Stray 9Dec04 - The Swearing Issue.

I am a walking catalogue of North American fucked up shit.
One second the conversation is all about nice
inconsequential banter, the next I'm off on some rabid
diatribe about how US navy sonar kills dolphins and
you can't drink the rainwater.
Too long in Babylon.
So I give myself the advice I find myself offering
many North Americans; this is not the world. Also:
there is more going on here than you may know.
Goodwise, I mean.
That's true about the dolphins, by the way.

And that was before I tagged along with the three
kiwigirl (Emily, Kate and Marama) documentary crew,
the one that’s been traveling the world for the last
nine months cataloging fucked up shit. And good stuff
too, of course, its all about solutions.

First we went north, six hours drive up and eight west
to the coast, to the predominately native little town
of Bella Coola. This catalogue is about Canadian First
Nations.
We stayed with a man called Ed Moody, chief Qwatsinas
of the Nuxalk (nookh-elk) Nation, the Salmon People.
Dude’s had an interesting couple of years.
Since he started getting into native rights and
environmental issues the courts have seized his house
and his car, charged him with dozens of offenses that
always end up being dropped but mean he has to make
the thirty hour round trip to Vancouver almost every
week, and a lot of harassment from the police.
Now he lives in an extended trailer with his cat. He
had a husky/ timberwolf cross, but someone shot it.

It’s pretty messed up, actually. Ed’s trailer was full
of maps of areas being logged, we saw some video of
the clear cuts and they are immense, getting bigger.
They’re starting to open the area up to strip mining.
The fish farms in the fjords, to save money on feed,
dangle lights into the tanks to attract the native
salmon fry from the outside water for the farmed
salmon to eat. That combined with the soil that washes
into the inlets from the clear cuts is wiping the
native salmon out.
The Nuxalk were trying to get their own fishery going,
but the government shut it down citing health
regulations. They hunt, but a few years back the
government sprayed the area with poison to kill off
tree species that aren’t ideal for logging, and
inadvertently killed off most of the deer and goats as
well.

And this is on land that Canada doesn’t actually
legally own. They’re still negotiating with the ninety
or so First Nations to buy it, but they’re reluctant
to sell since the two or three who have done so, after
lawyer’s fees and taxes, pretty much ended up with
nothing. Any land they do retain is subject to land
taxes, and if these can’t be paid (which they usually
can’t) the land is repossessed.
There’s a big thing at the moment with a private ski
resort here called Sun Peaks wanting to build a hotel
on public land where natives had their homes. Since
they refused to leave the government had them forcibly
removed. Now there’s a big sign on the police patrolled

road saying ‘No Indians beyond this point’ and a lot of

people have been arrested for protesting it.

And then there’s the cultural stuff. To anyone
familiar with Australia’s Stolen Generation, it’s
pretty much the same thing. Kids taken from parents
and kept in boarding schools where they weren’t
allowed to speak their language, many were abused and
a lot died, usually of exposure trying to escape. This
was happening up till the eighties, we were able to
interview a couple of the elders about it, which
surprised some people there since they usually never
talk about it.
Now they teach native history in reservation schools,
but a school on a reservation only gets 60% the
funding of other schools, so most of them are shutting
down.

Told you it was fucked up, told you it was a
catalogue. That’s not even the half of it, but I have
my limits. Suffice it to say the Canadian and BC
governments are just about the worst and most corrupt
I’ve come across, and that those fighting are fighting
still. There are a lot of victories. It’s not like
people here actually like what’s going on, it’s just
that this is a two and a half party system and the
guys in right now aren’t even the really bad ones.
When the Conservatives get in this place is gonna be
just uninhabitable.
Despite BC having logging practices that make even the
US flinch, they’re coming under a lot of fire, and
their only real bastion of support; people with
logging related jobs, will dwindle greatly once their
immerging practice of exporting those jobs to cheaper
labour really kicks in.

The night before we were hoping to leave the worst
flood in forty years threatened to carry off the road.
We bunkered down, ate wild Moose, and hoped for the
best.

We’d just been taken on a little tour by one of the
local guys, up the river to where hundreds of
petroglyphs are carved into the rocks. They’re mostly
figures and faces and supposed to be ten to fifteen
thousand years old.
One of them looked _exactly_ like a Maori Tiki.
There’s a lot of evidence that New Zealand Maoris are
direct descendants of north western Canadian natives,
Ed told us there are legends of them leaving Canada in
canoes and riding the currents down the American coast
to the south Pacific. Fair enough. What I want to know
about is; for them to have the legends, some must have
also made it back. Look at a map of Pacific currents,
it can’t really be done.
Their history also says that, whereas now in Bella
Coola the sea is on the west and the land on the East,
it used to be the only way around. This was generally
scoffed until geographic evidence, like finding trees
on the seabed, proved that it was true.
When it comes to long memories, these people don’t
piss around.

The rains let up, and the road remained, and we left.
Ed gave us all bald eagle feathers he’d gathered from
where they dive for salmon, I want to keep it but if I
try to take that thing into Australia they’ll have a
conniption fit.
Ed’s brother and I followed the girls in his pickup,
in case the little rental Kia went over a cliff on the
formidable dirt road. Snow and ravens. We said our
goodbyes in a redneck diner, pocketed some packages of
marmalade for the road, and started out on the long
road home.

The sun sets about four pm these days, so we were only
halfway to halfway back when it suddenly got dark, and
the northern lights started up.
They began as a few vague curtains that took me a
while to realise weren’t clouds. By the time we hit
the home stretch the sky was alight with swirling
vortexes of purple and green, and flashing ribbons of
light tearing from one side of the sky to the other.
God it was incredible. There were even slight tints
when we arrived back in Vancouver at three a.m, which
I haven’t seen before or since, so I think what we saw
was about as good as it gets. Words fail me. I’m
stoked.


A while back we celebrated Downstairs Sarah’s birthday
with karaoke. About twenty of us crammed into a little
private booth, trying to find singable western songs
post seventies. It was a bit lame, but they had cheap
beer.
Afterwards we’re standing on the street outside a bar.
People start drifting home. Brief episode with jumping
fences and thrown out of the bar, I find myself
heading home on a bike, following one of my flatmates,
drunk, sharing a bike with another, also drunk, who’s
shouting at the people we pass: This country is not
about genetically modified beer! Who’s with me? I,
just killing myself laughing, stop for a red light and
they don’t (nor for three more after) and I lose them.
I head home and they crash into a lamppost, bend their
wheel; try unsuccessfully to hitch a ride before
heading back into town for another couple of drinks. I
learn this when they make it home late the next day.

After a week at home me and the girls head into
America. They’re going as far as LA, via Arizona, I’m
planning to make it down to the redwoods I missed last
time, before turning back.
We were driven across the border by a friend, and had
the misfortune of drawing a shitty border guard who
made for the only difficulty I’ve had so far entering
or leaving the United States. After forty-five minutes
of pointless questions and a quick search of our
vehicle we’re back on the way to Bellingham,
Washington state, where we have people to interview
and friends to stay with.
If I were to live in America it would be in
Bellingham. When you pass people on the street there
they smile and say hello. It’s unnerving. Really good,
obviously, but completely incongruous with my
experience of this part of the world. We stayed in a
little loft where a girl lives and practices massage,
cuddled up in our sleeping bags at night, attending
city planning meetings and interviewing planners of
communities during the day.

The city planning meeting was along the lines of
something like this, though I have to doubt it coz
don’t make sense: the port authority (a public
institution) wants to buy an area of the port from a
paper mill company that’s been operation there for a
long time. They want to buy it with taxpayer’s money.
Everyone’s for the development of the area, since it
could be a great little feature for the town but is
currently an industrial shit hole.
Thing is, over the years said mill company has been
dumping truly obscene amounts of mercury and lead into
the bay, along with all the other byproduct crap of
making paper.
So the port authority wants to spend more tax money
cleaning the area up. Problem is, if you touch the
sand with the mercury, it’s certain that an amount of
it will get stirred into the water. They don’t plan to
contain this.
After all this is done, which will take about twenty
years, they want to sell 85% of the site as commercial
space and luxury condominiums (with a moorage lagoon
for big ass yachts), with only 12% accessible by the
people of Bellingham. This sale will be at an enormous
loss, but they hope maybe to make the money back on
land taxes. The insurance company they’ve bought
onboard to underwrite any overspending is on a
blacklist of the top ten most untrustworthy in the US.
Under American law the mill has no responsibility to
clean up its own mess, and in addition to paying them
for the site, for their trouble, the port wants to
chuck in a free building.

Hmmmm.
And we didn’t even really seek this out, we just
stumbled across it as something that happened to be
going on there at the time.

We talked to community planners, we talked to
gleaners, we talked to hippies and thinkers and the
doers of stuff. Had a nice dinner or two.
There’s a lot being done to reduce waste, especially
when it comes to food. Groups that go round farms and
offer to take what the farmer can’t do anything with.
People’s fruit trees that they don’t want to harvest.
The manky lottery of diving in dumpsters.
There’s a lot being done to develop communities. Know
thy neighbor.
Alternative energies. Grey water. Things I’ve been
taking a bit of an interest myself recently. I want to
get an inventor’s forum going, maybe next year.

Leaving Bellingham, Emily and Kate jump on a Greyhound
for Portland, me and Marama set out hitching. We wait
an hour before being picked up by a young couple, not
too long considering there are two of us (maybe it was
the thumb puppets), who having not much better to do,
end up deciding to drive us the whole damn way. Bless
them.

Quick unsubstantiated rumor: I was told the Bush
administration is currently shutting down the
Greyhound bus company because they don’t like people
moving around too easily. Doesn’t sound feasible to
me, but these days you never know.

Portland, house to stay in so cold we wear our winter
clothes inside during the day, drive up to the Mt Hood
national park to check out more clear cuts.
The group who took us first showed us an aerial map of
the area, damn thing looked like a tile floor, every
other square being felled trees. Once we got out there
it was even worse, most of the treed areas were just
waist high monocultures of Douglas fir. Five feet tall
is when the law says an area has been fully
regenerated, and you can fell the area next to it.
It was weirdly still. We were overlooking a valley
half missing, and there were no birds, or squirrels,
or insects, or any other signs of life at all.
Apparently there’s bugger all fish either. It was one
of the quietest places I’ve ever been, and that
includes the deserts.

We arrived in an area of relatively old growth,
walked, filmed and ate. It was beautiful there. Big
trees (decadent, is the official term of the logging
advisory) with occasional flurries of ice mist
drifting down from the canopy. We stumbled into a cut
the size of a football field, retreated. There were
birds all over the place.

One of the guys at the house we were staying is a
logger; the area he works is apparently managed with
much tighter ecological considerations. He was
surprised at what we’d seen in the Mount Hood.

Interesting story about that guy: he’d recently tried
to catch a flight. In his hold luggage (not the stuff
you take into the cabin) were his grandfather’s
straight razor, two disassembled antique rifles, gay
porn, and a magazine with a map of the Republican
convention in New York.
As he’s about to board the plane there’s a call for
him to come to the check-in desk. Waiting for him are
several cops and representatives of the FBI, he is
quickly arrested.
The main charge is ‘non declaration of an edged
weapon’ and there’s a good chance he’ll do at least a
year in prison. If they make the charges federal he
could get fifty.
During the questioning the agents kept saying things
like, “So when the Kerry campaign gave you the map…”
and, “When you said you’d do this for the Kerry
campaign…” and, “We can help you if you tell us who
else is involved”.

More scaryarse shit, something they’re trialing at the
moment is new student id cards that are also credit
cards. The chips in them are radio transceivers, which
broadcast your whereabouts to a range of twenty feet.
These are being trailed with student cards, with the
aim of bringing them in as a national id card.
Plans are also in place to put low range cell phone
repeaters (radio frequency) on the top of every
lamppost and power pole in the country.

The catalogue rolls on.
I didn’t get to see the redwoods, a-gain, I had to be
out of the country by Thursday night when the visa I
got for the Burningman trip expired. So I said goodbye
to the girls as they left for Southern Oregon, and
turned myself back towards home.

Don’t leave late on a day that gets dark at four
thirty. I waited an hour at an onramp for a ride that
took me two miles (to be fair, with the traffic it did
take half an hour) and two hours by another onramp for
a ride that never came, before it got too dark and I
had to go to bed.
Looking for a place to pitch my tent in the middle of
a suburb I inadvertently wandered into a gated
community. I was eying up the jumpabililty of a fence
by the river when a guy who’d been packing things into
his nearby car called out as to whether he could help
me, or not.
Told him I was a little lost, which was true.
He informed me I would have to go back the way I’d
come, and to do it quickly before someone sees me and
calls the police.

So I end up curled against a power transformer at the
base of a huge animated sign in a patch of hedge next
to a busy restaurant. After couple of hours I think,
if I sleep next to this thing I’m going to get cancer,
and move a few meters back where I’m more visible but
can’t feel the hum of electricity through the wall of
my tent.

The next morning I wait another two hours before a guy
drifts along and tells me I’m better off walking to
the other side of the town. He’s been hitching between
Canada and Mexico for three years, tells me where I
can get the cheapest food and places to stay. But I’m
moving on. He tells me to be careful. I wish people
would stop saying that.
Another hour to walk, I buy a hotdog from a vendor for
a buck twentyfive, should’ve bought two - it’s the
first food I’ve had since the huge Vietnamese lunch
leaving Portland.
Another two hours at the onramp north of town. This
one surprises me, I’d excused people for not picking
me up previous, they were shitty places to hitch, but
this one’s perfect and I still wait two hours.
America. Guy eventually picks me up and takes me
twenty minutes north.

He’d been the Democrat voting overseer type guy (I
don’t know the technical name) in his area for the
election. He was telling me about the woman who was
the Republican. Twice in the day she asked someone for
their voter registration card before she would let
them vote. This was strange because you don’t actually
need to do that, but most people wouldn’t think to
question it. They happened to be the only two black
people who came to vote there that day. Apparently she
was trying to intimidate a lot of people.
The guy was planning his escape to Canada. I told him
to aim higher.

Word from the front: yes the election was rigged. Even
on the day there were reports of voting in certain
areas being made unreasonably difficult and the
occasional county turning in more votes for Bush than
there were people actually living there (See how good
a president he is, his approval rating is 107%!)
But in the end it was something more surprising than
that. My first reaction when I heard fifteen million
new voters turned out this time was, great, people
showing their concern over the current government.
Nope. Five million of those were from the Christian
far right, voting purely on the matter of gay marriage
and abortion. More people cited Morality (with a
capital M) as their reason for voting than any other.

I think Bush may have actually won fair and square.
Despite his best efforts.

If you look at a map of the election, county by county
rather than by state, one thing becomes obvious.
Cities voted for Kerry, everyone else voted for Bush.
The bigger the city, the higher the Kerry vote. He got
90% in Washington DC.

But the thing is, fundamentalist votes don’t come
cheap. Piss off the left wing and they make snide
comments about you at dinner parties. Piss off the
right and they’ll fucking kill you. And they’re easily
annoyed. So now Bush is torn, please his constituency
and completely alienate his urban centers (I think we
can safely consider the rest of the world about as
alienated as it’s going to get) or make a few
allowances and lose his voter base. And maybe catch a
cap in his arse.

Of course its not that simple, which is why I’m still
fascinated to see how this all plays out.


Mark my words and mark them well; he will not complete
four years. This I know.


Next guy to pick me up, slightly dubious local farmer,
took me twenty minutes up the road. He’d already made
his escape from the South. Said Portland was becoming
another LA, but liked where he lived on the side of Mt
St Helens. Through his slightly aggressive stoicism he
seemed relieved that volcano has eased on its threats
to blow up.

Next guy, twenty minutes, planning his escape to
Canada. Aim higher. Telling me about a guy he knew was
giving him grief for being gay, telling him he was
going to hell. He says, Wait a minute; you’re a drug
addict, married, having an affair.
For some reason that’s not an effective argument.

Next guy. Canada. Higher, dude, higher. Seriously. He
drops me in Olympia and I decide to take a Greyhound
as it’s now dark and I’m not making good time. Two
hour wait in which time I have a hard time trying to
find somewhere to exchange money, Bank of America
wants to charge me fifteen dollars for the service.
Place across the road doesn’t. Catch bus. Seattle
stopover. Back in Bellingham by one a.m. I try to
hitch from the bus station into town, where I can have
somewhere to stay, but no one’s having it so I pitch
my little tent by the sea and have a surprisingly good
sleep considering the lumpy ground.
Next morning I make a break for the border, have to
wait two more hours despite the sweet spot, on my way
with a couple and their toddler who take me all the
way home.
They’re popping over to Vancouver for thanksgiving. At
the border the woman in the booth asks how we know
each other, they say they picked me up hitching. Woman
looks like someone just told her the moon is made of
dead bodies and says I strongly advise you to NEVER
transport someone you don’t know across a border. Then
lets us go.
Toddler, who the second I stepped into the car burst
into tears and had to be extensively consoled is like,
Where are we going? To the zoo. Is Daniel coming too?
Nope. Is he going to stay in the car?
Cute.


Home! Weeee! It’s been all parties and movies and
making a little bit of money and wet weather. The
flat’s gearing up for winter with talk of backcountry
snowboarding missions and tours of the Rockies. I’ve
been offered a pretty high level job working on an
animated tv show with maybe a feature film to come.
The guy from the studio has been looking for a modeler
for six months.

Almost a pity I’m leaving in a week and a half,
really.

So it is confirmed, arrive London (Heathrow, god help
me) Dec 21st, fly into Glasgow same day, hitch into
Edinburgh the day after. Leave London for Singapore on
January 12fth, Perth the 14th. Hang round there for a
while, Melbourne, where I’ll take another crack at the
film industry and get this inventor’s community thing
going.
I’ve been making improvements on our house here (in my
head); ground level fire baths and solar funnels and
greywater toilets. I started setting up a water
collection system, but they tell me you can’t drink
the rainwater.

Daniel.


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