Note: This is just a blow-by-blow first-person of what happened last weekend. It has simmered in my posted-but-not-published queue for a week, and I have missed out on writing any number of other things as a result. I've never felt compelled to use the John McPhee tactic of rearranging your notecards visually with this blog before, and I did it this time; this has to stop, I won't be dogged by these thoughts any more. There was more thoughtful stuff I had to say, but in the end I believe I will turn that into a paying article, because it feels more like Art than usual, and it is taking too long to write. So here this is.
One more note, just because I realize there will be people out there who don't know why the hell an American citizen would be getting tear-gassed in Canada: We were there to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas. If you don't know what it is, I can tell you this: Bush supports it, and this is what it does:
Step 1: Your government (if you live somewhere between Canada and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) makes a law protecting its environment from pollution or its workers from exploitation.
Step 2: FTAA goes into effect, claiming to "protect the rights of stockholders."
Step 3: Company X decides to set up shop in your country.
Step 4: Company X says, "Hey, I want to dump my fifty billion tons of excess DDT in your water supply! The law that your democratically elected lawmakers have made to protect your children is infringing on my stockholders' rights to make more money!"
Step 5: Company X sues your government's a$s off, running up huge expenses and costing taxpayers millions. (It has already happened under NAFTA in Mexico and California.)
Any questions? (If you are my Uncle Bob, you are not permitted to ask belittling questions that you really should know better about, seeing as even most intelligent free-market capitalists admit this system has its abuses.) I hope to see all you democracy-lovin' citizens in the streets with us next time.
Stephan and I slipped across the border in perfectly legal fashion at 5:00 a.m. (Our trick? We said we were going to Montreal, not Quebec City. They didn't bat an eye.) We were lucky enough to catch one of a dozen protest-bound schoolbuses from Concordia University in Montreal, and arrived at the Universite Laval in Quebec City shortly before noon. We were told we could leave our bags in the gym, so we headed there. The Olympic-sized indoor stadium was carpeted from wall to wall with sleeping bags and luggage, an indicator of the size of the crowds to come.
In the company of a group of Mexicans looking for the anarchist bloc, we joined the pacifist student march to the main meeting place. Stephan and I had a long conversation with one of the Mexicans, a middle-aged woman, cobbling sentences together in French, Spanish, and English. Like the Canadian students around us, who carried signs reading "Public education is NOT for sale!" she was greatly concerned that free public education should not be privatized.
The march of students chanted "SO-SO-SO, SOLIDARITE-EH!" Residents came out onto their balconies or peered out from behind first-floor curtains. Some of them had cameras, like us. Some looked apprehensive; some gave us looks of contempt. "DANS-LA-RUE! A-VEC-NOUS!" called a chorus of female voices behind me.
Eventually the road opened up on a park. Our march of thousands was joined by thousands and thousands more, pouring in from every corner. Seeing this evoked a surge of joy I can't compare to anything else. I think of seeing your regiment emerge safely from the woods at the news of a ceasefire -- of seeing a running herd of buffalo and realizing they weren't all wiped out -- no metaphor really fits. Final estimates of the number of people in Quebec City that day were in the tens of thousands -- between thirty and sixty -- and I think they were all there, coming across the lawn, beating on buckets and carrying signs and waving red flags. There was even a bagpiper.
There were a few brief speeches made at the park, again in three languages. Stephan and I decided we wanted to go elsewhere, possibly to find the IMC, so we took off, joining an offshoot of the continuing march.
When you are at a protest, the way to find the action is to look overhead and head for the location of the nearest hovering helicopter. Our march was heading towards a helicopter. Then some organizers, kids with orange armbands, started nervously waving us around a corner... and we split off from a contingent carrying red and black flags, which was ignoring the organizers... and my stomach started feeling heavy. I looked down the street we had just been turned away from. A white geyser of tear gas erupted at its end.
That was the first indication I saw that the plan to have "red, yellow, and green" zones to distinguish intensity of action was falling apart. It was also the first volley in the second day of the poisoning of Quebec. Stephan and I pulled up our damp bandannas, which didn't help. I cursed myself for not grabbing packets of vinegar at a fast food joint. (How lucky to have a gas war in a country where one of its antidotes is the preferred condiment for french fries.)
Either the terminology has always been different, or there was enough gas in Quebec that it changed: people spoke not of breathing gas, but eating it. I can't describe what it's like. I think in cowardice I am trying to forget it. It smells like burning vinyl. It tingles in your mouth and nose evenly, too evenly and drily to be a hot pepper. Kind of like a bad sunburn in your mouth, but one so perfect it seems calculated to torture you. Your eyes begin watering; then you really do start to cry. Up to that level, being gassed is unpleasant but, in retrospect, unremarkable -- like a running in Los Angeles on a smoggy day. I didn't get any further than that. I was about ready to hyperventilate, and all I could think of was retreating to the shelter of the IMC.
(I am reminded of the time I was stung by a ray in Mexico. I had been yelping and cringing in fear as we walked through the infested waters, spearing the little parasites to feed them to sea turtles. I didn't really want to do it at all. Given the choice, I would rather not put myself in the way of physical harm. I lifted my feet too high, and stepped on one, which stung me. I ran from the water in terrified surprise. Nobody knew I'd been stung for a few minutes, because I'd been so noisy about my squeamishness.)
Stephan and I fell in with a pair of women who were also looking to hide, and headed away from the heaviest gas. One of them had a lemon, a stand-in for vinegar. I dripped it on my bandanna. Instantly the world was clear and sweet. My throat stopped itching. I started praying, laughing, swearing I would wear a lemon talisman around my neck for the rest of my life. Later I bought my own lemon, and kept it in my pocket until there was nothing left but a tapped-out peel drooling down my leg.
We ducked into the IMC, narrowly avoiding a cloud of gas floating down the hill towards us. As we entered the IMC was in the process of closing down a street-level welcoming center which was poorly ventilated and was suffused with gas. We were not the only building with this problem. Le Soleil, the Quebecois newspaper, reported the next day that the Board of Health had closed down a hotel restaurant for the same reason, and that a senior citizens' home had been similarly threatened.
The Quebec IMC, known by the Francophone acronym CMAQ (pronounced Smack), had a setup which proved quite useful. The main space, a cavernous black sound stage, was deep in a warren of local media outlets -- Radio Basseville, Fisheye, Medea, some artists' lofts, video producers. From one approach it was hard to find, useful for confusing secret police; from the other, it was moated by a lobby where protesters came in to detox in the bathroom or crash in an upstairs café. On the second floor, there was an FM radio station from which we did sporadic broadcasts.
I got restless staying in the IMC. The dispatcher didn't give me a good opportunity to plug in and help, and there was more action in the streets than I'd ever seen. So Steph and I headed out again.
The sixty thousand people from the morning march had not dispersed; they did not go to earth. Crowds of threes or dozens loitered in the middle of the roads and by the walls, regrouping before returning to the bang of the gas guns in the middle of the clouds. People visited stores to buy face protection or vinegar, or just to get out of the gas. Bars were crammed with people scanning the television news. Locals offered their hoses to those who had succumbed to the lacrymo.
This time I had secured a pair of goggles for myself, so we ventured up to the intersection of St. Jean and St. Genevieve. I had my camera with me, out of guilt. I felt bad that there was so much going on, and I wasn't going to come back with images of any of it. (You know what? I think I was trophy hunting.)
The line of skirmish was haunted by a different kind of drums -- military-sounding drums, not polyrhythmic African ones. I found myself among the Western Massachussetts Drum and Bugle Corps, in gas masks and denim with an American flag logo on their backs. Their music was changing the mood; it was sober, elegiac, not something that made you want to dance in front of the cops. Some of them had plastic buckets; one or two had snares. Under the mask I saw someone I knew, another Hampshire student; later I found out an IMC compadre was under another mask. It was hard to tell who was who.
It was hard to tell what was going on generally; my goggles were fogging. I heard explosions. gagged on the gas and ran. "SO-SO-SO!" chanted the crowd. People I dodged called, Take it easy. I found Stephan. You want the camera? I asked. He hedged. I threw it at him. I ran back to the IMC, emerging again only to hang out at the periphery, hunting for a store that was rumored to still have gas masks. (It had, like every other store, sold out. Pharmacists had also sold out of swimming goggles.)
Sometime that evening -- I had by that point completely lost track of time -- I re-entered the press room to the sound of a baby squalling. Half a dozen IMC volunteers were standing around with newspapers, fanning a woman holding an infant. The mother and child had apparently been tear gassed. The baby's cries were beyond anguish; it sobbed over and over on the same harrowed note. Its face was open, too stunned to wrinkle, gelid with tears.
A huge man with a ponytail was frantically giving the mother advice. Let's take off the suit, he said, and they stripped the baby of its fleece jumper, down to its bare skin. Can I still breastfeed? the mother asked. Yes, the man said, the antibodies should do him good. (I don't know if this was accurate advice. He may have been clinging to the best things he could think of.)
The crowd parted, and the mother and child were escorted upstairs. The ponytailed medic dropped to his knees, crying in the arms of another man.
I snuck past to get out of the press room. Directly outside the press room was a lobby; the lobby was separated from the press room as it was from the outdoors by two sets of doors, with a little "airlock" in between. The gas had gotten bad enough that teams had been stationed at each airlock to let people in and out, so that gas would not be let in to the unventilated central space. As a result, the press room had gotten quite stuffy. We ached for clear air. By this point there was no question of going outside, though. The gas engulfed the neighborhood, and police were on all sides of the building. Stephan had volunteered to work the airlock to the outside, which was crowded with people rubbing their eyes and removing gassed clothing. I was lonely and wanted to talk to him, but I couldn't get through. I wrote messages on a pad and showed them to him through the glass.
Medics had set up camp in the lobby. The medical center had been shut down by armed police, it was said, sometime that night. Clusters of armbanded volunteers huddled around people on the floor. One man was on his stomach. There was a red waffle mark the size of a hockey puck on his back. It appeared he had been hit by one kind of rubber bullet. Others were also in use; someone told me they had seen a protester open a bag with a startlingly large collection of bullets and gas canisters which he had collected on the street. I got to see one an IMC volunteer came in and held up. It was the size and shape of a nail polish bottle. It wasn't like an eraser, as I always expected from the term "rubber bullet." It was quite hard, more plastic than rubber.
Returning to the inner sanctum, I headed upstairs to the radio station. The mother I had seen earlier was in the hall. In her arms, the baby was completely naked, smiling broadly, grabbing for the bottle of water she held. The mother told me that the baby hadn't been crying because of the gas, but because he was hot. I didn't know whether to believe her. It could have been true, or she might have been feeling like a bad mother for having her baby out late and in a war zone.
Five flights up CMAQ had some quiet space in the artists' lofts, which the communications team had co-opted. This space served as an excellent crow's nest, and they were able to relay messages about skirmishes they could see up by the steel fence to a dispatcher downstairs.
The building was also blessed with a six-story stairwell with bay windows. I staked out one of the three landings with a handful of other videographers. From there, we could see Côte d'Abraham at street level, where there was a frightening charge of cops at about two a.m.; the edge of the cliff our building sat on, which protesters swarmed up, scavenging rocks to throw and things to burn; the fence in the distance, now well guarded by a line of storm troopers who kept arriving in vans and trotting out new weapons, including a water cannon; and a freeway overpass in the distance, under which a bonfire taller than a building was attended by a nonviolent, energetic dance party. Every now and again a wave of gas would roll off the top of the bridge. This panorama was periodically obscured and revealed by veils of smoke and gas.
When the cops charged the crowd of protesters a final time and cleared out down Côte d'Abraham, I decided to sleep. (That's a rare move for me at the IMC, an indicator of how difficult CMAQ had made it to find something to do.) The compound was particularly short on sleeping space; what space there was in the lofts upstairs had been hogged by despairingly drunk CMAQ organizers. No great loss; what I really wanted was to be right where I would be awoken promptly in the event of a raid. I stretched out on the floor of an underused tech crew space, and fell soundly asleep. I was awoken by a stranger offering me a sleeping bag. I took it, and he stretched out on his pad nearby. When I woke at nine thirty, he was not there. A kid who had lent me his goggles the previous day was sacked out there instead, curly blond hair framing a face still puffy from forced tears.
I ventured into the streets. The gas had been dampened by an overnight fog; you could still smell it, but it didn't hurt as bad. The streets were a mess, charred places still smoking. Here and there you'd find broken goggles or empty vinegar jugs. Up by the fence, there was a huge pile of abandoned brassieres. Apparently there had been a large feminist demonstration there. Groups of protesters moved through the alleys, putting garbage in bags. Residents appeared with brooms. A metal ring caught my eye. It was attached to a pin -- a grenade pin, I think it was. I pocketed it to show to my students.
Now I got to see the neighborhood that had been closed by the threat of gas the day before. Many of the stores along the fence had pre-emptively boarded-up windows, but they bore signs which read "Welcome to the neighborhood of St. Jean Baptiste. We have a long tradition of resistance. We're with you. Have a good demonstration!" Some boarded windows had been decorated, by employees and by protesters. A bookstore had plastered its boards with copies of covers of progressive books, with word balloons describing what the book was about in French.
We left at noon, having spent almost exactly 24 hours in the city. Returning to the Université Laval, we ate the clean air with gratitude.
Posted by Gus at April 23, 2001 12:08 PM