There’s an eight-year-old Canadian boy serving as a sort of roving ambassador for UNICEF, a reward for having raised $50,000 in tsunami-relief money through a website he built in the days following Dec. 26. The Mums & Kids agency have taken him to India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives and now, Aceh province.
He is by all accounts a precocious young man with a sharp mind. But, you’ve gotta wonder what fundraisers are thinking bringing a child tourist and his parents into the midst of the greatest natural disaster of the past 200 years!
While the roads are passable and there really is a degree of “normalcy” returning to my backyard, the excavators on Friday scooped 38 bodies out of a canal that bisects the main east-west road through the capital, the city is dotted with mass graves and the typical VIP sight-seeing tour features a ruined landscape of homes literally erased from the earth’s surface along with the lives off tens of thousands of people, a disproportionate number of whom were children under the age of 12!
Even the elephants that featured prominently in early news reports, hauling cars from the rubble, have begun to die: Tantor or what ever his name was, died a few weeks back from tetanus. His tough hide was no protection from the fields of rusting metal and shattered pipe littering the ground where he walked.
The young Canadian may well have wanted to come to see for himself the devastation wrought by the tsunami but its about as appropriate as allowing an eight-year-old to watch slasher flix or triple-X porn.
This is not a PG entertainment experience. This is bloody Mordor, a rank place of pain and tears and damaged psyches, not a Pixar experience.
You want to reward him for work well done, and not insult someone who is obviously a bright bulb send him to the Smithsonian in DC for a couple of days or something along those lines. Sending a child to Aceh should be seen as a punishment, not a reward.

March 18, 2005 was my 40th Birthday

Wake up 612 a.m. by my watch to the bed rocking.
(Those who know the Grinch will surprised to know that he’s back into personal time management after 22 years consulting bank clocks and strangers in the street. A story for another day involving a $32,000 timepiece going cheap in Hanoi.)
Dawn wake-ups of this type are rarely bad news but in this case it kinda set the tone for the day. I’m alone and deep into the Mmmm part of REM and the bed is doing things one associates with rodeos and Hollywood.
Think Buffalo Bill and Linda Blair. Think Poltergeist. Bed’s hammering the ground, while the room's all floating walls and swinging picture frames, the white tiled floor pitching like a tugboat in high seas and me perched on the edge eying the walls for new cracks and evidence to support the “flight” messages being sent from some nerve bundle at the base of my skull. You know, the place that keeps you alive.
I check with the US Geological Survey website a bit later to find out it was a magnitude 6.1 earthquake located 55 kms off the coast of Banda Aceh. These aftershocks are getting closer and closer. Not as heavy as some in the early days after the tsunami, the ones that turned the streets into cartoons, so powerful they prevented those who slept or fell from standing up. But strong enough.
Frigid bucket bath because the shower is on the fritz, quick shave ahead of the morning press conference and wander into the kitchen to get the coffee pot going. Unplug the water-bottle dispenser, plug in the coffee-maker and take 220-volts through my shoulder for the seconds it takes me to pry my locked-up mummy-fingers off the plug. Damn, foul mood begins so take it out on the lovely and clueless Anim, busty proprietress of the home opposite BA’s Hero’s Cemetery where I now live.
Walk away massaging my arm, cursing. Brush teeth and return to the living-room to consider the latest issue of The New Yorker, and happy news from correspondent Michael Specter that we’re all going to die from some mutation of bird flu. Grand.
15 minutes later Anim has braved the fiery inner workings of the home’s electrical system to get the pot boiling so that at least when Iqbal arrives to take me to work my blue Ace Hardware ubermug is full to the cap with a solid litre of Aceh’s finest Arabica.
The kid with the rotten teeth who I usually buy the local paper “Serambi Indonesia” from on the way into work has vanished from his post inside the bus-stop near Iskandar Muda mosque, the one with the great, Disney-esque dome that’s meant to be a traditional Acehnese man’s wedding hat but comes off as a four-tiered wedding cake painted Rasta red, green and yellow. Seriously. It must be seen to be truly appreciated. Years ago, in happier times, I drifted into the same building on a cloud of local ganja courtesy of the guards outside the home of a senior local politician, and developed a serious case of the giggles.
Iqbal suggest that maybe the kid is in school but I have my doubts.
I’ve got a full calendar today. I’m to attend the Heads of Agencies Meeting at 8, a powwow with all the top brass from the major missions in Aceh. By 10 I’ve gotta be at the local Information Ministry offices to give my two cents worth at the joint UN press conference.
The agency heads are all atwitter about the government saying all foreigners have to be out of Aceh by the 26th to get new visas. We'll see. Government will cave and extend the deadline, methinks. (Four days later my prediction comes true)
dash back ot the office at 9:15. Of course, the fellow who is supposed to translate the press releases into Bahasa Indonesia has not so. Mum calls while I’m at the photocopier to say “I feel old”. Yeah, me too.
Did a dozen post-press conference interviews with everyone from a popular on-line service detik.com to Radio France Intl. No one is asking the right questions so I get out with my scalp intact.
At some point after I get back, the boss wanders into the closet I call an office, tosses a bag of addictive Vietnamese candies on the desk and says happy birthday. Vanishes. Later the birthday well wishes start to pour into my mailbox. Awww, you guys.
Lunch of rice and veg and chicken at my desk trying to make sense of the volumes of mail bearing a bewildering host of acronyms.
I’m besieged by requests for information, most of it from people internal. Some government bigwig needs to be wined and dined and convinced that the organization should remain in Aceh through the long-term. Fair enough but I’m not sure how a press folder is going to tip the scales.
Do best to fill it but the hard-drive crash that occurred while I was on RnR has taken with it all Indonesian language files so I’m scrambling to get the package finished for his 5 pm meeting. At some point my new printer, a Canon iP1000 attempts to eat my scarf, sucking it into the guts of the machine. Thankfully adulthood has mellowed me somewhat so it actually takes me 15 minutes (instead of the usual 5) to rip the bloody thing out, taking with it half a dozen of the teeth that are used to secure the paper. Still works. Good Canon. Nice Canon.
At the same time juggling face-to-face interviews with Daily Telegraph, Christian Science Monitor and a host of others. Things start to blur.
I stagger out of the office at 7:30, into the gloom. It’s a wordless drive home. I’m knackered. Pour a long cold Jaimeson and the phone rings with Pat. 15 minutes later he’s over and reclined and his good humor is infectious. His wife Karen appears with another product of the Canadian foreign service in tow and a bottle of Bushmills.
I talk to J back in Jakarta and the peripherals start to get warm and fuzzy. We sit up deconstructing Canadian and Australian immigration policy before moving over to wannabe Nazi Ernst Zundel and Freedom of Speech until the midnight curfew looms. By the time they pull out of the driveway it’s after 12 and I’m officially 24 hours into my 41st year.

Spin Cycle & The Merits Of A Walk In The Woods
I'm now nine days into this new life of spin and fortunately I suppose, it has been a busy time.
Baptism by fire last friday with the first press conference before the slavering masses: Hi EnLai, Heya Jerry... etc. Mind, I never much cared for overly friendly flacks myself so perhaps I'll cull the chummy bits a bit.
There's a bunch of blanks to fill in but I'm going to tip-toe into it over the first wee bit. This is no anonymous blog. There are plenty of folks out there who'll be able to whittle down the list of suspects pretty quickly so I'm going to go against my instincts (publish and be damned) and be a bit coy till I gather my feet beneath me.
Can mention yesterday's crisis, the announcement by the head of the Natl Police aceh task force that my organization and UNHCR will have to leave by 26 March.
Whoa? Is that sound of sphincter's snapping shut in offices around the globe?
Have dealt with it now - more on the weekend about that most excellent spinnage - but for now I'm going to exit with fine words from the 19thC Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (and repeated in Lawrence Scanlan's Harvest of a Quiet Mind: The Cabin as Sanctuary) on the merits of a good walk:
"... above all do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it... The more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. If one just keeps on walking, everything will be alright."

Klingon Intel And The Arrival Of The Do-Gooders

I’ll save for another day the story about how I was fired by USA Today while I was in Aceh because I also string for (their words) “publications that have a bias or the appearance of a bias -- be it political, religious or ethnic.” (unlike USA Today for example…) A full explanation will be forthcoming in days to follow compete with zingy letters between me and head-office.

What I will tell you is that all that after 18 years of journalism, I’m putting all that nonsense behind me.
Monday will be my first day of work as the Aceh-based public information officers (PIO) with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a donor-funded agency that does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to situations like post-tsunami Aceh. I like them and I think it's going to be an excellent fit.
Three months to start, the job will keep me in Banda Aceh for upwards of a year and opens up a whole new vista for me personally and professionally. I’m very excited about it and will weather the snide comments of friends and colleagues (you know who you are!) who accuse me of joining Vader and the rest of the forces of evil.
In the meantime, here’s a few yarns you didn’t read in you local rag or hear on TV during the five weeks I was covering the tsunami from Aceh:
On the drive up to Banda Aceh from Medan (Dec. 27) we stopped in Lhokseumawe for two nights. Took a day and filed from the Malacca Strait side of Sumatra island where the devastation was tremendous and response, under-reported.
At one point J and I were grabbed up and interrogated by Indonesian police intel. They’re a pretty brutish bunch generally speaking and these fellows didn’t disappoint.
Their issue was that we’d not reported in when we arrived. That and the fact that it was, and as far as I know remains, illegal to drive the highway linking Medan in North Sumatra and Banda Aceh, the capitol of the afflicted province. The only sanctioned port of entry is the airport in BA.
We explained at length and often that the vice-president had said publicly that ALL journalists and aid workers were welcome and the more, the sooner, the better. That didn’t hold much water.
They insisted on watching all the tape we’d shot of devastated villages and grieving families, the basic morgue set up in a mosque and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn’t a rough interrogation, but a mind-numbingly inane one.
One humourless thug, all shoulders and hair would have had me in irons and dumped in the bay if he’d had his way. The others were pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.
What was immediately obvious was that these were perhaps the dumbest bunch of cops ever to put on a uniform. If they are the elite of the police force one is left to imagine what the regular beat (no pun intended) cop is like.
For example, one fellow was so baffled as to how to type up the police report that Jihan actually had to do it for him. Yes, Windows 98 is a bit of a challenge but this guy broke a sweat just turning the damn machine on.
They also insisted on repeating the fact that BA was the only legal POE in Aceh…. at least 300 times during our stay. I swear, if it was meant as an interrogation technique it was quite successful because if J had not been there I’m pretty sure I would have attacked someone after about the 138th repetition. Then I imagine I would have had to listen to them repeat how hospitalizing police officers was an offence and of course I would have been in cells at that point and they, too far away for me to get someone by the collar.
The only thing missing from the whole process was the inevitable request for money which I think they probably discussed amongst themselves before the one with the functioning cerebral cortex suggested soliciting bribes from foreign journalists carrying al Jazeera accreditation might not be the best idea.
In the end they sort of cut us some slack. I signed off on a ‘confession’ and they released us with the warning not to leave the city until their boss made an official decision as to our fates. We fled, organized two mini-vans, bought supplies and plotted out pre-dawn escape from the city. Never did find out what the decision was.
The one thing that stuck in my mind was that if these Klingons were ready to break my balls over a minor infraction, can you imagine the fate awaiting any poor Acehnese guy who found himself in their clutches?

Once in Banda Aceh there was all kinds of whacked out folks wandering around under the “aid” banner. The Scientologists’ Emergency Response Team was among the first of the fringe operators to show up. Resplendent in yellow t-shirts and offering some sort of power-point re-centering massage beneath tents across from the governor’s mansion where much of the administrative action took place.
The Mormons arrived to lend a hand, bringing with them 40 motorcycles and a posse of scary-looking pasty middle-aged white guys in pressed white shirts and ties. A conservative read of church doctrine pretty much reduces all non-whites to the status of non-humans and their operating in swarthy, Muslim Aceh was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.
Laskar Mujahedin were there in force. They pretty much hate all Christians but at least they kept a fairly low profile and pitched in to load rice and instant noodles into US Navy helicopters in their Osama t-shirts. What the American flyboys thought about that goes unrecorded.
And of course, our night-club-bashing friends from FPI, the Islamic Defenders Front were loaded like cattle onto Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) transport planes and shipped up to “defend” Islam against the foreign infidels.
This is a group of Jakarta-based gangsters who dress up like Arabs and are paid by security forces to trash bars in Jakarta that refuse to cough up protection money.
For the first few weeks FPI confined themselves to sight-seeing before they finally got around to the task of retrieving dead bodies.
They set up shop in a mosque opposite the heroes cemetery in BA and got busy pissing off everyone in the neighborhood.
I was living in a house 100 meters from their camp for much of my time in Aceh. I understand that they kicked out the local imam and started broadcasting some really nasty stuff from the loudspeakers, beginning at about 4 a.m. The new imam, from Jakarta, started off demanding an explanation why the tsunami didn’t hit America “where all the evil people live” and went on from there.
In the run-up to Idul Adha, their Koranic readings became night-long events. Friends who have lived all over the Islamic world say they’ve never heard anything like it. The half-dozen journos in our house bitched about it but figured if it was okay with local folks we’d just deal with it.
Well, apparently it wasn’t okay and since I left there have been several nasty showdowns between Acehnese guys pissed about being told how to pray, and FPI goons with a rudimentary knowledge of Islam who are used to dealing with Javanese folks who roll over at the first sign of trouble. There will be more on this later, I’m afraid. Despite the propaganda published by Indonesian media, the Acehnese are far more excited about having foreigners around than they are about having so many non-Acehnese Indonesians.

Some interesting personalities and professional conundrums emerged as well.
One of the best involved a media-savvy Sydney, Australia, Catholic street priest who arrived with a (metaphorical) suitcase full of money, a black shirt with PADRE written in white block letters, and a plan to build orphanages. Nice idea except for the fact that warehousing kids is the absolute last resort, he was utterly blind to the sensitivity of the issue of housing Muslim kids in a Christian facility (it’s illegal) and didn’t bother to actually ask anyone in Aceh if they wanted this kind of help.
Like many Australian angles to the tsunami story – indeed any story in Oz – mighty Channel 9 had “bought” the story. This is standard operating procedure in Oz, and something that pisses off most folk in the biz. When you hear that 9 has bought someone it becomes your complete focus to blow that exclusivity away, regardless of the value of the story.
It happened after the Bali bombing as well. Oz channels trying to prevent their “bought and paid for” interview subjects from talking to the masses. I usually laugh when a TV producer tells me who I can and cannot speak to but it’s a very serious issue.
I was living with an Aussie media pack that was sharpening its teeth over this clown and set to the day after he arrived. By the time they were done, he was heading for the airport and safety back home.
The addendum to the yarn is that the Herald-Sun newspaper was riding shotgun with 9 and this priest. I’ve no idea how much it cost them but it was a waste. Unbelievably, they sent a young woman reporter who had never been out of the country on assignment to cover the story. She arrived without a laptop or cellular phone, with no translator, local fixer and just $200 in her pocket.
There was much muttering about the house because she seemed nice enough if completely and utterly clueless about Indonesia, the tsunami, Islam etc etc. A couple of guys took her in and saved her from making an utter fool of herself but the general feeling was that whichever editor it was that signed off on the plan to parachute this virgin into post-tsunami Aceh deserved to be shown the door at the very least.

There’s more of this stuff, funnier and maybe more important, but its going to have to wait. I made the mistake of poking J’s arm this evening, just hours after she had five vaccinations and though sleeping now, she’s not a very happy camper.

Aceh #1
Feb. 8/05

There’s a crack on the wall of my room in Banda Aceh that runs parallel to and about 18 inches below the ceiling before plunging like an Enron profit report, through a narrow, nipple-high band of flowered wallpaper to disappear in the floor.
The one in the john traces all the places where ceiling and walls meet so that every time you reach up to dump a bucket of water over your head you’re confronted by your mortality, and the real possibility the roof is about to drop, squishing you like a bug.
I watched those cracks for several weeks and though every second day brought new aftershocks, including a minute-long 6.1 whopper the day before I returned to Jakarta, the damage seems to have leveled out.
The kids in the school next door didn’t run screaming into the street which I take as a sign they’ve compartmentalized events of the past month almost as well as I.
Aftershocks were a way of life during the month I spent in Aceh after the tsunami. The only night I don’t remember the earth moving was the one J and I spent in a nice hotel in Medan the first day out of the Jakarta. Big, solid cement beast with a flesh and bone interior that’ll probably remain intact until the earth splits open at the end of days.
It really struck me sitting in room 19 of the Kuta Karang Lama hotel in Lhokseumawe, early the same day the intelligence division of the national police – pound-for-pound perhaps the dumbest brutes on the block – picked us up.
If it must 4 a.m. then I’d been at it for almost three days on about five hours sleep.
I’d just filed to the Globe & Mail and the phone rang with FOX! on the line from New York looking for an update. This may be the most enthusiastic & overwrought network in Rupert Murdoch’s television empire. Its employees are like cultists. I remember meeting a hyperactive 20something FOX!!! field producer from New Jersey in Kabul who kept insisting we “swap digits” which apparently means exchange phone-numbers. I had to threaten him with a empty bottle of Uzbek vodka before he backed off, and with me, people usually know when it’s time to back off.
In the world according to FOX!, traffic jams are “devastating” or “crippling”, critics of US foreign policy, “terrorist sympathizers” and Oliver North, “a true American patriot”.
They also pay upwards of $100.00 US per two minute Question & Answer session so we put a cork in it and try to work the phrase “God-fearin’ folks” in to render recognizable the Moslem fishermen and their families who make up the bulk of the Acehnese killed in the Boxing Day tsunami.
I bounced through various layers of their production system before washing up with CHIP! or BOB! or MAX! broadcasting live from something called FOX-CONTROL, the network nerve center and the place where “good” is molded into “bad” and “villains” into “heros”.
I’m not actually sure if FOX-CONTROL is the real name or something I made up but if it’s the latter, it should be the former.
As I struggled to re-form intelligent commentary about what I’d seen the previous day into something simple-syllabic and digestible by FOX!!! anchors and viewers, the floor started to shimmy and wobble. Struggling to contain the giggles, I reworded what was essentially a terrible seismic cause-and-effect Sunday morning event into the actions of a slavering, dangerous and perhaps animated creature with a rudimentary cerebral cortex and a visceral dislike for suburban commuters.
As the words formed, the yellow floor tiles began to undulate, morphing into the scales of the very creature I was conjuring for the lamp-jawed, mouth-breathing masses of middle-America, the swinging florescent ceiling lights slit-eyed cold and malicious, the dull, rolling hum of the ancient air-conditioning unit the bellows of the breast’s great lungs.
My laptop rattled on its grey Formica-topped table, and an ashtray fell to the floor as the doors of adjacent ground-floor units in this segregated (no marriage license meant J and I were not allowed to share a room) down-market hotel in this grey, petro-town swung open spilling terrified, half-awake renters into the rain-soaked parking lot.
At some point the anchor, ignoring the briefing notes, asked what I saw when I looked outside my hotel. It’s a question they ask every time.
I stood in the doorframe watching events unfold, and stuck to scripted descriptions of ruined fishing villages, a mounting death-toll and the three-story-high wall of black water that seemed to actively seek out its victims.


BELOW IS THE PIECE I FILED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL THAT MORNING. IT IS TIMED AT 4:17 AM/DEC 29

Paul Dillon
Lhokseumawe, Indonesia
On a normal day, dozens of brightly colored fishing boats would be tethered to the rickety raised catwalks that meander through the impoverished fishing community of Pusung on the east coast of the island of Sumatra.
Instead the poorest victims of Sunday’s devastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the killer tsunamis it spawned spent Tuesday evening trying to rescue their few remaining personal items from their ravaged homes.
“We have nothing left but our lives,” said 25-year-old Nurslah, surveying the thick, putrid pools of mud and broken timbers where her house once stood. “The only good thing is that my husband was fishing when the waves came and his boat was not damaged.”
Others were not so lucky. Three of Nurslah’s neighbours, including a seven year-old boy lost their lives when a wall of water and mud crashed into Pusung at 8:15 a.m., just 15 minutes after residents were jolted to their feet by a powerful earthquake hundreds of miles away in the Indian ocean.
The death toll in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra is expected to reach 25,000, Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said Tuesday in Jakarta. At least one-fifth of the population of 50,000 in the west coast town of Muelaboh are believed dead and a further 9000 died in the provincial capitol Banda Aceh.
The ten-hour drive from Medan in North Sumatra along the east coast of Aceh province to Pusung, offers a vivid snapshot of the power unleashed by the earthquake.
Along this otherwise bucolic stretch of road are communities which have cumulatively lost upwards of 1,000 residents according to the Indonesian ministry of health. At least 400 people were seriously injured and a further 300 are reported missing.
In places closer to the epicenter on the west side of Sumatra, the earth was split apart by the force of an earthquake of Biblical proportions that struck as fathers threw their fishing nets and children played by the water’s edge. The ensuing tsunami blamed for an estimated 48,000 dead in nations as far away Somalia buried towns in Aceh province under mud and water.
In communities like Pusung, other forces were at work. Here the damage was entirely done by the fast rising debris-choked waters
Sgt. Suyitno, an Indonesian Army officer working at a Lhokseumawe camp for people rendered homeless by the tragedy, said the earthquake caused the waters of the Malacca Strait to suddenly drop.
“Many fish were stranded so the people on the beach, mostly women, children and old people, rushed down the beach to collect them,” he said. “A short time later the first waves came in and trapped those poor people. I was told the wave was as high as two coconut trees.”
Evidence of the devastation wrought by the earthquake begins more than an hour’s drive south of Lhokseumawe, in the town of Nibong. The town’s principal mosque, which squats at the side of the Trans-Sumatran highway linking Medan and Banda Aceh, has become a tent-city built of cheap plastic tarps and sleeping mats.
Arranged like pickets along the mosque’s fence are roughly two-dozen boys under the age of 10, who survey the passing traffic and visitors hollow-eyed and mute. Though no one will come right out at say it, the few adults at the mosque hint that the boys have lost one or both of their parents.
By contrast many areas appear to have escaped unscathed. Behind the mosque are healthy green fields of rice and bucolic scenes of men and buffalo working the ground.
In consecutive towns one sees growing numbers of disposed people, some begging hand-outs along the highway. An estimated 25,000 people have been forced from their homes in the communities around Lhokseumawe, and tent-cities like those in Nibong flourish in the many mosques that line the route.
The buildings are the traditional refuges of long-suffering citizens of Aceh who are frequently trapped between the Indonesian army and separatist rebels who have waged a near 30-year campaign against the government in Jakarta.
In Kadung village 15 kms south of Lhokseumawe, the damage is finally visible for all to see. Although almost a kilometer from the sea shore, grad piles of mud and debris have piled up against and between gaudily colored homes.
While no one died here, the tsunami wiped out the vast shrimp farms that support the community.
“What are we going to do, how will we buy food and clothing now that everything is destroyed,” says an elderly man, surveying the ruined pools. “If someone doesn’t rebuild this could be the end of our community.”
Foreign aid is starting to trickle into Aceh. Two planes loaded with humanitarian aid arrived in Banda Aceh on Tuesday and Australia has dispatched four more military transports to the area.
Pusung’s 1,200 residents of a ardscrabble fishing community on the borders of Lhokseumawe are living in army tents in a camp that is a model of efficiency, run jointly by the army and the Indonesian Red Cross.
Sitting cross-legged in one of the tents surrounded by the few possessions she rescued from her home, 35-year-old Halima counts her blessings. She fled with her family ahead of the rising flood waters and despite the damage to her home, believes it is salvageable.
“There are many people who are suffering far more than we are,” she says, drawing her six-year-old son close. “People have lost their families, children have no parents. We are too scared to return home at this time but at least we still have a home that we can go back to one day.”

-30-

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.

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.

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.”

“… 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.

“… 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.

The Death Of Mark Worth

On January 15, 45-year-old Australian journalist and documentary film-maker Mark Worth died in Sentani, Indonesia, a small town one-hour from Jayapura, the capitol of Papua province. At the time there were all kinds of rumors that a foreigner had been murdered in his bed when in fact it turned out that he'd drunk himself to death.
Like most people, I let my prejudices color events and thought no more of the incident until I met a Pakistan-based journalist friend of mine passing through Jakarta who told me she was greatly upset by Mark's death, that he'd been a great talent and a fine human being. There were others out there that crossed my path between mid-January and an unrelated return trip I made to Papua earlier this month.
On March 13 I met for three hours with Mark's widow in the house they shared in Abe Pantai (also called Abepura). The following is a slightly edited version of what she told me. I have sent it to some people who knew Mark and have decided to re-print it, with the intro I penned, on my blog. I have not included the photos mentioned in the intro.
For those interested in learning more about the issue which consumed Mark's lifework, find a copy of "Land of the Morning Star", an hour-long documentary he produced that first aired in December.
For my part, I'm embarrassed by my knee-jerk reaction: "A drunk passes out and dies. Big shit."
I'm still hoping to evolve to the point where I'm not going to simply write people off the way I did this fellow.

Cover Letter:
Hi all.
I wanted to on-pass a couple of photos I took last week of Mark Worth's widow Helen Ronsumbre, 29, daughter Insoraki, 3, and his grave site. They're not very good quality but I hope they'll give you at least a bit of an idea of the lay of the land.
Not many folks who knew Mark have been able to make it there on account of on-going troubles getting visas for Papua so feel free to send these out to whomever you feel might be interested. Steve, I've lost Ben's e-mail so maybe you could take care of that for me and send my regards.
I've also included a narrative based on a three hour-long talk I had with Helen and members of her family at their home in Abe Pantai on March 13. My apologies if exact dates and times turn out to be slightly off: I was translating for JB (ex of the ABC and now employed by ****** in Jakarta) who knew Mark, and so I was too busy to take detailed notes.
I never met Mark, didn't know of his work until after he died and have only the smallest inkling about the kind of man he was. I also don't know what exactly the doctors told him in Australia at the end of November - I'm not sure he told Helen precisely what the diagnosis was - but if you ask my opinion I would tell you that Mark returned to Abi Pantai to be around family he loved, in particular his wife and daughter, in anticipation of his death.
There are painful details in this (edited) story and it may not be for everyone but if it were me, I'd want an honest accounting to my friends. If you feel it is appropriate to share with others I leave the decision up to you.
If you have any questions about what I saw and heard in Abi Pantai please feel free to contact me by e-mail and/or at the phone number below.
Best Regards,
PD
Jakarta, Indonesia
21-03-04

Narrative:
Mark Worth's widow Helen Ronsumbre, 29, and her family in the oceanside village of Abi Pantai outside Jayapura give an emotional and troubling description of the period between the time of Mark's arrival back in Papua on Dec. 13 and his death in a Sentani hotel room on the morning of Jan. 15, 2004. Here are some of the things they mentioned.
Mark called from Australia in late November to say that he'd visited a doctor there, that he'd been told he was very ill and that he was coming to Papua to see her and their daughter three-year-old Insoraki. He was pale, sick but sober when he arrived in Jayapura from Bali, where he'd spent several days.
That lasted until his birthday, Dec. 23. A simple, brief diary he kept in a yellow steno-pad between the time he returned and the end of December when the shakes got too bad, indicated he was thinking in general terms about future projects while obviously wrestling with his thirst. What set him off this time is unclear. On Xmas eve he was taken to a pharmacy in Jayapura where he bought what looks like cough medicine. He was also taking pills prescribed in Australia with his whiskey every evening but the cover of the case is too smudged to read what they are.
Although exceedingly ill and consuming a minimum of three liters of local whiskey each day, Mark repeatedly and vehemently refused to be checked into hospital or to return to Australia in the three weeks prior to his death.
Late on Christmas day for example, having lost control of his physical faculties and apparently incoherent, he was taken to a Jayapura hospital. The following day he insisted on being returned to Abi Pantai, arguing he didn't trust Indonesian hospitals and would get better care at home. The family felt it was better to agree to his wishes than to have him try and leave the hospital on his own, something they felt he would certainly attempt.
Helen said she and Mark settled into a pattern over his last days in Abi Pantai. He would wake up after noon but would rarely be able to get out of bed, drinking steadily through the day and eating very little until evening when he got up long enough to cook large pots of spaghetti and meat sauce for the entire extended family, upwards of a dozen people. He seemed to really enjoy this.
Although most in the family are teetotalers who strongly disapproved of his drinking, there was always someone who could be badgered into going to town to pick up a few bottles. Later, he and Helen would sit out on the porch talking into the morning hours, Mark repeatedly steering the conversation back to the issue of Papuan independence. And, like a ritual, they'd wait until dawn when the Morning Star dipped below the horizon before going to bed.
If I have the time-line right, he remained at home, being ministered to by the Ronsumbre family, until early January at which point he checked into the Pacific Hotel, a haunt he'd shared with other Australian journos in the past.
He said that he did not want to be a burden on the family and felt it was best if he stayed away from the village. While Mark was never abusive to members of the Ronsumbre family, he was not so understanding with other people Helen said and he may have sensed that his presence was disruptive.
He remained at the Pacific Hotel, cared for by Helen, her younger brother (with whom I understand Mark had a strong bond) and other members of the family who visited every day, until shortly before his death.
The family, Helen in particular, repeatedly urged him to return to get further medical treatment in Australia, something Mark refused to do. In his final days he was exceedingly ill, completely bedridden and sometimes coughing up and urinating blood. A guy named Dr. Budi, who treats the foreign missionaries and was well known to Mark, became a regular part of his life through the last weeks, sometimes visiting a dozen times a day.
Several days before he died, Helen's family pooled their money and bought him a airline ticket home. Mark didn't fight the decision and slept as they drove out to Sentani airport. He was very weak and Helen was wiping fluid from his mouth and nose even as they pulled into the airport parking lot. Given his condition, Garuda staff on the ground refused to allow him to board the aircraft ("They tore up the ticket.") which would have seen him traveling unassisted to Timika and Bali before proceeding to Australia.
Mark was then checked into a second, star-rated hotel (it might have been the Hotel Semeru), beside the airport, where he remained until his death two or three days later.
Helen said that during his conscious hours he occasionally asked that they pray together. She recalls that at one point he described to her a vision he'd had: he'd seen Jesus and there were three angels preparing to come and take him (Mark) away.
In the early afternoon of January 14th, as Helen slept, Mark appeared on the front steps of the family home in Abi Pantai. He'd convinced a hotel driver to take him there. He embraced his father-in-law on the front porch and together they walked through the small home, briefly examining each and every room. He then asked to speak to his daughter. Insoraki, who was with a family friend, was sent for and father and daughter spent about 15 or 20 minutes together sitting on the porch talking and looking at the sea.
Before leaving the house Mark stood up, stretched his arms out wide and told the family (it may have been only the old man, the narrative broke down somewhat at this point) that he was leaving Papua the following day on a special airplane with very wide, light wings but that he would see them again one day.
He then got back into the hotel car, withdrew money from an ATM, bought three bottles of whiskey and returned to the hotel. By the time he arrived, one of the bottles was almost completely empty. Helen was furious and hid the remaining booze, which made Mark very angry. Eventually he slept.
Mark woke for the last sustained period shortly after dark. Helen said they prayed together for some time and that he seemed calm and lucid. They held hands and he told her repeatedly how much he loved her and their child. He tried to explain himself and how he felt. At one point he slowly drew his hand out of hers until just the very tips of their middle fingers were touching. As he did so, he told Helen that while they had been very, very close, now the physical line connecting them was going to be severed, but that they would meet again in heaven. As he said this he drew his finger away from hers so they no longer touched.
A short time later, Mark fell unconscious for the final time. In the early hours of the following morning, Helen and her brother called Dr. Budi (Mark may have had some sort of convulsion) who urged them again to take Mark directly to hospital. It was 5:30 in the morning, there was no traffic in Sentani and no vehicle to take them to the hospital. Ultimately, it didn't matter: Dr. Budi arrived a short time later by which point Mark was nearing the end. Together, he, Helen and Helen's brother watched and prayed as Mark pass away 30 minutes later, 6:30 am, Jan 15.

I understand that preparations for the funeral took at least three days. The church in Abi Pantai is a modest affair with an extraordinary ocean view when you step out into the sunlight. I was told literally thousands of people attended, and the two kilometer stretch of road between the village and the graveyard was a sea of people that brought traffic to a standstill.
The grave itself is the finest in the area, set back behind a stand of native trees perhaps 100 meters from the road, and a similar distance from the bay. In the evening the simple bottle-lamps around the grave are lit. And every night since his death, Helen sits on a simple wooden bench to the right of the grave talking to Mark, telling him about what's going on in the village, how the family is coping, what's happening with the Indonesian election campaign and how she is dealing with his death and her new pregnancy (which was hardly showing when we met). I understand Mark found out in December that he was going to be a father for the second time. She is hoping for a boy.
Helen says she really appreciates the many phone calls and letters she has received from abroad. I understand several people in particular have made an effort to stay in regular contact in the two months since Mark's death and I'll just say that during the entire course of a very emotional afternoon, the only time I thought Helen was going to break down, was when she described what it means to have people continue to call. I would encourage you to continue doing so.
She also said that the family's doors are always open to Mark's family and friends.

Sprung Spring, The Kampung Bomb And Matters Of The Faith

Just off the phone with Mum. Temperature soared to 8C in Montreal today where folks in shorts and Ts wandered through puddles with goofy smiles on their faces.
“Wore my office jacket to work and sent the winter jacket to the dry cleaners,” she says.
Some people wait for the robins to return before declaring winter over. In our family the ritual dry-cleaning-prior-to-packing-away-of-the-winter-wear is the surest sign that spring has sprung.
Of course it’s an illusion. Spring doesn’t sprung until the Sunday nearest St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, the day of the annual parade along the length of St. Catherine’s Street, which always coincides with the last, vicious right hook from the allegedly departed winter.
I’ve never seen a St. Paddy’s Day parade that didn’t require full winter battle wear: it was one of the few days during the course of the winter that I actually wore a touque. The main shopping boulevard is one of the city’s finest wind tunnels. The gusts ricochet off the stone facades of Simpson’s, Hudson’s Bay and other classic Montreal grey-stone edifices (where one watches movies or plays arcade games these days) built on the back of 200 hundred years of the fur trade, plunging a relatively balmy minus five to a bone rattling –28C.
Later the Old Dublin would morph into a sweathouse as once-a-year Irishmen of every hue peeled out of half a dozen layers of wool and synthetics for a day of fully sanctioned drunkenness, bad jokes and endless recitations of Dirty ‘Ol Town.
Mum’s an optimist. I expect she’ll be digging out those woolies at least once more before it’s safe to stick a spike in the winter of 2003-04 and call it ‘done’.
Mum tells me we’ve just celebrated another anniversary of some significance. 36 years ago Feb. 28, Dad arrived in Toronto, a bold first step onto terra incognita for the Dillon clan. Mum, Clare and I followed about three weeks later, before boarding a train for the nine hour ride to Thompson, Manitoba and our first Canadian apartment.
And here I am, huddling behind the closed doors of my Jakarta home wearing a balaclava against the noxious fumes of the dengue foggers who’ve just bombed my backyard. Ten folks in this little kampung alone have come down with it during the current epidemic. Over 340 people have died, mostly here in West Java, and thousands are hospitalized. It’s so bad we treat every little cough and ache as though it were a sign to head for the hospital. Others in the kampung are having the insides of their homes sprayed but I’m not sure the cats will last long gnawing on insecticide-soaked toys. As it is, I’m worried about the fish, though they’ve proven themselves resilient to poison, brackish water and neglect in the past.
Different worlds, eh?
Speaking of which, a day has been chosen for The Grinch to shed this moral coil, emerging after the incantation of sacred words and the blessing of the religious, as a fully formed follower of Mohammed. And, what more appropriate time to do it than on the aforementioned Irish holiday. Two weeks tomorrow, freshly back from a week-long stay in Papua (first day of the national elections will be spent in Wamena!) I’m off to Istiqal Mosque, the largest mosque in Asia, for the day-long conversion process. J’s brother will witness and Juliana will attend as well.

Have to practice getting my mouth around a couple of Arabic formulas, the most important of which is the declaration of faith repeated five times a day in a hundred million mosques worldwide: “There is no God but God and Mohammed was his Prophet.”
Not sure how many uncircumcised-Moslem-Irish-Scot-Canadians there are out there but I vow here and now that if I add another hyphen to my socio-genetic profile, I’ll explore the possibility of federal funding to help me deal with my complicated, conflicted emotions. And then found a support group for others like me.
The whole thing should be quite interesting. I’ve read heaps (so as to avoid being a spectator in my own life) and will try my best not to trouble the revered Imam with too many spurious questions: no point in overturning the mango cart now when I’ve got the rest of a lifetime to poke and probe.
Have to pick Jihan’s brain afterwards over a celebratory St. Paddy’s Day pint o Guinness…