. “There was no information before today... no socialization of the process and anyone can see it is very complicated.”
With so many undecided voters grappling with a complicated ballot it is difficult to predict with any accuracy what the new legislature will look like. Organizers say it will take up to 30 days before all the results are in.
But informal polling conducted at sites around the city, and the initial flow of results from around Indonesia painted a grim picture for president Megawati Sukarnoputri and her Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), and surprising gains by a several rivals.
PDI-P took over a third of the popular vote in the last elections in 1999, the highest of any of the 48 parties on the ballot, largely on the basis of her personal popularity, and disgust with Golkar, the rubber-stamp party of 32-year strongman Suharto. Cashing in on its vast network of life-long cadres Golkar still managed to pick up 22.5 percent of the vote.
What a difference five years makes. Reputable pollsters have said that PDI-P was in trouble for several weeks, polling as low as 12 per cent, compared to Golkar’s roughly 20 per cent. And Megawati’s personal popularity has similarly slumped: she now trails her former chief security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the top presidential candidate.
His tiny Democratic Party (PD) is polling well in many regions of the country.
In what can only be described as a highly symbolic slap in the face, returns from polling station 001, where the president cast her ballot Monday morning, showed PDI-P running a distant third behind PDI and a nominal Christian party.
Despite her near mythical credentials as a reformer, the daughter of the founding president Sukarno has proven herself to be an ineffective and distant ruler. Like Abdurrahman Wahid, the Sufi cleric whom she served as vice-president from 1999 until his impeachment in 2001, Megawati has squandered bushels of goodwill, both domestically and abroad.
Despite some modest strides in repairing the tattered economy, her coalition government has largely failed to tackle issues near and dear to people’s hearts, in particular the lack of jobs and the woeful state of the education and health systems in Indonesia. Her well established ties to an oppressive military apparatus and the failure of the attorney general’s office to prosecute most of the nation’s worst corporate debtors has alienated her from the young activist set credited with forcing Suharto from power in 1998.
“I was one of the people who organized the big rallies for Mega (as she is known colloquially) in 1999. I painted my face and wore her colors, red and black,” said 26-year-old Deny Purnawan, a diehard “Slanker”, the nickname for followers of a popular Indonesian hardcore band. “But what has she done? All the talk, talk, talk about Reformasi and I still don’t have a job. We knew it was going to take time to change this country but it is obvious that she has sold us to the same corruptors we fought against.”
Another intriguing ingredient in Indonesia’s complicated political pie are the apparent gains being made by the Prosperous Justice Party, headed by Saudi-educated Hidayat Nurwahid. Running on an anti-corruption ticket, Nurwahid and his band of intellectual urban Islamists have carved out a soft spot in the public consciousness though an informal good-works policy in poor kampungs, or areas struck by natural disasters that predates by years the actual election campaign.
“We’ve seen that the mainstream political parties are unable to beat corruption so even though I am worried that they could become very strict with God’s help they’ll beat corruption here in Indonesia,” said Firdaus Nursalim, a father of five who works for a local government agency. “Maybe they can apply moral pressure. However, I would still like to see SBY (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) as president. I think he is a true reformer.”
Not everyone is making such bold decisions though. In some parts of the country, ghosts still run the show.
A heavily made-up dowager arrives at a high school polling station in the toney Menteng district of Jakarta in a late-model, midnight blue Mercedes-Benz.
“I will vote for Mega's sister Rakmawati because we prospered under her father,” she says, as several men in orange vests scurry to process her voting credentials. “He was a good man.”
Tomorrow? "Converting To Islam For Dummies"
Jakarta, Indonesia
There’s still thirty minutes before the polls in Jakarta open and the men wearing the orange vests of Indonesia’s national election commission have struck just the right absurdist chord.
Blaring from massive concert speakers beneath a polling station tent in a quiet, working-class neighborhood is a recording of one-hit-wonder Ray Parkey Jr. banging out the catchy opening lyrics of a twenty-year-old best seller:
“There's something weird,
In the neighborhood,
Who're you gonna call?
Ghostbusters!”
It was not the sort of wake-up call Indonesians normally associate with election day, the so-called “dawn raids” by candidates who swap bags of rice, packaged noodles and hard currency for votes. Then again, with reputable pollsters reporting up to one-third of the country’s eligible voters undecided a week before the elections, there may be plenty of surprises in store as results roll in from what has been billed as the most daunting logistical exercise in the recent history of democracy.
An estimated 147 million Indonesians are eligible to punch ballots for the 550-seat national parliament (DPR), local and provincial legislatures in this first round of a reformed electoral process. The country’s first direct presidential elections follow in July.
The month-long election campaign culminated with massive rallies of paid participants in party colors. Motorcycle taxi drivers and housewives publicly advertised their willingness to participate in exchange for the equivalent of $6 US, lunch and a new party T-shirt. Candidates offered platitudes not platforms, and a cynical electorate brooded that their votes for reform five years ago had fallen on deaf ears.
And yet, early results suggest that not only couldl projections of a 90 per cent-plus turnout be reached, but an interesting reworking of the political landscape is taking place in 600,000 polling stations in the world’s third most populous democracy.
A carnival-like atmosphere pervaded the backstreets of Tanah Abang, a poor, melting-pot neighborhood anchored by what was once Asia’s largest textile market. Streets normally clogged with vehicles became impromptu playgrounds for swarms of children on rattletrap bicycles and lounging parents who pretended to ignore their appeals for cherry-flavored popsicles.
“I made up my mind (who to vote for) after talking with my friends this morning,” said Antonius Utomo, a 37-year-old tax consultant from South Sumatra. “I know there is very little chance my vote will change the way the candidates behave because they are all corrupt. But with help we will have a good democracy in Indonesia by the time my daughter is old enough to vote. I also hope it will be more simple for her.”
It is an oft-repeated complaint at polling stations across the sprawling capitol. Some voters were clearly confounded by the daunting stack of up to four ballot sheets, each the size of an unfolded broadsheet newspaper, covered with the names, photographs and party affiliation of each of the hundreds of candidates from two dozen parties.
“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do,” says housewife Li Pao Liem, pacing nervously beside a rotting pile of garbage near a polling station in a shanty neighborhood in East Jakarta that disappears beneath the polluted waters of the Ciliwung River every February. “There was no information before today... no socialization of the process and anyone can see it is very complicated.”
With so many undecided voters grappling with a complicated ballot it is difficult to predict with any accuracy what the new legislature will look like. Organizers say it will take up to 30 days before all the results are in.
But informal polling conducted at sites around the city, and the initial flow of results from around Indonesia painted a grim picture for president Megawati Sukarnoputri and her Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), and surprising gains by a several rivals.
PDI-P took over a third of the popular vote in the last elections in 1999, the highest of any of the 48 parties on the ballot, largely on the basis of her personal popularity, and disgust with Golkar, the rubber-stamp party of 32-year strongman Suharto. Cashing in on its vast network of life-long cadres Golkar still managed to pick up 22.5 percent of the vote.
What a difference five years makes. Reputable pollsters have said that PDI-P was in trouble for several weeks, polling as low as 12 per cent, compared to Golkar’s roughly 20 per cent. And Megawati’s personal popularity has similarly slumped: she now trails her former chief security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the top presidential candidate.
His tiny Democratic Party (PD) is polling well in many regions of the country.
In what can only be described as a highly symbolic slap in the face, returns from polling station 001, where the president cast her ballot Monday morning, showed PDI-P running a distant third behind PDI and a nominal Christian party.
Despite her near mythical credentials as a reformer, the daughter of the founding president Sukarno has proven herself to be an ineffective and distant ruler. Like Abdurrahman Wahid, the Sufi cleric whom she served as vice-president from 1999 until his impeachment in 2001, Megawati has squandered bushels of goodwill, both domestically and abroad.
Despite some modest strides in repairing the tattered economy, her coalition government has largely failed to tackle issues near and dear to people’s hearts, in particular the lack of jobs and the woeful state of the education and health systems in Indonesia. Her well established ties to an oppressive military apparatus and the failure of the attorney general’s office to prosecute most of the nation’s worst corporate debtors has alienated her from the young activist set credited with forcing Suharto from power in 1998.
“I was one of the people who organized the big rallies for Mega (as she is known colloquially) in 1999. I painted my face and wore her colors, red and black,” said 26-year-old Deny Purnawan, a diehard “Slanker”, the nickname for followers of a popular Indonesian hardcore band. “But what has she done? All the talk, talk, talk about Reformasi and I still don’t have a job. We knew it was going to take time to change this country but it is obvious that she has sold us to the same corruptors we fought against.”
Another intriguing ingredient in Indonesia’s complicated political pie are the apparent gains being made by the Prosperous Justice Party, headed by Saudi-educated Hidayat Nurwahid. Running on an anti-corruption ticket, Nurwahid and his band of intellectual urban Islamists have carved out a soft spot in the public consciousness though an informal good-works policy in poor kampungs, or areas struck by natural disasters that predates by years the actual election campaign.
“We’ve seen that the mainstream political parties are unable to beat corruption so even though I am worried that they could become very strict with God’s help they’ll beat corruption here in Indonesia,” said Firdaus Nursalim, a father of five who works for a local government agency. “Maybe they can apply moral pressure. However, I would still like to see SBY (Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) as president. I think he is a true reformer.”
Not everyone is making such bold decisions though. In some parts of the country, ghosts still run the show.
A heavily made-up dowager arrives at a high school polling station in the toney Menteng district of Jakarta in a late-model, midnight blue Mercedes-Benz.
“I will vote for Mega's sister Rakmawati because we prospered under her father,” she says, as several men in orange vests scurry to process her voting credentials. “He was a good man.”
Thursday, April 01, 2004
“… I think life can be very melancholy as well as being inspiring and pleasant. One of the functions of life is that throughout it you discover, sometimes painfully, your limitations. Because you find out not only what you can do but also what you can’t do.”
Sir Peter Ustinov (RIP March 28 @ age of 82)
The Magicicada septendecula are coming! The Magicicada septendecula are coming!
Isn’t it marvelous? It’s sooo big National Geographic are, like, all over it. And a bunch of scientists and, Jeeze, everyone’s talking about it. I heard some folks are actually packing up and leaving town! And others are planning on sleeping rough outside! How weird is that?
Do you remember where you were the last time the Magicicada septendecula came?
‘Cause The Grinch knows EXACTLY where he was.
I cast my mind back, awaaaay back to the sunny summer of ’87. Ahh yes, freshly back in the East from a year’s skiing and banging nails in the western frontier, falling in and out of love, bright though bleary-eyed after a second semester back at university, a considerably leaner, un-inked version of myself was thumbing his way south.
Montreal, Kingston, Syracuse, Harrisburg and on down the I-81 to a lonely trailhead outside Winchester, Virginia. Three days hauling ass, dawn-till-dusk and the rides and the road-trash were as diverse and wonderful as a young man might want. There was the businessman who punted me 200 m before the border crossing and waited patiently on the other side for me to clear customs (“No offense, son.” None taken, I’ve done the same).
And the trailer trash who picked me up mid-afternoon somewhere in the Finger Lakes district, mom, dad and a T-ball infield worth of under-nines rolling about the back of a rusted ‘ol Chevy van like softballs in a bat-bag. Dad was determined that one day he was gonna get his-self to Canada on account of how good the huntin’ and fishin’ wuz (“cuz my brother-in-law went up there once and had a real good time ‘cept for all the Frenchies of course, no offence.” None taken, I’m English.)
And then to impress the kids, who had the vulpine look of youngsters who’d pretty much sacrifice one of their own for kicks if it meant turning the van back towards home, the toothless wonder at the wheel asked what winters were like up there in Canada. And then he was wondering how much snow fell and how he reckoned it must be hard on us Canadians always having to dig ourselves out “on account of all the storms and whatnot.” And pretty soon he got around to what he actually wanted to say which was to tell the yoots in the back that it was not uncommon for Canadian children to live in snow houses and take dog sleds to work.
And of course I played along thinking, whattheheck, be a good sport and so on… except for the fact that it took about 30 seconds of banter to realize he was serious. And this guy, this adult who lived maybe a 90-minute drive south of the border reckoned, I guess, that some sort of extraordinary meteorological event occurred between his house and mine that caused the dense coniferous forests of Appalachia to evaporate before and endless tundra populated only by bison and caribou and a particularly hardy sort of elementary school student who tethered half a dozen silver-eyed dogs to a harness and mushed his way to the igloo school. Amazing.
But, as always, more entertainment (Magicicada septendecula!) awaited the further south I went. Somewhere in Connecticut, one of those states about which very little is known in Canada, I put a fair bit of road beneath my boots, walking from one unproductive hitching spot to another, maybe six or eight kilometers south. Effective hitchhikers do this (I oughta write a book) because staying in one place is a bad idea. Give it a couple of hours but if nothing stops for you, move. If you’re gonna use your thumb to travel efficiently then you’ve gotta respect road mojo.
It’s always kinda weird walking along a big highway. The day before, crossing an amazing, mustabeen two mile-long bridge over the muddy Susquehanna River, some hicks in a passing pick-up with Pennsylvania plates threw a beer bottle at me. I don’t think I’m going out on the limb here when I say that a Michelob bottle (they must have been Michelob drinkers) traveling at 100+km/h is going to do some damage if it hits you!
So anyway, yeah, not many people walk on the really big highways that don’t have to. Maybe run out of gas, or run out of town. You get plenty crazy people on the side of the interstate and the T-Can up north; maybe the noise drowns out the voices. I dunno. Mostly they leave you alone.
So I’m walking and up ahead there’s the exit and beyond a ways, there’s the entrance. It’s bad enough that the road is empty except for the odd Freightliner thundering by with a load of denim or scrap metal or frozen All-Beef-Patties but worse yet, through the wet mirage I can see there’s someone sitting by the entrance ramp. Competition.
The guy slowly takes shape as I approach. Pretty raggedly looking, bearded, wearing a baseball cap and an army surplus overcoat and at his feet is a cigar-shaped army surplus tote bag, the kind with just one long shoulder strap. He’s sitting with his back against a metal reflector and he looks like he’s been there for a while. He makes no move to get up so I walk up directly, smiling, nodding, my hands out where he can see them.
Yeah, I know this guy. He’s as familiar as familiar to the road as a shredded tractor-trailer wheel and a red-winged blackbird. I’ve seen him in Northern Ontario and on Vancouver Island and the Salvation Army hostel in the Crows Nest. I’ve never had a bad experience with Vietnam vets though I’ve heard some stories. I cup my palm to light up a couple of smokes and pass it to his remaining hand. Where are you going? Where you coming from? What’s the traffic like? Damn, two days, eh? Anywhere to get water ‘round here? Cops okay? Alright then, maybe I’ll just wander down the road a bit. You take care now. Here, take a couple more smokes for the road. Peace.
And I’m no more than 60 meters down the road when I hear a car coming. It’s natural to turn and face traffic and I do in time to see a powder-yellow Cadillac convertible drift past the smoking man. I see the driver giving him a glance but he doesn’t brake so I turn south. As the car passes though, I catch the driver’s eye and after some quick calculation, he starts to brake, pulling onto the shoulder.
I turn to look at the vet. He just smiles and waves ‘Go on’ and I shrug and turn and jog towards the car.
The driver’s a florid city slicker. New York City is only a couple hours drive from here and this big city queer says he’s looking to buy a property out in the country and, yeah, he’s heading for Virginia.
He doesn’t waste any time. Gets right to the point, tells me I’m a natural for one of the movies he’s producing. No, I wouldn’t only be screwing men, there’s always a couple of women too (yeah, right). Seriously, you’d be great, make a ton of cash. Check it out, he says, pulling a fat manila envelope out of the glove compartment, check out the photos in here, see what you think?
Aggressive homo drivers are an occupational hazard but this guy is soft and I know he’s not going to try and manhandle me, and besides my hand is resting on a concealed six-inch-long Canadian Tire “Bowie” knife strapped beneath the sleeping bag bound to the top of the pack I’ve placed between my legs. I don’t really want to throw a rod and force him to let me off ‘cause the only car that’s gonna pick up a lone guy with a pack in the middle of nowhere has cherries on top and trouble behind the wheel.
So I try and be diplomatic and say, ‘Listen dude, you wanna let me off here I don’t care but if you think I’m going to give you satisfaction for a couple hundred kilometers of open road, you’re out of your mind.’ And I ask about life in the Big Apple and get him talking about something other than his business and pretty soon we’re settled in and chillin’, and the Rolling Stones blasting from the 12-speaker Blaupunkt, are "Coming To My Emotional Rescue".
Of course, every now and then he pipes up with some new line. I mention I’d like to buy a camper van like the Westphalia we just passed: “Three months with me and you can buy it,” he says.
It’s a long 3 hours and early afternoon by the time we hit Winchester. He drops me at a mall in town with a final appeal that I look inside that envelope. By that time it’s pretty much a joke and we part with a handshake.
He pulls away in that luxurious automobile and I shoulder my pack for what’s going to be a two or three-hour walk to the trailhead, with a stop first for supplies at the Mega-Super-Discount-Savings-Special Mart that anchors the mall. And something cold for my parched throat.
I’m not halfway across the parking lot when a snappily dressed guy only a couple of years older than me steps up and into my face.
“How y’all doin’ today, beautiful day…”
I’m looking at some sort of Yankee cowboy in a bigass hat, cowboy shirt, bolo tie, jeans so creased you could crack an egg on em, and some very fine, spit and polish red-leather winkle-picker cowboy boots.
“Son, the Lord Jesus Christ has spoke to me this morning, and I want you to have this,” Tex tells me, handing over a folded $10 bill.
I guess I’m looking a little grubbier than normal, but I tell him I don’t need his money. I’ve got plenty of my own, and walk past. But he’s a persistent fellow and puts himself between me and the milkshake I’ve been thinking about since I woke up on the side of the road that morning, and again, tells me about God’s order to him and so I relent and I politely take his $10 which seems to make him very, very happy. And I’m a sucker for making people happy, providing it doesn’t involve looking in manila envelops. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses with that man’s money.
And so re-supplied with dried goods, and with a burbling belly full of strawberry milkshake (two of them if I recall) and greasy fried chicken I wandered off through the mid-day sun, an unseasonably hot May day in Winchester, Virginia, to find the trailhead.
The signs there pretty much told me what I already knew. The Shenandoah Valley is one of the oldest stretches of the Appalachian Mountains that run much of the length of the eastern seaboard of the US and southern Canada. Viewed days later from a different perspective the Shenandoah’s undulations from altitude to the valley and back reminded me of pictures I’d seen of sea monsters, only the spiny back of this beast dropped not beneath waves but expanses of farmland dotted with cows and silos and neat-as-a-pin barns. I expected to be there for about 10 days, walking south along the Appalachian Trail about 200 kms.
The other interesting thing about this particular stretch of the AT is that something like a quarter of the US population lives within a three hour drive, but during my late spring hike I’d see only two or three other hikers.
As late afternoon started to get dozy I used my waning energy to clear a camp deep in the bush, some distance from the trail itself. I boiled some water for tea, took out my journal and started to write. And as the last tendril of light cut through the canopy, they came.
Magicicada septendecul is a grand name for a fairly innocuous bug known parochially as the periodical cicada.
Like all cicadas when they're horny they kick up a hell of a racket. Tens of millions strong, the males make their way from the burrows where they spend virtually their entire lives, to the highest point they can find and start drumming out their courtship drill. The females too emerge to find their mate. The males die shortly after copulating and the females will only last long enough to deposit up to 600 eggs in slits they cut in the tree branches. When the wee ones are born they drop to the forest floor and burrow beneath the soil where they’ll spend their adolescence siphoning nutrients from tree roots.
The sound the males make is extraordinary, building in waves that never seem to break, at times discordant, at others seemingly cooperative, soaring with orchestral precision. If shoals of anchovies or flights of swallows sang, this is what it would sound like.
I was entranced, hypnotized, floating in my tent, surfing, surging atop seas of sound. And as quickly as they began, the noise broke off and died. Had an hour gone by? Or five minutes?
Over the coming days the love songs of the Magicicada septendecul followed my every step. And every night, as I lay in my tent or in some lean-to I’d listen as they slowly ebbed away. It was a very lonely feeling at times but one that sticks.
Since the spring of 1987 I’ve heard plenty of cicadas in different countries. The reason I know where I was when these particular one’s emerged is that they only bare themselves to the light once every 17 years.
No one really understands what causes Magicicada septendecul to emerge en-mass like that. I guess it’s the same kind of beautiful unknowable that we find in some species of salmon and butterflies and whales and birds.
And though I’ve no idea where I’ll be in the year 2021, you mark my words that when those days come, wherever I am, in some small measure I’ll be a young man alone and far from home in the ancient forests of the Shenandoah Valley.
Sir Peter Ustinov (RIP March 28 @ age of 82)
The Magicicada septendecula are coming! The Magicicada septendecula are coming!
Isn’t it marvelous? It’s sooo big National Geographic are, like, all over it. And a bunch of scientists and, Jeeze, everyone’s talking about it. I heard some folks are actually packing up and leaving town! And others are planning on sleeping rough outside! How weird is that?
Do you remember where you were the last time the Magicicada septendecula came?
‘Cause The Grinch knows EXACTLY where he was.
I cast my mind back, awaaaay back to the sunny summer of ’87. Ahh yes, freshly back in the East from a year’s skiing and banging nails in the western frontier, falling in and out of love, bright though bleary-eyed after a second semester back at university, a considerably leaner, un-inked version of myself was thumbing his way south.
Montreal, Kingston, Syracuse, Harrisburg and on down the I-81 to a lonely trailhead outside Winchester, Virginia. Three days hauling ass, dawn-till-dusk and the rides and the road-trash were as diverse and wonderful as a young man might want. There was the businessman who punted me 200 m before the border crossing and waited patiently on the other side for me to clear customs (“No offense, son.” None taken, I’ve done the same).
And the trailer trash who picked me up mid-afternoon somewhere in the Finger Lakes district, mom, dad and a T-ball infield worth of under-nines rolling about the back of a rusted ‘ol Chevy van like softballs in a bat-bag. Dad was determined that one day he was gonna get his-self to Canada on account of how good the huntin’ and fishin’ wuz (“cuz my brother-in-law went up there once and had a real good time ‘cept for all the Frenchies of course, no offence.” None taken, I’m English.)
And then to impress the kids, who had the vulpine look of youngsters who’d pretty much sacrifice one of their own for kicks if it meant turning the van back towards home, the toothless wonder at the wheel asked what winters were like up there in Canada. And then he was wondering how much snow fell and how he reckoned it must be hard on us Canadians always having to dig ourselves out “on account of all the storms and whatnot.” And pretty soon he got around to what he actually wanted to say which was to tell the yoots in the back that it was not uncommon for Canadian children to live in snow houses and take dog sleds to work.
And of course I played along thinking, whattheheck, be a good sport and so on… except for the fact that it took about 30 seconds of banter to realize he was serious. And this guy, this adult who lived maybe a 90-minute drive south of the border reckoned, I guess, that some sort of extraordinary meteorological event occurred between his house and mine that caused the dense coniferous forests of Appalachia to evaporate before and endless tundra populated only by bison and caribou and a particularly hardy sort of elementary school student who tethered half a dozen silver-eyed dogs to a harness and mushed his way to the igloo school. Amazing.
But, as always, more entertainment (Magicicada septendecula!) awaited the further south I went. Somewhere in Connecticut, one of those states about which very little is known in Canada, I put a fair bit of road beneath my boots, walking from one unproductive hitching spot to another, maybe six or eight kilometers south. Effective hitchhikers do this (I oughta write a book) because staying in one place is a bad idea. Give it a couple of hours but if nothing stops for you, move. If you’re gonna use your thumb to travel efficiently then you’ve gotta respect road mojo.
It’s always kinda weird walking along a big highway. The day before, crossing an amazing, mustabeen two mile-long bridge over the muddy Susquehanna River, some hicks in a passing pick-up with Pennsylvania plates threw a beer bottle at me. I don’t think I’m going out on the limb here when I say that a Michelob bottle (they must have been Michelob drinkers) traveling at 100+km/h is going to do some damage if it hits you!
So anyway, yeah, not many people walk on the really big highways that don’t have to. Maybe run out of gas, or run out of town. You get plenty crazy people on the side of the interstate and the T-Can up north; maybe the noise drowns out the voices. I dunno. Mostly they leave you alone.
So I’m walking and up ahead there’s the exit and beyond a ways, there’s the entrance. It’s bad enough that the road is empty except for the odd Freightliner thundering by with a load of denim or scrap metal or frozen All-Beef-Patties but worse yet, through the wet mirage I can see there’s someone sitting by the entrance ramp. Competition.
The guy slowly takes shape as I approach. Pretty raggedly looking, bearded, wearing a baseball cap and an army surplus overcoat and at his feet is a cigar-shaped army surplus tote bag, the kind with just one long shoulder strap. He’s sitting with his back against a metal reflector and he looks like he’s been there for a while. He makes no move to get up so I walk up directly, smiling, nodding, my hands out where he can see them.
Yeah, I know this guy. He’s as familiar as familiar to the road as a shredded tractor-trailer wheel and a red-winged blackbird. I’ve seen him in Northern Ontario and on Vancouver Island and the Salvation Army hostel in the Crows Nest. I’ve never had a bad experience with Vietnam vets though I’ve heard some stories. I cup my palm to light up a couple of smokes and pass it to his remaining hand. Where are you going? Where you coming from? What’s the traffic like? Damn, two days, eh? Anywhere to get water ‘round here? Cops okay? Alright then, maybe I’ll just wander down the road a bit. You take care now. Here, take a couple more smokes for the road. Peace.
And I’m no more than 60 meters down the road when I hear a car coming. It’s natural to turn and face traffic and I do in time to see a powder-yellow Cadillac convertible drift past the smoking man. I see the driver giving him a glance but he doesn’t brake so I turn south. As the car passes though, I catch the driver’s eye and after some quick calculation, he starts to brake, pulling onto the shoulder.
I turn to look at the vet. He just smiles and waves ‘Go on’ and I shrug and turn and jog towards the car.
The driver’s a florid city slicker. New York City is only a couple hours drive from here and this big city queer says he’s looking to buy a property out in the country and, yeah, he’s heading for Virginia.
He doesn’t waste any time. Gets right to the point, tells me I’m a natural for one of the movies he’s producing. No, I wouldn’t only be screwing men, there’s always a couple of women too (yeah, right). Seriously, you’d be great, make a ton of cash. Check it out, he says, pulling a fat manila envelope out of the glove compartment, check out the photos in here, see what you think?
Aggressive homo drivers are an occupational hazard but this guy is soft and I know he’s not going to try and manhandle me, and besides my hand is resting on a concealed six-inch-long Canadian Tire “Bowie” knife strapped beneath the sleeping bag bound to the top of the pack I’ve placed between my legs. I don’t really want to throw a rod and force him to let me off ‘cause the only car that’s gonna pick up a lone guy with a pack in the middle of nowhere has cherries on top and trouble behind the wheel.
So I try and be diplomatic and say, ‘Listen dude, you wanna let me off here I don’t care but if you think I’m going to give you satisfaction for a couple hundred kilometers of open road, you’re out of your mind.’ And I ask about life in the Big Apple and get him talking about something other than his business and pretty soon we’re settled in and chillin’, and the Rolling Stones blasting from the 12-speaker Blaupunkt, are "Coming To My Emotional Rescue".
Of course, every now and then he pipes up with some new line. I mention I’d like to buy a camper van like the Westphalia we just passed: “Three months with me and you can buy it,” he says.
It’s a long 3 hours and early afternoon by the time we hit Winchester. He drops me at a mall in town with a final appeal that I look inside that envelope. By that time it’s pretty much a joke and we part with a handshake.
He pulls away in that luxurious automobile and I shoulder my pack for what’s going to be a two or three-hour walk to the trailhead, with a stop first for supplies at the Mega-Super-Discount-Savings-Special Mart that anchors the mall. And something cold for my parched throat.
I’m not halfway across the parking lot when a snappily dressed guy only a couple of years older than me steps up and into my face.
“How y’all doin’ today, beautiful day…”
I’m looking at some sort of Yankee cowboy in a bigass hat, cowboy shirt, bolo tie, jeans so creased you could crack an egg on em, and some very fine, spit and polish red-leather winkle-picker cowboy boots.
“Son, the Lord Jesus Christ has spoke to me this morning, and I want you to have this,” Tex tells me, handing over a folded $10 bill.
I guess I’m looking a little grubbier than normal, but I tell him I don’t need his money. I’ve got plenty of my own, and walk past. But he’s a persistent fellow and puts himself between me and the milkshake I’ve been thinking about since I woke up on the side of the road that morning, and again, tells me about God’s order to him and so I relent and I politely take his $10 which seems to make him very, very happy. And I’m a sucker for making people happy, providing it doesn’t involve looking in manila envelops. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses with that man’s money.
And so re-supplied with dried goods, and with a burbling belly full of strawberry milkshake (two of them if I recall) and greasy fried chicken I wandered off through the mid-day sun, an unseasonably hot May day in Winchester, Virginia, to find the trailhead.
The signs there pretty much told me what I already knew. The Shenandoah Valley is one of the oldest stretches of the Appalachian Mountains that run much of the length of the eastern seaboard of the US and southern Canada. Viewed days later from a different perspective the Shenandoah’s undulations from altitude to the valley and back reminded me of pictures I’d seen of sea monsters, only the spiny back of this beast dropped not beneath waves but expanses of farmland dotted with cows and silos and neat-as-a-pin barns. I expected to be there for about 10 days, walking south along the Appalachian Trail about 200 kms.
The other interesting thing about this particular stretch of the AT is that something like a quarter of the US population lives within a three hour drive, but during my late spring hike I’d see only two or three other hikers.
As late afternoon started to get dozy I used my waning energy to clear a camp deep in the bush, some distance from the trail itself. I boiled some water for tea, took out my journal and started to write. And as the last tendril of light cut through the canopy, they came.
Magicicada septendecul is a grand name for a fairly innocuous bug known parochially as the periodical cicada.
Like all cicadas when they're horny they kick up a hell of a racket. Tens of millions strong, the males make their way from the burrows where they spend virtually their entire lives, to the highest point they can find and start drumming out their courtship drill. The females too emerge to find their mate. The males die shortly after copulating and the females will only last long enough to deposit up to 600 eggs in slits they cut in the tree branches. When the wee ones are born they drop to the forest floor and burrow beneath the soil where they’ll spend their adolescence siphoning nutrients from tree roots.
The sound the males make is extraordinary, building in waves that never seem to break, at times discordant, at others seemingly cooperative, soaring with orchestral precision. If shoals of anchovies or flights of swallows sang, this is what it would sound like.
I was entranced, hypnotized, floating in my tent, surfing, surging atop seas of sound. And as quickly as they began, the noise broke off and died. Had an hour gone by? Or five minutes?
Over the coming days the love songs of the Magicicada septendecul followed my every step. And every night, as I lay in my tent or in some lean-to I’d listen as they slowly ebbed away. It was a very lonely feeling at times but one that sticks.
Since the spring of 1987 I’ve heard plenty of cicadas in different countries. The reason I know where I was when these particular one’s emerged is that they only bare themselves to the light once every 17 years.
No one really understands what causes Magicicada septendecul to emerge en-mass like that. I guess it’s the same kind of beautiful unknowable that we find in some species of salmon and butterflies and whales and birds.
And though I’ve no idea where I’ll be in the year 2021, you mark my words that when those days come, wherever I am, in some small measure I’ll be a young man alone and far from home in the ancient forests of the Shenandoah Valley.
“… I think life can be very melancholy as well as being inspiring and pleasant. One of the functions of life is that throughout it you discover, sometimes painfully, your limitations. Because you find out not only what you can do but also what you can’t do.”
Sir Peter Ustinov (RIP March 28 @ age of 82)
The Singing Forest
The Magicicada septendecula are coming! The Magicicada septendecula are coming!
Isn’t it marvelous? It’s sooo big National Geographic are, like, all over it. And a bunch of scientists and, Jeeze, everyone’s talking about it. I heard some folks are actually packing up and leaving town! And others are planning on sleeping rough outside! How weird is that?
Do you remember where you were the last time the Magicicada septendecula came?
‘Cause The Grinch knows EXACTLY where he was.
I cast my mind back, awaaaay back to the sunny summer of ’87. Ahh yes, freshly back in the East from a year’s skiing and banging nails in the western frontier, falling in and out of love, bright though bleary-eyed after a second semester back at university, a considerably leaner, un-inked version of myself was thumbing his way south.
Montreal, Kingston, Syracuse, Harrisburg and on down the I-81 to a lonely trailhead outside Winchester, Virginia. Three days hauling ass, dawn-till-dusk and the rides and the road-trash were as diverse and wonderful as a young man might want. There was the businessman who punted me 200 m before the border crossing and waited patiently on the other side for me to clear customs (“No offense, son.” None taken, I’ve done the same).
And the trailer trash who picked me up mid-afternoon somewhere in the Finger Lakes district, mom, dad and a T-ball infield worth of under-nines rolling about the back of a rusted ‘ol Chevy van like softballs in a bat-bag. Dad was determined that one day he was gonna get his-self to Canada on account of how good the huntin’ and fishin’ wuz (“cuz my brother-in-law went up there once and had a real good time ‘cept for all the Frenchies of course, no offence.” None taken, I’m English.)
And then to impress the kids, who had the vulpine look of youngsters who’d pretty much sacrifice one of their own for kicks if it meant turning the van back towards home, the toothless wonder at the wheel asked what winters were like up there in Canada. And then he was wondering how much snow fell and how he reckoned it must be hard on us Canadians always having to dig ourselves out “on account of all the storms and whatnot.” And pretty soon he got around to what he actually wanted to say which was to tell the yoots in the back that it was not uncommon for Canadian children to live in snow houses and take dog sleds to work.
And of course I played along thinking, whattheheck, be a good sport and so on… except for the fact that it took about 30 seconds of banter to realize he was serious. And this guy, this adult who lived maybe a 90-minute drive south of the border reckoned, I guess, that some sort of extraordinary meteorological event occurred between his house and mine that caused the dense coniferous forests of Appalachia to evaporate before and endless tundra populated only by bison and caribou and a particularly hardy sort of elementary school student who tethered half a dozen silver-eyed dogs to a harness and mushed his way to the igloo school. Amazing.
But, as always, more entertainment (Magicicada septendecula!) awaited the further south I went. Somewhere in Connecticut, one of those states about which very little is known in Canada, I put a fair bit of road beneath my boots, walking from one unproductive hitching spot to another, maybe six or eight kilometers south. Effective hitchhikers do this (I oughta write a book) because staying in one place is a bad idea. Give it a couple of hours but if nothing stops for you, move. If you’re gonna use your thumb to travel efficiently then you’ve gotta respect road mojo.
It’s always kinda weird walking along a big highway. The day before, crossing an amazing, mustabeen two mile-long bridge over the muddy Susquehanna River, some hicks in a passing pick-up with Pennsylvania plates threw a beer bottle at me. I don’t think I’m going out on the limb here when I say that a Michelob bottle (they must have been Michelob drinkers) traveling at 100+km/h is going to do some damage if it hits you!
So anyway, yeah, not many people walk on the really big highways that don’t have to. Maybe run out of gas, or run out of town. You get plenty crazy people on the side of the interstate and the T-Can up north; maybe the noise drowns out the voices. I dunno. Mostly they leave you alone.
So I’m walking and up ahead there’s the exit and beyond a ways, there’s the entrance. It’s bad enough that the road is empty except for the odd Freightliner thundering by with a load of denim or scrap metal or frozen All-Beef-Patties but worse yet, through the wet mirage I can see there’s someone sitting by the entrance ramp. Competition.
The guy slowly takes shape as I approach. Pretty raggedly looking, bearded, wearing a baseball cap and an army surplus overcoat and at his feet is a cigar-shaped army surplus tote bag, the kind with just one long shoulder strap. He’s sitting with his back against a metal reflector and he looks like he’s been there for a while. He makes no move to get up so I walk up directly, smiling, nodding, my hands out where he can see them.
Yeah, I know this guy. He’s as familiar as familiar to the road as a shredded tractor-trailer wheel and a red-winged blackbird. I’ve seen him in Northern Ontario and on Vancouver Island and the Salvation Army hostel in the Crows Nest. I’ve never had a bad experience with Vietnam vets though I’ve heard some stories. I cup my palm to light up a couple of smokes and pass it to his remaining hand. Where are you going? Where you coming from? What’s the traffic like? Damn, two days, eh? Anywhere to get water ‘round here? Cops okay? Alright then, maybe I’ll just wander down the road a bit. You take care now. Here, take a couple more smokes for the road. Peace.
And I’m no more than 60 meters down the road when I hear a car coming. It’s natural to turn and face traffic and I do in time to see a powder-yellow Cadillac convertible drift past the smoking man. I see the driver giving him a glance but he doesn’t brake so I turn south. As the car passes though, I catch the driver’s eye and after some quick calculation, he starts to brake, pulling onto the shoulder.
I turn to look at the vet. He just smiles and waves ‘Go on’ and I shrug and turn and jog towards the car.
The driver’s a florid city slicker. New York City is only a couple hours drive from here and this big city queer says he’s looking to buy a property out in the country and, yeah, he’s heading for Virginia.
He doesn’t waste any time. Gets right to the point, tells me I’m a natural for one of the movies he’s producing. No, I wouldn’t only be screwing men, there’s always a couple of women too (yeah, right). Seriously, you’d be great, make a ton of cash. Check it out, he says, pulling a fat manila envelope out of the glove compartment, check out the photos in here, see what you think?
Aggressive homo drivers are an occupational hazard but this guy is soft and I know he’s not going to try and manhandle me, and besides my hand is resting on a concealed six-inch-long Canadian Tire “Bowie” knife strapped beneath the sleeping bag bound to the top of the pack I’ve placed between my legs. I don’t really want to throw a rod and force him to let me off ‘cause the only car that’s gonna pick up a lone guy with a pack in the middle of nowhere has cherries on top and trouble behind the wheel.
So I try and be diplomatic and say, ‘Listen dude, you wanna let me off here I don’t care but if you think I’m going to give you satisfaction for a couple hundred kilometers of open road, you’re out of your mind.’ And I ask about life in the Big Apple and get him talking about something other than his business and pretty soon we’re settled in and chillin’, and the Rolling Stones blasting from the 12-speaker Blaupunkt, are "Coming To My Emotional Rescue".
Of course, every now and then he pipes up with some new line. I mention I’d like to buy a camper van like the Westphalia we just passed: “Three months with me and you can buy it,” he says.
It’s a long 3 hours and early afternoon by the time we hit Winchester. He drops me at a mall in town with a final appeal that I look inside that envelope. By that time it’s pretty much a joke and we part with a handshake.
He pulls away in that luxurious automobile and I shoulder my pack for what’s going to be a two or three-hour walk to the trailhead, with a stop first for supplies at the Mega-Super-Discount-Savings-Special Mart that anchors the mall. And something cold for my parched throat.
I’m not halfway across the parking lot when a snappily dressed guy only a couple of years older than me steps up and into my face.
“How y’all doin’ today, beautiful day…”
I’m looking at some sort of Yankee cowboy in a bigass hat, cowboy shirt, bolo tie, jeans so creased you could crack an egg on em, and some very fine, spit and polish red-leather winkle-picker cowboy boots.
“Son, the Lord Jesus Christ has spoke to me this morning, and I want you to have this,” Tex tells me, handing over a folded $10 bill.
I guess I’m looking a little grubbier than normal, but I tell him I don’t need his money. I’ve got plenty of my own, and walk past. But he’s a persistent fellow and puts himself between me and the milkshake I’ve been thinking about since I woke up on the side of the road that morning, and again, tells me about God’s order to him and so I relent and I politely take his $10 which seems to make him very, very happy. And I’m a sucker for making people happy, providing it doesn’t involve looking in manila envelops. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses with that man’s money.
And so re-supplied with dried goods, and with a burbling belly full of strawberry milkshake (two of them if I recall) and greasy fried chicken I wandered off through the mid-day sun, an unseasonably hot May day in Winchester, Virginia, to find the trailhead.
The signs there pretty much told me what I already knew. The Shenandoah Valley is one of the oldest stretches of the Appalachian Mountains that run much of the length of the eastern seaboard of the US and southern Canada. Viewed days later from a different perspective the Shenandoah’s undulations from altitude to the valley and back reminded me of pictures I’d seen of sea monsters, only the spiny back of this beast dropped not beneath waves but expanses of farmland dotted with cows and silos and neat-as-a-pin barns. I expected to be there for about 10 days, walking south along the Appalachian Trail about 200 kms.
The other interesting thing about this particular stretch of the AT is that something like a quarter of the US population lives within a three hour drive, but during my late spring hike I’d see only two or three other hikers.
As late afternoon started to get dozy I used my waning energy to clear a camp deep in the bush, some distance from the trail itself. I boiled some water for tea, took out my journal and started to write. And as the last tendril of light cut through the canopy, they came.
Magicicada septendecul is a grand name for a fairly innocuous bug known parochially as the periodical cicada.
Like all cicadas when they're horny they kick up a hell of a racket. Tens of millions strong, the males make their way from the burrows where they spend virtually their entire lives, to the highest point they can find and start drumming out their courtship drill. The females too emerge to find their mate. The males die shortly after copulating and the females will only last long enough to deposit up to 600 eggs in slits they cut in the tree branches. When the wee ones are born they drop to the forest floor and burrow beneath the soil where they’ll spend their adolescence siphoning nutrients from tree roots.
The sound the males make is extraordinary, building in waves that never seem to break, at times discordant, at others seemingly cooperative, soaring with orchestral precision. If shoals of anchovies or flights of swallows sang, this is what it would sound like.
I was entranced, hypnotized, floating in my tent, surfing, surging atop seas of sound. And as quickly as they began, the noise broke off and died. Had an hour gone by? Or five minutes?
Over the coming days the love songs of the Magicicada septendecul followed my every step. And every night, as I lay in my tent or in some lean-to I’d listen as they slowly ebbed away. It was a very lonely feeling at times but one that sticks.
Since the spring of 1987 I’ve heard plenty of cicadas in different countries. The reason I know where I was when these particular one’s emerged is that they only bare themselves to the light once every 17 years.
No one really understands what causes Magicicada septendecul to emerge en-mass like that. I guess it’s the same kind of beautiful unknowable that we find in some species of salmon and butterflies and whales and birds.
And though I’ve no idea where I’ll be in the year 2021, you mark my words that when those days come, wherever I am, in some small measure I’ll be a young man alone and far from home in the ancient forests of the Shenandoah Valley.
Sir Peter Ustinov (RIP March 28 @ age of 82)
The Singing Forest
The Magicicada septendecula are coming! The Magicicada septendecula are coming!
Isn’t it marvelous? It’s sooo big National Geographic are, like, all over it. And a bunch of scientists and, Jeeze, everyone’s talking about it. I heard some folks are actually packing up and leaving town! And others are planning on sleeping rough outside! How weird is that?
Do you remember where you were the last time the Magicicada septendecula came?
‘Cause The Grinch knows EXACTLY where he was.
I cast my mind back, awaaaay back to the sunny summer of ’87. Ahh yes, freshly back in the East from a year’s skiing and banging nails in the western frontier, falling in and out of love, bright though bleary-eyed after a second semester back at university, a considerably leaner, un-inked version of myself was thumbing his way south.
Montreal, Kingston, Syracuse, Harrisburg and on down the I-81 to a lonely trailhead outside Winchester, Virginia. Three days hauling ass, dawn-till-dusk and the rides and the road-trash were as diverse and wonderful as a young man might want. There was the businessman who punted me 200 m before the border crossing and waited patiently on the other side for me to clear customs (“No offense, son.” None taken, I’ve done the same).
And the trailer trash who picked me up mid-afternoon somewhere in the Finger Lakes district, mom, dad and a T-ball infield worth of under-nines rolling about the back of a rusted ‘ol Chevy van like softballs in a bat-bag. Dad was determined that one day he was gonna get his-self to Canada on account of how good the huntin’ and fishin’ wuz (“cuz my brother-in-law went up there once and had a real good time ‘cept for all the Frenchies of course, no offence.” None taken, I’m English.)
And then to impress the kids, who had the vulpine look of youngsters who’d pretty much sacrifice one of their own for kicks if it meant turning the van back towards home, the toothless wonder at the wheel asked what winters were like up there in Canada. And then he was wondering how much snow fell and how he reckoned it must be hard on us Canadians always having to dig ourselves out “on account of all the storms and whatnot.” And pretty soon he got around to what he actually wanted to say which was to tell the yoots in the back that it was not uncommon for Canadian children to live in snow houses and take dog sleds to work.
And of course I played along thinking, whattheheck, be a good sport and so on… except for the fact that it took about 30 seconds of banter to realize he was serious. And this guy, this adult who lived maybe a 90-minute drive south of the border reckoned, I guess, that some sort of extraordinary meteorological event occurred between his house and mine that caused the dense coniferous forests of Appalachia to evaporate before and endless tundra populated only by bison and caribou and a particularly hardy sort of elementary school student who tethered half a dozen silver-eyed dogs to a harness and mushed his way to the igloo school. Amazing.
But, as always, more entertainment (Magicicada septendecula!) awaited the further south I went. Somewhere in Connecticut, one of those states about which very little is known in Canada, I put a fair bit of road beneath my boots, walking from one unproductive hitching spot to another, maybe six or eight kilometers south. Effective hitchhikers do this (I oughta write a book) because staying in one place is a bad idea. Give it a couple of hours but if nothing stops for you, move. If you’re gonna use your thumb to travel efficiently then you’ve gotta respect road mojo.
It’s always kinda weird walking along a big highway. The day before, crossing an amazing, mustabeen two mile-long bridge over the muddy Susquehanna River, some hicks in a passing pick-up with Pennsylvania plates threw a beer bottle at me. I don’t think I’m going out on the limb here when I say that a Michelob bottle (they must have been Michelob drinkers) traveling at 100+km/h is going to do some damage if it hits you!
So anyway, yeah, not many people walk on the really big highways that don’t have to. Maybe run out of gas, or run out of town. You get plenty crazy people on the side of the interstate and the T-Can up north; maybe the noise drowns out the voices. I dunno. Mostly they leave you alone.
So I’m walking and up ahead there’s the exit and beyond a ways, there’s the entrance. It’s bad enough that the road is empty except for the odd Freightliner thundering by with a load of denim or scrap metal or frozen All-Beef-Patties but worse yet, through the wet mirage I can see there’s someone sitting by the entrance ramp. Competition.
The guy slowly takes shape as I approach. Pretty raggedly looking, bearded, wearing a baseball cap and an army surplus overcoat and at his feet is a cigar-shaped army surplus tote bag, the kind with just one long shoulder strap. He’s sitting with his back against a metal reflector and he looks like he’s been there for a while. He makes no move to get up so I walk up directly, smiling, nodding, my hands out where he can see them.
Yeah, I know this guy. He’s as familiar as familiar to the road as a shredded tractor-trailer wheel and a red-winged blackbird. I’ve seen him in Northern Ontario and on Vancouver Island and the Salvation Army hostel in the Crows Nest. I’ve never had a bad experience with Vietnam vets though I’ve heard some stories. I cup my palm to light up a couple of smokes and pass it to his remaining hand. Where are you going? Where you coming from? What’s the traffic like? Damn, two days, eh? Anywhere to get water ‘round here? Cops okay? Alright then, maybe I’ll just wander down the road a bit. You take care now. Here, take a couple more smokes for the road. Peace.
And I’m no more than 60 meters down the road when I hear a car coming. It’s natural to turn and face traffic and I do in time to see a powder-yellow Cadillac convertible drift past the smoking man. I see the driver giving him a glance but he doesn’t brake so I turn south. As the car passes though, I catch the driver’s eye and after some quick calculation, he starts to brake, pulling onto the shoulder.
I turn to look at the vet. He just smiles and waves ‘Go on’ and I shrug and turn and jog towards the car.
The driver’s a florid city slicker. New York City is only a couple hours drive from here and this big city queer says he’s looking to buy a property out in the country and, yeah, he’s heading for Virginia.
He doesn’t waste any time. Gets right to the point, tells me I’m a natural for one of the movies he’s producing. No, I wouldn’t only be screwing men, there’s always a couple of women too (yeah, right). Seriously, you’d be great, make a ton of cash. Check it out, he says, pulling a fat manila envelope out of the glove compartment, check out the photos in here, see what you think?
Aggressive homo drivers are an occupational hazard but this guy is soft and I know he’s not going to try and manhandle me, and besides my hand is resting on a concealed six-inch-long Canadian Tire “Bowie” knife strapped beneath the sleeping bag bound to the top of the pack I’ve placed between my legs. I don’t really want to throw a rod and force him to let me off ‘cause the only car that’s gonna pick up a lone guy with a pack in the middle of nowhere has cherries on top and trouble behind the wheel.
So I try and be diplomatic and say, ‘Listen dude, you wanna let me off here I don’t care but if you think I’m going to give you satisfaction for a couple hundred kilometers of open road, you’re out of your mind.’ And I ask about life in the Big Apple and get him talking about something other than his business and pretty soon we’re settled in and chillin’, and the Rolling Stones blasting from the 12-speaker Blaupunkt, are "Coming To My Emotional Rescue".
Of course, every now and then he pipes up with some new line. I mention I’d like to buy a camper van like the Westphalia we just passed: “Three months with me and you can buy it,” he says.
It’s a long 3 hours and early afternoon by the time we hit Winchester. He drops me at a mall in town with a final appeal that I look inside that envelope. By that time it’s pretty much a joke and we part with a handshake.
He pulls away in that luxurious automobile and I shoulder my pack for what’s going to be a two or three-hour walk to the trailhead, with a stop first for supplies at the Mega-Super-Discount-Savings-Special Mart that anchors the mall. And something cold for my parched throat.
I’m not halfway across the parking lot when a snappily dressed guy only a couple of years older than me steps up and into my face.
“How y’all doin’ today, beautiful day…”
I’m looking at some sort of Yankee cowboy in a bigass hat, cowboy shirt, bolo tie, jeans so creased you could crack an egg on em, and some very fine, spit and polish red-leather winkle-picker cowboy boots.
“Son, the Lord Jesus Christ has spoke to me this morning, and I want you to have this,” Tex tells me, handing over a folded $10 bill.
I guess I’m looking a little grubbier than normal, but I tell him I don’t need his money. I’ve got plenty of my own, and walk past. But he’s a persistent fellow and puts himself between me and the milkshake I’ve been thinking about since I woke up on the side of the road that morning, and again, tells me about God’s order to him and so I relent and I politely take his $10 which seems to make him very, very happy. And I’m a sucker for making people happy, providing it doesn’t involve looking in manila envelops. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses with that man’s money.
And so re-supplied with dried goods, and with a burbling belly full of strawberry milkshake (two of them if I recall) and greasy fried chicken I wandered off through the mid-day sun, an unseasonably hot May day in Winchester, Virginia, to find the trailhead.
The signs there pretty much told me what I already knew. The Shenandoah Valley is one of the oldest stretches of the Appalachian Mountains that run much of the length of the eastern seaboard of the US and southern Canada. Viewed days later from a different perspective the Shenandoah’s undulations from altitude to the valley and back reminded me of pictures I’d seen of sea monsters, only the spiny back of this beast dropped not beneath waves but expanses of farmland dotted with cows and silos and neat-as-a-pin barns. I expected to be there for about 10 days, walking south along the Appalachian Trail about 200 kms.
The other interesting thing about this particular stretch of the AT is that something like a quarter of the US population lives within a three hour drive, but during my late spring hike I’d see only two or three other hikers.
As late afternoon started to get dozy I used my waning energy to clear a camp deep in the bush, some distance from the trail itself. I boiled some water for tea, took out my journal and started to write. And as the last tendril of light cut through the canopy, they came.
Magicicada septendecul is a grand name for a fairly innocuous bug known parochially as the periodical cicada.
Like all cicadas when they're horny they kick up a hell of a racket. Tens of millions strong, the males make their way from the burrows where they spend virtually their entire lives, to the highest point they can find and start drumming out their courtship drill. The females too emerge to find their mate. The males die shortly after copulating and the females will only last long enough to deposit up to 600 eggs in slits they cut in the tree branches. When the wee ones are born they drop to the forest floor and burrow beneath the soil where they’ll spend their adolescence siphoning nutrients from tree roots.
The sound the males make is extraordinary, building in waves that never seem to break, at times discordant, at others seemingly cooperative, soaring with orchestral precision. If shoals of anchovies or flights of swallows sang, this is what it would sound like.
I was entranced, hypnotized, floating in my tent, surfing, surging atop seas of sound. And as quickly as they began, the noise broke off and died. Had an hour gone by? Or five minutes?
Over the coming days the love songs of the Magicicada septendecul followed my every step. And every night, as I lay in my tent or in some lean-to I’d listen as they slowly ebbed away. It was a very lonely feeling at times but one that sticks.
Since the spring of 1987 I’ve heard plenty of cicadas in different countries. The reason I know where I was when these particular one’s emerged is that they only bare themselves to the light once every 17 years.
No one really understands what causes Magicicada septendecul to emerge en-mass like that. I guess it’s the same kind of beautiful unknowable that we find in some species of salmon and butterflies and whales and birds.
And though I’ve no idea where I’ll be in the year 2021, you mark my words that when those days come, wherever I am, in some small measure I’ll be a young man alone and far from home in the ancient forests of the Shenandoah Valley.
Sunday, March 21, 2004
The Death Of Mark Worth
On January 15, 45-year-old Australian journalist and documentary film-maker Mark Worth died in Sentani, Indonesia, a small town one-hour from Jayapura, the capitol of Papua province. At the time there were all kinds of rumors that a foreigner had been murdered in his bed when in fact it turned out that he'd drunk himself to death.
Like most people, I let my prejudices color events and thought no more of the incident until I met a Pakistan-based journalist friend of mine passing through Jakarta who told me she was greatly upset by Mark's death, that he'd been a great talent and a fine human being. There were others out there that crossed my path between mid-January and an unrelated return trip I made to Papua earlier this month.
On March 13 I met for three hours with Mark's widow in the house they shared in Abe Pantai (also called Abepura). The following is a slightly edited version of what she told me. I have sent it to some people who knew Mark and have decided to re-print it, with the intro I penned, on my blog. I have not included the photos mentioned in the intro.
For those interested in learning more about the issue which consumed Mark's lifework, find a copy of "Land of the Morning Star", an hour-long documentary he produced that first aired in December.
For my part, I'm embarrassed by my knee-jerk reaction: "A drunk passes out and dies. Big shit."
I'm still hoping to evolve to the point where I'm not going to simply write people off the way I did this fellow.
Cover Letter:
Hi all.
I wanted to on-pass a couple of photos I took last week of Mark Worth's widow Helen Ronsumbre, 29, daughter Insoraki, 3, and his grave site. They're not very good quality but I hope they'll give you at least a bit of an idea of the lay of the land.
Not many folks who knew Mark have been able to make it there on account of on-going troubles getting visas for Papua so feel free to send these out to whomever you feel might be interested. Steve, I've lost Ben's e-mail so maybe you could take care of that for me and send my regards.
I've also included a narrative based on a three hour-long talk I had with Helen and members of her family at their home in Abe Pantai on March 13. My apologies if exact dates and times turn out to be slightly off: I was translating for JB (ex of the ABC and now employed by ****** in Jakarta) who knew Mark, and so I was too busy to take detailed notes.
I never met Mark, didn't know of his work until after he died and have only the smallest inkling about the kind of man he was. I also don't know what exactly the doctors told him in Australia at the end of November - I'm not sure he told Helen precisely what the diagnosis was - but if you ask my opinion I would tell you that Mark returned to Abi Pantai to be around family he loved, in particular his wife and daughter, in anticipation of his death.
There are painful details in this (edited) story and it may not be for everyone but if it were me, I'd want an honest accounting to my friends. If you feel it is appropriate to share with others I leave the decision up to you.
If you have any questions about what I saw and heard in Abi Pantai please feel free to contact me by e-mail and/or at the phone number below.
Best Regards,
PD
Jakarta, Indonesia
21-03-04
Narrative:
Mark Worth's widow Helen Ronsumbre, 29, and her family in the oceanside village of Abi Pantai outside Jayapura give an emotional and troubling description of the period between the time of Mark's arrival back in Papua on Dec. 13 and his death in a Sentani hotel room on the morning of Jan. 15, 2004. Here are some of the things they mentioned.
Mark called from Australia in late November to say that he'd visited a doctor there, that he'd been told he was very ill and that he was coming to Papua to see her and their daughter three-year-old Insoraki. He was pale, sick but sober when he arrived in Jayapura from Bali, where he'd spent several days.
That lasted until his birthday, Dec. 23. A simple, brief diary he kept in a yellow steno-pad between the time he returned and the end of December when the shakes got too bad, indicated he was thinking in general terms about future projects while obviously wrestling with his thirst. What set him off this time is unclear. On Xmas eve he was taken to a pharmacy in Jayapura where he bought what looks like cough medicine. He was also taking pills prescribed in Australia with his whiskey every evening but the cover of the case is too smudged to read what they are.
Although exceedingly ill and consuming a minimum of three liters of local whiskey each day, Mark repeatedly and vehemently refused to be checked into hospital or to return to Australia in the three weeks prior to his death.
Late on Christmas day for example, having lost control of his physical faculties and apparently incoherent, he was taken to a Jayapura hospital. The following day he insisted on being returned to Abi Pantai, arguing he didn't trust Indonesian hospitals and would get better care at home. The family felt it was better to agree to his wishes than to have him try and leave the hospital on his own, something they felt he would certainly attempt.
Helen said she and Mark settled into a pattern over his last days in Abi Pantai. He would wake up after noon but would rarely be able to get out of bed, drinking steadily through the day and eating very little until evening when he got up long enough to cook large pots of spaghetti and meat sauce for the entire extended family, upwards of a dozen people. He seemed to really enjoy this.
Although most in the family are teetotalers who strongly disapproved of his drinking, there was always someone who could be badgered into going to town to pick up a few bottles. Later, he and Helen would sit out on the porch talking into the morning hours, Mark repeatedly steering the conversation back to the issue of Papuan independence. And, like a ritual, they'd wait until dawn when the Morning Star dipped below the horizon before going to bed.
If I have the time-line right, he remained at home, being ministered to by the Ronsumbre family, until early January at which point he checked into the Pacific Hotel, a haunt he'd shared with other Australian journos in the past.
He said that he did not want to be a burden on the family and felt it was best if he stayed away from the village. While Mark was never abusive to members of the Ronsumbre family, he was not so understanding with other people Helen said and he may have sensed that his presence was disruptive.
He remained at the Pacific Hotel, cared for by Helen, her younger brother (with whom I understand Mark had a strong bond) and other members of the family who visited every day, until shortly before his death.
The family, Helen in particular, repeatedly urged him to return to get further medical treatment in Australia, something Mark refused to do. In his final days he was exceedingly ill, completely bedridden and sometimes coughing up and urinating blood. A guy named Dr. Budi, who treats the foreign missionaries and was well known to Mark, became a regular part of his life through the last weeks, sometimes visiting a dozen times a day.
Several days before he died, Helen's family pooled their money and bought him a airline ticket home. Mark didn't fight the decision and slept as they drove out to Sentani airport. He was very weak and Helen was wiping fluid from his mouth and nose even as they pulled into the airport parking lot. Given his condition, Garuda staff on the ground refused to allow him to board the aircraft ("They tore up the ticket.") which would have seen him traveling unassisted to Timika and Bali before proceeding to Australia.
Mark was then checked into a second, star-rated hotel (it might have been the Hotel Semeru), beside the airport, where he remained until his death two or three days later.
Helen said that during his conscious hours he occasionally asked that they pray together. She recalls that at one point he described to her a vision he'd had: he'd seen Jesus and there were three angels preparing to come and take him (Mark) away.
In the early afternoon of January 14th, as Helen slept, Mark appeared on the front steps of the family home in Abi Pantai. He'd convinced a hotel driver to take him there. He embraced his father-in-law on the front porch and together they walked through the small home, briefly examining each and every room. He then asked to speak to his daughter. Insoraki, who was with a family friend, was sent for and father and daughter spent about 15 or 20 minutes together sitting on the porch talking and looking at the sea.
Before leaving the house Mark stood up, stretched his arms out wide and told the family (it may have been only the old man, the narrative broke down somewhat at this point) that he was leaving Papua the following day on a special airplane with very wide, light wings but that he would see them again one day.
He then got back into the hotel car, withdrew money from an ATM, bought three bottles of whiskey and returned to the hotel. By the time he arrived, one of the bottles was almost completely empty. Helen was furious and hid the remaining booze, which made Mark very angry. Eventually he slept.
Mark woke for the last sustained period shortly after dark. Helen said they prayed together for some time and that he seemed calm and lucid. They held hands and he told her repeatedly how much he loved her and their child. He tried to explain himself and how he felt. At one point he slowly drew his hand out of hers until just the very tips of their middle fingers were touching. As he did so, he told Helen that while they had been very, very close, now the physical line connecting them was going to be severed, but that they would meet again in heaven. As he said this he drew his finger away from hers so they no longer touched.
A short time later, Mark fell unconscious for the final time. In the early hours of the following morning, Helen and her brother called Dr. Budi (Mark may have had some sort of convulsion) who urged them again to take Mark directly to hospital. It was 5:30 in the morning, there was no traffic in Sentani and no vehicle to take them to the hospital. Ultimately, it didn't matter: Dr. Budi arrived a short time later by which point Mark was nearing the end. Together, he, Helen and Helen's brother watched and prayed as Mark pass away 30 minutes later, 6:30 am, Jan 15.
I understand that preparations for the funeral took at least three days. The church in Abi Pantai is a modest affair with an extraordinary ocean view when you step out into the sunlight. I was told literally thousands of people attended, and the two kilometer stretch of road between the village and the graveyard was a sea of people that brought traffic to a standstill.
The grave itself is the finest in the area, set back behind a stand of native trees perhaps 100 meters from the road, and a similar distance from the bay. In the evening the simple bottle-lamps around the grave are lit. And every night since his death, Helen sits on a simple wooden bench to the right of the grave talking to Mark, telling him about what's going on in the village, how the family is coping, what's happening with the Indonesian election campaign and how she is dealing with his death and her new pregnancy (which was hardly showing when we met). I understand Mark found out in December that he was going to be a father for the second time. She is hoping for a boy.
Helen says she really appreciates the many phone calls and letters she has received from abroad. I understand several people in particular have made an effort to stay in regular contact in the two months since Mark's death and I'll just say that during the entire course of a very emotional afternoon, the only time I thought Helen was going to break down, was when she described what it means to have people continue to call. I would encourage you to continue doing so.
She also said that the family's doors are always open to Mark's family and friends.
On January 15, 45-year-old Australian journalist and documentary film-maker Mark Worth died in Sentani, Indonesia, a small town one-hour from Jayapura, the capitol of Papua province. At the time there were all kinds of rumors that a foreigner had been murdered in his bed when in fact it turned out that he'd drunk himself to death.
Like most people, I let my prejudices color events and thought no more of the incident until I met a Pakistan-based journalist friend of mine passing through Jakarta who told me she was greatly upset by Mark's death, that he'd been a great talent and a fine human being. There were others out there that crossed my path between mid-January and an unrelated return trip I made to Papua earlier this month.
On March 13 I met for three hours with Mark's widow in the house they shared in Abe Pantai (also called Abepura). The following is a slightly edited version of what she told me. I have sent it to some people who knew Mark and have decided to re-print it, with the intro I penned, on my blog. I have not included the photos mentioned in the intro.
For those interested in learning more about the issue which consumed Mark's lifework, find a copy of "Land of the Morning Star", an hour-long documentary he produced that first aired in December.
For my part, I'm embarrassed by my knee-jerk reaction: "A drunk passes out and dies. Big shit."
I'm still hoping to evolve to the point where I'm not going to simply write people off the way I did this fellow.
Cover Letter:
Hi all.
I wanted to on-pass a couple of photos I took last week of Mark Worth's widow Helen Ronsumbre, 29, daughter Insoraki, 3, and his grave site. They're not very good quality but I hope they'll give you at least a bit of an idea of the lay of the land.
Not many folks who knew Mark have been able to make it there on account of on-going troubles getting visas for Papua so feel free to send these out to whomever you feel might be interested. Steve, I've lost Ben's e-mail so maybe you could take care of that for me and send my regards.
I've also included a narrative based on a three hour-long talk I had with Helen and members of her family at their home in Abe Pantai on March 13. My apologies if exact dates and times turn out to be slightly off: I was translating for JB (ex of the ABC and now employed by ****** in Jakarta) who knew Mark, and so I was too busy to take detailed notes.
I never met Mark, didn't know of his work until after he died and have only the smallest inkling about the kind of man he was. I also don't know what exactly the doctors told him in Australia at the end of November - I'm not sure he told Helen precisely what the diagnosis was - but if you ask my opinion I would tell you that Mark returned to Abi Pantai to be around family he loved, in particular his wife and daughter, in anticipation of his death.
There are painful details in this (edited) story and it may not be for everyone but if it were me, I'd want an honest accounting to my friends. If you feel it is appropriate to share with others I leave the decision up to you.
If you have any questions about what I saw and heard in Abi Pantai please feel free to contact me by e-mail and/or at the phone number below.
Best Regards,
PD
Jakarta, Indonesia
21-03-04
Narrative:
Mark Worth's widow Helen Ronsumbre, 29, and her family in the oceanside village of Abi Pantai outside Jayapura give an emotional and troubling description of the period between the time of Mark's arrival back in Papua on Dec. 13 and his death in a Sentani hotel room on the morning of Jan. 15, 2004. Here are some of the things they mentioned.
Mark called from Australia in late November to say that he'd visited a doctor there, that he'd been told he was very ill and that he was coming to Papua to see her and their daughter three-year-old Insoraki. He was pale, sick but sober when he arrived in Jayapura from Bali, where he'd spent several days.
That lasted until his birthday, Dec. 23. A simple, brief diary he kept in a yellow steno-pad between the time he returned and the end of December when the shakes got too bad, indicated he was thinking in general terms about future projects while obviously wrestling with his thirst. What set him off this time is unclear. On Xmas eve he was taken to a pharmacy in Jayapura where he bought what looks like cough medicine. He was also taking pills prescribed in Australia with his whiskey every evening but the cover of the case is too smudged to read what they are.
Although exceedingly ill and consuming a minimum of three liters of local whiskey each day, Mark repeatedly and vehemently refused to be checked into hospital or to return to Australia in the three weeks prior to his death.
Late on Christmas day for example, having lost control of his physical faculties and apparently incoherent, he was taken to a Jayapura hospital. The following day he insisted on being returned to Abi Pantai, arguing he didn't trust Indonesian hospitals and would get better care at home. The family felt it was better to agree to his wishes than to have him try and leave the hospital on his own, something they felt he would certainly attempt.
Helen said she and Mark settled into a pattern over his last days in Abi Pantai. He would wake up after noon but would rarely be able to get out of bed, drinking steadily through the day and eating very little until evening when he got up long enough to cook large pots of spaghetti and meat sauce for the entire extended family, upwards of a dozen people. He seemed to really enjoy this.
Although most in the family are teetotalers who strongly disapproved of his drinking, there was always someone who could be badgered into going to town to pick up a few bottles. Later, he and Helen would sit out on the porch talking into the morning hours, Mark repeatedly steering the conversation back to the issue of Papuan independence. And, like a ritual, they'd wait until dawn when the Morning Star dipped below the horizon before going to bed.
If I have the time-line right, he remained at home, being ministered to by the Ronsumbre family, until early January at which point he checked into the Pacific Hotel, a haunt he'd shared with other Australian journos in the past.
He said that he did not want to be a burden on the family and felt it was best if he stayed away from the village. While Mark was never abusive to members of the Ronsumbre family, he was not so understanding with other people Helen said and he may have sensed that his presence was disruptive.
He remained at the Pacific Hotel, cared for by Helen, her younger brother (with whom I understand Mark had a strong bond) and other members of the family who visited every day, until shortly before his death.
The family, Helen in particular, repeatedly urged him to return to get further medical treatment in Australia, something Mark refused to do. In his final days he was exceedingly ill, completely bedridden and sometimes coughing up and urinating blood. A guy named Dr. Budi, who treats the foreign missionaries and was well known to Mark, became a regular part of his life through the last weeks, sometimes visiting a dozen times a day.
Several days before he died, Helen's family pooled their money and bought him a airline ticket home. Mark didn't fight the decision and slept as they drove out to Sentani airport. He was very weak and Helen was wiping fluid from his mouth and nose even as they pulled into the airport parking lot. Given his condition, Garuda staff on the ground refused to allow him to board the aircraft ("They tore up the ticket.") which would have seen him traveling unassisted to Timika and Bali before proceeding to Australia.
Mark was then checked into a second, star-rated hotel (it might have been the Hotel Semeru), beside the airport, where he remained until his death two or three days later.
Helen said that during his conscious hours he occasionally asked that they pray together. She recalls that at one point he described to her a vision he'd had: he'd seen Jesus and there were three angels preparing to come and take him (Mark) away.
In the early afternoon of January 14th, as Helen slept, Mark appeared on the front steps of the family home in Abi Pantai. He'd convinced a hotel driver to take him there. He embraced his father-in-law on the front porch and together they walked through the small home, briefly examining each and every room. He then asked to speak to his daughter. Insoraki, who was with a family friend, was sent for and father and daughter spent about 15 or 20 minutes together sitting on the porch talking and looking at the sea.
Before leaving the house Mark stood up, stretched his arms out wide and told the family (it may have been only the old man, the narrative broke down somewhat at this point) that he was leaving Papua the following day on a special airplane with very wide, light wings but that he would see them again one day.
He then got back into the hotel car, withdrew money from an ATM, bought three bottles of whiskey and returned to the hotel. By the time he arrived, one of the bottles was almost completely empty. Helen was furious and hid the remaining booze, which made Mark very angry. Eventually he slept.
Mark woke for the last sustained period shortly after dark. Helen said they prayed together for some time and that he seemed calm and lucid. They held hands and he told her repeatedly how much he loved her and their child. He tried to explain himself and how he felt. At one point he slowly drew his hand out of hers until just the very tips of their middle fingers were touching. As he did so, he told Helen that while they had been very, very close, now the physical line connecting them was going to be severed, but that they would meet again in heaven. As he said this he drew his finger away from hers so they no longer touched.
A short time later, Mark fell unconscious for the final time. In the early hours of the following morning, Helen and her brother called Dr. Budi (Mark may have had some sort of convulsion) who urged them again to take Mark directly to hospital. It was 5:30 in the morning, there was no traffic in Sentani and no vehicle to take them to the hospital. Ultimately, it didn't matter: Dr. Budi arrived a short time later by which point Mark was nearing the end. Together, he, Helen and Helen's brother watched and prayed as Mark pass away 30 minutes later, 6:30 am, Jan 15.
I understand that preparations for the funeral took at least three days. The church in Abi Pantai is a modest affair with an extraordinary ocean view when you step out into the sunlight. I was told literally thousands of people attended, and the two kilometer stretch of road between the village and the graveyard was a sea of people that brought traffic to a standstill.
The grave itself is the finest in the area, set back behind a stand of native trees perhaps 100 meters from the road, and a similar distance from the bay. In the evening the simple bottle-lamps around the grave are lit. And every night since his death, Helen sits on a simple wooden bench to the right of the grave talking to Mark, telling him about what's going on in the village, how the family is coping, what's happening with the Indonesian election campaign and how she is dealing with his death and her new pregnancy (which was hardly showing when we met). I understand Mark found out in December that he was going to be a father for the second time. She is hoping for a boy.
Helen says she really appreciates the many phone calls and letters she has received from abroad. I understand several people in particular have made an effort to stay in regular contact in the two months since Mark's death and I'll just say that during the entire course of a very emotional afternoon, the only time I thought Helen was going to break down, was when she described what it means to have people continue to call. I would encourage you to continue doing so.
She also said that the family's doors are always open to Mark's family and friends.
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Sprung Spring, The Kampung Bomb And Matters Of The Faith
Just off the phone with Mum. Temperature soared to 8C in Montreal today where folks in shorts and Ts wandered through puddles with goofy smiles on their faces.
“Wore my office jacket to work and sent the winter jacket to the dry cleaners,” she says.
Some people wait for the robins to return before declaring winter over. In our family the ritual dry-cleaning-prior-to-packing-away-of-the-winter-wear is the surest sign that spring has sprung.
Of course it’s an illusion. Spring doesn’t sprung until the Sunday nearest St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, the day of the annual parade along the length of St. Catherine’s Street, which always coincides with the last, vicious right hook from the allegedly departed winter.
I’ve never seen a St. Paddy’s Day parade that didn’t require full winter battle wear: it was one of the few days during the course of the winter that I actually wore a touque. The main shopping boulevard is one of the city’s finest wind tunnels. The gusts ricochet off the stone facades of Simpson’s, Hudson’s Bay and other classic Montreal grey-stone edifices (where one watches movies or plays arcade games these days) built on the back of 200 hundred years of the fur trade, plunging a relatively balmy minus five to a bone rattling –28C.
Later the Old Dublin would morph into a sweathouse as once-a-year Irishmen of every hue peeled out of half a dozen layers of wool and synthetics for a day of fully sanctioned drunkenness, bad jokes and endless recitations of Dirty ‘Ol Town.
Mum’s an optimist. I expect she’ll be digging out those woolies at least once more before it’s safe to stick a spike in the winter of 2003-04 and call it ‘done’.
Mum tells me we’ve just celebrated another anniversary of some significance. 36 years ago Feb. 28, Dad arrived in Toronto, a bold first step onto terra incognita for the Dillon clan. Mum, Clare and I followed about three weeks later, before boarding a train for the nine hour ride to Thompson, Manitoba and our first Canadian apartment.
And here I am, huddling behind the closed doors of my Jakarta home wearing a balaclava against the noxious fumes of the dengue foggers who’ve just bombed my backyard. Ten folks in this little kampung alone have come down with it during the current epidemic. Over 340 people have died, mostly here in West Java, and thousands are hospitalized. It’s so bad we treat every little cough and ache as though it were a sign to head for the hospital. Others in the kampung are having the insides of their homes sprayed but I’m not sure the cats will last long gnawing on insecticide-soaked toys. As it is, I’m worried about the fish, though they’ve proven themselves resilient to poison, brackish water and neglect in the past.
Different worlds, eh?
Speaking of which, a day has been chosen for The Grinch to shed this moral coil, emerging after the incantation of sacred words and the blessing of the religious, as a fully formed follower of Mohammed. And, what more appropriate time to do it than on the aforementioned Irish holiday. Two weeks tomorrow, freshly back from a week-long stay in Papua (first day of the national elections will be spent in Wamena!) I’m off to Istiqal Mosque, the largest mosque in Asia, for the day-long conversion process. J’s brother will witness and Juliana will attend as well.
Have to practice getting my mouth around a couple of Arabic formulas, the most important of which is the declaration of faith repeated five times a day in a hundred million mosques worldwide: “There is no God but God and Mohammed was his Prophet.”
Not sure how many uncircumcised-Moslem-Irish-Scot-Canadians there are out there but I vow here and now that if I add another hyphen to my socio-genetic profile, I’ll explore the possibility of federal funding to help me deal with my complicated, conflicted emotions. And then found a support group for others like me.
The whole thing should be quite interesting. I’ve read heaps (so as to avoid being a spectator in my own life) and will try my best not to trouble the revered Imam with too many spurious questions: no point in overturning the mango cart now when I’ve got the rest of a lifetime to poke and probe.
Have to pick Jihan’s brain afterwards over a celebratory St. Paddy’s Day pint o Guinness…
Just off the phone with Mum. Temperature soared to 8C in Montreal today where folks in shorts and Ts wandered through puddles with goofy smiles on their faces.
“Wore my office jacket to work and sent the winter jacket to the dry cleaners,” she says.
Some people wait for the robins to return before declaring winter over. In our family the ritual dry-cleaning-prior-to-packing-away-of-the-winter-wear is the surest sign that spring has sprung.
Of course it’s an illusion. Spring doesn’t sprung until the Sunday nearest St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, the day of the annual parade along the length of St. Catherine’s Street, which always coincides with the last, vicious right hook from the allegedly departed winter.
I’ve never seen a St. Paddy’s Day parade that didn’t require full winter battle wear: it was one of the few days during the course of the winter that I actually wore a touque. The main shopping boulevard is one of the city’s finest wind tunnels. The gusts ricochet off the stone facades of Simpson’s, Hudson’s Bay and other classic Montreal grey-stone edifices (where one watches movies or plays arcade games these days) built on the back of 200 hundred years of the fur trade, plunging a relatively balmy minus five to a bone rattling –28C.
Later the Old Dublin would morph into a sweathouse as once-a-year Irishmen of every hue peeled out of half a dozen layers of wool and synthetics for a day of fully sanctioned drunkenness, bad jokes and endless recitations of Dirty ‘Ol Town.
Mum’s an optimist. I expect she’ll be digging out those woolies at least once more before it’s safe to stick a spike in the winter of 2003-04 and call it ‘done’.
Mum tells me we’ve just celebrated another anniversary of some significance. 36 years ago Feb. 28, Dad arrived in Toronto, a bold first step onto terra incognita for the Dillon clan. Mum, Clare and I followed about three weeks later, before boarding a train for the nine hour ride to Thompson, Manitoba and our first Canadian apartment.
And here I am, huddling behind the closed doors of my Jakarta home wearing a balaclava against the noxious fumes of the dengue foggers who’ve just bombed my backyard. Ten folks in this little kampung alone have come down with it during the current epidemic. Over 340 people have died, mostly here in West Java, and thousands are hospitalized. It’s so bad we treat every little cough and ache as though it were a sign to head for the hospital. Others in the kampung are having the insides of their homes sprayed but I’m not sure the cats will last long gnawing on insecticide-soaked toys. As it is, I’m worried about the fish, though they’ve proven themselves resilient to poison, brackish water and neglect in the past.
Different worlds, eh?
Speaking of which, a day has been chosen for The Grinch to shed this moral coil, emerging after the incantation of sacred words and the blessing of the religious, as a fully formed follower of Mohammed. And, what more appropriate time to do it than on the aforementioned Irish holiday. Two weeks tomorrow, freshly back from a week-long stay in Papua (first day of the national elections will be spent in Wamena!) I’m off to Istiqal Mosque, the largest mosque in Asia, for the day-long conversion process. J’s brother will witness and Juliana will attend as well.
Have to practice getting my mouth around a couple of Arabic formulas, the most important of which is the declaration of faith repeated five times a day in a hundred million mosques worldwide: “There is no God but God and Mohammed was his Prophet.”
Not sure how many uncircumcised-Moslem-Irish-Scot-Canadians there are out there but I vow here and now that if I add another hyphen to my socio-genetic profile, I’ll explore the possibility of federal funding to help me deal with my complicated, conflicted emotions. And then found a support group for others like me.
The whole thing should be quite interesting. I’ve read heaps (so as to avoid being a spectator in my own life) and will try my best not to trouble the revered Imam with too many spurious questions: no point in overturning the mango cart now when I’ve got the rest of a lifetime to poke and probe.
Have to pick Jihan’s brain afterwards over a celebratory St. Paddy’s Day pint o Guinness…
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Is Indonesia Encouraging Genocide in Papua?
The Number One question I’ve been asked since I got back from Papua – with the exception of ‘wadidyagetme?’ – goes something like this.
“Is the Indonesian government trying to wipe out the Papuans?”
It’s an important question, not nearly as ridiculous as it might sound to someone outside the community of Indonesia-watchers. I mean, what government in the modern era would sanction the killing of two million of their own citizens? Or maybe I’m the one being naïve, now.
The background to the question is Indonesia’s four decade-long occupation of Papua (formerly known as Irian Jaya), the western end of the island known as Papua-New Guinea. During that time, an estimated one million land-hungry settlers from across Indonesia have immigrated to Papua, boosting the overall population to roughly three million.
With them have come the loggers and miners and fishermen who are slowly nibbling away at the island’s massive resource base, often times at the expense of indigenous communities.
Seems like everything to do with the place is kinda foggy: too big, too diverse, too far flung (and often primitive) is the population to have a real clear view of what the specific impact of these incursions are. But, one doesn’t need a penis gourd to understand that local folks are about as happy with the arrangement now as you average displaced, quasi-alcoholic Plains Cree might have been 120 years ago with Whitey’s on-going westward expansion.
There’s plenty conclusive evidence of human rights violations on a grant scale in Papua, though I’m loath to use the HR word because it really conceals so much. Police in Jakarta whinge about their human rights being violated because they have to buy paper for their typewriters (with money they’ve extorted from motorists, drug dealers and anyone without the right ID papers).
Lets describe it as it is. The Indonesian army uses the Papuans for target practice. A Swiss friend of mine jailed in Jayapura for visa violations watched Brimob (a poorly trained, poorly equipped “elite” paramilitary police force that operates in Indonesia’s hotspots) goons beat several Papuan university students to death in front of him in the wake of a street clash there a couple of years ago. Sex crimes on a vast scale, extortion, random detention and beatings, extra-judicial killings: the behavior of Indonesia’s security forces has been as brutal as one might expect.
While the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) are used to operating with utter impunity even in the post-east Timor era, they’ve had their you-know-what’s caught in a door jam twice in the past three years.
The Nov. 2001 murder of independence leader Theys Eluay by members of Kopassus (several junior Special Forces officers received sentences of under three years for strangling the Don King look-alike in the front seat of his own car, after attending a mess dinner with senior TNI officers) and the ambush/executions of three teachers in Aug 2002 (two of whom were American) by persons unknown (read: security forces) returning from a picnic near the massive Freeport mine, forced the slumbering Yanks to appear to act.
The largest gold mine on the planet, Freeport has been paying millions annually in “protection” monies to the TNI (Indonesian Armed Forces). It’s generally felt the murders were designed to send a message to the mine’s Louisiana owners to keep the cash pipeline open.
The FBI conducted a couple of investigations into the latter incident and the fact the results have yet to been publicly released suggests either they didn’t get the kind of access they were promised, or have very strong suspicions that the army was involved but insufficient evidence to make a formal accusation. Put it another way: if they felt they could exonerate the Indonesians, they would. Partners in terror and all that, harrumph harrumph.
Papua has a wee insurgency of its own but the Free Papua Movement is fractured, poorly armed and largely ineffective, hidden away in the dense bush of the mountainous interior. Unlike the Free Aceh Movement at the other end of the archipelago, there’s no apparent coordination between different rebel units, at least some of which appear to be nothing more than gangs of kidnappers and ransom-takers, no shared vision and little in the way of experienced battlefield leadership.
None of which bothers the powers that be too much because it’s important for the army that can’t shoot straight to get out there and beat the bushes, get some jungle training for their boys so they’ll be sufficiently pumped up to effectively keep a close eye on the generals’ highly profitable illegal logging, mining and fishing operations (see ‘Migrants’, above).
But there’s something quite evil going on in Papua. While there, we heard real horror stories about what’s going on in the backcountry. Of people being buried alive by their family’s because they were believed infected by “evil spirits”, of youngsters withering away and dying despite proper drug treatments, of graveyards where the graves of infants wait half competed for mother and father arrive. There’s something sinister happening there, well away from the eyes of world.
On the streets of the main towns it is easy to see the effects of prolonged exposure to foreign influences: alcoholism, disease, despair. Churches. It’s like being back on the Rez in British Columbia except instead of North American aboriginals killing themselves, you’ve got black-skinned, kinky-haired Melanesians.
Perhaps the most obvious of the great many problems facing indigenous Papuans – and of course the migrant population as well – will be the spread of HIV/AIDS. It’s generally accepted – though who really knows for sure – that the virus arrived with Thai tuna fishing fleets in the deep harbor at Merauke in the early 90s, where it incubated among prostitutes who will cycle through various towns, ports and logging camps over the course of a year or two – thanks again to the TNI. Infection levels in certain parts of Papuan society are comparable to sub-Saharan Africa, and like the bad old days of long-distant truckers running from the jungles of Uganda into brothels of Kampala and onwards, the mode of transmission is almost exclusively by heterosexual sex. Elsewhere in Indonesia IV drug use and dirty needles are the primary routes. Though most figures should be taken with a high amount of skepticism (read: under-reporting is the order if one considered official Indonesian figures) sex workers in Merauke and Sorong report infection levels of 27 and 17 per cent respectively.
No one has the science to support it and the government has no interest in letting foreign researchers in to do the field work (the army chief of staff early this year said foreign and domestic non-governmental organizations were waging a covert war against Indonesia under the orders of undisclosed foreign governments) but all the anecdotal evidence suggests that the virus has made the leap from these fairly small sub-groups into the general population where it will spread like wildfire. The fingers hovering above the panic buttons belong the African mafia, those aidies and journalists now based in Indonesia who cut their teeth on Africa’s AIDS crisis.
While there’s no single ‘template’ to accurately describe “Papuan” sexual practices, it can be said that folks generally start having sex at the early onset of puberty, that they have numerous sexual partners, and that while men and women do bond for life, that does not mean they are sexually exclusive to their mates. Sorta like in Canada. Except that in those areas where this is the tradition, Papuans acknowledge it. While we go to marriage counselors. And use condoms, something they do not.
A lady I know who did the most recent and in-depth study of Papuan sexuality is deeply worried that the virus will tear through communities, rapidly killing a population that already loses many people to the kinds of opportunistic illnesses that ensure HIV sufferers may never actually be diagnosed as such. These diseases include TB, malaria, typhoid, dengue and other lesser tropicals that won’t kill a healthy, well fed adult male, but account for large numbers of untimely Papuan dead. In particular, upper respiratory tract infections that every clinician I met said was the number one killer.
Meanwhile, the government does nothing. Or almost nothing.
Which brings us back to the question of the day. Is Jakarta waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Papuans?
People whispered this in my ear on many occasions. It is market currency in Wamena and Jayapura and Sorong and elsewhere. Something folks discuss behind closed doors.
Is there a DELIBERATE offensive?
Well, Indonesia has proven itself capable of some quite extraordinary atrocities: witness 800,000 “communists” murdered in a two year period 40 years ago; the invasion of East Timor in 1975 and the subsequent campaign that cost the lives of perhaps one in four of the former colony’s citizens. These are well documented but there have been plenty of other lesser known cleansings over the years.
I’m not sure that there’s some cabal linking Istana Merdeka, the presidential palace, TNI headquarters, and the lofty executive suites of petroleum towers on Jl. Sudirman that’s saying: “Let’s have AIDS thin out the population on the ground there in Papua and then in 15 years we put a loyal migrant population to work logging and mining our last resource base, without having to deal with uppity locals armed with M-16s, those traitorous NGOs and aid groups, or a press with fangs.”
It all seems too diabolical.
But then, if you went to Papua with the idea in your mind that there might in fact be such a conspiracy, and you traveled around a bit and talked to heaps of people in the health care field or social service providers and teachers, or church and mosque leaders, and you picked the brains of those Indonesians who are truly committed to helping the Papuans save themselves. If you did those things and you came in with your eyes looking in a certain direction, I’m pretty sure you’d find all the evidence you need to support the theory, without ever finding the document, the smoking gun.
Of that, I’m absolutely certain.
The Number One question I’ve been asked since I got back from Papua – with the exception of ‘wadidyagetme?’ – goes something like this.
“Is the Indonesian government trying to wipe out the Papuans?”
It’s an important question, not nearly as ridiculous as it might sound to someone outside the community of Indonesia-watchers. I mean, what government in the modern era would sanction the killing of two million of their own citizens? Or maybe I’m the one being naïve, now.
The background to the question is Indonesia’s four decade-long occupation of Papua (formerly known as Irian Jaya), the western end of the island known as Papua-New Guinea. During that time, an estimated one million land-hungry settlers from across Indonesia have immigrated to Papua, boosting the overall population to roughly three million.
With them have come the loggers and miners and fishermen who are slowly nibbling away at the island’s massive resource base, often times at the expense of indigenous communities.
Seems like everything to do with the place is kinda foggy: too big, too diverse, too far flung (and often primitive) is the population to have a real clear view of what the specific impact of these incursions are. But, one doesn’t need a penis gourd to understand that local folks are about as happy with the arrangement now as you average displaced, quasi-alcoholic Plains Cree might have been 120 years ago with Whitey’s on-going westward expansion.
There’s plenty conclusive evidence of human rights violations on a grant scale in Papua, though I’m loath to use the HR word because it really conceals so much. Police in Jakarta whinge about their human rights being violated because they have to buy paper for their typewriters (with money they’ve extorted from motorists, drug dealers and anyone without the right ID papers).
Lets describe it as it is. The Indonesian army uses the Papuans for target practice. A Swiss friend of mine jailed in Jayapura for visa violations watched Brimob (a poorly trained, poorly equipped “elite” paramilitary police force that operates in Indonesia’s hotspots) goons beat several Papuan university students to death in front of him in the wake of a street clash there a couple of years ago. Sex crimes on a vast scale, extortion, random detention and beatings, extra-judicial killings: the behavior of Indonesia’s security forces has been as brutal as one might expect.
While the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) are used to operating with utter impunity even in the post-east Timor era, they’ve had their you-know-what’s caught in a door jam twice in the past three years.
The Nov. 2001 murder of independence leader Theys Eluay by members of Kopassus (several junior Special Forces officers received sentences of under three years for strangling the Don King look-alike in the front seat of his own car, after attending a mess dinner with senior TNI officers) and the ambush/executions of three teachers in Aug 2002 (two of whom were American) by persons unknown (read: security forces) returning from a picnic near the massive Freeport mine, forced the slumbering Yanks to appear to act.
The largest gold mine on the planet, Freeport has been paying millions annually in “protection” monies to the TNI (Indonesian Armed Forces). It’s generally felt the murders were designed to send a message to the mine’s Louisiana owners to keep the cash pipeline open.
The FBI conducted a couple of investigations into the latter incident and the fact the results have yet to been publicly released suggests either they didn’t get the kind of access they were promised, or have very strong suspicions that the army was involved but insufficient evidence to make a formal accusation. Put it another way: if they felt they could exonerate the Indonesians, they would. Partners in terror and all that, harrumph harrumph.
Papua has a wee insurgency of its own but the Free Papua Movement is fractured, poorly armed and largely ineffective, hidden away in the dense bush of the mountainous interior. Unlike the Free Aceh Movement at the other end of the archipelago, there’s no apparent coordination between different rebel units, at least some of which appear to be nothing more than gangs of kidnappers and ransom-takers, no shared vision and little in the way of experienced battlefield leadership.
None of which bothers the powers that be too much because it’s important for the army that can’t shoot straight to get out there and beat the bushes, get some jungle training for their boys so they’ll be sufficiently pumped up to effectively keep a close eye on the generals’ highly profitable illegal logging, mining and fishing operations (see ‘Migrants’, above).
But there’s something quite evil going on in Papua. While there, we heard real horror stories about what’s going on in the backcountry. Of people being buried alive by their family’s because they were believed infected by “evil spirits”, of youngsters withering away and dying despite proper drug treatments, of graveyards where the graves of infants wait half competed for mother and father arrive. There’s something sinister happening there, well away from the eyes of world.
On the streets of the main towns it is easy to see the effects of prolonged exposure to foreign influences: alcoholism, disease, despair. Churches. It’s like being back on the Rez in British Columbia except instead of North American aboriginals killing themselves, you’ve got black-skinned, kinky-haired Melanesians.
Perhaps the most obvious of the great many problems facing indigenous Papuans – and of course the migrant population as well – will be the spread of HIV/AIDS. It’s generally accepted – though who really knows for sure – that the virus arrived with Thai tuna fishing fleets in the deep harbor at Merauke in the early 90s, where it incubated among prostitutes who will cycle through various towns, ports and logging camps over the course of a year or two – thanks again to the TNI. Infection levels in certain parts of Papuan society are comparable to sub-Saharan Africa, and like the bad old days of long-distant truckers running from the jungles of Uganda into brothels of Kampala and onwards, the mode of transmission is almost exclusively by heterosexual sex. Elsewhere in Indonesia IV drug use and dirty needles are the primary routes. Though most figures should be taken with a high amount of skepticism (read: under-reporting is the order if one considered official Indonesian figures) sex workers in Merauke and Sorong report infection levels of 27 and 17 per cent respectively.
No one has the science to support it and the government has no interest in letting foreign researchers in to do the field work (the army chief of staff early this year said foreign and domestic non-governmental organizations were waging a covert war against Indonesia under the orders of undisclosed foreign governments) but all the anecdotal evidence suggests that the virus has made the leap from these fairly small sub-groups into the general population where it will spread like wildfire. The fingers hovering above the panic buttons belong the African mafia, those aidies and journalists now based in Indonesia who cut their teeth on Africa’s AIDS crisis.
While there’s no single ‘template’ to accurately describe “Papuan” sexual practices, it can be said that folks generally start having sex at the early onset of puberty, that they have numerous sexual partners, and that while men and women do bond for life, that does not mean they are sexually exclusive to their mates. Sorta like in Canada. Except that in those areas where this is the tradition, Papuans acknowledge it. While we go to marriage counselors. And use condoms, something they do not.
A lady I know who did the most recent and in-depth study of Papuan sexuality is deeply worried that the virus will tear through communities, rapidly killing a population that already loses many people to the kinds of opportunistic illnesses that ensure HIV sufferers may never actually be diagnosed as such. These diseases include TB, malaria, typhoid, dengue and other lesser tropicals that won’t kill a healthy, well fed adult male, but account for large numbers of untimely Papuan dead. In particular, upper respiratory tract infections that every clinician I met said was the number one killer.
Meanwhile, the government does nothing. Or almost nothing.
Which brings us back to the question of the day. Is Jakarta waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Papuans?
People whispered this in my ear on many occasions. It is market currency in Wamena and Jayapura and Sorong and elsewhere. Something folks discuss behind closed doors.
Is there a DELIBERATE offensive?
Well, Indonesia has proven itself capable of some quite extraordinary atrocities: witness 800,000 “communists” murdered in a two year period 40 years ago; the invasion of East Timor in 1975 and the subsequent campaign that cost the lives of perhaps one in four of the former colony’s citizens. These are well documented but there have been plenty of other lesser known cleansings over the years.
I’m not sure that there’s some cabal linking Istana Merdeka, the presidential palace, TNI headquarters, and the lofty executive suites of petroleum towers on Jl. Sudirman that’s saying: “Let’s have AIDS thin out the population on the ground there in Papua and then in 15 years we put a loyal migrant population to work logging and mining our last resource base, without having to deal with uppity locals armed with M-16s, those traitorous NGOs and aid groups, or a press with fangs.”
It all seems too diabolical.
But then, if you went to Papua with the idea in your mind that there might in fact be such a conspiracy, and you traveled around a bit and talked to heaps of people in the health care field or social service providers and teachers, or church and mosque leaders, and you picked the brains of those Indonesians who are truly committed to helping the Papuans save themselves. If you did those things and you came in with your eyes looking in a certain direction, I’m pretty sure you’d find all the evidence you need to support the theory, without ever finding the document, the smoking gun.
Of that, I’m absolutely certain.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Killing Goats, Super Bowl And The Pursuit Of The Divine
I remember my first Day of Sacrifice.
Ahhh yes, cast the mind back to the spring of 1999: the bellow of the hemorrhaging bulls, the feedback screech of the goat with the severed jugular, the children squealing with delight while the mullah's yodeled from a thousand minarets.
Today is the Id-ul-adha (spellings vary, so get off my ass) so folks have been pouring into the streets to butcher the animals they’ve saved up for these past weeks.
The She-Grinch was outta the house @ 5:45 am with her rug and accessories, heading for a front row spot in the ballroom at the Hotel Indonesia. Later on a goat she owns a quarter share in will be chopped up and handed out to the poor.
It’s all supposed to commemorate, honor, Abraham’s dedication to his faith, his belief in the rationality of the Divine and the faith he displayed when asked to make the ultimate sacrifice to some unrevealed master plan. Imagine the scene, the old guy pinning his eldest son Ishmael (aka Isaac), swaddled in fine white clothing, to the butcher’s slab with one horned, calloused hand while with the other, prepares to plunge some grey and vorpal blade into the youth’s thin chest, bleeding him like the sheep and goats of the herd.
And in the inevitable pause before the crashing of cymbals and drums, a voice thunders from above: “Abe, dude, relax. I was just kidding!”
What kind of a compassionate deity tests a guy like that? And what about Job? And the others. What about the wives and children of the apostles?
“Sorry, Sweetie, I’ve gotta run. This Jesus fellow says I’m to put away my nets and become a fisher-of-men! Cool! Look, I’ll be back sometime I guess. Meanwhile you and the kids… uhhh… yeah well good luck with that, eh? Catch ya later.”
Fortunately no one listens to these sorts of mysterious messages from above ordering folks to kill people for no reason, right?
Well, except for that lady who killed her three kids there in Michigan a couple of years ago. And J.W. Gacy, too: I seem to remember him going on about “voices” at some point during the trial for killing all those men and burying them beneath his Chicago garden. Maybe there were a couple of others…
And there’s always Oral Roberts, the Grahams and the rest of those vile people. Seems God’s forever speaking to them or appearing in trailer-parks 45-feet high to lay down the word: “Go on, I know she’s only 14 but she likes it when you touch her there!” or “Bring me a Shitload of money or I’ll bring you home!” or “Persecute all who are not like you!”
There might be a few others besides. I wonder who James Brown was channeling the other night, when he took a swing at his wife?
Today we’ve got real, live human judges to mete out justice so guys like Abraham, they’d be sickin’ the child protection people on his ass so fast it’d make his head spin. Then some beefy rent-a-cop would probably let slip to the rest of the boys in general population about how old Abe was hurting kids and that would be pretty much all we’d ever hear of the ‘ol goat till either Jesus or the Justice system stepped in to get him out from under the weight pile.
All of which is germane as The Grinch prepares to switch teams. Yes indeed, making the move from one tribe of People of the Book to another, (so it’s more like a trade within the leading division rather than an outright exile to some non-Primetime operation: like moving from the NFL to the Euro League or something equally horrible).
- I’m going to follow this tangent for a moment. Am I the only one who is trying to reconcile the fact that Sunday afternoon stateside a bunch of overpaid apes are going to start one of the most agonizingly boring events in sport with a solemn Super Bowl prayer for help and forgiveness. And that at the end of the game, the inter-league ministry will see a large number of the same gorillas kneeling down, holding hands and praying together at center-field, offering up their respective performances as a gift to the Deity. And that in between these two moments (four hours apart) one of the key manifestations off all that is good and great in the world will be a 12-minute football game between two teams of lingerie-clad supermodels?
The Grinch is no prude but he is truly struggling to understand what forces are at work in a country so obsessed with and ultimately afraid of its own sexuality, that would lead it to create the Lingerie Bowl half-time show? As a friend verily remarked yesterday on hearing the news: “Soon, the American Empire must end.” –
But I digress…
Fact is, to paraphrase Garrett Morris: “Christian-ty has been berry berry goo to me.”
39 x Christmas!
First Communion coins!
Pancakes for supper in March/April!
Fish-sticks for supper March/April!
Learning how to make hooch from my Mohawk brothers at Jesuit school!
“Darling, try to understand, it’s against my religion for me to wear one!”
Despite the long list of positives, by May I’m enlisting with the goat killers. I’m quite looking forward to ignoring my second manifestation of man’s desperate search for order in the universe. Been reading up on Islam, studying the life of the prophet etc etc. So much I didn’t pick up by osmosis during my years in the Durian.
Seems like folks hijacked his vision as well. And I don’t mean the Talibs and the rest of those little modernist fascists. Wayyy back, almost immediately after his death, the squabbling (of the: “The shoe, follow The Shoe!” vs “This is his sacred gourd, it alone is the sacred relic” variety) splintered his followers into many different camps. So all you’re left with now are corrupted versions of his vision.
Sort of like Che. If there is an afterlife, I bet he and Mohammed are playing dominos and having a great chuckle at our expense.
I remember my first Day of Sacrifice.
Ahhh yes, cast the mind back to the spring of 1999: the bellow of the hemorrhaging bulls, the feedback screech of the goat with the severed jugular, the children squealing with delight while the mullah's yodeled from a thousand minarets.
Today is the Id-ul-adha (spellings vary, so get off my ass) so folks have been pouring into the streets to butcher the animals they’ve saved up for these past weeks.
The She-Grinch was outta the house @ 5:45 am with her rug and accessories, heading for a front row spot in the ballroom at the Hotel Indonesia. Later on a goat she owns a quarter share in will be chopped up and handed out to the poor.
It’s all supposed to commemorate, honor, Abraham’s dedication to his faith, his belief in the rationality of the Divine and the faith he displayed when asked to make the ultimate sacrifice to some unrevealed master plan. Imagine the scene, the old guy pinning his eldest son Ishmael (aka Isaac), swaddled in fine white clothing, to the butcher’s slab with one horned, calloused hand while with the other, prepares to plunge some grey and vorpal blade into the youth’s thin chest, bleeding him like the sheep and goats of the herd.
And in the inevitable pause before the crashing of cymbals and drums, a voice thunders from above: “Abe, dude, relax. I was just kidding!”
What kind of a compassionate deity tests a guy like that? And what about Job? And the others. What about the wives and children of the apostles?
“Sorry, Sweetie, I’ve gotta run. This Jesus fellow says I’m to put away my nets and become a fisher-of-men! Cool! Look, I’ll be back sometime I guess. Meanwhile you and the kids… uhhh… yeah well good luck with that, eh? Catch ya later.”
Fortunately no one listens to these sorts of mysterious messages from above ordering folks to kill people for no reason, right?
Well, except for that lady who killed her three kids there in Michigan a couple of years ago. And J.W. Gacy, too: I seem to remember him going on about “voices” at some point during the trial for killing all those men and burying them beneath his Chicago garden. Maybe there were a couple of others…
And there’s always Oral Roberts, the Grahams and the rest of those vile people. Seems God’s forever speaking to them or appearing in trailer-parks 45-feet high to lay down the word: “Go on, I know she’s only 14 but she likes it when you touch her there!” or “Bring me a Shitload of money or I’ll bring you home!” or “Persecute all who are not like you!”
There might be a few others besides. I wonder who James Brown was channeling the other night, when he took a swing at his wife?
Today we’ve got real, live human judges to mete out justice so guys like Abraham, they’d be sickin’ the child protection people on his ass so fast it’d make his head spin. Then some beefy rent-a-cop would probably let slip to the rest of the boys in general population about how old Abe was hurting kids and that would be pretty much all we’d ever hear of the ‘ol goat till either Jesus or the Justice system stepped in to get him out from under the weight pile.
All of which is germane as The Grinch prepares to switch teams. Yes indeed, making the move from one tribe of People of the Book to another, (so it’s more like a trade within the leading division rather than an outright exile to some non-Primetime operation: like moving from the NFL to the Euro League or something equally horrible).
- I’m going to follow this tangent for a moment. Am I the only one who is trying to reconcile the fact that Sunday afternoon stateside a bunch of overpaid apes are going to start one of the most agonizingly boring events in sport with a solemn Super Bowl prayer for help and forgiveness. And that at the end of the game, the inter-league ministry will see a large number of the same gorillas kneeling down, holding hands and praying together at center-field, offering up their respective performances as a gift to the Deity. And that in between these two moments (four hours apart) one of the key manifestations off all that is good and great in the world will be a 12-minute football game between two teams of lingerie-clad supermodels?
The Grinch is no prude but he is truly struggling to understand what forces are at work in a country so obsessed with and ultimately afraid of its own sexuality, that would lead it to create the Lingerie Bowl half-time show? As a friend verily remarked yesterday on hearing the news: “Soon, the American Empire must end.” –
But I digress…
Fact is, to paraphrase Garrett Morris: “Christian-ty has been berry berry goo to me.”
39 x Christmas!
First Communion coins!
Pancakes for supper in March/April!
Fish-sticks for supper March/April!
Learning how to make hooch from my Mohawk brothers at Jesuit school!
“Darling, try to understand, it’s against my religion for me to wear one!”
Despite the long list of positives, by May I’m enlisting with the goat killers. I’m quite looking forward to ignoring my second manifestation of man’s desperate search for order in the universe. Been reading up on Islam, studying the life of the prophet etc etc. So much I didn’t pick up by osmosis during my years in the Durian.
Seems like folks hijacked his vision as well. And I don’t mean the Talibs and the rest of those little modernist fascists. Wayyy back, almost immediately after his death, the squabbling (of the: “The shoe, follow The Shoe!” vs “This is his sacred gourd, it alone is the sacred relic” variety) splintered his followers into many different camps. So all you’re left with now are corrupted versions of his vision.
Sort of like Che. If there is an afterlife, I bet he and Mohammed are playing dominos and having a great chuckle at our expense.
Killing Goats, Super Bowl And The Pursuit Of The Divine
I remember my first Day of Sacrifice.
Ahhh yes, cast the mind back to the spring of 1999: the bellow of the hemorrhaging bulls, the feedback screech of the goat with the severed jugular, the children squealing with delight while the mullah's yodeled from a thousand minarets.
Today is the Id-ul-adha (spellings vary, so get off my ass) so folks have been pouring into the streets to butcher the animals they?ve saved up for these past weeks.
The She-Grinch was outta the house @ 5:45 am with her rug and accessories, heading for a front row spot in the ballroom at the Hotel Indonesia. Later on a goat she owns a quarter share in will be chopped up and handed out to the poor.
It?s all supposed to commemorate, honor, Abraham?s dedication to his faith, his belief in the rationality of the Divine and the faith he displayed when asked to make the ultimate sacrifice to some unrevealed master plan. Imagine the scene, the old guy pinning his eldest son Ishmael (aka Isaac), swaddled in fine white clothing, to the butcher?s slab with one horned, calloused hand while with the other, prepares to plunge some grey and vorpal blade into the youth?s thin chest, bleeding him like the sheep and goats of the herd.
And in the inevitable pause before the crashing of cymbals and drums, a voice thunders from above: ?Abe, dude, relax. I was just kidding!?
What kind of a compassionate deity tests a guy like that? And what about Job? And the others. What about the wives and children of the apostles?
?Sorry, Sweetie, I?ve gotta run. This Jesus fellow says I?m to put away my nets and become a fisher-of-men! Cool! Look, I?ll be back sometime I guess. Meanwhile you and the kids? uhhh? yeah well good luck with that, eh? Catch ya later.?
Fortunately no one listens to these sorts of mysterious messages from above ordering folks to kill people for no reason, right?
Well, except for that lady who killed her three kids there in Michigan a couple of years ago. And J.W. Gacy, too: I seem to remember him going on about ?voices? at some point during the trial for killing all those men and burying them beneath his Chicago garden. Maybe there were a couple of others?
And there?s always Oral Roberts, the Grahams and the rest of those vile people. Seems God?s forever speaking to them or appearing in trailer-parks 45-feet high to lay down the word: ?Go on, I know she?s only 14 but she likes it when you touch her there!? or ?Bring me a Shitload of money or I?ll bring you home!? or ?Persecute all who are not like you!?
There might be a few others besides. I wonder who James Brown was channeling the other night, when he took a swing at his wife?
Today we?ve got real, live human judges to mete out justice so guys like Abraham, they?d be sickin? the child protection people on his ass so fast it?d make his head spin. Then some beefy rent-a-cop would probably let slip to the rest of the boys in general population about how old Abe was hurting kids and that would be pretty much all we?d ever hear of the ?ol goat till either Jesus or the Justice system stepped in to get him out from under the weight pile.
All of which is germane as The Grinch prepares to switch teams. Yes indeed, making the move from one tribe of People of the Book to another, (so it?s more like a trade within the leading division rather than an outright exile to some non-Primetime operation: like moving from the NFL to the Euro League or something equally horrible).
- I?m going to follow this tangent for a moment. Am I the only one who is trying to reconcile the fact that Sunday afternoon stateside a bunch of overpaid apes are going to start one of the most agonizingly boring events in sport with a solemn Super Bowl prayer for help and forgiveness. And that at the end of the game, the inter-league ministry will see a large number of the same gorillas kneeling down, holding hands and praying together at center-field, offering up their respective performances as a gift to the Deity. And that in between these two moments (four hours apart) one of the key manifestations off all that is good and great in the world will be a 12-minute football game between two teams of lingerie-clad supermodels?
The Grinch is no prude but he is truly struggling to understand what forces are at work in a country so obsessed with and ultimately afraid of its own sexuality, that would lead it to create the Lingerie Bowl half-time show? As a friend verily remarked yesterday on hearing the news: ?Soon, the American Empire must end.? ?
But I digress?
Fact is, to paraphrase Garrett Morris: ?Christian-ty has been berry berry goo to me.?
39 x Christmas!
First Communion coins!
Pancakes for supper in March/April!
Fish-sticks for supper March/April!
Learning how to make hooch from my Mohawk brothers at Jesuit school!
?Darling, try to understand, it?s against my religion for me to wear one!?
Despite the long list of positives, by May I?m enlisting with the goat killers. I?m quite looking forward to ignoring my second manifestation of man?s desperate search for order in the universe. Been reading up on Islam, studying the life of the prophet etc etc. So much I didn?t pick up by osmosis during my years in the Durian.
Seems like folks hijacked his vision as well. And I don?t mean the Talibs and the rest of those little modernist fascists. Wayyy back, almost immediately after his death, the squabbling (of the: ?The shoe, follow The Shoe!? vs ?This is his sacred gourd, it alone is the sacred relic? variety) splintered his followers into many different camps. So all you?re left with now are corrupted versions of his vision.
Sort of like Che. If there is an afterlife, I bet he and Mohammed are playing dominos and having a great chuckle at our expense.
I remember my first Day of Sacrifice.
Ahhh yes, cast the mind back to the spring of 1999: the bellow of the hemorrhaging bulls, the feedback screech of the goat with the severed jugular, the children squealing with delight while the mullah's yodeled from a thousand minarets.
Today is the Id-ul-adha (spellings vary, so get off my ass) so folks have been pouring into the streets to butcher the animals they?ve saved up for these past weeks.
The She-Grinch was outta the house @ 5:45 am with her rug and accessories, heading for a front row spot in the ballroom at the Hotel Indonesia. Later on a goat she owns a quarter share in will be chopped up and handed out to the poor.
It?s all supposed to commemorate, honor, Abraham?s dedication to his faith, his belief in the rationality of the Divine and the faith he displayed when asked to make the ultimate sacrifice to some unrevealed master plan. Imagine the scene, the old guy pinning his eldest son Ishmael (aka Isaac), swaddled in fine white clothing, to the butcher?s slab with one horned, calloused hand while with the other, prepares to plunge some grey and vorpal blade into the youth?s thin chest, bleeding him like the sheep and goats of the herd.
And in the inevitable pause before the crashing of cymbals and drums, a voice thunders from above: ?Abe, dude, relax. I was just kidding!?
What kind of a compassionate deity tests a guy like that? And what about Job? And the others. What about the wives and children of the apostles?
?Sorry, Sweetie, I?ve gotta run. This Jesus fellow says I?m to put away my nets and become a fisher-of-men! Cool! Look, I?ll be back sometime I guess. Meanwhile you and the kids? uhhh? yeah well good luck with that, eh? Catch ya later.?
Fortunately no one listens to these sorts of mysterious messages from above ordering folks to kill people for no reason, right?
Well, except for that lady who killed her three kids there in Michigan a couple of years ago. And J.W. Gacy, too: I seem to remember him going on about ?voices? at some point during the trial for killing all those men and burying them beneath his Chicago garden. Maybe there were a couple of others?
And there?s always Oral Roberts, the Grahams and the rest of those vile people. Seems God?s forever speaking to them or appearing in trailer-parks 45-feet high to lay down the word: ?Go on, I know she?s only 14 but she likes it when you touch her there!? or ?Bring me a Shitload of money or I?ll bring you home!? or ?Persecute all who are not like you!?
There might be a few others besides. I wonder who James Brown was channeling the other night, when he took a swing at his wife?
Today we?ve got real, live human judges to mete out justice so guys like Abraham, they?d be sickin? the child protection people on his ass so fast it?d make his head spin. Then some beefy rent-a-cop would probably let slip to the rest of the boys in general population about how old Abe was hurting kids and that would be pretty much all we?d ever hear of the ?ol goat till either Jesus or the Justice system stepped in to get him out from under the weight pile.
All of which is germane as The Grinch prepares to switch teams. Yes indeed, making the move from one tribe of People of the Book to another, (so it?s more like a trade within the leading division rather than an outright exile to some non-Primetime operation: like moving from the NFL to the Euro League or something equally horrible).
- I?m going to follow this tangent for a moment. Am I the only one who is trying to reconcile the fact that Sunday afternoon stateside a bunch of overpaid apes are going to start one of the most agonizingly boring events in sport with a solemn Super Bowl prayer for help and forgiveness. And that at the end of the game, the inter-league ministry will see a large number of the same gorillas kneeling down, holding hands and praying together at center-field, offering up their respective performances as a gift to the Deity. And that in between these two moments (four hours apart) one of the key manifestations off all that is good and great in the world will be a 12-minute football game between two teams of lingerie-clad supermodels?
The Grinch is no prude but he is truly struggling to understand what forces are at work in a country so obsessed with and ultimately afraid of its own sexuality, that would lead it to create the Lingerie Bowl half-time show? As a friend verily remarked yesterday on hearing the news: ?Soon, the American Empire must end.? ?
But I digress?
Fact is, to paraphrase Garrett Morris: ?Christian-ty has been berry berry goo to me.?
39 x Christmas!
First Communion coins!
Pancakes for supper in March/April!
Fish-sticks for supper March/April!
Learning how to make hooch from my Mohawk brothers at Jesuit school!
?Darling, try to understand, it?s against my religion for me to wear one!?
Despite the long list of positives, by May I?m enlisting with the goat killers. I?m quite looking forward to ignoring my second manifestation of man?s desperate search for order in the universe. Been reading up on Islam, studying the life of the prophet etc etc. So much I didn?t pick up by osmosis during my years in the Durian.
Seems like folks hijacked his vision as well. And I don?t mean the Talibs and the rest of those little modernist fascists. Wayyy back, almost immediately after his death, the squabbling (of the: ?The shoe, follow The Shoe!? vs ?This is his sacred gourd, it alone is the sacred relic? variety) splintered his followers into many different camps. So all you?re left with now are corrupted versions of his vision.
Sort of like Che. If there is an afterlife, I bet he and Mohammed are playing dominos and having a great chuckle at our expense.
Saturday, January 24, 2004
But I'm Not A BAAAD Person...
The bike is sick and my antique door has mushrooms: I’ll be such a lousy father.
Okay, scratch the latter. Failure to register & plate, oil and maintain the Harley, and allowing that fine piece of teak to rot don’t necessarily mean I’ll forget my (future) kids at the carnival ground/bowling alley/A&W/mall.
But I ask you, what kind of motorcycle lover (guilty) who would allow his vintage ’47 HD to sit un-taken-care-of for over 2 years? The dirt has turned sticky, there’s tiny rust kisses (rust in the tropics? Who’d a thunk?) and even though I clamped the gas line I might as well throw the carbs away. The brakes need work – the rear drum is okay but the loathsome modern front disc has gotta go. And on and on.
And yet, there it sits in the garden, still wearing its original expired Bali plates. Nominally cleaner now as I was finally shamed into spending an hour with rags, soap and shammy. The sudden burst of energy can be ascribed to the imminent arrival of Bapak Yoyo, maestro of motorcycles, fixer of legal papers and source of both Indo Harley lore and experienced mechanics who’ll come off the clock to do custom jobs like my own affordably.
(two hours later…) and Yoyo has left for the four hour trip back to Bandung with the bikes rego papers in his pocket and a promise to be back on Tuesday next week with original front and pillion seats, an original drum brake for the front, various other stock doodads and a grease monkey with all the necessary tools. Perhaps two weeks till I’m street legal and we’re off to the races. Mind, going to have to re-learn the suicide shift but that’ll be a pleasure.
I'm also Rp. 800,000 lighter, having bought a couple of tix for HOGFEST 2004, Feb. 7. Hours of cold beer, roast pig, potato salad, live Country & Western music (once a year) and loads of shiny Hogs. Calls to friends thus far have been met with "Yeah, umm, that sounds great. Lemme just check with my wife if I'm available..." Three times today I heard the same thing. Maybe its my delivery?
… A further couple of hours later….
The door is tomorrow’s project. Regular readers will already know the Tale Of The Door. For the rest of you, the stripped down version is that I managed to haggle down a Madurese trader a couple of years back. Picked up what I think is a beautiful teak door and frame of either Balinese of E Javanese pedigree, lushly carved with a combination human, plant and animal imagery. Unlike others that I’ve seen it’s not gaudy and the flaking paint and muted colors give it a very sedate air.
So sedate in fact that some variety of mushrooms have taken up residence along the bottom, encouraged no doubt by daily watering of plants and washing of the flagstones which would cause the water to pool beneath the door – which is actually leaning up against a wall at the moment. I’ve not looked closely at it as today was taken up searching for a spot to get married, a trip to a “Western” grocery store and the arrival of J’s (too) massive bookcase (all of which warrant some explanation at a later date).
Tomorrow however, I’ll tip that puppy back and whittle back the rotten bits, and fry up those pale wee ‘shrooms alongside some juevos rancheros. Yummm.
The bike is sick and my antique door has mushrooms: I’ll be such a lousy father.
Okay, scratch the latter. Failure to register & plate, oil and maintain the Harley, and allowing that fine piece of teak to rot don’t necessarily mean I’ll forget my (future) kids at the carnival ground/bowling alley/A&W/mall.
But I ask you, what kind of motorcycle lover (guilty) who would allow his vintage ’47 HD to sit un-taken-care-of for over 2 years? The dirt has turned sticky, there’s tiny rust kisses (rust in the tropics? Who’d a thunk?) and even though I clamped the gas line I might as well throw the carbs away. The brakes need work – the rear drum is okay but the loathsome modern front disc has gotta go. And on and on.
And yet, there it sits in the garden, still wearing its original expired Bali plates. Nominally cleaner now as I was finally shamed into spending an hour with rags, soap and shammy. The sudden burst of energy can be ascribed to the imminent arrival of Bapak Yoyo, maestro of motorcycles, fixer of legal papers and source of both Indo Harley lore and experienced mechanics who’ll come off the clock to do custom jobs like my own affordably.
(two hours later…) and Yoyo has left for the four hour trip back to Bandung with the bikes rego papers in his pocket and a promise to be back on Tuesday next week with original front and pillion seats, an original drum brake for the front, various other stock doodads and a grease monkey with all the necessary tools. Perhaps two weeks till I’m street legal and we’re off to the races. Mind, going to have to re-learn the suicide shift but that’ll be a pleasure.
I'm also Rp. 800,000 lighter, having bought a couple of tix for HOGFEST 2004, Feb. 7. Hours of cold beer, roast pig, potato salad, live Country & Western music (once a year) and loads of shiny Hogs. Calls to friends thus far have been met with "Yeah, umm, that sounds great. Lemme just check with my wife if I'm available..." Three times today I heard the same thing. Maybe its my delivery?
… A further couple of hours later….
The door is tomorrow’s project. Regular readers will already know the Tale Of The Door. For the rest of you, the stripped down version is that I managed to haggle down a Madurese trader a couple of years back. Picked up what I think is a beautiful teak door and frame of either Balinese of E Javanese pedigree, lushly carved with a combination human, plant and animal imagery. Unlike others that I’ve seen it’s not gaudy and the flaking paint and muted colors give it a very sedate air.
So sedate in fact that some variety of mushrooms have taken up residence along the bottom, encouraged no doubt by daily watering of plants and washing of the flagstones which would cause the water to pool beneath the door – which is actually leaning up against a wall at the moment. I’ve not looked closely at it as today was taken up searching for a spot to get married, a trip to a “Western” grocery store and the arrival of J’s (too) massive bookcase (all of which warrant some explanation at a later date).
Tomorrow however, I’ll tip that puppy back and whittle back the rotten bits, and fry up those pale wee ‘shrooms alongside some juevos rancheros. Yummm.
Saturday, January 17, 2004
The Garbage Man of Wamena
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Sitting on the top floor balcony of the Manokwari Wind music bar and restaurant, drinking in the sweeping views of the Jayapura harbor-front on Saturday, it was easy to forget the ugly realities of the previous few days.
We’re only a 45 minute flight – and a airport commute of similar length – removed from Wamena, the only substantial settlement in the Baliem Valley highlands, but it might as well be a different century, a different planet.
Last Friday night was spent listening to the harrowing tales of street kids living rough in that district capitol, a place where all the ugliest aspects of “modernity” collide with the millennia-old pastoral existence of the tiny farming communities that dot the landscape.
Here the shiny Land Cruisers of the elite, top civil servants, timber barons, the trades who get fat off the inflated prices of all commodities here, thunder past craggy-faced men in feathered crowns and swallow-boned old women bent double beneath loads of yams and firewood. A group of young toughs in Philadelphia 76ers caps and surfing shorts loiter on a darkened street-corner seemingly oblivious to the man passing by, naked except for a penis sheath and face-paint, a black umbrella tucked beneath his arm.
This is the end of the world but the girls fear nothing but the Garbage Man.
The Garbage Man cruises Jl. Irian, a 250 meter-long strip of tiny grocery stores, pirated DVD shops and rooming houses that passes for ‘downtown’ here, as part of his regular route. Here the girls alternately loiter in the shadows or ply the trade, selling themselves off for the equivalent of six US dollars to the men who hide behind the mirrored windows of their automobiles and the official red licence plates that mark them for senior officials of a notoriously corrupt district government.
Yosephina, Afrida and their friends mark with their eyes the dilapidated, long-body pick-up stacked high with rotting food, cloth, and plastic bags. On the nights the Garbage Man is not alone, the girls sink further into the dark pockets between buildings, or saunter into the midst of idling boys. With the help of two or three friends armed with machetes, the Garbage Man stalks them through the streets and alleys.
Cornered, subdued, they’re loaded in with the rubbish and trucked out of town. Along the pot-holed airport road. Away from the hangers of the Missionary Air Service, away from the lights of Jl Irian, to the old graveyard where Christian city dwellers were once buried beneath small roofs of corrugated tin. Here the police officers are waiting, smoking.
Over the next several hours the youngsters, 14-, 15-, 16 years of age, are raped in turn by the Garbage Man, his friends and the laughing men in uniform. As dawn begins to lighten the mountains behind their backs, the girls make their way back to town on foot. Shivering in the crisp mountain air.
Of course my new friends aren’t offering up ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the Garbage Man. No, these are the tales told by their friends on the strip. Teenagers less lucky than they, kids who’d not been able to leap off the pick-up before it reached the graveyard… No, these are the stories of other girls. And yet, no one will look me in the face and somewhere behind my left shoulder, there’s the gargle of a choked-back tear.
And it’s interesting how they describe the sores on a friend’s face. A 17-year-old from a village ‘behind the mountains’ who is wasting away to some disease they cannot identify. They say the sores look like someone extinguished their cigarette on her face. And chest. And back.
Who thinks in those terms? Someone who has seen cigarettes butted out on human flesh? Someone who has had it done to them?
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Sitting on the top floor balcony of the Manokwari Wind music bar and restaurant, drinking in the sweeping views of the Jayapura harbor-front on Saturday, it was easy to forget the ugly realities of the previous few days.
We’re only a 45 minute flight – and a airport commute of similar length – removed from Wamena, the only substantial settlement in the Baliem Valley highlands, but it might as well be a different century, a different planet.
Last Friday night was spent listening to the harrowing tales of street kids living rough in that district capitol, a place where all the ugliest aspects of “modernity” collide with the millennia-old pastoral existence of the tiny farming communities that dot the landscape.
Here the shiny Land Cruisers of the elite, top civil servants, timber barons, the trades who get fat off the inflated prices of all commodities here, thunder past craggy-faced men in feathered crowns and swallow-boned old women bent double beneath loads of yams and firewood. A group of young toughs in Philadelphia 76ers caps and surfing shorts loiter on a darkened street-corner seemingly oblivious to the man passing by, naked except for a penis sheath and face-paint, a black umbrella tucked beneath his arm.
This is the end of the world but the girls fear nothing but the Garbage Man.
The Garbage Man cruises Jl. Irian, a 250 meter-long strip of tiny grocery stores, pirated DVD shops and rooming houses that passes for ‘downtown’ here, as part of his regular route. Here the girls alternately loiter in the shadows or ply the trade, selling themselves off for the equivalent of six US dollars to the men who hide behind the mirrored windows of their automobiles and the official red licence plates that mark them for senior officials of a notoriously corrupt district government.
Yosephina, Afrida and their friends mark with their eyes the dilapidated, long-body pick-up stacked high with rotting food, cloth, and plastic bags. On the nights the Garbage Man is not alone, the girls sink further into the dark pockets between buildings, or saunter into the midst of idling boys. With the help of two or three friends armed with machetes, the Garbage Man stalks them through the streets and alleys.
Cornered, subdued, they’re loaded in with the rubbish and trucked out of town. Along the pot-holed airport road. Away from the hangers of the Missionary Air Service, away from the lights of Jl Irian, to the old graveyard where Christian city dwellers were once buried beneath small roofs of corrugated tin. Here the police officers are waiting, smoking.
Over the next several hours the youngsters, 14-, 15-, 16 years of age, are raped in turn by the Garbage Man, his friends and the laughing men in uniform. As dawn begins to lighten the mountains behind their backs, the girls make their way back to town on foot. Shivering in the crisp mountain air.
Of course my new friends aren’t offering up ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the Garbage Man. No, these are the tales told by their friends on the strip. Teenagers less lucky than they, kids who’d not been able to leap off the pick-up before it reached the graveyard… No, these are the stories of other girls. And yet, no one will look me in the face and somewhere behind my left shoulder, there’s the gargle of a choked-back tear.
And it’s interesting how they describe the sores on a friend’s face. A 17-year-old from a village ‘behind the mountains’ who is wasting away to some disease they cannot identify. They say the sores look like someone extinguished their cigarette on her face. And chest. And back.
Who thinks in those terms? Someone who has seen cigarettes butted out on human flesh? Someone who has had it done to them?
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