It was wet and frigid when I flew out
of the hippest city in the USA -- Portland, Oregon -- on a direct
flight to Houston, Texas. As measured by the number of facial
tattoos per capita, Austin may be the second-hippest city in the
country, but Houston doesn't even get on the charts of hipness, at
least according to the standard measurement. I rented a car and
headed towards the city, from the sprawling, bustling airport north
of town that shall not be named. I tuned in KPFT, one of the five
radio stations in the US owned by the Pacifica Foundation, which is
undoubtedly the closest thing Houston's progressives have to a
virtual living room. I was just in time to hear an interview with a
local artist who was eloquently singing Houston's praises.
This, in itself, is notable. Much has
been said, by me and many others, about Houston's down sides, of
which there are many. For about six months out of the year it's
impossibly hot and humid. There are hardly any sidewalks, and the
wide streets and expansive highways take up most of the land area of
the city. They're filled with SUV's and huge pickup trucks for the
most part. With four million people, almost nonexistent mass
transit, terrifying conditions for anybody thinking about riding a
bicycle, and lots of oil refineries nearby, it is the most polluted
city in the nation. It is home to many of the scariest multinational
corporations on Earth. All the ones bent on extracting every last
nonrenewable resource available, they're mostly based in Houston,
along with most of the military contractors running the occupations
of Iraq and Afghanistan into the ground.
But it is largely all this ugliness,
all this lack of hipness, that makes Houston such a special place, as
the artist on the radio was pointing out. During the three years I
more or less found myself living in Houston, I conducted an ongoing
social experiment. When I'd meet someone new, whether they were a
dishwasher or a musician or a businessman, I'd ask them why they
lived in Houston. Around 99% of the people I talked to answered with
one of three possibilities: a) “This is where I'm from.” b)
“This is where my partner is from.” c) “I moved here for
work.” The last one was far and away the most common response.
Just from this much information, if you
use your powers of deduction, perhaps you can see where I'm going
with this. There is a lot of work in Houston, of all kinds. There
are millions of gainfully-employed people in Houston, and millions
more somewhat less gainfully-employed people working in the service
industries, taking care of all those oil men, bankers, secretaries,
accountants, computer programmers, etc. Not only do all these people
need to eat and keep their SUVs running, but they need to be
entertained. Nobody moves to Houston because they love the city, so
there is a relative shortage of hipsters – so if you happen to be
one of them, your chances at making a living doing art, music,
theater, dance, etc., in either English or Spanish is increased
dramatically. The city is full of well-used museums, theaters,
cinemas, galleries, and live music clubs. But unlike Portland, where
a stellar band might be playing for tips in a cafe and making $20 per
musician for the night if they're lucky, in Houston they're generally
getting paid for their labor. To paraphrase the artist on the radio,
in LA you can have a showing in a gallery and a few of your friends
will show up. Do the same thing in Houston and your friends will
show up, as will one or two journalists and some guy with a lot of
money who actually wants to buy a painting.
I was on KPFT soon after the artist, on
Wally James' long-standing weekly show, the Progressive Forum. I
arrived at the station just in time. After seeing some wonderfully
familiar faces there at the station, I headed north towards Dallas.
When touring in the US and many other countries, the most economical
way to go is usually to rent a car from the same airport where you'll
be returning it. So I flew into Houston because my last gig in Texas
was going to be there. But my first gig was in Dallas, the following
evening.
Originally I had been hoping my first
gig would be an informal affair, singing for folks camped out at one
of the blockades in eastern Texas, where people from all over North
America were going, in an effort to stop the building of the latest
huge extension of the pipelines slurrying Alberta's oil shale from
Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. But I got word the night I arrived
that the pipeline blockaders were moving camp that night and the next
day, so it wasn't a good day for me to go distract them. So I
continued on north from Houston, and the radio was abuzz with news of
another mass shooting, this time on the University of Houston campus.
I spent the night in a Motel 6 somewhere in between Houston and
Dallas, and continued on to Dallas the next day.
Lucky for me, although I didn't get a
chance to hang out with pipeline blockaders in their natural habitat
(sweating in a tent in a partially-bulldozed forest with no running
water, waiting to get arrested, I imagine), some of them came to
me... My show was a benefit for the Tar Sands Blockade, taking place
in a dance studio, though luckily no one was attempting to dance to
my erratic rhythms. There at my first show on this visit to Texas
were an array of people, ranging in age from around 18 to 88.
When I tune in to the things people are
talking about and the way they approach different subjects, it's
often easy to tell exactly when they became involved with activism.
Some people had clearly been on the left since the 1960's. Some had
been shaped by the anti-capitalist movement circa 1999. A bunch of
them first cut their activist teeth when Cindy Sheehan started her
protest camp outside Bush's ranch nearby in 2005. Others were
clearly products of Occupy Wall Street, doing an Occupy Dallas livestream of the event. And then there were those who had only
discovered activism, and the tradition of civil disobedience, in only
the past few months, getting involved with the Tar Sands Blockade.
Those in the latter camp included people of all ages, from local
landowners to grandmothers concerned about their family's drinking
water, from sharply-dressed college students to idealistic young
hippies from the west coast, clothed in dumpster-dived, home-made
rags. The newest activists are the easiest to identify, because they
are always the ones struggling to come to terms with the petty
differences among their colleagues that seem to dominate so much of
their time and energy.
I got up early the next morning to go
visit a friend who is decidedly not from the camp of the
newly-activated. Marie Mason, convicted “ecoterrorist,” two
years in to a twenty-two-and-a-half-year sentence for doing four
million dollars worth of damage to corporate property in Michigan
many years before. No prior criminal record aside from trespassing,
a vegan who never hurt a fly, let alone a human, she's being held in
a supermax, the only supermax for women that is also a Communications
Management Unit, where those within it have severely restricted
lives and ability to interact with the outside world, much more so
than in “normal” super-maximum-security prisons.
This was my second visit to FMC
Carswell, so I knew the drill. The hardest part last time was
finding the entrance, but this time I had it saved in my GPS. The
penitentiary is a massive complex adjacent to an even more sprawling
military base on the outskirts of the vast city of Ft. Worth. It was
January in Texas, the morning air was crisp but not cold, just the
sort of winter weather that could convince me to spend some time
there one day. Visitors of inmates were lined up along the
badly-maintained road beside the prison complex. Most of the
vehicles in the line were the older, more worn cars and minivans of
the working class, and about half of them were from Oklahoma, just to
the north. As Leonard Peltier and others have pointed out, the US
prison system is the country's biggest Indian reservation, and
evidence of that was there in the line of cars with me.
Directly across from the strangely
unmarked entrance to the prison is a woodsy little piece of property
that has an obviously hand-made sign advertising that people can camp
there, and there was a little farm stand of some kind. I never
checked it out, but I'm curious what reality is like in that little
homestead.
The entrance to the prison consists of
a ramshackle little guard house with a small, middle-aged Latino man
its sole occupant. During visiting hours – which are designed to
be confusing, it seems; you have to show up either at 8:30 am or at
11:30 am, something like that, but in between those times he stops
processing people for a long while – he's standing just outside the
shack, in front of a little portable lectern which is uncomfortably
perched on the gravel-covered road. He's got a little tattered
notepad, and he's already got information on each of the people
coming in to visit their imprisoned friends and relatives. He
clearly doesn't think winter in Texas is anything too exciting, since
he's standing there with an electric heater, much like a big hair
dryer, and just as loud, that's sitting on the ground by his lectern
and warming his feet.
From the time I enter to the time I
leave I get the feeling that the whole place functions with very few
actual staff. I drive through the deserted streets within the prison
complex, and the little wooden homes that presumably house prison
employees of some kind. Then the lower-security prisoner housing,
where some of the women often seem to be outside, carrying around
laundry and stuff. Then the parking lot, which you can find easily
by following the over-sized American flag blowing in the wind in
front of the building through which visitors enter.
Altogether it's a two-hour-long process
from entering the prison to seeing Marie. In the visitor entrance
building an impatient, apparently overworked employee repeatedly
tells me and other visitors to back away from his section of the
room. There are dozens of us, and we're all supposed to squeeze into
one part of the room, which isn't big enough for us all to fit in.
The man behind the counter tells people to wait outside if they don't
fit in the little section of the room we're supposed to wait in. One
young male visitor tests positive for cocaine and has to leave. An
elderly woman sets off the metal detector because of a hip
replacement, and he tells her she has to have a note from a doctor
explaining that she has a hip replacement or she can't come in. He
doesn't like my Oregon driver's license because some information on
it has faded out. I go to the car and get my passport, and that
works for him.
Last time I visited, the two guards who
brought me through the myriad of impossibly thick steel doors within
the maze of windowless corridors were two white guys, of Italian and
Norwegian descent, judging from their appearances and last names. I
don't remember their names, but the Norwegian-looking guy seemed very
nice, and I nicknamed him Thor. Anyone else would have, too – he
had blond hair hanging down most of the way to his shoulders, arms
about the size of my legs, completely muscle-bound, with a neck
almost as thick as a Cardassian (if you watch Star Trek and know what
one is). This time my guides through the prison were both women of
Latin American descent. Word was that Thor was out with an injury,
which he actually got from throwing hammers in some kind of Viking
competition.
As with my last visit, I was brought
into the visiting room before Marie got there. It was a barren room,
but unlike the corridors we were walking through, it had windows,
plate glass, bulletproof I'm sure, through which you could see a
field, other buildings, and lots of barbed wire. The room was
slightly less barren than the last time. I guess you could call it
an improvement, though such a minor one that it's barely worth
mentioning: in addition to the large, ratty poster of the Statue of
Liberty, there was now a plant. A fairly sizable bush of some kind,
it sat beside the plastic card table and two plastic chairs in the
middle of the room. I was instructed to sit at the table and wait
for Marie. I had set up the chairs so they were too close to each
other, and one of the guards moved them so they were on either end of
the table. She informed me that the chairs had to stay that way, and
that after briefly greeting Marie I was not allowed to touch her.
Indeed, when Marie was brought out from
a different hallway than the one I came in, the guards seemed to be
timing our hug. Two seconds or so, too short to make them get antsy
yet. Last time I visited, Thor and the Italian guy made a point of
sitting as far away from Marie and I as possible, to give us as much
privacy as they could under the bizarre circumstances. This time the
guards sat about three feet from us, easily able to hear every word
if they were paying attention.
In some prisons, even in some US ones,
they have private monthly visits for married couples, visiting
performers coming through now and then, and all sorts of other
opportunities to avoid total insanity setting in too quickly. Not
here. Marie's efforts to allow us to have access to one of the two
guitars that were sitting, rarely used, in a dark room nearby under
lock and key, were fruitless. We sang unaccompanied a bit. But even
though I'm a professional musician, and Marie's a darn good singer
herself, I don't think either of us ever felt comfortable in that
room without instruments, trying to sing a cappella with those
guards so nearby, despite the fact that there was a nice, bathroom-y
reverb in the empty room.
Mostly we talked. I have friends in
various parts of the world who I only see once or twice a year at
most, like Marie. But most of the rest of them aren't in prison, and
although we might spend four hours straight talking with each other
and catching up, we'll be doing that in the midst of other activities
– walking, going to a cafe, interacting with other people we run
into, etc. I once again forgot to bring a bit of money with me – I
had left everything in the car, once again forgetting I was allowed
to bring a little money to buy food from the vending machines in the
prison. I was hungry. By now it was mid-day and I had barely eaten
that morning. But the time slipped by despite the circumstances.
They let us have an extra half hour for some reason. Marie was
concerned if I stayed the extra half hour I might be late getting to
my next gig, several hours away in Austin. She's always saying
things like that, trying to make sure nobody's inconvenienced, which
of course is impossible given her situation, but such a kind gesture,
so out of step with her very unkind reality.
We spent four hours talking about
politics, mutual friends, political strategies, other political
prisoners, art, music... In the course of the two years Marie has
been incarcerated she has been moved from a prison in the upper
midwest where she had much more musical and educational
opportunities, to this hellhole in Texas, where she and the rest of
the women on her block spend much of their time on lockdown. The
only slightly bright spot since she was transferred to Carswell was
the MP3 players Marie and most other federal prisoners were
eventually given the opportunity to purchase through the prison
store, whatever it's called. Although most of the artists she'd like
to find among the one million or so songs they make available for
purchase are not in the collection, she's found other songs she likes
well enough, and can successfully escape into the music for a bit,
most days.
They wouldn't let us have a guitar, but
they did allow Marie to spend a little of her money to have a member
of the prison staff come and take photographs of Marie and I posing
beside the plant. I asked if we were allowed to have the photos
taken with the windows behind us, and the barbed wire, but the man
said that wasn't allowed – it could compromise security somehow.
The photos were taken with a cheap disposable camera. A little more
physical contact was allowed while the photos were being taken. I
thought the photographer might have been taking his time, perhaps
knowing Marie and I wanted to be able to have our arms around each
other, as we did for the photo shoot. Then it was time to go.
Marie's eyes were filled with tears, and one of the jail guards
seemed to feel defensive. She said, “I gave you warning that the
visit was ending soon,” as if the fact that she did this should
have made Marie feel more in control of her life, and less apt to
cry, under such outrageous circumstances.
I was escorted through the maze once
again in the other direction, found my way to the car, and slowly
drove through the grounds of FMC Carswell, and back past the little
man in the guard house. Listening to BBC World Service on the
satellite radio while driving through the vast, empty, scruffy
expanses of east Texas landscape, the world felt like an especially
small place. Dominating the news was the scene then unfolding at the
gas plant on the Algeria/Libya border. Among the negotiating terms
the hostage-takers were attempting to put forward included trading
Americans
for
the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and Pakistani
scientist Aafia
Siddiqui
– Ms. Siddiqui being one of Marie's neighbors there in the gulag.
Naturally, if folks are launching an attack against a British-owned
gas plant as a result of a French invasion of a neighboring country
(that being Mali), there must still be an American role in the whole
thing. And if a female “terrorist” kidnapped by the CIA is one
of the people in question, then FMC Carswell is where she would
likely be found.
Austin
was a veritable hotbed of seditious activity the whole 14 hours or so
I was there... A long-time local activist named Juniper and other
folks had organized a series of workshops all afternoon around the
theme of defending the Commons. After my show was over later in the
evening, an unknown number of Tar Sands Blockaders were due to arrive
in town, where the following day Austin-based organizer
extraordinaire Lisa Fithian would be facilitating meetings aimed at
moving the campaign forward. Seeing Lisa always naturally reminds me
of the last time I saw Lisa, and it's usually somewhere interesting.
If memory serves, September 17th,
2011, right near the big statue of the bull near Wall Street was the
last time I saw her. Seeing Lisa involved with a campaign also
always gives me optimistic feelings for the future possibilities of
the campaign in question. It's usually a very good sign.
Before
I left Austin the morning after the show, I visited Lisa and
Juniper's place, and ten or twelve blockaders who were waking up
after spending the night sleeping on various surfaces. Before they
got started with their day's activities, Lisa showed me her
newly-reorganized filing cabinets full of materials related to the
book she was working on writing, on effective strategies for kicking corporate booty.
After
a show sponsored by the active local chapter of the Communist Party,
USA at one of Houston's most venerable venues for independent music,
Dan Electro's Guitar Bar, I flew next to Tampa, Florida, for a
four-day visit to what was once the land of the Seminole Nation.
The
last time I had been in Tampa it was August – incredibly hot, and
even more humid, with the sun baking everything most of the time, and
then occasionally a torrential downpour. And everywhere you went you
were surrounded by thousands of riot cops, with at least one police
helicopter never far from view. The Republican National Convention
was in town, and even as far away as St. Petersburg, it was martial
law.
But
now the weather was beautiful, the riot cops and ten-foot-tall black
steel barricades were gone, and Tampa and most of the rest of Florida
was back to being tourism central. With all those tourists there are
a lot of bars and restaurants, and quite a lot of musicians to go
along with the live music venues among those establishments. One of
them is a wiry young woman with long dreadlocks whose rhythmic guitar
playing inevitably invites Ani DiFranco comparisons, Jun Bustamante.
Jun and I and other musicians she knows in the area are working on a
recording together, remotely, sending tracks to each other across the
country. (It's going brilliantly, and she's livestreaming these recording sessions in case you wanna watch the process in action, so
to speak...!)
Jun
and I took a little road trip to St. Augustine, where we did a show
for the local IWW chapter in this old college town, first settled by
the Spanish back in the 16th
century. We got to town early enough to take in some gorgeous, very
European-looking old neighborhoods, and to eat some very expensive
food – the only kind of food that seems to be available in St.
Augustine if you're eating out. We visited the old slave market,
where some of Jun's African ancestors may have found themselves along
the way.
Another
of those musicians who migrated to the balmy beaches of the peninsula
a long time ago is Jim Glover, who I first met soon after I started
out as a traveling musician. In his adopted home town of Sarasota I
did a feature spot at the weekly jam session that Jim participates in
actively, which rotates from home to home, between four houses in the
area.
Sometime
around 1960 Jim was a college friend of Phil Ochs, and turned him on
to folk music. My next stop, Springfield, Massachusetts, was to
attend the winter gathering of the People's Music Network (PMN), a
group that Phil's sister Sonny helped get off the ground back in the
1970's, along with Charlie King, Pete Seeger, and other luminaries of
the folk scare and beyond.
Twenty-three
years or so after my first PMN gathering, the feelings I had at the
first one are all still there. A profound sense of humility, being
in the presence of a number of the best songwriters you'll find
anywhere. And frequent waves of childhood memories, since basically
anytime I meet an elderly Jewish woman with a Brooklyn accent I think
of my grandmother, and a significant percentage of regular PMN
gathering participants fit the description. (Some of the best
songwriters also fit that description, but my grandmother wasn't one
of them.)
In
Boston, another shooting. This one typical of the killings that
represent the bulk of the tens of thousands of young people killed in
the USA every year – a young person of color, this time a woman,
shot on the streets of Jamaica Plain, a historically working class
neighborhood of Boston where I lived for many years, along with my
sister, Bonnie. The woman killed was a close friend of the stellar
hiphop duo, the Foundation Movement and together with Evan Greer we
did a show together in JP, at the historic community center called
Spontaneous Celebrations. (Radio programmer and audio engineer Chuck Rosina recorded my set.) The Foundation Movement was originally
going to go last, but they wanted to go first so they could get back
to the hospital, where their friend was in a coma, with a very
uncertain future.
The
rappers calling themselves Foundation Movement are brilliant young
men, masters of the form, as comfortable with musical backup as they
are with rapping unaccompanied, just bouncing off each other's
voices. At least one of them is of Puerto Rican descent, and their
analysis of US imperialism is spot-on. Another theme addressed
frequently was gentrification.
A
majority of the audience at the gig my sister organized were white,
as is usually the case at my shows, and probably most of them could
broadly be described as middle-class, or in other words, of the
gentrifying class. Most were not from JP. I know because the hiphop
duo asked folks where they lived, and only a handful said they lived
in JP. Most had driven from another part of town or taken the T to
JP for the show. I don't know if the duo usually performed for
mostly white audiences, but I got the impression that when they did,
they felt compelled to bring up the question of what to do about
gentrification.
The
answer to this question is an important one, one so many people are
facing one way or another. It's confusing, because naturally there
are serious divisions within neighborhoods like JP – after all,
some of the white people moving in are out of touch with what reality
is like for so many others, they're self-interested sometimes –
maybe more than sometimes. Sometimes their own definition of “their
community” doesn't include brown people, and they're basically
scared of brown people. When they have a problem with their
neighbors they call the police, and the divide intensifies and
festers, as the property rates continue to rise.
But
the overriding problem is not these white people moving in. The
overriding problem is so much bigger than that. Many people reading
this know, of course, exactly where I'm going with this, but for
some, perhaps even for some young politically-conscious rappers from
urban America, the elephant in the living room is just too big to see
clearly. Well, the name of that elephant is capitalism.
The “free market.”
The
story of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts illustrates this point well.
Going back to the 1960's JP was a predominantly white working class
neighborhood of Boston. For the most part, well-off people didn't
want to live there. The MBTA (Boston's subway system) didn't go to
JP, so it wasn't convenient to get into the center of town from
there. But it wasn't far enough out of town to be good for the
suburban life that many upwardly-mobile white people wanted, if they
could afford it. So JP was a white working class neighborhood.
Then,
state and federal authorities descended upon JP, and much of the rest
of the country, with plans to destroy the neighborhood by turning it
into a 12-lane highway, an extension of Interstate 95. Throughout
the late 60's and 70's people in JP and throughout Boston and much of
the rest of the country mobilized against these highway-building
plans. They were defending their communities, the communities of
others, and the environment, or all of these things, depending on who
you asked. As this fight went on, the future of JP was very
uncertain. Property values plummeted. Many who could afford to move
to a neighborhood with a less catastrophic future did so. People who
couldn't afford to think this way, but just needed a decent house to
live in regardless of whether it was going to be demolished a few
years later, moved in. This is when JP became a largely Latino
neighborhood, populated largely by folks from the Dominican Republic,
moving to the US to escape the mess created in their country by the
US Marines, among other nefarious forces.
But
then, the people won. In JP and many other places around the
country, the Anti-Highway Movement won. It won, and the community center we were performing in, Spontaneous Celebrations, and the two annual festivals run by people involved with the place, were direct outgrowths of this people's victory. Not only did the authorities
give up on their plans to build a highway, but due to popular
pressure they used the route of the highway extension and put an
extension of the T there instead, with a miles-long, block-wide park
directly above it. They finished the Orange Line extension in 1987,
and since then, property values have been rising. This process is
often so similar you could change a few words and tell the same story
anywhere else in the western world. At first the white people moving
in were decidedly alternative types, people who embraced the idea of
living in a Latino neighborhood. Others didn't care one way or
another as long as the rent was cheap, because they couldn't afford
to live wherever they were living before. Then more white people
came, attracted by the multicultural neighborhood and the houses they
could afford to buy – these were people who mostly couldn't afford
to buy a house in a central neighborhood like Back Bay or a fancy
suburb to the west of Boston like Newtown but they could buy one here
in JP.
Seems
to me when you look into it, none of these elements of society are to
blame for all the people who get screwed in this process. If the
housing market were heavily regulated and controlled by a
democratically-run government, in the interest of the people, rather
than the banks, this would pretty much take care of the whole
problem. Neighborhoods would still change over time, but not so
chaotically and painfully. Tall order, getting rid of capitalism,
but I don't see any way around it.
On
my way driving the rental car from Boston to New York City, I stopped
for lunch with my father, Howard, and his wife, Christina. Driving
on I-84 towards the Connecticut/New York border and the welcoming
little Middle Eastern restaurant there, I drove past Exit 10,
Newtown, an exit I know well. That's where I have often stopped for
the best eggplant sub in the state, at that pizza place right there
off the exit, run by real Europeans. If you're coming from the east,
it's also the exit to take if you're trying to get to Bethel, a few
miles away, where Howard and Christina live, along with six of their
grandchildren.
Then
I passed exit 9 – Newtown/Sandy Hook, it says on the green sign.
On the day of the massacre they locked down the schools for my little
nieces and nephews in Bethel, too. At the Middle Eastern restaurant
Christina tells me it turns out she's related to one of the kids
through one of her brother's extended family, the girl named Olivia,
and she had just recently sang at the girl's funeral, as she has done
at so many other funerals in the area over the years, professional
singer that she is. But usually the deceased are much older than
Olivia.
I
got to Brooklyn and found parking directly in front of my
destination. For the past several visits to New York this has been
happening. A house concert at the now-historic home of a local
firebrand red diaper baby (my favorite kind), and then a benefit for
Bushwick City Farm. I was the youngest person in the room one night,
and the oldest the next. In a neighborhood of Brooklyn where some
fear to tread (I know because they told me so by email, when
explaining why they weren't coming to the show), these folks have
taken over a blighted little plot of land and turned it into a
thriving community garden with lots of local youth participation.
My
friend Brad Will is no longer around, since he was killed in October,
2006, but here in Brooklyn are some of his many other friends, still
working on guerrilla gardening, as Brad was before he died, among his
many other pursuits. In most of the faces in the room, as I mention
Brad, I see a lack of recognition. 2006 was a long time ago. If
you're 23 now, you were 17 then, still living in the suburbs with
your parents, and maybe you never heard of Oaxaca yet. And when
folks like Brad formed Indymedia you were ten, and had not yet heard
of the World Trade Organization either...
Upstate
New York, the Pine Hill Community Center, there is talk of canceling
because of warnings of heavy rain, high winds, and flooding, but the
show goes on. It's a nice crowd, especially considering the flood
warnings, in this community recently devastated by flooding. Soon
after Hurricane Irene destroyed so many homes in the area, I was
doing a few gigs in the region, traveling with my daughter, Leila.
We were staying in a motel and Leila got hungry at 1 am. Since we
weren't at home and I wasn't planning things very well apparently, we
had no food in the room or in the car. So we got dressed and went
out to Denny's a few miles away, the only place open. An elderly
couple sitting nearby us apparently thought Leila and I were victims
of the flood – why else would a man and his 5-year-old daughter be
eating dinner at Denny's at 1 am? They bought our dinner, we found
out from the waitress after they left the restaurant, while we were
still eating.
Along
with flooding, hydraulic fracturing was heavy on the minds of many
there in upstate New York. Some of the folks there in Pine Hill had
recently taken a road trip to Albany to say fracking should stay out
of New York, while Governor Cuomo was giving his speech. (Not
surprisingly, long-time environmental activist Pete Seeger was there
at the protest, too, banjo in hand!) I learned there that the nearby
town of Woodstock had recently not only banned fracking in their town, but made it a felony offense punishable by up to ten years in
prison! Local democracy, the only kind we got...
On
the way towards Bradley International airport north of Hartford, I
spent the night at my mom's place. The drive there through upstate
New York and the northwestern corner of Connecticut was very foggy,
and at times the rain came down in buckets. Temperatures were all
over the place – only days before it was well below freezing, and
suddenly it was in the 60's and raining. At 5 am I awoke, because of
an alarming new sound coming from outside the window. The wind was
no longer whipping or whistling, it was humming. A low, vibrating
hum, like a train approaching. Thinking of the train reminded me of
what so many people have said about what it sounds like when a
tornado is approaching. But presumably a tornado never formed in
Connecticut that night, or I would have heard about it. One did come
down that night in Georgia, though.
I
got up early to go catch my flight, not enough sleep. The winds had
knocked over a dead tree, directly up hill from the rental car. It
fell sideways, rather than down the hill, thus sparing my car, and
knocking over part of a wood pile instead.
At
the airport the TV screens perpetually droning CNN propaganda were
all about the man in Alabama who shot a bus driver and took a
5-year-old boy hostage. I switched flights in Chicago, and all the
local papers were blaring headlines about the girl who had just been
shot down in the street blocks from where Obama used to live. A
notable event for national news only because this teenage girl had
just recently been a performer at an inaugural event with the
president.
Back
home in Portland, driving past the homeless families living under
every bridge, I got a call from Bob at the community radio station in
Moab, Utah where I'll be heading in a week. Much of the word from
him and others out in Utah are also about gas and oil drilling, and
Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year sentence for participating in a
land auction to try to stop this insanity, is an iconic figure there,
deservedly so. Looking forward to meeting his friends and supporters
there next week. But for now, time to make breakfast.
.JPG)
