Travels With Leila

Some stories and a little bit of advice from a traveling dad...

I was sitting on a plane catching up on editions of my favorite BBC program, From Our Own Correspondent, and caught one about a reporter's experience with trying to travel with her toddler, while working, doing interviews, filing stories, etc. For understandable reasons, taking a toddler on the road and working at the same time is something this reporter, and many other people, try to avoid. The piece reminded me of the many times I've traveled with my daughter while also working, as a touring musician.

She's seven now, but from the age of one until the present, Leila and I have traveled together a lot. Sometimes it's just the two of us. Other times it's with her stepmom, Reiko, which of course takes me off the hook in terms of attempting to be an active parent while I'm actually on stage or doing an interview or something.

Leila's first protest was when she was just over two months old. Mostly she was sleeping at her mother's bosom, but she woke up for bits of it. It was me, Leila, her mother Nathalie, and fifty thousand or so Mexicans and folks from other Spanish-speaking countries in the region, marching for their rights as human beings and as workers, in downtown Houston, Texas. Definitely the biggest crowd I ever played for while Leila slept, though there have been many smaller ones since then.

I tried taking Leila on an overnight trip for a gig in Eugene, a hundred miles south of our new home in Portland, Oregon, when she was just over one year old, but that didn't go so well. She was still breast-feeding, and had never taken to using a bottle at all. During the day and evening she was fine, having a blast playing with a 9-year-old girl she met there. There were a couple of friends there visiting from Denmark, and I roped them into hanging out with Leila while my actual gig was happening. Then we were planning on spending the night there in a tent. Which went fine until Leila woke up at about 3 am wanting milk, and was no longer impressed with the cold milk in the bottle I offered her. She just kept crying and saying “mommy,” making it abundantly clear what she wanted. I packed her and our stuff up in the car and headed back to Portland, getting there around 5 am and delivering her to mommy. Though once we got in the car and started heading north she stopped crying, and seemed content for the rest of the trip, perhaps understanding what I had told her about where we were headed, knowing she had successfully communicated her desires to me.

Leila got cut off from the boobie sometime soon after her second birthday, for the most part. I felt bad for her at the time, because it was something she really liked. On the other hand, I was glad her mother felt she needed to wean her, because that had been the one thing her mom had that I didn't. Since then, I don't think she's ever missed her mommy enough to cry about it once.

Most of the traveling Leila and I did together with no other adult supervision happened when she was two. This is because of a combination of factors. Before she was two, she was busy breast-feeding all the time. By the time she was three, Reiko had moved in with us, and Leila had more options.

But the main difference between age two and after age two can be summed up by one two-word phrase: “lap baby.”

In the US at least, all the airlines participate in a collective delusion that babies don't need their own seats. From a safety standpoint, this apparently makes no sense. (But I've noticed that in most airline disasters, either everybody dies or everybody lives, so that probably doesn't matter.) From a financial standpoint, it's fantastic – at least while the child is a baby. What it means is you don't have to pay anything extra to take a baby on a flight with you.

This worked especially well for me, because I'm on some kind of watch list which seems to indicate that I should usually have at least one empty seat next to me on any domestic flight. My guess is that's the seat for the cop, if the flight in question is going to have a cop on it. So the person sitting next to me is, presumably, a cop, or nobody. Usually it's nobody. (No, I'm not paranoid.)

This of course meant that Leila usually had her own seat anyway. Which was good, because for babies, doing what everybody else is doing is especially important, so it would tend to seem unjust and otherwise altogether wrong for all the other people to have their own seats while the baby has to sit on daddy's lap. (Which is of course where the baby wants to be most of the time anyway, but it's important for babies to feel like they have options.)

Of course there is a cut-off for this lap baby policy, which is at age two. So technically, if the baby is over two, they need to sit in (and someone has to pay for) their own seat. Like most parents, we stretched that out to at least 2-1/2. Leila was maybe a little smaller than most babies her age, so in terms of appearances it worked OK. The potential problems came when she'd open her mouth, because she was definitely more articulate and had a bigger vocabulary than the average baby. I'd have the sudden, strange urge to interrupt her line of thought, or get her engaged in some kind of nonverbal activity, as I'd be looking at the person across the aisle that Leila was talking to, wondering if they were thinking that Leila seemed a bit too intellectual for a lap baby.

No one ever said anything about that, though, and I took Leila on five tours within a few months of her second birthday, most about two weeks in length, four of them involving flights. The exact timing, order, etc. eludes me, but what I do remember is me bragging to various people that summer that I had traveled with a toddler as a lap baby four times since she turned two. It's the rebel element of the thing that sticks with me, I guess, and helps me remember the details a bit...

We went to the east coast twice, up and down the west coast by car, and another west coast trip to southern California by plane, that I remember, over-age lap baby and dad.

When it came down to walking, Leila's preferred method of travel at that age was to sit on top of my rolling suitcase. That worked great for me, too. She was big enough that you could rely on her to hold on (and not fall off), but small enough that you knew you would be carrying her in some form anyway, and given the alternatives, this was easiest. It looked really fun, too.

On both of those trips out east in the spring of 2008, our flights got massively delayed. Once it was at O'Hare Airport west of Chicago, which is always really crowded and a bit dreary. For some reason we had to exit the airport and re-enter it. I can't remember why, but it involved traversing the length of the airport twice, with Leila on my shoulders, in between the neck of the guitar and my head. (Reminding me of one of the first principles of parenthood you must learn early on: whatever else you've got going in life, mainly you're a pack animal.)

Then we got stranded there in Terminal C for eight hours.

Being stranded in a crowded airport terminal with a toddler for eight hours is a sort of parenting test, some would say. In any case, that seems to be what it is, judging from the very mixed results involved with parents and children who find themselves in such a situation.

A basic principle that one must embrace when one has a toddler, is toddlers need to move. Physical activity is very important. And if the place they need to move in requires you to follow them in order for them to not be killed, then your job is to follow that toddler. Of course if you need to move in a certain direction it's not hard to convince a toddler to move in that direction with you. But if you need to stay still, and you expect the toddler to join you in this activity for long periods of time, you're being unrealistic.

So for eight hours, we did what any sensible toddler would want to do when stranded at O'Hare Airport – we rode the moving sidewalks back and forth, back and forth, all day. Leila had a blast. I occasionally thought of other things I might prefer to be doing than running around the moving sidewalk behind this little girl for the 159^th time, but for the most part, I had fun, too.

The other time we got stranded trying to go from west to east was in Dallas, where the flight got canceled for some reason, and we spent the night in an airport hotel with no luggage. Leila was really excited to be in a hotel room, and spent a long time examining every bit of it and jumping on the bed, which was her routine in all new rooms we were staying in, whether it was a hotel room or a guest room in someone's house. (Though the foldout couches are shit for jumping.)

The little store near the desk in the hotel didn't sell much, but the one essential item for us was in stock – diapers. Diapers are a big part of your life when you're a baby. When we were traveling around for several weeks with fellow rabble-rouser, Anne Feeney, Leila started out every morning there in the back seat singing a new original composition about that very subject. One morning when she failed to start the day with a song about diapers, I started singing one, instead, but Anne told me to stop.

At one point during that tour with Anne, Anne told Leila and Reiko and I that we would soon be meeting a teenage girl named Piper. Leila was aghast. She couldn't believe it was true. “That rhymes with diaper!”, she pointed out. Which of course led to another ten minutes of diaper songs. But the next day, when we actually met Piper, Leila very politely never mentioned the potty poetry that her name had inspired.

I would often try to do concerts without lining up someone in particular to hang out with Leila, which may have been a bad idea, in retrospect, especially for those who came to hear a concert that might include lots of solemn material about people who die in the end and that sort of thing. The songs would be there, more or less, but there might be a wobbly little diaper-clad toddler running around my legs and diving off the stage, or sitting beside me and carefully taking off her shoes or performing some other captivating feat. It tended to change the focus in a way that wouldn't be possible to achieve with an older child, because at her age people were generally afraid she'd hurt herself when diving off the stage, which she never did.

Sometimes she'd get tired and take a nap on the stage, which was helpful for a smooth concert experience. Her favorite place to nap was inside my guitar case, which would often be somewhere off to the side on the stage. At that point I'm not sure if she had figured out that performance napping in my guitar case was exceptionally adorable. It was more just familiar, and what felt right, like this stage was our space, that's dad's guitar case, and I'm taking a nap, and I'm ignoring these people who are looking at us. People look at cute babies a lot, anyway, even if they're not on stage.

I quickly found that it was important to announce early on that there is an unattended toddler on the loose in the room, and nobody has to worry about that, but whatever you do, don't let her out. Because of course there would likely be a door that would be regularly opening and closing. Perhaps a door that leads onto a sidewalk and a busy street. Not an environment you'd normally let an unsupervised toddler venture into, but surprisingly, a lot of people will just unthinkingly hold the door for a toddler trying to leave a building and enter such an environment, unless they're told in advance not to do that.

But as long as they didn't let her out, everything would be OK. Of course, it's not uncommon for a two-year-old to want to get naked. Leila was pretty good about keeping her diaper on, but whether she wanted to be wrapped in several layers of clothes, or wanted to shed all of them, would depend on her mood. Audience reactions would vary. If there were more hippie types in the crowd, Leila would end up with nothing but diapers pretty soon. On the other hand, at one gig we had flown to in California, Leila started taking her clothes off, but this time it was a show sponsored by a Palestine solidarity student group, and most of the audience was Arab, about half women, many of them mothers of small children. So at that event it took Leila longer to remove her clothes, because there were several dozen Arab mothers trying to help her put something back on, with only partial success.

A memorable moment during one of those lap-baby tours happened at the winter gathering of the People's Music Network somewhere in western Massachusetts. The open mike was on, and the stalls folks staffed during the day and sold various stuff at (mainly CDs), were closed. By “closed,” I mean they had sheets covering them up, but all the merch and such was still there. Leila figured that out, and found money, in the form of single dollar bills, in one of the containers under the sheets. Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, she began stuffing dollar bills into her pants.

When she joined me on stage as I was singing a children's song, that was not unusual or surprising. But when she suddenly started pulling dollar bills out of her pants and throwing them around on the stage, it was.

Just a few days before that we had had another notable money-related incident. We were staying at the home of some friends in West Hartford, Connecticut. Leila and Reiko and I live in a relatively small apartment, but most folks in West Hartford live in decidedly bigger houses, and this was the case with our friends there as well.

Since she was a baby, Leila has been as much a fan of hot tubs as her dad is. Our hosts had an especially nice, big hot tub in their backyard, which Leila and I were thoroughly enjoying. It was a cold winter, perfect time to be in a hot tub amidst the snow and ice, we both thought.

Leila took a little visual survey of the other houses around us in the neighborhood. Because it was winter, you could see them through the trees.

“I want to live in a big house with a hot tub,” she announced.

“I'd like to, too, my love, but we can't afford it,” I explained. “It costs a lot of money to live in houses like these, and we don't make enough money.”

Leila took this in, and went for a wander inside the house. A few minutes later, she staggered outside, carrying a glass lid to a huge jar, and in the lid she was holding about $30 worth of quarters, which, between the quarters and the thick glass container, is very heavy for a toddler.

“Is this enough?”, she asked, hopefully. (In the master bedroom she had found the gigantic glass jar they keep change in, and she had loaded the lid up and helped herself to some of it...)

I'm always sitting on planes with crying babies. I don't want to brag, but they're never my crying babies. I don't really understand how it happens, but what seems to be going on is something along the lines of the toddler wants to move, and the parent tells the toddler to stay still. The toddler cries, and the parent tells the toddler to shush, usually by making faux sympathetic noises that are meant to sound like they're trying to calm the baby down, when really they mean “shut up.”

One must connect with one's baby. If the kid knows that normally dad doesn't make me stay still, but on this rare occasion I have to stay here in this seat without crawling around, they're more likely to just deal with it. Of course, as soon as the seat belt sign goes off, she's free to go.

This policy of mine annoyed some fellow passengers, but I had no patience for their nonsense. If the seat belt sign went on, I'd get her into a seat, but otherwise, if she wanted to run up and down the aisle, as far as I was concerned, that's what it was there for. Most people enjoyed it, including the flight attendants, unless she ventured into First Class, so I tried to steer her away from that, and so did the flight attendants, but always in a nice, playful way.

One time an older male passenger asked me, clearly perturbed, “don't you think the child should stay in her seat?” Nope...

Of course if you do have to keep a small child strapped to a seat, keeping them engaged is important. It can just be good if they know that you empathize with their plight, you feel their pain. But if you got a good story up your sleeve, that always helps. One time I forgot to pack any picture books. That induced innovation, and that's when I started up the habit of making up stories to tell to Leila. Which is a lot of work, to think up scenarios like that instead of just reading.

Traveling long distances east or west always comes with certain challenges, namely jet lag. When you get older, jet lag is pretty easy to manage. For little kids it's not, and with Leila it seemed like adjusting to a new time zone was a very long process. When she was three, she and I and Reiko went to Europe together. For Reiko and I it was a pretty sleep-deprived experience, because Leila would always be wide awake from around 3 to 10 am, and then she'd be fast asleep from 10 am until late afternoon. So we got a stroller for her in London and took lots of pictures of Leila sleeping in it in front of lots of iconic London landmarks.

We have been to more amusement parks than I would care to count, many of them before Leila was at all old enough to appreciate them. I was so excited to have a kid, I wanted her to experience all those things that I really liked as a kid, such as amusement parks, of course. It just didn't occur to me – and to many other parents of toddlers you see around at Disneyworld – that toddlers just want to climb things, and they're too small for most of the rides. So we spent much of that first visit trying to coax Leila down from objects she had climbed which had signs on them saying things like “no climbing.”

We've traveled together in 9 or 10 different countries. When she was three or four I remember someone asking her what she wanted to do when she grew up. She thoughtfully replied, “probably travel around to different countries and play gigs.” Of course, she didn't have many other examples to go on in terms of what other things she could do with her life, but I liked her response...

In a smoky expat English bar in Tokyo, where the leftwing group, Tokyo Spring, was having its regular meetings, Leila gave her first interview, at the age of three. It was a man from the Communist Party's newspaper, a warm man with a scruffy beard who had lived at some point in Washington, DC and spoke good English.

“What's your name?”, he asked her.

“Leila,” she replied.

“How old are you?”

“Three.”

“What's your favorite food?”

“Thai noodles.”

At this, everybody nearby starting cracking up, to Leila's bewilderment.

Traveling can bring you into all sorts of varied environments. Perhaps that's a little more with the places I end up than it would be for most travelers, I don't know. But on one memorable occasion the three of us were in a squat in Switzerland. It's unusual these days in most western countries for there to be much cigarette smoking indoors, but at squats it's more common. We had originally been thinking we might stay there, but we made other plans. It wasn't that it was so bad – it was just not quite up to standards if you had higher standards than me.

The smokers had spontaneously decided to emigrate to the porch and keep the smoking outside, but the room still stank of cigarettes. Otherwise it was a nice enough place, with a table and a loft bed and a couple of windows. They made very nice food, which Leila liked a lot, a sort of salty rice porridge kind of thing. What I remember most is the conversation she had with her mother, who was back in Portland. It was on speaker phone via Skype.

Mom: “Where are you?”

Leila: “I'm in a squat.”

Mom: “What's a squat?”

Leila looked at me and Reiko for direction, apparently not sure what a squat was, either.

Her mom heard the silence, and added helpfully, “Is that when people take over an abandoned building?”

Reiko and I nodded affirmatively.

Leila: “Yes.”

Mom: “What's it like in there?”

Leila: “It's dirty.”

There were nice Swiss punks sitting nearby who could presumably hear every word, but they didn't react. Reiko and I thought it was hilarious, but we didn't want to laugh too loudly and possibly offend anyone.

At Disneyworld Tokyo we were having a good time, until Leila wandered off without us noticing. She was lost. After a while we gave up on hunting for her and contacted staff. They were getting ready to send out an all-points bulletin kind of thing, and needed to get all the pertinent information.

Reiko was saying something like, “She's a three-year-old little white girl with wavy brown hair.”

They were looking at Reiko's very Asian features and seeking clarification. “She's half-white...?”

“Totally white,” Reiko explained... She turned up soon thereafter, found happily milling about somewhere not too far away.

When we were in the lowlands in Europe we heard about a wonderful, old amusement park called Efteline.

Our friend Armand is basically a rock star in Holland. He's in his late sixties and has long, wavy, dyed pink-and-yellow hair, and dresses in a psychedelic interpretation of 17th-century Dutch fashion. He and his partner, who dresses the same way, met us at Efteline. Armand had recently been on TV a lot, and all the Dutch youngsters were approaching him for his autograph. He had come prepared with postcards to sign. Some adults wanted to have pictures with him, too.

Leila didn't notice all the hubbub around Armand, but had a great time with the rides and the things in the forest. She eventually bonded a bit with Armand, because he was the only one of us who would accompany her on the rides that made the rest of us nauseated. Armand had recently done an interview with a journalist while riding on the really fast roller coaster there at Efteline, so he was used to it.

When Leila was four and we were in Copenhagen, the Israeli attack on the aid convoy that included the Mavi Marmara took place. I generally tried not to expose Leila to too much television, but during those few days I was spending a fair bit of time with Al-Jazeera streaming on my laptop. So the concept that there were some bad soldiers out there who killed people was one she grew to understand that week.

At first she said we should go help those people being attacked in the ship, which was a very nice response. Though sometime the next day she said, “I like watching soldiers kill people on TV,” which was a less desirable perspective.

There was a protest at the Israeli consulate in Copenhagen which I was asked to sing at, and we were getting ready to go there. Everything was fine, but when we got there, Leila saw the Danish policemen, identified them as soldiers, and asked, “Are they going to kill us?”

I immediately thought of the Danish police shooting protesters back in 1993, but I decided that sort of thing happened infrequently enough there in Denmark that I could ethically lie a little bit in that situation and I told Leila that the police here in Denmark don't shoot protesters, they're not the same soldiers, those ones were far away from here. (It's good when they feel safe...)

Traveling with a child can bring out the best in people.

I learned when Leila was much younger that if she's hungry in the middle of the night, you should be ready to give her something to eat. I tried complaining that it was the wrong time to be hungry, that she should sleep and we'd eat in the morning, lazy things like that, but I was convinced by experience and by other parents who were more intelligent than me that this was a bad strategy. Just feed them if they're hungry, it's pretty basic. It's not like she's so picky when she wakes up at 1 am hungry. A piece of bread or an apple will generally do.

But one time we were in upstate New York, just the two of us in a hotel room. We had been in bed for a little while, it was after midnight, and Leila said she was hungry.

Shit, thought I, we have no food with us. That was dumb. So I said I had no food, but we could go off to the nearest Denny's, which I knew would probably be the only thing open in that area at that time of night.

We got our clothes on and drove twenty minutes to the nearest Denny's. Leila was excited. The place was brightly-lit, the menus were colorful, the staff friendly, other people were up and about, and it was the middle of the night, when everybody was supposed to be asleep!

The food itself didn't impress Leila wildly. Even she could tell it was not very good food, coming out of a frozen box as most of it did. But she was still happy to be there.

There had been some big floods in that part of the world in recent weeks and months, and there were thousands made homeless by them. Which I guess is what one older couple nearby us was thinking when they bought our dinner. Leila wasn't old enough to understand the concept of buying anything yet, I discovered when I tried to explain what had just happened. And the couple was already outside and heading toward their car when the waitress told us they had bought our meals.

I felt a little guilty, for not being the flooded-out little family they probably thought we were. Just a happy dad happy little girl in an all-night diner at one in the morning.

The Ecoterrorist and Me

“Pinocchio asked Jiminy Cricket, 'how do you become fully human?' Jiminy Cricket said, 'you develop a conscience, and then follow it.'”

That's probably not exactly how the dialog went. That of course is from the story of Pinocchio, and I could look it up. The rest I can't.

Sitting on plastic chairs, around a plastic table, inside a room with thick cement walls and massive, steel doors, was Marie Mason, Peter Werbe, and me. On top of the table was a little bag of peanuts and a bag of very mediocre trail mix. These are the only vegan options available from the vending machines in the room Peter and I were taken to before we were escorted into the visitation room in Marie's cell block. Nearby sat a sleepy-looking prison guard.

Peter and I were spending the weekend in prison. Marie is in her fifth year of a 22-year sentence at the Carswell federal women's prison in Fort Worth, Texas. She is being held in a highly repressive, so-called Administration Unit of the facility. She's not allowed to give interviews, or write anything for publication anywhere. The few people approved to visit her, somewhat bizarrely, include me and Peter, one of the most notorious anarchists of Detroit, sitting at the table with us.

Peter is a journalist – host of a popular Detroit radio talk show, and a long time staff member of the almost half-century old Fifth Estate magazine. I have also dabbled in that profession to some small extent. But no one visiting this prison is allowed to bring a notepad, a writing utensil, a recording device, or anything else other than car keys and a few dollars, which you can spend on the vending machines in the general visitation area. So anything I write here that attempts to represent Marie's words are my efforts to remember our conversations of several days ago.

Peter and I are both old friends of Marie's. Our visit includes fond reminiscences shared by these two Michiganders of the Detroit newspaper strike way back when, and of the many concerts of mine that Marie, a talented musician herself, organized over the decades. Such as the one she organized at the Trumbullplex alt-space back in the 90's, when I first met her, Peter, David Watson and other members of the Detroit anarchist community.

Peter is a member of Marie's support committee, and he's been working with other good people on a campaign to get her moved from this prison-within-a-prison back into a somewhat less draconian “general population,” preferably closer to where most of her friends and relatives reside.

“Why do you think they moved you here?”

It was a question we all already knew the answer to, but Peter was searching for ways to explain this to the general public for the purposes of the next Move Marie campaign brochure.

“They're scared of me.”

Marie is a humble person, not one to brag, but what she says is clearly a statement of the obvious. There is no other explanation. She was and is a model prisoner, in terms of her work ethic, respect for the guards and other prison authorities, kindness towards fellow inmates, etc. Back in Waseca, the Minnesota prison she was in before being transferred to this gulag in Ft. Worth, she was able to give classes in music and was able to interact with a broad range of other people within the prison. But this seemed to be exactly what troubled the BOP.

That, and the fact that as time went on, her infamy was growing. It's one thing to get several years in prison for politically-motivated destruction of property – that's bad enough. But to get the post-PATRIOT Act “terrorism enhancement” and a sentence of over two decades when you're a 52-year-old loving mother of two who has never hurt a fly, let alone a human, well, word gets around, apparently.

I continued the discussion, trying hard as I could to remember every word of her response, knowing I'd fail to do so. I was thinking of some of the Plowshares activists I had met recently in Australia, who had taken sledgehammers onto a military base in Queensland and badly damaged an American helicopter gunship – one of so many gunships. I mentioned an encounter I had with a Dutch hippie on a foot path in rural France who had heard the song I wrote about this Plowshares action, that I sang the night before.

“You know,” he said, “ten million people with sledgehammers could change everything.”

“Yes,” was Marie's emphatic,one-word response to that little anecdote.

I followed up. “Do you see the actions you engaged in as symbolic actions?”

“No, they were exemplary.” She explained further. “The organization that I was part of believed that sometimes the best way to illuminate a dark space is to light a match.”

In the name of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front – the organization(s) in question – Marie had carried out many operations, which arguably inspired many other similar acts around the country and the world. She pleaded guilty to over a dozen of them.

Million-dollar mansions under construction were burned to the ground, logging equipment was destroyed, and Monsanto's efforts to enslave the world were set back to some extent when a research facility at Michigan State University went up in flames on one New Year's Eve some 13 years ago.

As with the Plowshares actions around the world, no human or animal has ever been harmed in any ELF or ALF action.

Peter told Marie about a news item he had recently run across. “This guy burned down an apartment building in Detroit, hoping to collect on the insurance, and four firefighters were badly injured trying to put out the fire. Because of this, the judge gave the guy a 15-year sentence. But that was overturned later and drastically reduced, because it was found to be too harsh a sentence.”

Peter recounted this story because he was thinking of the contrast between it and Marie's case, which didn't involve anyone being hurt at any point. But Marie's immediate reaction was one of genuine human empathy for the injured firefighters.

“I would have been horrified if anything like that had happened.”

She continued. “People ask me why I didn't try to change things through legal means. I did! I organized campaigns, I went door to door with petitions, I organized educational events, concerts, all sorts of things.”

Of course, most people who knew Marie could easily vouch for the truth of these statements – this is the sort of thing she was most known for, except among a select few members of her ELF and ALF colleagues, who knew that she was also involved with other sorts of campaigns.

“But we felt like more had to be done.” She went on. “What we did at MSU, we did for the forty thousand farmers who committed suicide in India. Have you read Naomi Klein's book about Disaster Capitalism? That's exactly what's happening with Monsanto. Monsanto is trying to take advantage of the economic crisis around the world by forcing farmers to buy their Terminator seeds, and thus enslave the farmers of the world in the process. Dr. Vandana Shiva has written about this eloquently. We wanted to highlight this situation, to show that more could be done.” (She said it all so much better than that, though – at greater length, with bigger words, and more poetry. But that was the idea, anyway.)

“I just regret that we didn't get those research papers from the filing cabinets at MSU out to the public. If we had gotten them out there,

then everybody would understand why we did what we did. These papers really demonstrated how nefarious Monsanto's research on genetically modified seeds was. Frank thought we shouldn't do anything with the papers because it could make it easier for them to track us.”

She referred to Frank Ambrose, her ex-husband, and someone Peter and I both knew, who, faced with spending most of his life in prison, decided to cooperate with the authorities in return for a lighter sentence, and implicate his ex-wife, and others, in the crimes of conscience they committed together. Frank's cooperation with the authorities is ongoing.

“Do you have any other regrets?”, I asked.

She thought for a few seconds. “Once, I came across some foxes in a cage in the forest. I was so close to them. We were looking at each other. I tried to get them out, but I couldn't. I didn't have the right tools. There was nothing I could do. I had to leave them there.”

The painful emotions this memory brought up were obvious on her face. Marie is a vegan for reasons of conscience, and she loves living things. It's been years since she has so much as touched a blade of grass. She's held in a cell block of twenty women, about half of whom are have severe emotional problems and are there because of disciplinary, violence, or escape issues. Several, such as Marie, are clearly political prisoners – Afffia Saddiqui, a Pakistani scientist accused of shooting at American soldiers who had detained her in Afghanistan; Ana Belen Montes, who spied for Cuba for a quarter of a century from within the ranks of the Department of Defense; a well-known Plowshares activist who robbed a bank and publicly burned the money. (Marie is not allowed to talk about the women she shares the block with, but their names are on the prison's Wikipedia page, among other places.) Because the Carswell Admin Unit conditions exacerbate the problems so many of her block-mates have, they all spend much of their time on lockdown, basically in solitary.

One hour each day, she is let “outside” -- basically a small concrete area surrounded by 20' fences topped with triple-coiled razor wire, with the blazing Texas sun shining down from above. This is the closest she can come to communing with the natural world she has spent most of her adult life trying to save, in so many ways. Judging from the anecdotes she shares, that mostly involves insects now. She demonstrates a vast knowledge of the insect world, and an almost comical affection for these creatures. She tells Peter and I all about the differences between wasps, hornets, and different varieties of bees, and how you can tell they're being affected by the pesticides the BOP sprays on the grass all the time. I'm reminded of stories of the Bird Man of Alcatraz, but it would be very unlikely for such a story to be repeated there at FMC Carswell, because the windows in their cells are made of thick plastic, no bars, no contact with the outside.

A question occurs to me that I never thought to ask Marie before. Her mother is German.

“Do you think your German heritage had any impact on your activism?”

“Yes,” she said immediately. Peter seemed a bit surprised.

“My grandfather was an architect. During the war he took a lot of risks to help people. Near the end of the war, when the Allies were advancing, the Nazis wanted my grandfather to blow up certain bridges, and fix other bridges, depending on who controlled different areas or looked like they were about to control different areas. So he blew up the ones he was supposed to fix, and didn't blow up the ones he was supposed to blow up. He always said that when faced with a situation where those in power are doing terrible things, you can't just stand idly by. You have to do something, even if there aren't enough other people doing something, too.”

The conversation moves from one subject to another, and eventually returns to how we might phrase things on the Move Marie campaign brochure.

“As the brochure says,” she explains, “it's bad in here. But it could be worse. There are worse prisons in the US. Conditions could be worse. I don't want the emphasis to be just on me – no one should be held in these conditions.”

There are differences of opinion among members of the committee about what to emphasize. Some think the emphasis should be on the fact that Marie is a loving mother.

“Of course, I love my kids so much. And I'm so grateful that I didn't get arrested until after they were more or less grown up. And I'm so grateful for all the support I have, which most of my fellow prisoners do not have. But I'm not just a loving mother who ended up in here by accident. I'm a revolutionary anarchist. I'm in here for following my conscience.”

It's time to take Peter to the airport. It's Sunday – his weekly radio show is that evening. We all hug good-bye. I'm sure I'll be back within a few months – I'm one of the few friends of Marie's who is able to make it to Texas on a somewhat regular basis, since I can line up gigs there and pay for the travel expenses that way. This was Peter's first visit to Marie there, and his first visit to Texas, period. She recounts a long list of mutual friends Peter should say hello to on her behalf.

“Have a good trip to Austin,” she says to me. “Wish I could come to your gig.”

East Coast Travels

I love airports. Sure, there are the bored business travelers, the loud Americans who think everybody else desperately wants to hear every bit of their end of a mobile phone conversation, and there's often plenty of bad parenting on display, if you're not in Scandinavia. But for the most part, particularly in relatively poor countries like the United States, you've got a whole lot of people who are going somewhere, and excited to be doing it. Lots of folks who rarely fly, because they can't usually afford it, and when they do it, they're happy. Or they're sad to be leaving friends or family who they don't get to see often enough, and either way, the emotions are in the air, the atmosphere is charged with kinetic energy.

Being back at Logan Airport in Boston is especially exciting for me. Boston, the city I lived in as a young adult for more years than any other, where I cut my teeth as a street performer for the most part, where every block, and every stop on the MBTA contains memories. And it's a particularly exciting place to be because it is my point of embarkation for the journey home to Portland, Oregon, where I'll get to see my little family again, for the first time in two months.

Being at an airport for me usually means I'm in between one leg of a tour and another, which is indeed the case today. I flew from Iceland to Boston nine days ago, when the US government was well into the first week of its shutdown, and today I'm flying away from Boston, on the third week of shutdown, the day before we get to find out whether the federal government will default on its multi-trillion-dollar debt for the first time in over a century.

It was only nine days, with gigs in two US states and two Canadian provinces, but the east coast leg of my tour around the world has been full of the fascinating diversity of the human experience, and seems well worth recounting a bit.

When I arrived at Logan Airport nine days ago, I waited in the long line at Immigration, just ahead of an older man who took interest in the fact that I had a guitar over my shoulder, and asked me about what I had been doing. I told him I had been playing gigs around the world, and he told me about his life raising kids and working in middle management for various corporations, all of which at some point downsized their workforce and laid him off after a few years. But his wife still had a job, so he seemed to be doing OK, as he was just returning from some kind of Holy Land tour, where he had visited places of significance to Catholics such as the Vatican and what he called Israel, by which he meant the occupied West Bank. He had been to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem without noticing the Apartheid Wall. What did he think of the new pope, I wondered? John Paul II was his favorite, he said. John Paul was Polish, and so was he. (By which he meant Polish-American.)

I was glad to make it through that line. The Immigration guy was impressed at the number of countries I had visited, which I had obediently written down on the landing card. What were you doing in all those countries? A concert tour. How was it? Good, except for not being allowed into New Zealand. What happened? I guess I should have gotten that work permit before I left the US. Ah, he replied, Immigration can be sticklers about that sort of thing. Yes. Especially US Immigration, I wanted to say, but didn't. So many friends from so many countries who can't even enter the US on a tourist visa because of having some kind of criminal record, such as things like marijuana possession charges from two decades ago.

The rental car center was packed with people. Most of the companies had long lines of folks waiting to rent their cars. The company I had a reservation on had no line for some reason, even though it was one of the cheapest. The woman behind the counter did what they always do in the US – she tried to convince me that the small car I had reserved was really too small, and wouldn't I be more comfortable in a bigger car, for an extra $5 a day? No, I actually meant to reserve that car, thanks! I don't say that. I'm much more polite than that. The woman who has just stepped up to the counter, one foot away from me is breathing loudly, coughing every thirty seconds or so, without covering. She's old, she has very badly dyed black hair, and she's clearly mentally ill.

“They say you've got the last car,” she says to the woman behind the counter.

“I can help you when I'm done with this gentleman,” the woman responds, clearly annoyed, clearly tired of dealing with this crotchety old germ-spreading Bostonian.

She said I'd have a little Fiat, but the car in that space was a Chevy Malibu, which was exciting to me for no reason other than the fact that I knew the trunk would be big enough that I could fit both my suitcases and my guitar in it. That's always nice for not getting the car broken into. This has happened five times so far in my touring career (three times in the US, twice in Europe), but it's not happening this time, with this spacious car.

The young woman who checks me out of the parking lot looks about 16, and seems totally out of place in that smelly airport parking garage. She's the most elegant, angelically beautiful Latin American woman I've ever seen. She says only a few words, but the way she speaks immediately communicates an incisive wit, and an abundance of intelligence. Probably one of Boston's 250,000 college students. We check the car for scratches together. I sign on the dotted line, while she holds the paper on the hood of the car for me, unbearably close.

“Do you need anything else?”

Why is she asking me that? What else might I need? Directions to get out of the parking garage? Of course it's just a polite, meaningless question, to which I'm expected to answer, “no thanks.” Which is what I say. While every pheromone-drenched cell in my body is screaming at my brain to answer, “your phone number,” but I don't, and never would, for which the angel in the parking garage is probably glad.

It's after 8 pm by the time I get out of there, and my body feels like it's 2 am, and definitely past bedtime. Jet lag. I have for some reason decided I'd spend the night at my dad's place in Connecticut, a three-hour drive from the airport. I meet a friend in Wellesley for coffee at JP Licks. Sufficiently buzzed on caffeine, I continue on down the highway, enjoying the unexpected fact that my car has satellite radio built in. Fifty more Syrian refugees dead in Mediterranean, says the BBC.

After a too-short visit with my father and stepmother, I'm off the next day to Long Island, for the first of seven gigs on the east coast.

My father is a composer, and taught composition and other music-related courses at Long Island University for over three decades. For the small community of people who are into what they call “concert music,” what they used to call “avant garde,” “12-tonal,” or “microtonal” music, especially on Long Island, Rovics is a familiar name. But there is very little crossover between the Left or the folk music scene and the world of “concert music,” so I'm always pleasantly surprised when someone at a show knows one of my parents. The opening act consists of a fantastic duo – a married couple, I believe. The man playing the piano and singing along with his wife, who is clearly a trained opera singer, and pulls of these political art songs that the man wrote with another man who's sitting in the front row, hunched over because of some kind of health problem like the one my grandmother used to have. The woman is definitely a senior citizen, though a well-preserved one, and her voice is very much still intact. She pulls off these very funny songs, very reminiscent of Tom Lehrer's stuff, with acrobatic, vocal perfection, which match the skilled delivery of the piano part that her husband provides.

The gig is in a church. Which in North America is a common thing, and doesn't mean there's anything religious about the event. It's sponsored by Veterans for Peace, which is a secular organization. But at this church event, the minister is involved, and he is clearly a revered figure among the people gathered here. He's the second opening act. Banjo in hand, he proceeds to tell us all about the plane wreck in California about which Woody Guthrie wrote the song “Deportees.” He describes the song in detail before singing it, which is usually a bad idea, but then I wonder if he's doing that specifically for the benefit of the large Latin American presence in the room. It's a free event, and I get the impression that many of his flock who are there along with the Vets for Peace contingent are recently-arrived migrants who may not speak very good English yet. Sure enough, his second song is one by Daniel Viglietti, which he introduces as a song by Victor Jara. (Victor Jara sang it, but he didn't write it. I find out later that the minister was aware of this, but presumably didn't feel it was worth mentioning. As a songwriter this rubs me the wrong way, but it shouldn't.)

The Vets for Peace crowd is almost entirely of my parents generation. One of many gigs I've done over the years where I'm the youngest person in the room. I don't mind at all. I love playing for this generation of activists. Ten years ago, for the most part, the 1960's generation didn't seem old yet. They still seemed solidly in the camp that you would refer to as middle aged. But ten years is a long time, and now this generation is, for the most part, old. Of course there are the few of that generation of leftwing New Yorkers who look after their bodies and stay younger. There are a couple like that at the church. But for the most part, the New York diet of bagels, pizza, coffee and cigarettes that most of these good people grew up on has not been kind to them, and most of them are moving around the room with a pronounced awkwardness of gait, though most of them also seem to have successfully held on to the youthful optimism and colorful forms of dress which is still a hallmark of that generation.

Probably half the crowd there had never heard my music before, and their reaction to it was humbling, and at this point fairly predictable. People look for new music when they're young, for the most part. When they're older, it's more the kind of thing that has to come to them. When these people were young the FM airwaves were independently owned, and filled with the unmistakably leftwing sounds of the Sixties. Unbeknownst to most members of that generation, the leftwing music they loved existed long before the Sixties, and continued to be created afterwards, but there was only that brief period when they were young when this kind of music got on the radio much, so for them it basically disappeared. Then, for these people here in this room, I came along. Never mind all my contemporaries – Jim Page, Robb Johnson, Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco, Tom Morello, Grace Petrie – they've never run across those folks. They've never even heard of Rage Against the Machine. Since Phil Ochs died, the next one like that they came across, randomly enough, was me, and they're impressed.

They buy gobs of CDs, we pose for lots of photographs, and old women walking with the help of canes have that unmistakable glitter in their eyes that reminds me of why it's such a privilege to be a musician. I remember my friend Sara Stinus, who was a bit older than the Sixties generation, and has since died. She was the best-looking seventy-year-old anywhere. She didn't live in New York, she lived in Copenhagen, and rode a bicycle. In front of her husband, Erik, at the end of every show of mine they'd come to, she'd always say, “If I were younger, I'd take you home with me.” There was no question that she was not just talking about cooking me dinner. I'd smile and hug her lingeringly, not mentioning, for the benefit of Erik, that I'd happily have gone home with her at any age. But she died before he did, so that never happened.

The next day was the longest drive of the east coast tour, from one end of New York state to the other, up to the post-industrial city of Rochester. The gig is at the Squirrel Community Center, a neat place I've played at twice before. I walk in and I'm surprised to see a man I haven't seen in almost three decades, since we were both students at Earlham College in Indiana. He looks the same, except with grey hair, and I recognize him immediately.

When I knew him he was a good-natured, pot-smoking, guitar-playing hippie from Philedelphia. Since I last saw him he got mixed up with the mafia and had to leave Philadelphia on pain of death. He thought he should get far away from Philadelphia. Being Jewish, he figured he'd go to Israel. No Italian mafia there, just the Russian one, and that's different, at least for his purposes.

He hadn't really given it enough thought, and found himself an Israeli citizen under the age of thirty, and obligated to do military service. Soon he was driving around in a military vehicle, participating in the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, translating between English, Hebrew and Arabic for military officers and foreign visitors. A Scud missile landed in his Jeep and messed up his knee, but otherwise he weathered that one OK. The whole time he was there he wondered what the heck he was doing there, and felt nothing but sympathy for the Lebanese and the Palestinians. He missed a bus once because he had taken a walk with a friend to smoke a joint. They watched the bus leave the station, and then it blew up. Saved by a joint. After a couple more occasions like that he thought he'd move back to the US. Time had passed, and I guess the mafia wasn't interested in pursuing their vendetta anymore. He couldn't stick around for the gig because he had to go to an AA meeting, but it was good to see him.

There was an array of punks and hippies, young and old, at the Squirrel. In towns like Rochester, where the Left is small, people hang out together. There were a bunch of Sixties generation folks with white hair and white beards. There were folks from Rochester Indymedia, one of the few Indymedia centers still active, including one member who was, like me, a friend of the late Brad Will. I met friends of Brad's on this tour in Tokyo, Freiburg and Rochester. The guy got around. There were young punk rockers who really came alive for “I'm A Better Anarchist Than You,” singing along with gusto. Someone wrote a fun review of the show on his blog.

One man there told me that there was an active anti-eviction movement in Rochester. I hadn't heard about it. I had heard about a police raid on a foreclosed, squatted house that was especially brutal, and made national news to some extent. I hadn't heard that since that raid, the police had backed off a bit. Now, when activists chained their necks to foreclosed houses to protect the former owners from being evicted by the police, the police back off, every time. Solidarity works, sometimes. There I am in Rochester, wishing the great, progressive city of Portland had a police force like that. It doesn't.

The next day was one of the two days I didn't have a gig. I had dinner with a couple of friends in Buffalo. Activists, as usual, and when they moved to Buffalo from Vermont some years before, they were “welcomed” by a whole bunch of undercover police officers in unmarked cars, staking out their apartment, letting them know that the state was aware of their movements. On the day they moved in, someone smashed the windows of five cars in front of their building. A message of sorts. Or a coincidence, if you believe in coincidence theory.

After dinner I headed to the Canadian border. I wanted to cross a day early, in case I had any problems. As always, I was sent in for further questioning. The young woman behind the counter looked up my long record of trouble with the Canadian border. She looked completely unimpressed. I told her about the three gigs I had in Canada, and how they all fell under the exemption because each of them were rented for the occasion, and so didn't require a work permit. She was unconvinced. I showed her the part of the law which gave me the exemption, which my friend Walter, an immigration lawyer in Montreal, had just sent me to make sure I had it handy. She was still unconvinced.

“My friend Walter is an immigration lawyer, and I have his cell phone number right here,” I said, trying to be helpful in case there was some legal clarification needed. She took offense at this.

“He could be anybody,” she said. Actually I'm sure there's a way for her to look up who the legitimate lawyers are, but I didn't say that.

“Whether you get into Canada or not is up to me, nobody else,” she explained, clearly peeved that I may somehow have implied that there was anybody else with any kind of authority to decide my fate, other than her.

“Do you have a manifest?”

“I don't have anything printed out, but you can see on my website where I'm playing.”

“But I can't see on your website whether these are venues that fall under the exemption. You need to provide a printed explanation about each venue, their operating hours, and other pertinent information.” It sounded very much like she was getting ready to turn me away until I came back with printed information.

“So if I had this information in print, with the record of being turned away from the border that you're looking at on your computer there, you would just believe me?”

“No, I'd still have to confirm that the information you provided me with is true,” she replied. She clearly had just caught herself in this contradiction, and didn't need me to rub it in. I didn't. She looked up each of the venues, confirmed to her satisfaction that they all fell under the exemption, and told me I was free to go. Into Canada, that is, though she didn't say that.

The gig in Toronto was reminiscent of the gig in Long Island, in that most of the audience were leftwing Jews of a certain generation, except at this gig there was probably a higher proportion of Jews relative to Goyim, since it was a leftwing Jewish cultural center where the gig was taking place. As in Long Island, they bought gobs of CDs, and were wildly appreciative of the whole evening. Several of them were organizing a protest against the prime minister, who was scheduled to receive an award from the Jewish National Fund, a rightwing Zionist organization despised by probably everyone in the room. These were people of a generation who viscerally remembered anti-Semitism as it was practiced daily in North America, but these kinds of formative experiences just made these people despise the racism of the anti-Palestinian Jewish National Fund even more, sensibly enough. I love these people. They would drive the Antideutsch crazy if the Antideutsch ever met them, my friend Kate pointed out, when I told her about the folks at the Winchevsky Center, as Kate was traveling around Germany doing screenings of her documentary.

Next day, Canada's capital city, Ottawa. Another gig in a church. The audience here was just as leftwing as the last several audiences, but this time half of those in attendance were from Syria. It was an event sponsored jointly by a church-based group of leftwing Syrians opposed to US intervention in their war-torn country, along with the Communist Party of Canada, in the form of their Cuba solidarity group. I focused my set on songs related to refugees, and US imperialism. I've written three or four songs related to Syria, one of which is a love song. To my surprise, many of the Syrians had evidently heard that song already, and there in the church I had a group of Syrian women in the front row singing along to the chorus of “Syrian Princess” beautifully.

A friend from Victoria had taken a road trip across Canada to visit her parents in Ottawa, and there she was at the gig. She was the one person in the room for whom the posters worked. Posters only work for artists with name recognition. Otherwise you're much better off with word of mouth or other forms of more direct promotion, when trying to promote a relatively unknown artist. But the poster worked for her, even though she had only just seen it that day, and it was on the ground, having presumably been ripped down by someone who didn't like one or both of the sponsoring organizations. (Or by someone who didn't like me, which seems less likely. You don't have to know anyone from the Communist Party of Canada to know you don't like them, if you're that sort of person...) I met Anne and her 2-year-old son for breakfast the next morning. He and I really hit it off, and he had a good time riding on my shoulders, after he eventually figured out that I did not intend to drop him, even if he stuck is fingers in my ears and insisted on licking my inexplicably furry arms.

I had been in touch with a student activist from Montreal for a couple months before my arrival there at L'Artere. But while in previous years the average age of the folks in attendance in Montreal might have been around my age or a bit older, this time it was a different story. The older folks were there, but so were a whole bunch of young Francophone student activists. The student movement in Quebec had risen to incredible heights, with a demonstration happening more than once a day for months on end. For quite some time they had a demo on the 22nd of each month which usually had over a hundred thousand people at it. A real mass movement, against a rise in tuition fees for the university students of Quebec. Despite facing lots of police brutality, the movement persevered, grew, and won.

For the folks I was hanging out with there in Montreal before and after the show, the victory was bittersweet. The movement had been so big, and such a source of optimism, that many people involved thought it would be good to take advantage of that momentum and go further. The movement won in the sense that the planned tuition increases were canceled by the provincial government. But for these folks, they thought it would be a good idea to expand the fight to cancel tuition fees altogether, and other such lofty goals, but the mass of students and others participating in their struggle didn't think so, apparently. There are still regular demonstrations, but they're much smaller, and much more being controlled, kettled and mass-arrested by the police, who have also taken to issuing huge fines to protesters for things like ashing their cigarettes on the street (not even for throwing a cigarette butt on the ground, but for the ash from the end of the cigarette hitting the pavement!).

At the end of my show, another young woman who I hadn't met yet asked me, with a bit of an accusatory tone to her voice: “Why didn't you sing 'We Are Everywhere'?”

I didn't quite know what to say. I bumbled through some kind of response, like I've written a lot of songs and there's not time to do all of them.

“During the student movement here,” she explained, “'We Are Everywhere' was a song we all listened to when we were feeling down, to give us some hope.”

I had been admiring the massive Quebec student movement from afar, unable to make it to Quebec while it was happening, having no idea that any of these young Quebecers were fans of my music. Mine is a fun job in the worst of times, but these are the moments that make it feel entirely worthwhile.

If you go to Canada on business from the US, you have to pay $10.75 upon return. I was sent into the Immigration and Customs building, paid my $10.75, and drove through Vermont, from north to south, until I reached Massachusetts. No gigs in Vermont, but so many memories along the way. Singing at an antiwar protest in Burlington soon after 9/11 that Ward Churchill spoke at. Singing at a union event that Bernie Sanders spoke at. Hanging out there with Jim Page and the late, great author and activist, John Ross. Montpelier, and memories of Graciela, and giant puppets, my first pair of snow shoes, and nearby Plainfield, where the Institute for Social Ecology used to exist.

In Florence, Massachusetts the gig was a fundraiser for Valley Free Radio, and probably half the people in attendance were enthusiastic radio programmers at the station. The venue was Cafe Evolution, the latest business venture of Star Drooker, a very talented artist himself, and brother to a much more well-known artist, Eric Drooker. More memories of playing at Star's old cafe in Northampton, and of my brief stint living in western Mass, next to a sheep farm in the mid-90's.

A drive across the state of Massachusetts, back to Boston. I get to Copley Square a few hours before the gig, and walk around Boston Commons, near where I used to busk for a living at the Park Street T twenty years ago. I'm listening with my headphones to a podcast of This American Life, about Harper High School in Chicago, where something like 29 students got shot the year before, though this kind of thing happening at a predominantly Black high school in America hardly ever makes the news. The podcast was spell-bindingly good, as that show often is, but this one was especially so.

As I listen to the stories of death from Chicago, I happen to walk past a church near the place where the Boston Marathon bombings took place. The iron fence surrounding the church is festooned with ribbons of cloth, each one with some kind of Christian or pagan or other prayer for peace on it.

The gig in Copley is at the Community Church of Boston. Always hard to get a crowd there for some reason. Nobody lives around there, other than rich people. It's very accessible by mass transit, but that doesn't seem to help. I lived in Boston for many years, and the crowd of 15 people or so seems to be entirely from my email list, despite the good efforts made by the sponsor of the gig. There's my sister, her boyfriend, and several mutual friends of ours, and a random selection of fans from the Occupy movement and Veterans for Peace, or both. There's Chuck Rosina, radio programmer and sound engineer, who made a nice live recording of the whole show, as he often does.

The guitar strap I had been using since last spring was one I borrowed from a squatter in Copenhagen, and forgot to return to him. I lost it in Iceland, just before I got to Boston, and I had been doing all my gigs since then sitting on a stool, rather than standing, since I lacked a guitar strap and kept on forgetting to buy one. Dean Stevens, the activist there at the church, is also an accomplished musician, and I asked him if he had a guitar strap I could borrow. He presented me with a hand-made, woven purple guitar strap from a village in El Salvador that he visits regularly.

Back at the airport the next day, while waiting to board my flight and looking for coffee, I saw an old man who looked, from behind, like Noam Chomsky. I quietly walked towards him to get a closer look. It wasn't Noam, I determined.

Then I noticed that he wasn't just randomly admiring the view, looking out the window, but was looking at something out there in particular that was happening. Several fire trucks and police vehicles with lights flashing were gathered around a Delta airplane. Along with these official vehicles were a hearse, and a few other cars.

“What's going on over there?” I asked an airline employee who was standing nearby.

Quietly, with an unmistakable bitterness to her voice, she answered.

“It's the remains of a soldier, back from the wars. This happens way too often.”

I agreed, and headed towards my gate.

Hong Kong to Iceland

Another long flight and another blog post. I left the Eurasian land mass yesterday for Reykjavik, Iceland, and now I'm flying from Reykjavik to Boston, where the last nine days of my world tour will take me to various cities in the northeastern US and eastern Canada.   As we fly, the US government is nearing week two of the forced shutdown. The Republicans are freaking out about Obama's incredibly flawed national private insurance plan, but nobody among them seem to be complaining about the heavily-armed government workers who are going around having wild west-style shoot-outs with their alleged terrorist nemeses in Libya and Somalia, creating a new generation of terrorists with every bullet fired.

My last gig in Asia was in the bustling metropolis of Hong Kong. Once a fishing village on the outskirts of China, essentially taken by force by Great Britain as a consequence of China's defeat in the Opium War, it has for a long time now been one of the world's banking capitals. There would seem to be no limits to Hong Kong's sensible contradictions. People I met were just as concerned about the lunatics running the USA as they were worried about the increasing role of the People's Republic of China in their lives. The Opium War that gave birth to this place is rejected just as thoroughly as the massacre in Tiananmen Square, which is publicly commemorated in a massive protest every June. This city which is one of the original homes of free enterprise is also a place where everybody has access to free health care. It has one of the world's highest concentrations of billionaires, but around half the housing – the better half, for the most part – is provided by the government. (According to my host, who seemed to know what he was talking about.)

And although the place is dominated by extremely wealthy people and is now under Chinese control in many ways, the public media is very independent. It may be a small country as they go, but there are many millions of people in there, and it seems notable to me that once again, on my second visit, I was an honored guest at Radio Television Hong Kong, on a radio show run by an English ex-pat, and interviewed extensively later in the day by a TV crew of young Hong Kong Chinese men from the same organization. In our wide-ranging discussions, no subject seemed to be off-limits.

The concert I did took place in front of a packed crowd of folks at a wonderful nonprofit venue called the Fringe, that includes a gallery, a cafe, a restaurant, and a theater. As with the last time I played there, the audience was a mix of mostly folks from Hong Kong, with a large minority of people from all over the English-speaking world -- including a good crew of supporters of the Celtics football team in Scotland, whose fan clubs of fine, upstanding leftwingers dot the globe. I was once again honored by the presence of Hong Kong's most infamous leftwing parliamentarian, who is popularly known as Longhair. Election after election he wins by a landslide in his working class district of the city. People say that many of the folks who vote for him may not know or care about his particular political orientation. They just know he stands up for his people, and he's equally unafraid of speaking out against the Hong Kong capitalists, the West or the People's Republic. They also know that he refuses to accept the generous salary offered to parliamentarians, insisting instead on only being paid what the average Hong Kong worker makes.

I left Hong Kong in the evening on September 16th on a sleepy red-eye flight to Abu Dhabi, and then from there to Frankfurt, where I arrived at 7 am Frankfurt time the next day. The first flight was on a crowded Air Seychelles plane. The second was on a spacious Etihad Airlines flight, which included the best food I have ever been served at 36,000 feet. The plane was full in equal measure of people from all over Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and as we dined in luxury up there, our flight path took us directly over the war-torn nation of Iraq, directly over Baghdad, according to the flight map, then over Turkey and into Fortress Europe.

I waited in the line for non-EU citizens. Darker-skinned people from around the world were being asked questions, like how long they were planning to stay in Germany, but as always, when it was my turn, the man just stamped my US passport without a word. (Sometimes they say “welcome to Germany” to me, but at that hour of the morning maybe he didn't feel like saying that sort of thing.)

After a series of long flights, there is something liberating about renting a car and having control over when and where I stop and get out of the thing and take a little walk or get an espresso at one of Germany's upscale Autobahn service areas, where the espresso and food served is generally worlds above any of the service places on the highways of their neighboring countries, despite the fact that most of their neighbors are still known for having better food, generally. Reputations are often undeserved. Many people in Europe outside of Germany will tell you about the rigidity of German culture and the intolerance of the society. But it's obvious to anyone who spends time in various European countries – certainly obvious to me – that it is in the neighboring countries where the far right is on the rise more than in Germany. And by other measures, such as the educational system or the kind of parenting you can see happening on the streets of any city, it is in countries like France where you can easily find authoritarian parenting far more than in child-friendly Germany.

And France was my first destination on the European leg of the tour, after picking up my German rental car. I picked up three hitch-hikers – one young Polish engineering student on his first visit to Paris and two young German anarchists – and headed towards the beautiful French city of Besancon, where I would spend a night at a friend's place, before heading on to the sleepy village of Foulain, where I was on the bill at a small festival. Spending the day walking around Besancon, admiring the architecture, the cliffs and the river, it seemed so puzzling to me that I didn't see anyone crack a smile once. I was told that the summer had been nice and warm, and this was the first few days of autumn. Sure enough, it was cold enough to wear a jacket, and drizzling a bit. But what is it about this society that people can't just accept the fact that they live in a part of the world where it's often cold and wet? I suppose it's the same in the Pacific Northwest, where I live, but equally puzzling to me. Having just come from a lovely but sweltering visit to Hong Kong, where in parts of China parked cars were spontaneously bursting into flames due to the extreme heat, I was revelling in the fact that I had to get out my rain hat, jacket and waterproof shoes.

With the help of my trusty GPS I found my way to Foulain, and to the old, abandoned chalet that is the Lothlorien Peace Centre. I had visited the website of the Lothlorien Peace Festival and had wondered about the fact that this festival in France featured a website in French, English and Dutch. Given that the vast majority of Dutch people are fluent in English, and given the fact that the festival itself was in France, this choice of languages seemed a bit unusual, until I made my way down the dirt road that brought me to the chalet in the forest beside a creek, a chapel and an old mill, and discovered that the folks who ran the centre, and most of the people attending the festival, were from the Netherlands. Although the website featured Dutch, all of the workshops and performances were in French and English, since everybody spoke one of those two languages fluently.

Being a performer at this little festival was very much like a paid vacation more than anything else. They put me up in a caravan beside the creek, in the most isolated part of the forest, and I spent much of my time there staring at the water and noodling on the guitar, when I wasn't visiting the building where a very round French chef was making some of the best vegetarian food I had ever eaten, or hanging out with the professor from Besancon and a great English musician I had successfully recommend they hire to play at the festival, Cosmo. And the one guy who came to the festival because I was going to be there, an older man named Konni Schmidt from the German-French border city of Saarbrucken, who was serving delicious home-made mushroom soup out of his food truck, and making plans for the next Paris to Moscow bike trip for peace that he organizes regularly.

Most of the folks attending the festival were there for the morning workshops, which were primarily being run by indigenous people from North, Central and South America, along with a smattering of folks from Europe, an old man from Greenland, and a young man from Japan. They paid many hundreds of euros to attend this festival, which is no wonder when you think about the airfare involved with flying all these folks there from the Americas. Some folks were clearly skeptical of me, because I was consistently sleeping right through all the workshops, just emerging from my caravan to eat and do my three musical appearances. I have nothing against shamans, but admittedly I'd rather catch up on sleep than participate in healing rituals.

After the festival I picked up two young French hitch-hikers and headed back to Germany, to the hills of Freiburg, just to the north of Switzerland, where I would once again have another gig disrupted by the antics of the Antideutsch. This wasn't surprising for me, but I felt bad to have inadvertently put my friends there through all that. They are busy leftists with other things to do than attend meetings with these confused young ideologues, but I suppose some things are hard to avoid. At least it made for many interesting conversations about German society and history and about the post-war evolution of the German Left, along with more fond reminiscences of protests in Europe that many of us had attended over the years, such as the G8 meetings in Rostock, and the IMF/World Bank meetings in Prague. Which also gave rise to recollections about a man who was a friend of mine as well as of other folks there in the Freiburg scene, the late Brad Will.

Like Brad, Luciano and other folks there are also media activists, among other things, and like Brad, their activism takes them to the intersection of politics and gardening. Currently Luciano is working on a documentary to be titled the Strategy of Crooked Cucumbers. (One of the many ridiculous, wasteful EU regulations which should seem especially bizarre to anyone from the US is that cucumbers in Europe must be straight, and wrapped in plastic, which is how you will find them in most supermarkets throughout the EU's member states.)

The German election had taken place on the day of my gig in Freiburg, and after the show, as we were sitting around a fire in the backyard of the commune, people were checking their smartphones to see the latest election results. As in Australia a couple weeks earlier, the conservative party had won. Though in the German case, if the main three parties to the left of Angela Merkel – the Social Democrats, the Greens, and Die Linke – were willing to work together, they would have the majority. But the party that got the most votes was once again Merkel's party, and given that the Social Demcrats refuse to form a coalition with the former communists in Die Linke, the general prediction was that Merkel, the European queen of austerity budgets, would find some coalition partner to work with and lead another government eventually.

In spite of the fact that the NSA spy scandal was on the minds of many Germans in recent months, the party of government transparency led by computer hackers, the Pirate Party, did not make it into government this time, getting less than the requisite 5% in this election. Folks with the Pirates in Frankfurt, where my next gig was happening, thought that one part of the reason for their party's bad fortunes was that they were no longer an insurgent party coming from the sidelines, but had been for a few years now holding elected positions, and being in that situation, were thus less able to mobilize their base to put in the immense amounts of volunteer work necessary to propel a marginal party like that forward, since once people are in office there is a tendency for their supporters to think that now they can relax a bit and leave it up to the professionals. (One factor that hopefully did not play a role in the party's recent misfortunes was the national attention the local spokesperson received due to his association with a “terrorist sympathizer” -- me – a couple years ago. And the association continues – he was the main organizer of the gig.)

I got up early the following morning, to drop my rental car off at the airport in Dusseldorf and fly to Copenhagen, where I had a show at the new Ungdomshuset (the old one was destroyed by the police in 2007). One of the original Ungdomshuset organizers, a fantastic artist and leftwing militant named Adam, had put together this gig, complete with a brilliant poster that featured me as a sort of guitar-slinging superhero. Much like the gigs at the old Ungdomshuset that Adam organized, this one featured an audience that was impressive both in quantity and quality, with folks singing along enthusiastically to many of my songs. I've never had a “hit” in the traditional sense, but it's easy to ascertain on a night like that which songs are the ones that have been adopted by the Danish anarchists and socialists there at the House of Youth.

After a night in the familiar surroundings of my home away from home in the Valby neighborhood, I left a suitcase behind there, since I'd be coming back to Copenhagen five days later, and took the train to the airport, for another SAS flight to Trondheim. Like the last SAS flight to Trondheim I was on in the spring, I was strip-searched by Customs. Whether it was because I had on the same pair of jeans I had worn in the smoke-filled halls of Ungdomshuset the night before, which apparently interested the Norwegian sniffer dog, or because they were waiting for me, I don't know, and probably never will. But after once again failing to find any drugs on me (and this time I didn't have any for them to find, anyway), I made my way into the city, with the help of the nice young Maoist who came to pick me up.

After another enjoyable, cloudy and smoke-filled visit to the squatted community of Svartlamon, several excellent meals at the Ramp, and a gig at the venue run by the same workers collective that runs it, I was on another SAS flight to Oslo. (A domestic flight, without sniffer dogs this time.) The gig there was taking place at a club known as Maksitaxi, a bigger version of the old bar called Taxi Takeaway. The old one was located right across the street from the venerable hippie squat known as Hausmania. The new one was located directly across the street from the premier punk rock social center of Oslo, Blitz.

The big news at Blitz was that a couple weeks before, a teenage boy who had just gotten involved with the punk scene there was standing outside the place by himself during a show, and was stabbed by neo-Nazis. After hearing this news over a joint with a few folks in front of Blitz, I spent a couple hours taking in the sights and sounds of downtown Oslo on a chilly evening, since my gig at Maksitaxi wasn't actually starting til 11 pm. After giving away all the coins I had to Roma street musicians and panhandlers, and hanging out with the statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that stands in front of the harbor, I went back to the club and heard a wonderful cabaret band that was playing before me, that featured a female vocalist with a captivating, casual but spot-on singing style, accompanied by a woman who played various clarinets of different sizes, and a man on a Spanish guitar.

Then it was my turn, and the crowd there in Oslo was just as enthusiastic as the one at Ungdomshuset, and sang along to the same songs, which seemed to be “hits” among the Norwegian leftwing youth, too. Unbeknownst to me, while my gig was happening, some apparent neo-Nazis stood in front of Maksitaxi yelling and doing their stiff-armed salutes, before they were chased off. I don't know, but perhaps the Norwegian far right is feeling a bit emboldened by the recent elections there, which brought the relatively xenophobic Progress Party to power – the same party that the infamous Anders Breivik was once a member of, before he decided it wasn't rightwing enough for him. (The former Prime Minister was a bit more progressive, but perhaps his moonlighting as a taxi driver in order to better connect with the people may have backfired, since he apparently is a shit driver, as well as an uninspiring orator.)

Back to Denmark, to the western edge of Jutland, where I sang for an audience of union officials and their families, in an office of the progressive union called 3F. One member of the audience was a former union official who had since been elected as a member of the Danish parliament, representing the most leftwing party in Danish politics, Enhedslisten (“Unity List,” otherwise known as the “Red-Green Coalition”).

The day after spending an afternoon being driven across the country by another 3F organizer, I had one of those days which hardly ever happen for me except in the great city of Copenhagen -- I sang at three different protests in one afternoon. It was the opening day for the Danish parliament, and folks on the Left wanted to let them know that they were being watched... The biggest presence was Enhedslisten, but there were various others – communists, anarchists, leftwing union members, and more. For me it was a little reunion of people from throughout the leftwing political spectrum who I had met from throughout my many visits to this Scandinavian country. The man who organized my first-ever gig in Copenhagen was there, as well as folks who organized my most recent gig there at Ungdomshuset. The most random encounter was with a wonderful older couple from Scotland who were stopping by to use the public toilet, and heard me singing on the stage. They had purposefully come to hear me play in the past in Scotland, Ireland and New York, but they had no intention of meeting up with me in Denmark!

The next day I burned some more carbon with a flight to Brussels, rented a car, and headed to Cologne. I wasn't sure what time the gig started, or what kind of venue it was in. I knew the name of the venue – Bauwagenplatz – but hadn't tried to make sense of the name. Figured I was looking for a pub of some kind. The traffic once I crossed the German border was horrendous – construction all along the way on that highway. I had been hoping to be at the venue by 7 pm or so, but didn't get there til 9.

I stopped at a pub that seemed to be near my destination, and asked at the bar if they knew where I was going. Unusually for a young woman in Cologne, the bartender didn't speak English, but she was very nice and came outside to help point me in the right direction.

I wasn't quite sure if she was saying I should take a left at the lights, or that the venue was on the left before I got to the lights, so I asked a passerby if he spoke English.

“Yes, I do,” he responded. “You look like David Rovics.”

Recognized on the streets in Cologne! Granted, we were only about fifty meters from where the gig was happening, but this was still a surprising development. He was trying to find the place, too. He got the directions from the nice woman, and we headed down the road to the venue, which, it turned out, was a sorts of squatted trailer park (“wagon place” -- Bauwagenplatz).

We walked in to the dimly-lit trailer park, and discovered I wasn't too late at all, just on time. The band that was doing the gig with me was just setting up. A female singer, and folks playing keyboard, fiddle and guitar, all of whom also sang. Nice, folky, traditional-ish, political material with a decidedly Irish influence.

There was a fire outside with a crowd of folks gathered around it, most of whom crammed into the yurt where the gig was taking place when the band started playing. Many of the folks there seemed to have Danish names for some reason, plus there were a couple of squatters from the US. One woman had hitch-hiked there from Berlin for the occasion (a long way away), and another woman, an organizer with Blockupy, had driven there from Stuttgart. I definitely recommend the pub in the yurt at Bauwagenplatz for any of you who might be planning any visits to Cologne...

The next day involved a windy visit to the Hambacher Forest, where environmental activists of various sorts are squatting on land that is soon to be bulldozed and turned into a coal mine.

As I drove down the dirt road, past a farm, towards the camp, I was welcomed by a large banner with a drawing of some menacing-looking riot cops, and the acronym, “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards). I guess when the police raid the place, they will be under no illusions about how these folks feel about the armed enforcers of the state... Another banner on one of the caravans features a German translation of an Earth First! slogan, which I associate with Darryl Cherney, whatever its origins -- “there are no jobs on a dead planet.” There are other colorfully-decorated caravans and tents, and then came the kitchen tent, and next to it, the requisite campfire with folks sitting around it in a circle.

There in the countryside near Cologne, Europe's biggest coal mine is continually expanding, eating up more good farmland and forestland every few months. The action camps keep moving, too, from one about-to-be-deforested forest to another. There was an older woman there who grew up on a farm nearby as a child, but was displaced by the expanding mine when she was 14. She and her family moved far away, but now she was coming back, to oppose the ever-expanding mine that so disrupted her life and took away her beautiful forest home.

Smelling very strongly of campfire smoke, the next day I headed back to Belgium, for two gigs in two lovely venues in Flanders, in Eeklo and Sint-Niklaas, for a decidedly more socialist, less anarchist audience. (In case there was any doubt, photos of Marx, Engels and Lenin adorned one of the walls in Sint-Niklaas.)

These two gigs were my last ones in Europe, and the first two for Kate Mara's tour, promoting the excellent documentary she and the great English photojournalist, Guy Smallman, made about the ongoing crisis in Greece, Into The Fire. It had only been a few days since the leaders of the fascist group, Golden Dawn, were finally being arrested by the Greek police for running a criminal syndicate, systematically beating and killing immigrants (and most recently a Greek, which apparently was too much for the Greek government to tolerate). Kate talked about the crisis in Greece after the film, and I fashioned my set around the theme of refugees. The crowd was sympathetic, but the questions people were asking Kate made it very clear that this film, and more like it, are very much needed right now.

Last stop, Iceland. About halfway between Europe and Newfoundland. Is it in Europe or North America? In so many ways, it feels like a halfway point – certainly in the geographical sense it is, that's unequivocal. All over the streets of Reykjavik there were tourists, about half of them from North America and half from somewhere in Europe. Mostly, I imagine, on their way from one continent to the other, taking advantage of Iceland Air's relatively inexpensive tickets to and from. For no extra cost, you can make your stopover in Reykjavik be longer than the usual couple hours between flights. In my case, I made it a one-night stopover, just enough time to fit in a gig at Cafe Haiti, organized by a half-Icelandic, half-Danish leftwinger named Siggi, who I originally knew from Copenhagen.

It's been a few years since the economic crisis that led the people of Iceland to rise up, throw out the old regime, and tell the big banks to fuck off. There is a humble pride about this achievement, which you can feel in the air, though also a palpable feeling of discouragement that so soon after what some have called the “Icelandic Revolution,” the conservatives have been voted back into office, like in most of Europe lately.

Nearby to Cafe Haiti, by the harbor, there is a monument to the fishermen lost to the seas throughout the ages. Siggi tells me that these monuments fulfill the same sort of role, in this country with no military, that military memorials fulfill in other countries.

The gig included a wonderful band led by two women, doing material mostly in Icelandic, with a clear hiphop and ska influence. After a restful night in the guest quarters, in the basement of the collective house Siggi lives in, I took the bus back to the airport, had some fine Icelandic espresso and fish cakes, and boarded the flight to Boston. The flight map on the little screen in front of my seat is like any other flight map, except that this one includes markings for every major shipwreck that occurred in the North Atlantic in the past 300 years or so. I see the marking for the Thresher. Phil Ochs wrote a song about that when it sank. Great song. I used to sing it in the Boston subways every day, about twenty years ago.