Raysondetre's post on u2.com after Bono appeared on Conan

This is called ripping someone a new one the only place you can, on their official Chat forum. This was in reaction to the closing of Bono/U2's interview with Conan, 10/06/05. 

Please bear in mind that I wasn't ignoring his efforts in Africa. I simply felt that with that one line, he'd effectively whored his entire effort. I still stand by it; for that one closing sentence at 6:50, he ought to have been absolutely shredded and put up on a stick (metaphorically), meaning "litertarily" as follows. What did he say? Well it's perhaps the most devastating piece of Orwellian tripe ever uttered, thanks to the fact that he said it. I posted this response quite immediately, creating my profile for the purpose. What made it a real transgression was how U2 was scrolling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every night during this tour, and how this one falsehood had instantly made their belief in application of this apparently selective (or utterly obliviated reality) when it came to Western human rights abuses under the auspices of "the War on Terror". Here it is:

"On Conan and the 'war on terror' how 'bout it?!! Having seen U2 on Conan last night, I can only say I could not be more disheartened by this appearance, due to Bono's closing sentence, where he declared that the One campaign, or the campaign for debt relief to Third World Countries was a noble cause for this generation to be remembered for, like 'the war on terror'. It was overwhelming to hear the two equated with each other and leaves me with few other things I can think other than that in being conciliatory in the interest of his greatest achievement, Bono has finally managed to sell the greater part of his soul. While I have been encountering this sort of disillusionment in just about everyone I know (fan-mily excepted) when it comes to Bono (in Ireland especially) for many years, I now am counted among them, and it is final. While my opinion is solitary and unnoticeable, and pointless to put here, I am still declaring that had I known that he would make such a public statement, I never would have supported this album or this tour, and never will support U2 again. There have to be other people who feel the same even if in a small minority. It's safe to say you have lost the support of my entire family (not a small number), who have followed you with singular devotion for 18 years. ('Singular' to the extent that two of us were 'nutters' enough to even travel alone to Ireland over it.) 

I have seen this tour and duly noted your efforts towards religious tolerance between Christians, Jews and Moslems, as we are all commonly sprung from the God of Abraham, but the bitter fact is with this one public statement alone, to realms of people above and beyond your fan-base at such a key juncture, you have successfully betrayed your efforts in that moment, and betrayed peace itself. You have betrayed every single innocent Arab, Moslem victim of the 'war on terror', -traded them for Africa, by implying their victimization is 'noble', just as saving Africa is 'noble'. This dismisses every Iraqi and Afghani unborn child who will be deformed, all the civilians who die of cancer, possibly for the next hundred years or so, from all the depleted uranium bombs that have been dropped on their countries, in the name of 'the war on terror', everyone who suffers unjustly from it. While the mounting casualties in the Middle East and Eurasia of 'the war on terror' are still a minority compared to the implosion of Africa due to poverty and AIDs, the causes and potential ramifications of the 'war on terror' threaten to engulf far more, indeed, are well capable of precipitating WWIII, partly along religious fault-lines though its motives are of course far baser and basic, and more related, as you well know, to poverty. It relates to energy and who is going to control it as we start to run low. It relates to greed about basic standards of living and who gets to live by far higher standards than everyone else. 

Virtually none of the victims of the 'war on terror' were actually targets because they were causes of terror, and every time the catch-phrase is used, it is to abrogate human rights and create more terror. Iraq did not support Al Qaeda. They did not possess WMDs. The entire Afghani nation did not support Al Qaeda, in fact the US developed Al Qaeda in that country and Osama was a CIA asset then. The 'war on terror' is used over and over as a premise for abuse by states. The precedent by the United States of unilateral, unending potential warfare against anyone they choose, the precedent for waging pre-emptive war that they have set (illegally), has spawned and validated repressive efforts by other countries against their internal populations worldwide. It is used as a defense of illegal brutalities by the Israelis against the Palestinians, by Russia towards Chechnya (neither of whom's hands are not bloody), -it is used by many western nations as a ploy to limit the freedoms of their citizens, witness Australia and Italy, -where you cannot use an internet cafe anymore without a passport or ID. It's used in the US the same way. I am wasting my breath here. Simply put, if there is a war going on that physically, brutally enforces who is going to control the oil spigots in the coming years of decline, which translates directly into inequality where some will remain impoverished and others won't, which is enforced through brute force, it is not tenable, in the same breath, to espouse our equality, and equalization for all (the war on poverty), and yet espouse the enforcement of inequality and poverty that is enacted in the 'war on terror'. You've just wiped out your entire premise, upended your efforts. This war on terror is the enforcement of poverty and repression of equal human rights, via warfare and intimidation. Is the alleviation of debt you've managed to help accomplish -does it somehow cancel this out, or does articulating such a double standard, as if it doesn't exist, just support the continued enforcement of that double-standard? Sure it does, especially coming from you! Now it hardly seems appropriate to berate rock stars on their politics, especially considering their next to nil impact on politics, but you have always had a political stand, gained stature from it, and used it, so if you play there, you're open to criticism there. I'm sure most of your fan-base has always been grateful for your unabashed stance and the fact that you were willing to be a voice for peace, which included, in this sense, politics. I avidly observed the course of ZOOTV and your courage, everywhere, in your active stance in politics, manifest so many ways. The night you performed in Vancouver, that was the night Clinton won the presidency. How thankful we were for the unseating of Bush 1 and his gulf war in Iraq. The war is just as unjust today as it was then when you called Daddy Bush at the White House every night, worse now than it was then, when Daddy Bush mocked Clinton for meeting with the 'rock growp' U2, and I thought to myself, amazing, he just lost the entire U2 fan-base who votes because he thinks rock stars' politics are irrelevant, and they don't. Years later I felt right in this assumption when I read (in the Irish Times), that Clinton personally thanked your prime minister for how you, U2, had helped swing votes in his favour then. I'm sure the Bushes took notice of this misstep and it helps to open the door today. They never dismissed you again. 

Who's singing whose tune now? Yes, you play politics, even though you don't play; you were so careful to not endorse anybody, remained untainted by politics, but rabble-roused your way all through Europe, pulling the pants down on injustice. Through the entire course you have managed to be unpartisan, wending the middle way. As Conan said, you're doing it more now than ever, bridging between the Right and Left. But then they both support the War on Terror. How politically expedient for you! 

Never, in those heady times of ZOOTV, when you had the courage to broadcast the suffering of Sarajevo under the bombs of their own compatriots (but more so NATO), -never would I have foreseen you'd capitulate to voicing support for the darker modus operandi of Establishment. Never in my sad dreams would I have thought you'd parrot a political line in favour of anyone. Last night you did. How timely it was for Bush's latest exhortation to continue the 'war on terror' the same day in his state of the union address, treating this as the war on Iraq! (Compounded the senate's full endorsement of over 400 billion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan today.) On your latest tour you use the Fly to point out how helpless 'they' want us to feel, as if we have no voice or power, since we have no economic power. But with that one statement, you took away our voice, the alternative voice you've always been, that simply looked at suffering, conveyed it to us all, and showed it for what it was, NO MATTER WHO was causing it, and just by conveying it, indicted it for what it really was. With that one declaration that the war on terror is 'noble', you've become selective about who's causing suffering and upended the truth. 

By doing so, you robbed one of the last voices I thought remained in the public sphere that had any sort of broad impact, -yours. -In that sense, I have little or no voice left now that speaks for me, and so does everyone else who feels pain at all injustice no matter who's doing it -who feels like me. I feel even more helpless because of you. (No matter I felt helpless anyway.) Thanks for helping to close the full circle of the invisible, we are completely excised from the public debate, I'm now fully invisible. This war makes us all victims, whether our home is being blown up by the IDF, or we are subject to the Patriot Act. We are all victims of the erosion of human equality and freedoms. How well you know this, it is the fount of this entire tour, yet how fully you undermined it last night. You empathized with Africa after you saw it and it has transformed and dictated the sum of your efforts today. My father said for years that the first thing that had to be done to rectify what was wrong in this world was to forgive Third World debt and how grateful I was to see someone manage that somewhat! 

My personal empathy with suffering I've encountered came from living among the Palestinians in the West Bank at the onset of the intifada. Maybe it is part of our human nature, and while empathy is essential it is pathetic in its way to only empathize and act towards suffering and injustice we ourselves witness and experience, the flaw being we should be capable of empathizing universally. You've always appeared to have done so, until last night. You stood for something. That was the aspect of U2 that was more than just Rock 'n' Roll, music to feel and enjoy, was the aspect that actually could be believed in, and is gone for me today. You lost me. I'm someone you met once, because once around the time of the eclipse and the millennium I came and handed you a letter in four parts, one you appeared to have named both your sons after. Maybe that was just a really bizarre coincidence, but if you did, and you remember, you can put a face on this disillusionment."

Oh, and technically the boycott has stood up awfuly well, even despite a number of make-ups since then, since the only way I ever got anything U2 was if people bought (or ripped) it for me. Since Détente  there have only been two purchases. Ever. Trust me, it takes an awful lot for me to say Détente.

Dream in Jerusalem, 1988

The dream was in Jerusalem, but had a futuristic twist, invoked that it was “New Jerusalem”. 

 

Our family arrives in a beautiful city steeped in history where we intended to reside. But there is a great evil in this city, which pervades throughout. You can almost breath it in the air. This presence is a live force, silently converting all comers to its seductive will. The religious souvenir shops in the city act as small powerful centers, where the conversion process is commenced. All are subjugated. In touring the city we inevitably go to a great structure in the city’s center, which was correspondingly the center of its belief and religious history. It was also the source of all evil, the center of the insidious will. The family, or I alone came several times to this towering building which was revered by all the converts. It had the appearance of a church, cut in gilded stone in the gothic style. At present it served two purposes, it was a massive dining hall in the day, and in the evenings it served its true purpose; it became the site of mass congregational services. (Woe to us if we had encountered one of those services, I feel it would have been very frightening, like being in the presence of the Devil and opening oneself to discovery. I had a vision of the ceremony.) However, we came on this day to eat, (and soon lost our appetite). I said the city was steeped in history, of one religion, one building. As I wandered inside the stone surfaces faded, revealing the inside wholly decorated with the bones of innocent martyrs. Thus it had appeared for many centuries. It was founded on the blood of martyrs. They had been covered to make the place palatable to the more “enlightened” modern practitioners. But the truth was evil. Feeling oppressed we went outside, and sat on the cement where we ate our own lunch. I was sitting alone, and sensed the sun shining behind me, over my left shoulder. In my mind I could see it (without turning). It was very close, not light years away. I felt someone kneel behind me and was immediately enveloped in the care, strength and security of “Daddy’s love”. So I turned, fully expecting to see my father, and was faced with a stranger. He looked like a Palestinian Arab, a slight clean-cut man in a navy jacket and tan slacks. His hair was black and he had a moustache. I was taken aback, and as I had turned on him in complete familiarity I said, “Excuse me, Sir, but I thought you were my father.” I turned back, and the realization dawned, my lips curved into a smile, and I thought back, In fact, I think you are my Father.

It was Jesus Christ. We sat together, and then he went and spoke to my parents about the work still to be done.    

CHAPTER 5 - Israel

The arrival in Tel Aviv in 1988 was at nightfall and the last vestigial memory, the imprint of impression that remains was the advertisements, and how they strived for everything Western. The cutting edge visuals. The immaculate model. The stark green and black. The way so little the image related to what was being promoted was the same, so that a foreigner had no hope of knowing what it was promoting, outside of perhaps a brand. The sense that the image was striving for that standard so hard it betrayed it did not have it, yet asserting this opulent identity. Israel was replete with such contradictions, back then more an amalgam of all the Jews who had migrated from mainly Europe and North America, transferring that mentality and lifestyle, yet stridently asserting nationhood based on a forged and historic identity. It carried the taint of the conquistador wave back towards the cradle of civilization in a fiercely militarist state.

After a two-day stint at a Tel Aviv Hostel (the memory from that was that they put out chocolate icing in the morning to put on your toast, which obviously pleased the kids), the entire travelling group complete with luggage was actually squished into a single minivan (seats had to be removed in order to fit), which managed to not break down on the mountain climb to Jerusalem. That provided the sense of the aridity of the landscape, and the noted attempt in places on route to re-establish pine forests. A one-month apartment rental was obtained very quickly on the basis of the deception that it would house only four adults. This very nearly backfired when the landlord appeared unannounced while the children, who luckily were still on the stairs at the time coming back from the park, managed to hide under the staircase and avoid him and disappear for a while along with the bulk of the group. Given the apartment constituted three small rooms, the entire floor space was covered by the group sleeping at night. Very quickly they visited a foam mattress shop and single narrow mattresses made of dense high-quality foam were bought for everyone in the group. They were 3 inches thick and had to be rolled up daily. The month gave them the liberty to explore Jerusalem, the Old City, and gain an impression of Israel. They managed to get through this living arrangement amicably with only one flashpoint argument near the end.

In the meantime the search was on to find a place in which the entire group could realistically live, which realistically was not easy in the least. Housing in Israel was at an absolute premium. The more they talked to people, the more they learned that in attempting to maintain that westernized lifestyle, people were living on their credit month to month and just managing to pay it off with their next pay check. Nothing was wasted. Anything put out on the curb was gone within minutes, which was nothing like Canada. Back in Victoria there had been a “garbage day” twice a year, which allowed people to put out all the stuff that was too big for the garbage can limit and any backlog they had just lying about. It had gradually become a family exercise to go out in the evenings searching these piles the day before pick up, and there had been quite a lot of pickings. It was recycling, and gradually more and more people were seen doing it. Their Dad would come back with a flood of stuff that it would be difficult to deal with back home, filling the driveway. Where to put it all?! There was no such thing here. It implied something about relative affluence.

They did most of their travelling by walking or by taxis. They had a laugh-in at the park one night. Their father took many pictures, including full moon sessions of the Old City with his tripod, a new learning curve. They saw that your typical Brinks truck security carried Uzi’s. They met their first soldiers patrolling around the perimeter of the Palestinian East side of Jerusalem in the Kidron Valley, who were delighted to capture the western children in a photo-op. They encountered the Jerusalem Post “news” story of a settler girl who had allegedly been “stoned to death” by Palestinian villagers, only to discover a buried retraction in the Post that related a far different story after Prime Minister Shamir had personally made an appearance at the 16-year-old girl’s funeral declaring the Palestinians would pay in blood. It turned out the girl had been shot by her own (of US extraction) Zionist security guard, who had taken it upon himself to parade the high school children straight into a Palestinian village carrying his uzi after opening fire and shooting a Palestinian farmer in the head on the way. The Palestinian villagers who surrounded the group had thought they were being attacked, and once there the security guard had again opened fire. The village paid a collective punishment penalty for this encounter with homes and olive groves deliberately destroyed. (web link of report with articles)

Israel had an interesting amalgam of good food products and bad. The chocolate in the bulk section of the main grocery store was amazing, because the learning of it had been exported from the Swiss. It was not uncommon to see shoppers rifling through the chocolate and eating it as they passed. The Jaffa oranges were different, delightful and tangy. The attempts at western imitations like ketchup, Coca-cola, mustard, margarine, cottage cheese and mayonnaise were dreadful. Ketchup was heavily sugared tomato paste. Mustard best not described.

The search was on for a place to live but proving fruitless, mainly because of the prohibitive rents. It was imperative to leave the apartment when the month was out. To give a sense of how high the rents were, an “apartment” in East Jerusalem, which was actually two rooms with an open air kitchen that had a dirt floor shared with two other “apartment” families, ran $1200 US per month. While anything in the Old City was especially steep in price, it gives you a sense of how high the rental rates were. They looked at a place in Ein Karem, where John the Baptist was born. This was a travel rental; the house would be left fully furnished as the family went to Europe. Over the course of the conversation they asked how the Jewish family came by the home. They responded that it had just been abandoned, left fully furnished, and they were able to just walk in and take it, and from then on it was theirs. The question that loomed uncomfortably in the travelling family’s perception was what had happened to the Palestinian family that had fled their home and why had they fled it? While Randy deeply desired to live in the town of John the Baptist, in the end he backed away from the ethical matter of renting a home that had been forcibly taken from some unidentified unknown family. Added to the exorbitant price asked for the rental and the impression of dishonesty having to do with the deposit, it broke the camel’s back.

Opportunity knocked one day in the form of meeting a Palestinian pair of young men who appealed to Randy to come and check rentals in Bethlehem, in fact they knew someone who had a house available. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, the Occupied Territories. So the crossing began driven purely by economic necessity. The first foray into Bethlehem Rahab took caused a joking parley where an icon shop owner’s son offered “200 camels” as a dowry price. The house in question was actually in the adjoining town of Beit Jala. The name means “Carpet of Grass” in Aramaic. “It is said that the people of Beit Jala can make the stone talk!” –such is the community skill at stone cutting. Bethlehem is central to two adjoining towns, Beit Zahur in the north and Beit Jala in the south. Beit Zahur is primarily Muslim, but Beit Jala is primarily Christian, being next to Bethlehem. St. George the Patron Saint of Great Britain, was also the Patron Saint of the town because historically St. George is believed to have had a Christian Palestinian mother. Beit Jala ascends the second highest mountain in Israel; its families had farmed on the summit. In a possible stab at humour the Israelis cockily named the mountain Everest. Its original name is Ras Jala. The view of the settlement of Gilo partially obstructed the view of Jerusalem, which while on a summit itself, actually lay below in the view from the upper reaches of Beit Jala. (When the land for Gilo was expropriated from the local Palestinians, the local stone quarry which produced a lovely marbled pale pink stone was taken away.) Jerusalem was only about six kilometres away. The settlement of Har Gilo now capped the summit of Everest. There was no public transit bus service in the Palestinian areas, but a transit bus served Har Gilo exclusively maybe five times a day. If they did not go down to Bethlehem to take a taxi, the family and travel group members would be permitted to enter Har Gilo in order to catch the bus there to Jerusalem. They could show their foreign passports to pass the guarded gate, which was locked at nightfall. The bus was not the most common scheduled transit to Har Gilo, rather it was a jeep with armed IDF soldiers that made the trek every half hour, up and down, with a manned sub-machine gun mounted in the back. As the patrol jeep would ascend the main street in Biet Jala, the soldier manning the gun would often swivel to aim the gun barrel at the heads of passing children. This would strike one as an allegation the Palestinians made in their ready list of commonly endured traumas, except that it soon happened to the children of the visiting family as well. If the jeep patrol encountered any Palestinian male walking alone at night, that person would be beaten on sight.

In a small twist of fate the primary school that lay closest to their new home had the same name that was taken for the second daughter, “Talitha cumi”. There wasn’t a language barrier to deal with for the most part because children were taught English as a second language all through grade school.

In complete challenge to the Jerusalem Post article that treated Palestinians like they would attempt to attack settlers on sight, Randy, who with his facial appearance and long hair and beard looked every bit the part of a Zionist settler, and in fact created that impression on the villagers before they found out about the family’s origins, never once encountered negative treatment of any kind, neither verbal or physical. And while any spoken encounter would lead fairly soon to the disclosure that the family was not Jewish, this usually did not happen until they were invited into Palestinian homes. The culture of Arab hospitality was such that if the children or family members ventured outside walking, they often suffered serious delays in getting from “A” to “B” simply because they were constantly being invited into the homes of anyone who saw them, either for customary concentrated coffee spiced with cardamom, or a sublime lemonade. The odd time someone would try to introduce them to Araq, the Arab variant of Ouzo. These invites nearly always resulted in prolonged conversation, and the Palestinians suffered repression of a sort that made them want to tell any outsider they had the opportunity to speak to the hazards of their daily lives under the Occupation. They rarely had the opportunity to tell foreigners of their lives. They could not phone internationally anywhere, their phone lines only operated within the West Bank.  The grievances they spoke of were voluble and long, and included children beaten with multiple fractures by IDF soldiers. The first Intifada was just beginning, and in the beginning it was a collective rebellion of stone throwing children. But anyone listening to the relation of Occupation history and the telling of the present, understanding how these children had been born into these conditions, could easily see why they were reacting so. The elders were not restive because they remembered Occupation under the Turks before that, which in the more “benign” ‘80’s, they were recollecting as the worse of the two. The Turks would severely punish anyone who took it upon themselves to learn to read. The IDF had not yet taken to deliberately sniping and killing Palestinian children for daring to walk to school, though there were years they deliberately cancelled school altogether simply to put the Palestinian children behind in their education, and actually they would deliberately do this just before the children had completed their school year, in order to waste it and make them repeat a year. The right to education was and is attacked constantly.

On the Jerusalem side, you learned about all the reforestation the Israelis were doing, about all the collective farms and agriculture, and how the Palestinians had previously neglected the land. On the West Bank side you learned that the Turks had clear cut “everything” upon their retreat to fuel their steam engines. You learned of the collective punishments exacted on Palestinian villages by bulldozing their predominant crop, their olive groves, which filled the terraces on Everest as far as the eye could see, plunging down, down, down those steep valleys. The valleys were so steep it was now easy to understand how Saul in pursuit could have had a shouting match with David and his men directly across the valley, yet pursuing him would have never caught him, for he would still have had to have gone down, then up again. There were trees easily estimated to have stood at the time of Christ or even longer. No matter. It takes an olive tree thirty years to produce just one olive. No matter. They were bulldozed. On the Palestinian side they not only learned to identify the fig trees they’d seen in Jerusalem, but the pistachio trees, citrus, and the askedinias, a pitted fruit like an apricot in appearance, but much softer, juicier, and redolent with tangy flavour that was an explosion on your taste buds, with multiple smooth pits all fitted together at the centre. After six weeks they all succumbed one by one to a combination of prolonged vomiting and dysentery apparently brought on by an optically undetectable yeast spore westerners were unaccustomed to carried on all native fruit, especially since once they crossed into the West Bank, they were eating locally. The butcher’s was full of live caged chickens that were slaughtered on the spot. Pick one. The family never quite got into the swing of it. They tended to frequent the most westernized grocer’s, run by a thirty year old man named Maher who had lived in the US for eight years while getting his business degree. He set his sights on Rahab immediately.

They could smell the baker’s baking bread at night in the wee hours; it was just in sight down the hill, and often they would walk down the road at night to catch the bread freshly baked, hot out of the oven. It was white in the Italian style, along with the customary pitas. The trip down the hill had to be made very quietly because many of the homes had a dog chained outside, which otherwise would be not quite feral. The Palestinians did not treat their dogs like pets, whereas the Israelis doted on their dogs, and the cats in Jerusalem were pretty much feral. Because the chained dogs had little other social recourse, they would communicate with each other by barking at night. It was also a matter of protection. If one dog heard something and started to bark, the whole valley of dogs could be set off. It was not a small thing to manage to get to the bakery without setting off the wary valley of dogs who were bored silly on chains. It’s readily understood why in the animation/documentary Waltz With Bashir an IDF soldier was commanded to execute the dogs before entering a village. During their stay, the family heard of the “Druse”, a Christian militia described in dark frightened tones, which was a mercenary band the IDF utilized for their overwhelming brutality; they were identified by their burgundy berets.

On the lighter side, the youngsters on the bread run took to arming themselves with water balloons so they could pelt the nearby dogs that tended to set the valley off when they passed to get bread. The water balloon tactic had been Randy’s suggestion. That pacified most of them, except for an immense irascible pit bull, named “Teddy” after the mayor of Jerusalem. (Teddy was kept on the roof, which made him harder to hit.) The two German Shepherds who lived at the US Consulate residence, which was also in sight of their home, never backed down. The home the family were renting in Beit Jala had originally been constructed as a US Consulate residence, but because of some aspects that were shoddily built, the Americans had built another one themselves. The structure they had rejected was immense, over 1400 square feet on each floor and built with top of the line materials, stone floors throughout and granite countertops, spacious bathrooms with bidets, but not quite top of the line construction. It had two floors and two balconies, and you could go up on the roof as well. The rent for this palace was $600 US a month. The difference in property values and the quiet (Christian) nature of Beit Jala, its slightly milder climate due to elevation (it actually snowed there the odd time), and its proximity to Jerusalem created a situation where there were several Consulate residences in the area, including the US one.

They live large but lived poor in this immensity, which to them was a palace. They tried to get by on a washer that was so small it took at least fifteen loads to do the laundry each week. It broke down often and Rahab lost patches of skin on her knuckles and palms every week she had to do the laundry by hand.

In the West Bank her siblings played on the terraces, and once got into a stone throwing fight with a neighbouring family. Jonathan nearly got into a stone throwing fight with children outside the Temple Mount as well. On the terraces at their new home they played tag and capture the flag, running all over the place, something none of the Palestinian children would do. Neighbouring families would have thought them crazy because they were always climbing the rock terraces using handholds, putting their hands in crevasses that the locals all knew could easily house scorpions, though it was a while before anyone told them that. A yellow snake hardly larger than a garter snake was bludgeoned to death by their landlord on the front porch. He told them its bite was fatal. The landlord and his family lived on the ground floor. A black centipede about six inches long caused screams of panic by the landlord’s children while the kids were visiting them downstairs. Because the landlord’s kids were so afraid of it and they were shouting for their father, the Canadian boys tried to accommodate by stopping the centipede from getting under the furniture by blocking it with little plastic building blocks. It turned out the bite of this centipede could also prove fatal. Strangely it was called a “44” for its legs.

One day Rahab and her brothers decided to try and circuit the entire mountain, which was partially wild and mainly terraced, just for the sake of doing it. They saw a falcon dive for a plastic bag. The oldest of the landlord’s four sons insisted on tagging along. They were fine until they got to the fencing of Cremesan (scroll down to see aerial map), which was a monk’s retreat, seminary school and a winery as well. Its entry was halfway down the mountain; it was also on the other side from the direction they were circuiting the summit. They were close enough to the summit to find that the winery’s walls met with those of Har Gilo; there was no way to pass. The wall of Cremesan was topped with cement stuck full of shards of broken glass, with barbed wire strung above that. It was still better than dealing with Har Gilo, which was strung with razor wire proper. They found a small section at the top behind some bushes that was only strung with barbed wire. They shimmied under it, simply for the sake of trying to get around; no one wanted to double back in defeat of their original purpose. Rahab tried to get them all to run across the property as fast as possible. When they were nearing the other side, she could see there was a dog patrolling midway up the vineyard. She got them to the fence and the landlord’s son was no longer with them. She noted the soil as they ran. Outside Cremesan the land near the summit was devoid of anything and harder than clay, almost like rock except without the density. Inside where they’d managed to break it for the vineyard it was powder, so fine it reminded her of volcanic ash. (She’d had a small canister of ash from the explosion of Mt. St. Helen’s, but one of her siblings had managed to dump it.) So devoid of life, how hard it must be to try and bring back this ancient land. When they jumped it poof’ed up over their ankles, wan, tan and pale. The mid-section of the mountain and the valley bottoms, the land graduated to a reddish hue. There was still life in it. All the soil was drained out of these lands by man’s use, exposure and time. So much time with man, the soil was totally expended. It reminded her of what they’d encountered in the south of Italy, where the land was reduced to a rocky waste. She was amazed the monks had managed to break the land, curious that it went from rock to powder. She made sure the boys were making it through the fence and ran back in panic searching for the one who was missing, all the while aware there was a dog patrolling. She found the boy wandering disoriented in tears. He had gotten afraid and tried to turn back. He had not been raised with the mettle they had, and the ability to coordinate and work as a group. She brought him to the fence where the others had crossed and they all made the full circuit safely. In fact when they eventually made it to the road and began that portion of the walk back, there were the customary invites for lemonade. A walk to the Cremesan winery to buy wine became one of their excursions. Women were allowed as visitors only. When the seminarians had a party, you could hear their carousing and laughter all the way up the mountain. One day on the walk they met an Italian monk who had lived in Cremesan since the Second World War and could tell them the history going back to better times.

They did tours circuiting the wall of Old Jerusalem, went through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, walked the Kidron Valley, toured the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and saw Rachel’s Tomb in passing every time they went to Jerusalem and back through the checkpoint. At one spot outside the old wall, a natural cliff, Rahab felt such a strong sense of darkness she wondered if this was in fact the real site of the crucifixion, because part of their impression was that these were not the real places where these events took place but an assumed tradition. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was in neglect, but coveted and vied for by each Christian faction. Once passing through the Holy City they were accosted at night by a Greek Orthodox priest from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (which ironically stank of urine), and ordered to turn off their ghetto blaster immediately (which was playing Yes 90120), because it was an affront to the sacredness of the place, which prompted a pretty vocal debate on both sides. In the “basement” of the Church of the Nativity, they were told by their Palestinian “tour guide” that here were remnants of the crosses that had marked the massacres of the babies Herod killed when the Holy family fled to Egypt for fear of the messiah’s succession taking place as prophesied and removing him as King. Rahab mentioned that crosses would have been meaningless to commemorate graves; Jesus had not even been crucified yet, so when would they have been put in place? Leaving the Church of the Nativity Randy tried to position group photos so that he would get the soldiers stationed on the buildings all around the square in the pictures. There was a riot on the way back they did not see that was suppressed and they walked through the trace remnants of scattered rocks, not much to it. On the other side of Bethlehem, when they got to the road to Beit Jala, there was an IDF army jeep waiting for them. They questioned Randy on the reasons for his visit.

Their interior life in the West Bank was very much interior, they were heavily nocturnal, in part to escape the heat, especially since it was the hottest summer in 40 years. There was an insect with a loud blaring buzz that sounded incessantly throughout the day and the mosquitoes were clever and voracious, apparently genetically refined over eons of cohabitation with humanity. 

 

The thing they learned in speaking to people was that there was no civil law in the West Bank. They were governed by a military occupation, but that was illegal, since what is supposed to happen when you invade a country is that you’re supposed to annex that country. But Israel would not annex, perpetuating this military occupation limbo for 40 years. This way they could keep the population under military brutality. They did not want to annex the Palestinians since their population growth would outstrip the Jewish side of the Israeli nation and they would end up having a say in national concerns. Instead they maintained the population as menial labour for Israel without any rights or benefits. They were systematically oppressing them and driving them out. The forcibly taken settlements putting Zionist conservative Jewish enclaves throughout the Occupied Territories were illegally expropriated land, as was the water derived for them (coupled with their western patterns of water consumption), but thanks to the US Security Council veto in the UN, the settlements, despite being illegal, were never stopped. Dissension in the Occupied Territories was deliberately inflamed and then crushed, because the goal of the Israeli authority was total polarization between the respective populations so they could maintain the Occupation indefinitely and seek to justify it. The PLO was considered corrupt, and the Palestinians felt they were caught between a rock and a hard place. The Palestinians wanted to be the first Arab democracy; hence they had little support from Arab countries as well. Hamas was considered to have been fostered by the Mossad in typical divide and conquer method. The Israelis did not want to have an opponent who would negotiate with them, they wanted the conflict as prolonged as possible so they could continue to illegally expropriate as much land as possible. One night in 1976 the IDF had come and fenced the top of Everest using helicopters. The next morning the farmers going to the summit, who were presenting their deeds to the land no longer had access to their land again. It is this way with every settlement that is erected. Up went Har Gilo. Har Gilo now has a covered highway spanning over the valley on a bridge that is covered and serves the settlement exclusively. The pattern of illegal land confiscation has only escalated, becoming more and more pronounced.

Living in the West Bank was designed to be like life in a giant pressure cooker, Gaza much more so in the present day, but these are longstanding patterns since the inception of the Occupation. Or the IDF were like a stick continually poking at a caged bear, and when the caged bear reacted, that permitted them to punish the bear with disproportionate force. And disproportionate force was pretty consistent. The fact that there was no civil law exacerbated the situation greatly. The largest riot the family happened to witness, and the children saw right up front as they were nearly caught in the middle since they were walking to visit some children right next door, was a riot that broke out when two groups clashed in an attempt to evict a family that had not paid their rent for either their home or their shop for two years. With no courts for recourse a full on brawl with perhaps more than fifty participants broke out. A man was swinging stones on a rope above his head and just felling people. The people fighting the eviction were dropping stones off the balcony and cratered the hood of a car. The military intervened quickly but nothing was resolved. Later vigilante teams had to be formed by the community in order to catch a group of robbers that had been unleashed on the town. Eventually they managed to accost and stab two of them, but not before several houses had been broken into. The criminals were alleged to have been deliberately released out of Israeli prisons simply in the interest of causing trouble in a place that had no police force to arrest them.

On weekends when people would naturally sleep in, the IDF would send fighter jets above the towns deliberately breaking the sound barrier. They did this at such close proximity at times that the windows in houses would shatter. One night the family witnessed several explosions at a distance. They soon learned that the IDF had been blowing up people’s houses at night. One of the houses was said to have been demolished as a penalty because the family’s five-year-old boy had thrown a rock at an army jeep. For this the entire extended family, three generations, were made homeless. These actions have only escalated.

One night Maher told them that in the initial expansion of Israel before the ’48 invasion, the Israeli army (such as it was) had initiated their expansion by going into three Palestinian villages and massacring every man, woman and child. They recorded the screams. News of the massacres spread like wildfire among the villages promulgating fear. The army had then progressed onto the other villages using loudspeakers and blaring recordings of the massacres, which made every one flee because they thought a massacre was actually starting in their town as well. This is how the land was expropriated, brutality that was otherwise clever. No one was ever able to return to their homes again. And one is left to question how that Jewish family came by their home in Ein Karem?

During the family’s stay the entire town of Beit Jala was subject to curfew, meaning anyone seen out after dark would be shot on sight. The curfew was escalated so that no one was permitted outside during the day either except at permitted times when the IDF decreed there would be say, two hours to do shopping for food. This became a much more constant tactic for the following decades after the family left, to the point where people were starved for groceries, with children and elderly being sniped and killed for simply opening their windows. At the time, people had been shot for hanging their laundry on their roofs. What brought down the curfew was that an IDF soldier stationed on one of the buildings had deliberately dropped a concrete building block onto a Palestinian teenager’s head as he was walking with his younger sibling. The 16-year-old boy was killed instantly. This had caused a massive funeral to be scheduled in protest, and to prevent any mass reaction, a curfew was slapped on the town. In tandem a Palestinian man who was a known communist with five children was shot on his doorstep by the IDF. People exhibiting leadership qualities were systematically culled and killed.

During the curfew Maher was sneaking up to their house at night to visit. Randy and Maher kept talking to each other on the front porch one night when he was about to leave. A tear gas grenade was launched from the IDF stationed at the crossroads above. Maher came sprinting inside the house and shouted to seal all the windows tight, sealing any cracks with towels. While they escaped the gas, it wafted down the hill and into the windows of a house over 100 meters down. That family, which had five pretty daughters, was sick vomiting all night. The tear gas used in the West Bank was of a different variety. It ate epithelial tissue on contact and was known to have caused over 1000 spontaneous miscarriages at that time just with inhalation. Until quite recently all the discharged tear gas grenades had said “Made in the USA” on them. The rubber bullets were of a different variety too. They were the hardest rubber you could make; they felt like hard plastic, encasing metal. They could be fatal at under 60 yards if shot at the vital areas. First thing in the morning Randy dispatched the three youngest children to go and find the grenade that had been shot. Zur found it. Within minutes of his coming into the house with it, an IDF soldier was seen patrolling the terraces looking for the discharged tear gas grenade.

  

Their visit in Israel was wrapped up in a signatory way by a couple of cascading events. One, while the Israeli Embassy had told them they would be permitted to visit Israel for a full year, once in Israel that was a different story, and what was required of them was to renew their visas every two months. Randy and Sylvia would go in and speak on behalf of the family but the others in the group had to go in individually and speak for themselves. This included updating the authorities on where you were living. The group policy was that everyone was supposed to say they were living in Har Gilo, but when Mike went in, he made the mistake of saying Beit Jala, which brought them down on his head. They did not renew his visa, so that brought about a departure date for Mike at least and implied concerns about the rest of the group’s ability to continue renewing. The second mis-step was one day when Randy and Sylvia were walking up to Har Gilo in order to catch the transit bus to Jerusalem. They saw a bus coming down the mountain and because they didn’t want to miss it, they hailed it with their passports. The bus stopped for them immediately and let them on. What they discovered on board was that they were in fact on a tour bus that was showing American Zionist Jews the settlements. They had stopped for them because they thought they had lost a couple members of their group. Randy and Sylvia were literally cornered in the back of the bus with demands as to what they were doing in the West Bank. They thought they wouldn’t make it off without bodily harm. Randy had to demand to the driver that the bus be stopped immediately so they could get off.

In Israel at this time there was a computerized flagging system that could be used not just by the government to report you but also by any private citizens, basically a “three flags and you’re out” system. It would make sense that between the IDF questioning outside Bethlehem, Mike’s faux pas with Immigration, and these tourists reporting Randy and Sylvia for the impropriety of living in the West Bank and agreeing with the Palestinians, possibly our three flags were up. Randy began selling the stereo equipment because such high quality equipment was at a premium in the West Bank. Being hard to obtain it all commanded a high price in US dollars. He sold a camera to a photographer who was also interested in his walkie-talkies, which were good enough to be at the bottom of CB radio range. The buyer wanted to test them so he took one quite a distance and they tried transmitting, just enough to show that they worked. The house was completely surrounded by fully armed IDF soldiers in under half an hour. The IDF put the landlord in a complete panic by informing him they were after two Palestinian males who had been fleeing them; that they had seen them run into our house, and that if they found them in the house, they would blow it up. Randy knew what must have triggered them was the walkie-talkie transmission; he put the walkie-talkie he had been using out in plain sight on the balcony. Rahab was miked (with a microphone on a walkman, (as the details to this model point out, you could conceal the fact that you were recording by still wearing headphones)) to record events if anything took place with the soldiers, and Judah was told to try and sneak as much footage of the soldiers as he could. Before the journey began the camera, to allow surreptitious filming and to prevent it from being stolen, had a cloth sleeve fit around it; with the shoulder strap it looked like a carrying bag. The bottom was open though, so that all you had to do to film was lift it up. With this Judah was able to catch some very short shots of the soldiers outside and in the house. Randy was right in his deduction that the IDF had a radio transmission detection “blanket” over the West Bank that allowed them to catch even the smallest transmission, for when they saw the walkie-talkie in plain sight, they wrapped up the search pretty promptly. However, as this may have been the capping event in itself, it was not long after that the family’s home began to be watched by the IDF 24/7 in a big open canopy truck, with at least six soldiers armed to the extent of face shields (partial riot gear) as well as their weapons.

Their departure was smooth and uneventful; everyone was amicable and the perfect picture of jovial calm, though they knew they were carrying an expended flare shell, an expended tear gas grenade, and one of those fatal rubber bullets. As a family and substantially sized travelling group with 39 pieces of luggage, they were not searched, unlike John from their party who had returned singly and had the soles of his shoes split open. They escaped the scrutiny of El Al. They had to sleep overnight in Schiphol Airport under a staircase to catch their last plane. Back to the cold they came with skin peeling off in swaths due to their one and only visit to the beach at Tel Aviv, which gave them the worst sunburns of their lives.

Kahlil and the Big Tree

They were just beginning to be sufficiently settled when the fall rains started off with a three-day inundation. It trapped a group of Carmanah Forestry Society volunteers who were there to build hiking trails. They were helmed by Khalil, who did the bulk of the boardwalk work in the Walbran. Boardwalks were trails built off the ground out of cedar shake for preservation purposes; under Khalil’s direction, the work was exceedingly well done. The group got drenched. Sid, who was supposed to be coming to pick them up in his van the following day, had abandoned them. The family were sort of sitting on their laurels having brought this group into “well-healed” dryness and comfort when the following morning the siblings were talking to Khalil, and discovered...

”What do you mean you've never seen the Big Tree?!” (You of all people?!) This was vastly inappropriate. (And Khalil Really wanted to see it.) The Big Tree was the one found by English Jon in 1991 while he was working for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, and indeed he did, giving them first dibs on his find. Jon had discovered the sixth largest tree in all of Canada. WC² built a trail to the tree and put a small platform on the ridge beside it, insider knowledge at the time. It so happened that the “Big Tree” sat directly across the “Walbran Creek” from where Khalil got arrested and where Rolly had his last stand. In fact the kids had explored and figured out the precise area where Rolly must have come ripping down the roadside slope to cross the river during his escape. Rahab initiated this trek in the hope of perhaps finding her lost Bible, which may have been preserved somewhat in its carrying case. Impossible.

True to form the siblings opted for hiking down to the Big Tree via the river (not like anyone was going to put out by driving the group the long way around to the trail access to come at it from the trail direction) in order to take Khalil to see it. They had been doing this the entire summer, rock-hopping. Rock-hopping was only an option if it wasn’t at all wet, as then the rocks became very slippery. They had hardly ever tried it during the wet; stepping was still a possible option, jumping? Not a chance! They embarked with Khalil along with a few hangers on from the previously bedraggled trail crew. The group was as follows: Rahab, Zeb, Zur, Khalil, and hangers-on. They soon discovered a problem; there was a brand new up the ante that hadn't been apparent through the dry summer months; a new two tone algal slick on all the rock side surfaces that had just been introduced by the brand new clear-cuts that had transpired the previous fall and throughout this summer/fall. The green algae created an extreme slick on all the rocks, new growth due to the nutrient flushing the new clear cuts had caused on the entire watershed. This made even stepping to wet rocks next to impossible...

The real problem was that the siblings had simply never seen what a three and half day autumn rain was going to do to the high water mark; they had no clue as to the rain swell condition of the river on this stretch, and no clue that the trail they knew by collective memory down to each and every rock, -nearly the entire route was going to be submerged.

Entrée up the ante #2: Rahab transferred her jacket to Zeb because he’d fallen in the water and gotten wet. He next fell in up to his chest, wearing her jacket, which happened to have a little jewel-case in the pocket, which happened to have five tabs of acid in it. Which were now suddenly wet. Being of the waste not, want not mindset, which was deeply drilled into their cerebrum, they dropped them then and there; Rahab dropped two. Khalil did one too, no hesitation. This was before they really knew what they were in for. The hangers-on were not aware of this wee development, and the family were such stoic trippers that they would never know.

After several falls of the same sort the group started losing members as they realized this was a little more than they bargained for, whereas the siblings and Khalil were still of the mindset “it's just water”. By the time they were approaching the bend in the river where the stream morphology was about to change rather drastically, the group lost the tough-guy of the bunch who looked like a football player, with some sort of cute/lame excuse. Anything female had been the first to go. The “hangers-on” had dwindled down to one, a lean middle-aged man in his early fifties.

They were also pushing it in the extreme in terms of departure time because Sid was coming at a certain time to pick up the group, and would leave at a certain time, and was the sort who would abandon people rather than deviate from schedule, so that was weighing on everyone; it was just a matter who was it going to dictate and where.

The bend in the river really upped the ante. It was here the channel started to narrow as it was gradually forced into a small canyon. The wall on the other bank was a wall, -a sheer rock face that went straight up over 40 feet. The boulders in the riverbed were huge in size, meaning often several were of diameters around 8 to 18 feet. What the siblings found was that their normal route was completely submerged at this juncture and this forced them way up onto the other bank, -into much bigger rocks (and actually the rock-face itself that was the other bank), which meant all of a sudden they were looking at scrambles and climbs of up to 14 feet as they descended on pretty sheer wet surfaces. It was really difficult and slow going. When this started, the older man pointed out, “We shouldn't be doing this without a rope.” –Well duh. They all knew that, wished they had one, they just hadn't anticipated needing one... the question was not whether they needed it (they did) but whether the fact that they needed it was going to be something that stopped them.

After repeating these dangerous climbs once or twice and clambering generally, the senior of the group finally looked Rahab square in the eye and declared, “You're all crazy”...and literally fled back upstream. It's not like Rahab (or anyone else) wasn't interior-ly questioning this very nub at the moment, which made it doubly hard to take when someone subscribed to the opinion so strongly they're literally taking off as fast as they can manage. But the fact was they were just lucky he didn't see what the next leg entailed.

When they finally made it to the point where they normally crossed the river, the entire crossing was submerged. These were large, large boulders you either stepped or jumped to. The issue was they all knew the morphology at this juncture very well. The entire river was shunted into an opening of less than five feet wide! Imagine the velocity. The river was not only confined to a chute, it vaulted over a waterfall. Going into that opening, even without swell conditions, it was much too deep to touch bottom. The walls (where there are some) were too sheer to get a handhold on anything (but the sheer force would certainly prevent that anyhow).

Here's the kicker, the waterfall was not a big one, close to fifteen feet high perhaps, a straight drop. But it falls onto a flat rock, which was normally slightly above the water surface. So if you did happen to fall into the water at this stretch, the force is such you're pretty much guaranteed to go over the waterfall, and there's no water to fall into! You're going to get slammed into a pancake.

So here's the debate: the siblings (if not Khalil, exactly, but they were the sort to keep him informed) -knew exactly what the risk was. They also knew the riverbed so well; they knew where the rocks were under the water. In fact Rahab posited, “We can't use our normal route because some of the rocks are too deep underwater.” (This was actually a result of her testing the first route. She could tell the rocks were too deep and the water could sweep them away.) So they opted to check the other route (-starting from the large, large rock that blocked the flow where the river would otherwise run) -onto a chain of rocks where the distance between each rock was at least jumpable and the water was expected to get no deeper than around knee height (stepping onto the tops of the rocks). Hence the water wouldn't be able to suck them away, so long as no one slipped. It was the only other possible route; there had only ever been two.

Rahab's concern was to get the crossing done before they peaked on the acid if they were going to do it. The second real kicker was the looming time constraint due to Khalil having to go back to the city with Sid. Khalil had in town commitments; it was a ride he could not miss. They were going to have to cross a second time and go back the river route. They had no choice; the other route back combining the trail and the road was serpentine and around six kilometres long. It would take so long to walk that way they’d be guaranteed to miss Sid.

They were actually put in a position where the goal of making it to the Big Tree for Khalil was weighed against risking their lives because they could not make a mistake, -as under these circumstances, a slip equated with a fall, a fall equated with getting sucked into an inexorable water vortex, and the vortex was going to spit anyone over the waterfall at gravity induced speed onto a waffle iron, in a canyon where there was no foreseeable way of to getting to shore in a torrential river, even if they weren’t too injured to do so. No one was going to be able to retrieve anyone from the water; there was no access downstream. Not to mention they were over 45 kilometres from the nearest telephone, and had no way of carrying an injured individual back to camp. All this was immaterial to the fact that the injuries resulting from getting sucked over the waterfall would likely be severe enough you were immediately going to drown. (You’d hit so hard you’d be knocked unconscious, unable to swim. If you survived and managed to make it far enough downstream, hypothermia compounding injuries was a very serious matter due to remoteness.) Not only were they going to have to leap the gauntlet gambling with their lives, if they were going to commit to this endeavour so that Khalil got to see the big tree, they were going to have to commit to doing it twice.

Rahab took off her runners at this point. Zur opted to keep his on, as he preferred them for grip. Zeb? -On. Khalil? He opted to start doffing all his clothes except his T-shirt, as in why get them wet? But he kept his hiking boots on still. Naturally Rahab was the one who opted/had to go first. Now the chain of rocks they had to traverse at the crossing was not riverbed rock, -i.e., not smooth and rounded, (a good thing). It was jagged and large and came out of the little canyon. The unfortunate part was that there was one jump that had to be made in the middle; at the point of the jump you'd be negotiating footholds on these jagged type rocks under a foot or more of torrential current (they were barely even visible), and the waterfall itself was less than fifteen feet downstream. There was no riverbed in between those big rocks; the water was too deep. If you slipped and missed, you would never touch bottom. Rahab jumped it and put out her hand for Zur so he could make the jump; he refused and told her to stand out of his way, just be on hand in case he slipped. His lips were starting to change colour and he was starting to tremble from the effects of the cold and adrenalin. Zeb and Khalil each made the jump on their own. They made the crossing rock to rock to the other side.

The ensuing slope up to the big tree was very steep and like the rest of the route, they knew it down to every handhold that must be grabbed (right or left hand depending, that also had an order), knew every footstep. Once up (say about 90 feet of climbing) –WC² had a platform built around the base of the tree you could sit on, on the slope side. And that was where they peaked. Khalil was jigging around not quite buck-naked, he was so pleased they were “here”.

It is at this point Rahab observed for the first time a massive scar he had on his left calf. She felt a tremendous pang at the pain reflected in the scar. The musculature was completely laid bare the entire breadth of it. She could see every cord like an anatomy diagram. It was shaped like a diamond without the edges, like a two pointed paisley nearly five inches wide, and traversed from not quite his ankle to nearly the top of his calf. She deduced from its appearance that she was looking at muscles that regenerated; she could hardly imagine what might have happened to cause such a scar. But she felt it far too sensitive to ask; she did not want to bring this memory of Khalil’s into the content of the trip. Khalil was free and being himself and she was looking at him as himself, it was reciprocally understood and he was happy in it, -and that meant, ignoring the scar which was not him, but happened to him. But Zeb, who tended to be utterly upfront and will broach anything, broke the silence; he asked Khalil what happened...

It turned out it had to do with his mandatory service in the army in Singapore. Of course countries that have mandatory military service usually put it to good use; in this instance, Khalil was recruited to build a bridge, which meant giant iron girders. He was the lead carrier on a girder that the entire group happened to drop. Being the lead, he didn't see the collapse coming; he did not get out of the way in time and the girder came down on him alone, in fact, the girder came down on his lower leg. And crushed it. And yes, as Rahab had deduced, he was bedridden for many months as all the calf muscles re-grew themselves. (The leg had to be kept open to drain as well.) You would think they'd discharge someone who'd been injured like that... It was no surprise he refused to go back.

The paradigm captured in Khalil’s scar was the blood-price/sacrifice of the individual to the State. The other paradigm that was sonically in play, in diametric opposition to primordial ancient Eden that they were visually, sensually immersed in, (sitting by a tree that was easily 2000 years old) -was the screeching, tearing, grinding, continual roar of a grapple-yarder operating directly across from them on the other side of the river. Down on the riverbed walking the river, the sound of the river was so much they could not hear it. Up there in on the crest, it was the only thing they could hear. It was like hearing Death, in terms of earth's death, in an un-remitting grind at full volume. And they knew what those things looked like, the effect they had. As they take every log up the slopes (or down them), dragging them via cables with huge iron mandibles, they tear a gouge for each log they bring onto the landing, leaving actual individual scars on the landscape. The logs the yarder was grappling were the trees Rolly had tried to stop them from taking, in the clear cut both he and Khalil and the entire protest had tried to stop in their last stand, all fruitless in the face of this machine operating now.

You could tell by the sound of the dragging (literally the amount of sonic crashing and tearing the log is making in its wake, and how loudly the grapple-yarder roars), when some of these corpse trees were larger than others, and at the sound of a particularly large one, Khalil mentioned how they had found a stump, almost directly across the riverbank from this one, that was nearly as large as this one. Here by the arbitrariness of humanity's mark, this one was still standing, and the other was not. And one wonders how much these trees were like siblings in terms of the scope of time they stood there, thankfully one gets to hope there isn't a sense of loss between the trees themselves, because that would be insurmountable. It is sort of a priceless irony that as a human it is you who perceives the loss, maybe just you sitting there. Khalil in his existing circumstance may have been the only one who truly perceived the loss in the moment in the qualified sense of having witnessed it all firsthand, and having directly attempted to stop it. All that is distilled in the sound vs. the landscape, destruction vs. Eden, the greed, the pain of the earth; the fragility of something so totally intractable and immovable it has survived and stood for 2000 years. The paradox that humans, with their transient passage in time and finite short lived existence have the capacity to wipe out this timeless existence within a matter of hours.

The recognition that their tracks were of so little meaning in the face of such an existing scope of time, yet here they were fighting for it, a battle that had proved hopeless and pointless, for they knew in full irony that while half of the valley got preserved due to their little protest, the land they were sitting on, and the tree they were sitting beside, is still unprotected. The logging industry has always known where the goods are, and Deliberately insured they'd Have the Heart of the Valley. They were logging it as fast as possible. Khalil and the siblings were sitting in the centre of the Heart, the bottom centre of the Valley where all the biggest trees lived; it is not protected. Manifest in the grapple-yarder operating across the river that day. They knew full well that with it unprotected, the industry had every intention of ripping the Heart out, and was set on clear-cutting the side of the bank they were sitting on as well. That's the future. And all who were privy and present held much the same query in their hearts, what have you got left, if you rip out the Heart?

They didn't know if the tree they were beside would get to live in the future, or not. It's coveted. So they were here, now. They were among the rare people to perceive this Eden; perhaps in the future, it won't even be there. (And if the logging didn't get it, they knew climate change likely would.) First the increased strength of the winds would vie for the trees downing the largest and so many more (41 hectares of Stanley Park Old Growth lost to one windstorm (actually a Class 1 hurricane) in 2006, a known statistic only because it is the largest downtown park in NA). Next, the sea itself might swallow.... Rahab sat in a doomed place. At this point the primordial Eden is a mere tattered fringe that is left; humanity has consumed it across the globe so far they are sitting a mere six kilometres from the final edge of the last Sea, and yet the grapple-yarder NEVER stops. Living there, doom is all she sees; the Beauty that surrounds her reflects a loss that silently screams to infinity. To look at it is to suffer, watching the clear cuts go in, listening to the chainsaws. Every moment in the forest brings her to the question of the loss of the quality of perception itself (and thereby quality of existence).

That's how fragile the space/place is. (It's still there today though.) After peaking they came back down the embankment, re-charging for what would be a long difficult trek, with a supreme hurdle to start. Time is ticking against them, but they opt to lie out on the rocks in the sun and get warm, dry out for a little while. Details like this are important. For example, Rahab may be the only person who has ever traversed, via the river itself, from the point where they had just crossed in front of the “canyon” to Fletcher Falls at the juncture where the South Walbran tributary meets the West. (They were on the South.) It was a summer jaunt because it could only be a summer jaunt. She started the hike first thing in the morning, arriving at the waterfall leading into the canyon around 9:00 am. There she stripped and jumped into the river and swam the entire route to the waterfall, walking and climbing where swimming wasn't possible. This was when she discovered how totally un-traversable this stretch of the river was. She found that the canyon went nearly the entire stretch, and the walls on each side got so high as to reach around 90 feet, and were sheer and high in general. It was one of the most beautiful sights she had ever seen. Given it had taken her around 45 minutes to swim through and traverse the canyon, she knew anyone who fell over the waterfall, even if they survived, they had no chance of getting out of the river any time soon. They’d be trapped the entire way, nearly to the juncture where the South Walbran met the West.

Now the Walbran is cold water. Cold meaning, it was the second coldest water-body Rahab and the family had ever swam in. The one that rated first for them was Englishman River Falls, the river coming off a glacier fed lake. There isn't much of a degree colder you can find anywhere. The Walbran was so cold you’d feel a chemical reaction start around your heart inside your body after a few minutes in the water, very much akin to chemical heat packs. That sort of thing you do need to account for, which is why Rahab started in the morning, calculating to be at the Falls for the peak heat of the day when/where she could warm herself in the sun for quite some time before she made the attempt to swim back.

Now in October the following year a group (part of the Toronto pack, along with English Peter) -really mistook the fact that Rahab had made this little trip. It so happened when she swam downriver and came out at the falls (her lips were blue), there were actually quite a few people swimming at the Falls she knew who were as naked as she was, including a few from this group, so they remembered she had done it. (It was a fine afternoon, in a friendly amicable way.) She had come out of the water at the bottom of the Falls, and because no one anticipated anyone coming up that way Peter had nearly jumped out of his hide upon seeing her; he been dozing, sunning on the rocks, and she was soundless. She startled him by shaking the water out of her hair.

In the following Fall the Toronto group and Peter hiked the same area and decided to see how far they could hike down the canyon. They inevitably got trapped. They were so trapped their only option was to jump into the water in their clothes; they decided they could swim out of the situation back to camp, after all, they reasoned, Rahab had done it. If Rahab had been privy and present (late in the afternoon, in October), she would have told them they were Out of Their Minds. First, there's no way out of the canyon. Second, you must backtrack and hike back because, you can't get wet! Because, they had no dry wood they were going back to, no fire to start properly, no way to warm themselves after, no base camp, and they were soaking their clothes! So the entire group nearly got hypothermia, in fact one or two came down with it, or got awful close. And they wouldn't have been able to get to a hospital soon enough. They barely made it through the night.

So warming yourself on the rocks for a while can be a vital thing (as can be not getting wet). It’s not just a pastime. It is while sunning on the rocks that Khalil remarked how “free” the family was. They were free in terms of their willingness to accept the risk of trying to live out there, free in terms of the home-schooling, the drugs, and living life in a trajectory so far off the common cultural map it was completely their own. They were free in terms of what they were doing in the moment, but that was directly related to the fact that they had a base to go back to; that was what gave them the ability to accept risk. And that base took preparation, organization, leadership (in a patriarchal authoritarian model), a lot of practical fix-it and recycling know-how (backed by a killer collection of tools), a “blood is thicker than water” (or anything else) family cohesion, and an exorbitant amount of work.

But for the moment, they relaxed. You have to know when to relax and take the sun in. It is lying in the sun Khalil was saying, “Your family is so free.” How they took whatever came at them and rolled with it, how they weren’t scared, but he was summing it up as, “You're so free.”

How laden a context this was. What Khalil perceived as free carried a price. It was not really free; there was order under the sense of anarchy, and sacrifice under the order. There was a price in this moment, the price she paid mentally in the moment, for the moment, how horribly fraught she felt with the crossing still in store (and not just because it was a scary prospect in itself). In addition there was how horribly fraught she felt for putting her siblings in a life-threatening risk. In that sense there was a terrific mental price on her for Khalil’s sense of freedom in the moment, which she was internalizing every moment of this trip. But her demeanour was calm and free, even smiling. In part because, that is what she has to provide to the ones she's responsible for, to make sure they all get through it, and feel sure that they can and know it can be... fine. If you can’t step up and greet the challenge and embrace the experience, what's the point otherwise? If she cannot internalize the stress, it has the ability to erode and weaken everyone. Under the circumstances, they can’t be subject to fear; it will only compound the risk. You have to be serene. As the oldest, it’s imperative. There were only two moments in this position of eldership within her family that she was always in, that she lost her grip. This wasn’t the day.

The sense of “free” was also based on the underlying order of knowing every foothold. It was only due to their ability to act as guides. The route being taken over and over was the only thing that permitted them to take these risks, their sense of familiarity with the limits, and their ability to bear the price of risk-taking. (When Khalil made the jump at the crossing, Rahab described the shape of the rock underwater to him beforehand so he could anticipate the footing.)

Beneath all that was the burden Rahab existed in perpetually; in every waking moment she existed in sacrifice inside a relationship that sacrificed her. For her there is nothing free about where they are, there was a dark underside no one knew about that she internalized inside a complete secret at all times. Khalil had no comprehension of the price she paid to be free in the moment, what she paid so she could be here this moment, what she paid so that the moment could be free for everyone else. There is no sign, only serenity, but to hear someone describe the beauty of their freedom stabbed her deeply; she was forced to question its falsehood. It was true, but in a perverse way it was up to her that it seems true. Or is it up to her to blow it up and destroy the experience for everyone?

The whole trek back all Rahab sees is the same fractal patterning portrayed differently in each individual river rock, (this recurs every river trip she takes), but there's no time to sit and stare even though it’s the most amazing thing... It was not until they made it back to their camp safely that Rahab broke down and cried because of the moral price tag she felt, the enormous guilt of putting her siblings at risk. Only her mother saw it. Rahab always had the uncanny ability of maximizing the time out on these jaunts, but nearly always showed up back home at precisely the moment her mother began to wonder where she and the children were, saving her the price of worrying. It was the same on this day too. And when they awe them emerge out of the bush it was priceless, Khalil a wet mess with one hiking boot on, one hiking boot off (mercifully dressed). The parents reacted by collapsing in laughter because it was so typical of Rahab, as she was showing up bedraggled like this, (one boot off, one boot on) when she was a toddler. Sid’s van was idling and the whole group was loaded in when Khalil ran for it. Sid had been waiting 45 minutes, so they’d held him up to the utter max. But they made it, and Khalil thanked them later for this trip because it turned out to be a very long time before he ever set foot in the Walbran again.

what a twitter "epiphany" looks like

-when you can't even say what it's about.

I can't make it onto Chapter 25. Incidentally, "Salome" just blew right the f*** up in my face. -In a good way.

Yep. That One.

It's better literary, isn't it? I'm afraid that's the case. 

I did right by you today. Yes I did. 

*sigh* -now that I can finally tell you why... 

I love how you give things back and things get restored. it's amazing.

all these arrows come back to life 

We just went fatally Oedipal in this book. (there are some things you have no interest in feminizing ; )

there's levels, levels, there's levels between levels... 

oh f***. It's my Dad's B-day today.

"I'll show him forever, it'll take forever to see what I've got"

This day is the April Fools of the universe.

Today I found the heart of the book.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13"

yes, 13 is the key year in all this...

"I HAVE CREATED A MONSTER."

Dad is 65 today.

Oh Happy Sunday.

This is today.

My son's new target (thx to the game, Goldeneye) -which I got out for him at the opening of Spring Break (Mar 26th).

What it meant to me...

there is always a choice...

the only way I can integrate...

it's only actuality will be in what I [write] , and really I cannot imagine a better future.

 25 years was when my parents' expired.

It's been 25 years ago this month. Holy Hepzibah!

well, technically...

today is a day of joy.

This is the eruption of reality.

today is a day of joy. and today, and today, today, today...

The brain figures it knows what to do now. And that is a good feeling.

There is a storm tonight...

and two doors down the band refuses to stop playing.

when the lightning sound creates a spiral soundwave that descends down on the house, that's only happened to me once before.   (Well actually it turns out to have happened twice, which was nearly the start of this blog, and both times had to do with the same heartbreak.)

last night....

"babe, it must be art": it's an imperative, not an idea. it's the only way.

Morrisey, "Sing Your Life"

that was the first summer storm of the year. it's FL, that's how it works.

Donovan "Catch theWind"

last night...

my mind is streaming poetry

"I used to think a great first sentence was the key to the universe, but now, it's all about transitions. Keep me in it, don't let me go."

 Holy Hepzibah, indeed.

  "my delight is in her" in Hebrew

 "Before the rites of spring, Come to mean all things"