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.
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