Until a few short weeks ago, Haiti was a country rarely mentioned in the international press, except in annual rankings of the world’s economies, where it ineluctably squirmed at the bottom. Now it’s a story that writes itself; a bonanza to foreign correspondents and non-governmental organizations everywhere.
In the face of the disaster there, the typical departure points for a personal essay seem oddly trivial. The scale of the destruction, the pull of the human tragedy, and the naked fact that the world’s attention is a Johnny-come-lately to the morbid party in Port-au-Prince halt conventional approaches to journalism. Of course, the unique position of Haiti is that nature’s wrath has made an already dire humanitarian situation even worse, thus practically writing the script for the stream of news coverage. But it has also made Haiti, a place many reporters were visiting for the first time after the earthquake, a perfect storm of high-pitched clichés about people living on $1 a day and the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Since my first experience of Haiti, I’ve wanted to avoid writing about the clichés.
I visited this ramshackle one-third of an island for the first time in the summer of 2005. I was a graduate student at New York University, and when I first moved to New York, my first hosts in the city were Haitian. I decided to return the favor by writing about the lives Haitian immigrants face when they immigrate to America. As I began talking to journalists, preachers, nurses, and street vendors who shared stories about their previous lives on the island, I wondered why, in the face of such Third World-realities that existed in Haiti—a mere 700 miles from the United States—the country was contractually spurned by cable networks and newspapers. I flew into Port-au-Prince with the vague ambition to find an explanation.
Bougainvillea drape over countless fences, walls, and gardens in Haiti.
Mischievous, Twisting Beauty
Even before the earthquake pulverized the already crumbling city and crushed the living breath out of its people, and long before the cameras swooped in on the scene, the sporadic news out of Haiti was reliably grim. Reflecting the well-worn, though true, dictum that Haiti is a failed state, the stories again seemed to write themselves: dysfunctional government, urban blight, environmental degradation, unrivaled rates of illiteracy, hunger, violence, disease. The tender but more shielded beauty of the place seemed to escape notice—and even when it did impress itself, the news rarely got out.
The immediate, most vivid image of Haiti’s beauty to me is the clusters of bougainvillea wrapping the facades and fences of houses like some kind of jubilant pink ivy. From their perches on stone walls, their outrageously bright flowers seem to wink at visitors and whisper that looks are deceiving. That beneath all the misery and sadness, there’s actually a tradition of pride, humor, and a lust for life that puzzles and enchants.
It is not easy to put a finger on what exactly makes Haiti a country that anyone would want to visit, return to, or let alone live in. But if you ask the people who do live there, it is a very special place. Haitians often refer to their homeland as Ayiti cherie—dear Haiti—as if it were an abandoned child left in their care by abusive parents. The dictators, demagogues, and military despots that have governed it in bad faith for decades invite the easy allegory. Still, that a people should speak so fondly of a place that, to an outsider’s eye, gives back so little lends new meaning to the phrase “love of the land.”
A boy looks at passersby near his makeshift home in Port-au-Prince, before the earthquake.
In the Haiti I saw, cynicism is rare, but a mischievous sense of self-deprecating irony is plentiful. It is born out of a tradition of hardship that has taught people to pat misery on the back and shake its hand for being a trustworthy companion. Ask a Haitian person how they’re doing, and you’re likely to hear a double entendre: “N’ap boule”—everything’s good—which literally means “we’re burning,” presumably because of the tropical climate there, but also due to an existence seared by an unceasing struggle for survival.
What I discovered during that summer in Haiti and when I went back a few months later—beyond the disheartening realities of life and the people’s openhearted acceptance of them—was something I was completely unprepared for. In spite of the vast differences between the geopolitical, ethnic, temporal, and spiritual coordinates of this tiny Caribbean country and those of my only slightly larger European homeland, incredibly—almost illicitly—I felt that I’d come home.
Parallel Lives
In the uncomfortable period of Bulgaria’s transition from socialism to democracy in the ’90s, many of us inhabited the same survivalist reality Haitians have faced for years: young men half-worked, half-loitered, selling contraband car radios and cell phone chargers out of makeshift stores; grandmothers bought inexpensive Maggi chicken bouillon cubes to season a pot of soup; jitney drivers fastened the rickety doors of their vehicles with bits of linen rope while standing passengers doubled over to avoid bumping heads into the low ceiling. I am just old enough to remember the darker era of breadlines and coupons, which was also the time of two hours on, two hours off for electricity, home-brewed alcohol, and special shipments of bananas and oranges (only for New Year’s).
These experiences were not only humbling but also laughable, and thus the inconveniences, insufficiencies, and improvisations of our daily lives gave us a whole new language: the vernacular of making do and doing without, a treasure trove of practical jokes that the whole country would share. Bulgaria’s first post-socialist late-night talk show host, Slavi Trifonov, built his early career partly on making people find humor in scrimping, at once lampooning and lauding their learned instincts to reuse the aluminum lids from jars of homemade preserve season after season or spend a day “at the beach” under the laundry lines on a sunny balcony.
Street art of startling high-precision brush strokes—as if poised to deliver a view of life unmuddled by the grind of getting by—adorns many a roadside painter’s corner.
In Haiti, as in Bulgaria, people alter, adjust, and adapt. In Cap Haitien, on the northern coast, the upkeep of horses is costly, so tour guides use petite donkeys to lead tourists up a winding dirt road to the top of the Citadelle Laferrière, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and a symbol of the country’s erstwhile independence. In Port-au-Prince, people without running water but who can afford to get it delivered store it in cisterns in their yards, where the sun warms it just enough for a nightly shower. And on the half-hour stifling flight between these two cities, the pilots of the low-flying charter planes compensate for the lack of air conditioning by opening the cockpit windows and cracking jokes with their passengers.
The long traditions of self-reliance in the former French colony and that of stern, necessary resourcefulness in the former socialist republic are both legacies of debased, nepotistic, tyrannical, and sometimes barbaric governance. But the nations forced to make resilience and inventiveness part of their collective characters could not be any more different, culturally as well as organizationally. Clearly Bulgaria’s economic and political transition cannot compare with Haiti’s unbroken agony. And yet, the two countries seem to travel on strangely parallel paths.
Courage, the thread that holds together the fabric of life in Haiti.
To embark on the path to political and economic liberation after decades of Cold War psycho-tyranny, Bulgaria needed an event no less cataclysmic than the fall of the Berlin Wall. More than 20 years later, it is still bumping along, unsteadily but determinedly, on the road to honest and progressive governance. Like a faint transcultural echo, the shattering of the ground in Haiti too may have begun extricating it from the morass of economic calamity and international obscurity. And so, to begin clearing its past of the wounds of brutish dictatorial regimes that robbed its coffers and set in motion a wheel of unending misery, Haiti just may have needed the clean slate afforded by the earthquake—however perverse that may sound—to start rebuilding its own ailing organism, brick by brick, dream by dream. Ironically, this extravagantly insensitive proposal is one of the oft-repeated clichés about Haiti after the earthquake, but when spoken in earnest and not with the glib ease of punditry, it is a cliché I hope will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I prepared as I would for any other overnight at a cemetery in the middle of January—by pulling on three layers of clothing and making sure I had all the essentials. The essentials for this stakeout were a camera, a notepad, pencil, a hot cup of tea, and Edgar Allan Poe.
With his complete works secure as an application in my iPhone, I pulled on my black knit hat and heard a tapping. I spun around to find my husband giving me the pressing nod that all husbands give to their wives as a nonverbal cue to hurry up. I looked at the time and panicked. It was 11:36 p.m., and time to go.
The hotel clerk called us a taxi, but after waiting twelve minutes we took off sprinting through the streets of downtown Baltimore. We had flown in from Chicago just for this night and wanted to make it to our destination before midnight.
Cynthia Pelayo writes a note to Edgar Allan Poe before leaving her own tribute at his grave.
As we turned down Fayette Street, it was no surprise that a crowd of about 50 people had formed outside the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in front of both sets of tall, black gates. We caught our breaths and checked the time. We had made it. In a few minutes, this crowd of strangers, who had traveled from all over the United States, would mark Poe’s 201st birthday.
Some people greeted us with smiles or nods, others with the question on all our minds: “Do you think we’ll see him?”
“Him” being the Poe Toaster, the mysterious black-clad figure who has appeared at Poe’s grave every year for the past sixty-one years. First documented in 1949, the Poe Toaster raises a toast of cognac and leaves behind three long-stemmed red roses at the author’s grave. One rose is presumably for Poe, the second for his wife, Virginia Poe, and the third for his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. To date, the Poe Toaster’s identity has remained secret, making him—or her—one of America’s true mysteries.
Poe himself loved a good mystery. He is credited with writing the first detective story, starring his curious investigator C. Auguste Dupin. Yet even a master detective like Dupin couldn’t unravel the circumstances surrounding the cause of Poe’s death, which remain unsolved to this day. Speculations have come and gone as to how he wound up delirious in a Baltimore gutter, only to later die. He was then buried to no fanfare in an unmarked grave in a family plot at the rear of the cemetery. Eventually he was moved to the other side of the cemetery to rest beside his wife and mother-in-law beneath a white monument engraved with his image.
A headstone engraved with a raven and an epitaph that reads “Quoth the Raven. ‘Nevermore’” marks his original burial spot. And it is here that the Toaster prefers to leave a tribute, and near which I stationed myself for the night.
With my gloved hands gripping the black bars and my face pressed close to the cold metal, I refrained from participating in any graveyard chatter. I didn’t want to risk missing the Toaster.
Poe had reached out to me with “Annabel Lee” when I was an angst-ridden preteen convinced that no one understood my sorrow. Later, “The Raven,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” would inspire me to become a mystery writer.
I came here this evening to thank him, my guide and my mentor.
At 12:20 a.m. a girl screamed, “I see someone!” She pointed out over the cemetery, her face tinged with awe and fear. I looked in the direction of her finger and saw a silhouette. The shadow of a man crept across the tombstones and vaults and then disappeared. Then suddenly, shouts erupted as we saw the flip of a man’s cape. I screamed for my husband, who had gone off to take pictures. He rushed to my side and shook my arm in congratulations. “You saw him, honey!”
I was completely thrilled. We waited for Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House and Museum, to appear at the gate to ceremoniously present the three roses and bottle of cognac as proof. When he did walk out at 12:43 a.m., he only waved before returning to the church where he kept watch on the burial grounds. My heart sank. Whatever we saw, it wasn’t the Poe Toaster.
The celebrations resumed, because it was, after all, a birthday party, with a group reading of “The Raven.”
After a few hours the group dwindled to around 30 diehards. Paranoia set in as our eyes played tricks on us. At one point a gentlemen shouted, “I believe the Poe Toaster is one among us!”
He even pointed at me, perhaps because I had been mostly quiet.
There has never been any definitive evidence left by the Toaster to reveal his or her identity. All we know is that the original Poe Toaster left a note in 1993 stating that the “torch” had been passed. Later, another note indicated that the role was passed on to a son after the older Toaster died.
As the group grew impatient, we decided to sing “Happy Birthday” to Poe to help lure the Toaster out. Our chorus rang through the moss-covered graves, and the final note brought a charge of electricity. A young man cracked open the Poe book and announced he was going to read his favorite Poe poem, “A Dream Within a Dream,” written in 1849, the year of Poe’s death. The poem was fitting for such a moment; right then we all could easily have said, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
As it neared 5 a.m., I felt a growing pang of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. The latest that the Poe Toaster had ever left the tribute was at 5:30 a.m. in 1990. Was he—or she—running late? Was it even possible that the Poe Toaster would run late for such an important event? The idea of a no-show had never seemed possible to me.
Cynthia Pelayo’s tribute of three red roses and a bottle of cognac is left at Poe’s grave.
At 5:35 a.m., Jerome and his fellow watchers approached the gate slowly, their faces solemn.
“He didn’t show,” Jerome announced.
“What happened?” I asked.
As Jerome padlocked the gates, he shrugged and smiled again, his grey mustache moving with his words. “I don’t know. The guy could have the flu.”
They left, and before long, we decided to call it a night. At Poe’s grave I decided to read my favorite poem, “The Bells,” which was published posthumously. Reading as loudly and clearly as I could, I hoped that wherever the Toaster was, he would hear and finally pay his tribute.
“Oh the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells.”
In one final show of desperation, I pressed my face to the gate and shouted, “Please Poe Toaster! I promise I will not reveal your identity if you come out now.”
There was silence.
Shakily, I said, “You have to come. It’s his birthday.”
Tears flowed down my cheeks, and I couldn’t believe that for the first time in his history the Toaster failed to arrive. I thought of Poe’s death and how he was not initially praised for his writing but was mocked as an alcoholic and buried without any salute. I did not want Poe to think we, like the Toaster, had forgotten.
Later that morning, after feeling as if I’d been stood up for the prom, I realized I needed to stop at a liquor store and a flower shop.
With three red roses in hand and a bottle of cognac, my husband and I returned to Poe’s grave, anticipating it’d be already covered by people from all over the world. But there was nothing.
I wrote a note, opened the cognac, and took a long swig before pouring some over the moist dirt. Then I set the roses and note on the tombstone. I had come here to witness the Poe Toaster, and in a Poe-like plot twist, became one.
The massacres of 386 Palestinians in two Gaza Strip towns—Rafah and Khan Younis—by Israeli soldiers in 1956 have not left much of an imprint on history. At the time, the media was preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, and as a character in Joe Sacco’s new graphic novel Footnotes in Gaza laments, Gaza is a place “where the ink never dries” before the next calamity happens. Footnotes is Sacco’s impassioned attempt to set the historical record straight, to make the massacres more than a footnote.
“History can do without its footnotes,” he says. “Footnotes are inessential at best; at worst they trip up the greater narrative.”
Sacco himself only learned of the massacres from a brief mention in The Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky’s indictment of America’s pro-Israeli policies that was published in 1983. In 2003, he returned to Gaza—where he had previously traveled on assignment for Harper’s during the second intifada—to investigate the killings. Footnotes draws from his interviews with witnesses and survivors, examinations of Israeli archives, news stories, and United Nations photos.
Like Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Ed Piskor (Macedonia), Sacco is a master of what could best be described as “graphic journalism,” his two previous books—the award-winning Palestine and Safe Area Goražde—also using the form. In Footnotes, he alternates images of Gaza in the 1950s with images from present-day Gaza. One drawing, for example, shows neat rows of houses that made up a refugee camp in 1956; that is contrasted with an image of the same camp today, rocks holding down shabbily built roofs, a sea of satellite dishes on top of them. Similarly, when Sacco’s Gaza subjects tell their stories, images of them in the 1950s are juxtaposed with images of them now, their faces showing the toll of a hard life.
Sacco’s method has a tremendously compelling quality, in that his juxtaposing technique evokes a sense of what might have been, as readers grapple with the subjectivity of each storyteller’s memory. In one scene, Gazans debate over when exactly a family member died and was buried. Their memories are eroded from the passage of time—and from pain. The technique also evokes a sense of continuity, weaving together the past and present, and demonstrating the inexhaustible nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As if to demonstrate just how intertwined the past and present are in Palestine, Sacco touches on the death of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who was run over by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer while she protested the demolition of a house in Rafah in 2003. On the same day that Corrie was killed, Ahmed El-Najjar, a Rafah resident, was shot by Israeli forces in the head, chest, and leg, reportedly while standing in his own doorway. As Corrie’s body lies in the morgue, surrounded by the flashes of photojournalists’ cameras, El-Najjar is left alone by the media, tended to by only his family. “The killing of a Palestinian in Gaza is a routine occurrence,” Sacco observes. “His loss will cause not a ripple outside of his immediate circle of family, friends, and neighbors.” In one chilling image on one page, Sacco expresses the book’s message: death and destruction are so commonplace in Gaza that the details become simply footnotes, existing only in the memories of Gaza’s residents.
If one aspect of Sacco’s work must be criticized, it might be his apparent inability to leave anything out. Footnotes in Gaza is 432 pages thick (compared to Palestine, which comes in at only 288 much narrower pages) and, at times, feels cluttered. Fortunately, it’s split into sections and can easily be read piecemeal once the reader passes the introduction.
Footnotes does not provide a broad history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor does it answer any of its big questions. And though it is not a sequel to Palestine, those without much knowledge of the intricacies of Israel’s and Palestine’s histories would do well to go back and read Palestine first. But Footnotes provides an intimate look into the lives of ordinary Palestinians whose memories of 50 years of conflict are permanently ingrained into their outlook on life. It is one man’s take on the reality of Gaza, brought to vivid life by his unique brand of comic art.
It is somehow fitting that the new year begins in the dead of winter. The silence of the snowy landscape, the frozen lakes and the darkness all seem to reinforce a single depressing message: the world is dead. Give up. There is nothing more to hope for. For the last week, overnight lows here along the north shore of Lake Superior have reached -25°F, which, for those who use a temperature scale that makes sense, is awfully, miserably cold. Still, with the dawning of a new year, I am reminded that the world is not dead, that spring will come again and that life is a circle, endlessly repeating.
It is in the tradition of this time of year to take stock of what has come to pass in the previous year, and we at In The Fray do not feel the urge to stray from that tradition. It is with this in mind that we look back over the previous year and select some of our favorite pieces. We were blessed with a year of wonderful submissions, but (in no particular order) Sentenced by Buffy Charlet, Albion, New York by Andrew Marantz, and Colette Coleman’s From the Inner City to Indonesia all stood out, as did One Soldier, Many Stories by Sarah Seltzer, Lean Over: There Is Something I Must Tell You by Lynn Strongin, and Into the Light by Niclas Martin Rantala.
Thank you to all of our contributors over the past year, thank you to our readers, and thank you to those of you who donated your time and/or your money to help keep In The Fray magazine publishing. As a reader- and contributor-supported website, it is the talented and generous people who are involved in this site that allow us to keep publishing. Please consider donating to help support In The Fray in 2010.
Thanks again and Happy New Year!
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
By Buffy Charlet Photos by Buffy Charlet and Jenn Pflaumer
We knew only one thing: We needed to pack sleeping bags and rubber gloves. Jenn, my friend and farm coworker, and I were gearing up for our trip to Humboldt County.
It was the old “friend of a friend who knows a guy” scenario. Yes, that’s how we committed to working on a medical marijuana farm. We didn’t know specifically where we were going, what the work entailed, who we were going to be working for, where we would stay, or even how long we would be there. But somehow, from our comfortable couches in Los Angeles, the complete omission of specifics only heightened our anticipation of the adventure. All Jenn and I needed to hear was “$20 per hour cash” and “marijuana farm.” We were in.
Fresh-cut and de-leafed marijuana branches ready to go up to the trim tent. Jenn Pflaumer
We had been instructed by the Bossman to wait in a small town about 40 minutes away from our destination. He would meet us nearby and then escort us to the farm because there was “no way” we’d find it on our own. He was right.
During our hour or so of waiting for him, we were entertained by the sight of packs of dirty hippies. I say the term “dirty hippies” lovingly, as I spent the first seven years of my life in a hippie commune. But apparently in order to qualify as a dirty hippie in Humboldt, you must A) have a dog with a hemp rope tied around its neck, B) be barefoot, C) smell like BO, turmeric, and flightiness, D) ask for money, and E) style your hair with nail clippers and mud. A tension exists in Humboldt County’s new social strata, as the locals are repulsed by this ganja-reeking crowd but attracted by the money they spend.
Finally, we got the call from the Bossman. It was time to go to the farm.
We were instructed to meet him by the side of the highway, which seemed rather gangsta. We were excited and nervous, but mostly excited.
And then we saw him waiting for us, our Bossman — an energetic, bandana-wearing Southern boy with a slight Eau de Hippie.
How it all began
I’ve long had a fascination with marijuana. When I’m numb from hearing about health care, unemployment, foreclosures, and H1N1, I turn to the debate over legalizing medicinal marijuana for stimulation. The agri-counter-culture that is budding in California is at the very least interesting.
For those in an ethical struggle over the value of legalizing pot for medicinal purposes, try a more pragmatic angle: the United States would experience staggering economic benefits from its legalization. According to a National Public Radio report, each Southern California pharmacy contributes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in state tax revenue. Then there’s the geopolitical bonus: Stateside-grown marijuana directly threatens the dominance of Mexican drug cartels.
In fact, according to CBS, “The shifting economics of the marijuana trade have broad implications for Mexico’s war against the drug cartels, suggesting that market forces, as much as law enforcement, can extract a heavy price from criminal organizations that have used the spectacular profits generated by pot sales to fuel the violence and corruption that plague the Mexican state.” Yeah, duh. Of course “market forces” can take a bite outta crime. Think Al Capone and the repeal of Prohibition.
And then there’s the social justice angle. Users — perhaps you and I — will no longer have to risk buying weed from the sketchy kid down the block. Instead, we can take our cash and our self-respect and purchase our sack from the local, taxed, state-regulated pharmacy. I’m thinking you’d rather go to a pharmacy instead of waiting for “Tyler” to text you back to let you know the “Red Head” has arrived. Do we really think that by keeping marijuana illegal it’s going to go away and that bunnies and unicorns will run free?
Grape ape. Buffy Charlet
I was once in a grow house up in Sonoma County, but it was literally that — a regular suburban house with its bedrooms converted into marijuana grow rooms. Each room had 30 6-foot-tall plants and an exceptional amount of lighting and fans. It was very impressive, very well contained, and definitely NOT “green” (as in carbon-neutral).
Because medicinal marijuana in California is an emerging industry, the laws are murky. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s website, “In California there is no state regulation or standard of the cultivation and/or distribution of medical marijuana. California leaves the establishment of any guidelines to local jurisdictions, which can widely vary.”
The laws are different in every county and every city. In Los Angeles County, each card-holding patient or “caregiver” (someone who grows marijuana for patients) can grow fewer than 10 plants. In Sonoma County, the maximum jumps to 30 plants. And in Humboldt County, a caregiver can grow up to 99 plants! Seems like encouragement to move from houseplants to farming. How much bud a caregiver or patient can carry at any one time also greatly varies per county. So as long as you’re following the specifications of your city and county for growing, you have nothing to worry about as far as the state’s law is concerned.
The thing you do have to worry about is getting robbed. It’s not the law that is the danger, but rather gun-slinging criminals. People associate growing marijuana with mountains of cash, which is a fairly accurate assumption. Grow houses are risky, as the smell alone, wafting from the house, is enough to give someone a clue. The blacked-out windows and the air-conditioning turned on full blast in January are additional clues. So if you’re considering starting your own grow house, do yourself a solid and get an off-site safe.
Anypuffpuff, speaking on the phone about the details of our trip wasn’t smart. Marijuana, medicinal or not, is still illegal federally, so Jenn and I could only assume the situation in Humboldt would be similar to the one I witnessed in Sonoma.
We had heard through the grapevine — from the friend of a friend who knew the guy, our soon-to-be Bossman — that our job description on the farm was to be “trimmers.” We were unsure of what being a trimmer entailed, but it sounded like something you might learn in home ec class.
In addition to our sleeping bags and rubber gloves, we also packed running shoes for daily jogs by the river; yoga mats for morning asanas; DVDs for movie nights in the cabin; bikinis for the possible Jacuzzi on premises; multiple purses, because really, you just never know; tweezers, just ’cause I’m in Humboldt doesn’t mean my brows have to go to hell; our computers for intermittent Internet distractions; and a plethora of different outfits. We were starting to think of this as our “Humboldt Vacation.” The marijuana gods were laughing.
But that’s the lifestyle we were expecting to live for two weeks while communing with nature and trimming some ganja. This is what actually happened …
Inside the trim tent. Jenn Pflaumer
The road to nowhere
After following our Bossman for 30 minutes up a winding, deserted mountain road, I not only started seeing our town outings evaporate, but I also began to see our faces on milk cartons.
We pulled up to the bottom of a very steep dirt road, and Bossman jumped out of his car.
“Okay ladies, some cars can make this road, and some cars can’t.” ’Nuff said. I’d like to be in a car that can, por favor.
It should be noted here that I have a Prius, which I now know is perhaps the world’s all-time worst off-roading car. It barely clears speed bumps, and Priuses are to steep hills what I am to corporate ladders — you’ll never see it climbing one.
Bossman continued. “So you should start way down there, at the bottom of the paved road [about 50 yards], and gun it. Then once you hit the dirt road, just keep pushing on that gas, and hopefully you’ll make it to the top.”
“Um, can I just park it down here?”
“No, ’cause during trimming season there’s lots of weirdos up here who will strip your car.” Flashing red light in brain…
I was in over my head. Why did I feel the need to add “marijuana trimmer” to my already ridiculous resume? But at this point, I was in too deep. We had just driven 11 hours from Los Angeles, and I was now depending on this money. The market showed its ugly face again. No turning back.
I told myself, “Okay, I’m cool. I’m cool. No worries. I can do this,” as I tried to ignore the image of my mom’s face when I’d tell her that I totaled my car by driving it up a dirt road to trim weed. I drove to the bottom of the hill, and at the last minute I yelled out the window, “Oh, what do I do when I get to the top? Go straight?”
“Oh no! You’ll go off the side of the mountain if you go straight! You gotta cut hard right.”
Good to know.
Jenn turned to me and, in the calmest manner possible, said, “How you feelin’?”
“Like I might barf and have diarrhea at the same time.”
You know those friends who are really good influences on you? The ones who really put your issues in check? That’s what Jenn is for me. I have a tendency to be neurotic and high-strung, but Jenn is calm … really calm. But at this moment, I needed Valium.
Port-o-potty and Prius. Jenn Pflaumer
So I gunned it. We barreled up the hill and I cut hard right, and then the Prius coughed and pooped her pants and stopped. I floored the gas pedal, but the wheels just spun and whined, and we went no further. Bossman ran up and told me to back down the hill (oh, piece of cake!) and that he would go get his truck and they would tow us up.
My level of anxiety shot through the roof, and my shirt was now covered in sweat. But I was trying so hard to be cool. At this point, I began to feel sentenced.
A few minutes later, he sped down the hill in a beat-up truck with Bossman No. 2. They jumped out and started tying a rope (which I could only imagine was made of hemp) to my bumper.
Jenn crouched down with them, coolly inspecting the situation and knot-tying, while I stood a few feet away with pee trickling down my leg. Then Bossman dropped this load: “So, we had a little land dispute and lost the cabin. But there’s space for you ladies to sleep outside.”
My brain immediately jumped to the weather forecast (watching the weather is part of my genetics) and the fact that it was going to drop to the 30s at night while we’d be there. A) I might’ve grown up in a commune, but I do NOT enjoy sleeping outside. And B) I live in L.A. and I get cold if it’s below 70 degrees. I was speechless.
Jenn, Queen of Calm, said, “Huh. Well, we didn’t bring a tent.”
Bossman No. 1 replied, “Oh, that’s okay. You can share with the guys.”
Suddenly, we were not going to have movie nights, town outings, and Jacuzzi Sauvignon Blanc-sipping; we were going to be sleeping outside in 30-degree temperatures with “the guys.” I imagined these guys were like the dirty, barefoot, grime-caked, BO-stinking hippies we’d seen in town. In my head, Mom’s face was replaced by my boyfriend’s, shoving my belongings into a box and dumping them on the sidewalk.
“Well, that about does it,” said Bossman No. 2 as he secured the rope. “I just hope it doesn’t rip off your bumper.”
Well, gosh, me too. I didn’t think Toyota Financial would recognize “bumper ripped off on marijuana trim adventure” under my warranty.
But I stuffed down all my good sense, and with paranoia burbling to the surface of my brain, I said, “Okay, let’s do this.”
And so we did it — we towed my citified car up a dirt roller coaster using a hemp rope. Miraculously, my bumper remained secure and I kept my lunch down.
The resin on our gloves after only two hours of work. Buffy Charlet
Down on the farm
The farm really was something beautiful to behold. Nestled amongst the redwoods, the land was pristine. The only man-made items on the property were a small trailer where Bossman No. 1 and his girlfriend slept (and cooked most of our food), a large tent for trimming the marijuana, two small sheds where the marijuana dries, and THE GARDEN! This Eden boasted 45 marijuana plants ranging in size from 2-foot-tall babies to bushes well over 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide. These were some impressive plants.
We were then introduced to our workspace — the tent — and there was no getting prepared for the sight. Not scary or grotesque or hilarious, just reeeaally strange. Seated around a long table were 10 latex-gloved, heavy-metal-listening dudes — “the guys.” The air was thick with pot smoke, pot pollen, and dust from the dirt floor. The table was piled high with marijuana branches to be trimmed, and there were several large chafing dishes filled with the completed product — trimmed buds. Beautiful, perfect, and pounds and pounds of them. But the most peculiar thing about the tent was the flat-screen TV at the end of the table.
Here was a place where no one got cell reception, where we only had a Port-O-Potty, where there was no refrigeration or even ice, and where we had to sleep outside, yet we had DirecTV and a flat screen.
Metallica blared on the speakers and a baseball game filled the screen. Jenn and I were suddenly very aware that we were two women from Los Angeles in a male environment that chose TV over refrigerating meat. When we were given the option to go work in the garden by ourselves or stay in the tent to trim, in one voice we opted to work in the garden.
That first day in the garden, we couldn’t stop laughing. It wasn’t the pot — it was either laugh or cry. We kept asking ourselves what had possessed us to put our lives on hold and drive 11 hours to do manual labor with a bunch of dudes and then sleep on the ground? What were we thinking? So we just kept laughing. And pulling leaves off marijuana plants.
That was our job in the garden — pulling the leaves off the mature plants that were ready to be harvested. Doesn’t that just sound like a sweet little painless chore? That’s what we initially thought too. We had grand visions of finishing the entire garden in two days. And then we began our first plant.
First of all, we had to wear latex gloves because the resin from the plants is so thick and so sticky, in a matter of minutes you are covered in the gummy tar, which is impossible to get off. Later we learned an interesting fact: The resin can be removed from the gloves and smoked as hashish. At that moment, though, this information was not a bonus.
Anyhigh, we had to wear latex gloves, long-sleeved shirts, and long pants to avoid becoming resin babies. What we thought might take a few minutes of leaf-pulling per plant actually took over an hour per plant. There were zillions of leaves, and we had to pull delicately so as not to rip off the bud. We were immediately daunted, and as the sun bore down, we had a notion of what it must be like to be a migrant field worker.
Once the sun dropped, we joined the guys to work in the trim tent. The dust from the floor mixed with the pot smoke (yes, the trimmers smoke pot the entire time they trim — but as anyone who’s worked in a coffee shop knows, the last thing you want is a cup of joe) mixed with the airborne debris from 12 people trimming plant matter causes a sinus horror show. I blew my nose, and actual pieces of bud flew out. Listen, potheads, this is not okay. The tent was a constant cacophony of sneezing, wheezing, nose-blowing, hacking, and spitting. It was there we learned the term “the Humboldt hack.”
Trimming the buds into perfect little sellable nuggets was more mind-numbing than the garden plants’ deleafing, thus the flat screen. It also caused our hands and back muscles to cramp.
My multitasking, iPhone app-fiddling, Twittering, emailing, blogging, texting brain started to short circuit. I began to have a panic attack reserved expressly for middle class white people. How in the world was I going to do this for over a week, 12 hours a day? All the while sharing a Port-O-Potty with 10 dudes? I was not only dirty and disgusting (already!) I was bored. Picking and trimming leaves all day and night? Really? The social injustice was primarily body odor, and it seemed hardly worth the financial reward.
This was the temper tantrum my brain threw for the next two days. Bossman must have sensed my panic, because he got everyone a hotel room to share. And by hotel room, I mean a $25-a-night cell with a goat in the yard, 45 minutes away, in which we crammed as many bodies as possible. But hey, it had hot water and a roof, so I was grateful. I felt as though I were on Survivor, only without a million-dollar grand prize for surviving.
Meditations on pot
I’m not sure what got me through those first couple of days. It was probably Jenn’s constant calmness. And the fact that I needed to make this money or else I wasn’t going to be able to pay rent. It was also the knowledge somewhere deep, deep down in my gut that I needed this experience. I needed to be ripped away from my electronics, my comforts, my routine, and my false sense of control.
On the evening of day two, I had this epiphany: The universe sentenced my ass to a marijuana farm, and I had to do my time. I had to chill out, relax, and let go. If I counted the seconds, they would only get longer. I had to commit and be in the moment here more than in any of my previous meditations.
On day three, I embraced my epiphany and the work and living conditions. It started to feel less like prison and more like a spiritual retreat. I was becoming unplugged from my own expectations. That’s when I began to be fully aware of the unique experience I was having.
I started to ask the guys questions. I was amazed to find that what I once thought to be a motley crew of potheads and metalheads was in fact a group of interesting human beings. One had been a monk for 17 years in Laos. There was a chef, a firefighter, an actor, a screenwriter, a musician, a sports TV project manager, and a dad. We all had a desire to fall off the grid, if even for a brief period, and to experience some of the last days of the Wild West. And to make some fast money…
This truly was the Wild West. Our bossmen were in the throes of a major land dispute over another piece of property on which they had 350 mature marijuana plants. A mature plant can yield anywhere from half a pound to 2.5 pounds of dried bud. A pound of dried bud can sell anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. So we’re talking about a lot of money.
The daily news told stories of local robberies and even violence. We would hear gunshots in the distance. Target practice on squirrels? Possibly. More land disputes and more robberies? Very likely. Small planes would fly over our heads as we worked in the garden. Private joyriding? Perhaps. Scoping outdoor gardens? Maybe. This is big business, and it is largely unregulated.
We often mused about how once marijuana is legal on a federal level, it will be so regulated that working on a pot farm will no longer be a retreat of sorts for those of us who are wandering and could use $20-per-hour cash. We could eat, drink, and pretty much work when we wanted. We just kept track of our hours, on scraps of paper, through a perma-haze. But once it’s universally legal and regulated, there will be masses of real migrant workers who, being paid $8 an hour, will be required to produce a certain amount of pounds per hour. There will be no DirecTV, no free Coors Light, no joint being passed around the trim table, no constant chatter, no getting to know a monk from Laos, a chef, or a musician.
But this is how it’s done now. This moment of time presents a brief opportunity for an opportunistic few to make a considerable amount of money. Cash. And let’s be clear: This Wild West scene has been created by the law.
The ambiguity of the law is tough to navigate. Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, under which California voters approved the use of medicinal marijuana, is completely silent about transportation, distribution, and sales of marijuana. In 2004, SB 420 was passed, but it only focused on cultivation and possession.
Contradicting the very keystone of this debate is that while pharmaceutical prescription drugs are not taxed in California, medicinal marijuana is taxed. So medicinal marijuana is being treated more like alcohol and cigarettes under state law. This is just more evidence of the hazy laws and California’s own indecision of how it wants to treat marijuana. Like the citizens of Humboldt, the state likes the money it brings in but is having trouble with the stink.
The debate over pharmacies is likewise thick and convoluted. The laws themselves conflict and clarify little. In similar murky waters, the pharmacies and the patients who buy the bud are taxed, but the growers — the caregivers — are not taxed. Typically, a caregiver will sell his bud to a pharmacy (also called a “dispensary” or “collective” under state law) that will then sell it to the patients.
According to the California Attorney General’s elusive guidelines —
Well, isn’t that a fluffy mouthful? Let’s be real: Medicinal marijuana is a multibillion dollar business that could potentially help rescue us from a pulverized economy. The state of California stating that a pharmacy “might have to organize as some form of business to carry out its activities” is like refusing to admit your daughter is going to have sex at her senior prom.
Come on, give the girl a condom. Let’s look with eyes wide open at medicinal marijuana as the emerging, booming industry that it is. We need clear, concise laws to be mandated so that the grower, the transporter, the pharmacy, and the patient are at no risk for infringing on the law. And once we can do that, then maybe California — and the nation — can welcome another taxable business into the mainstream.
Who says size doesn’t matter? Jenn Pflaumer
The give and take
Jenn and I went to the farm with our own agenda. From Los Angeles to Humboldt, we carried with us plans and schedules — an itinerary of what we wanted to accomplish. Humboldt took our plans and bitch slapped them. On the marijuana farm, we weren’t so much seduced by the high of weed, but rather by the buzz of letting go and being in the moment.
On the eighth day of our stay, it became overcast and cold. The forecast called for rain — lots of rain. Jenn and I took this cue and realized it was time to return to L.A. After hugs and promises to stay in touch with our new “trim” family, we packed up our sleeping bags and resin rubber gloves. Then, reeking of ganja, we headed down that winding road. In the redwoods, on a farm up in Humboldt County, we left our agendas, our naïveté, and our phone numbers for next season.
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Best of In The Fray 2009. A look at two books written about one man: Mary Tillman’s Boots on the Ground by Dusk and Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.
The life and death of Pat Tillman has a symbolic resonance that continues to echo far and wide. In a country rife with anxious masculinity, he was a powerful example of a certain American ideal: a strong, independent-minded man with both brawn and shrewd intellect, a taste for challenge, and a compassionate, questioning soul.
Tillman — an NFL player, amateur philosopher, volunteer soldier, and freethinker who believed the Iraq War was wrong — was killed accidentally by his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan. Because he died during a war-mongering era that represented the worst aspects of American masculinity — and because his friendly-fire death in April, 2004, was subsequently packaged by the Bush administration as a heroic death in combat — the public hasn’t lost interest in his story. He’s been the subject of countless articles and TV news specials, and his mother Mary wrote a memoir, Boots on the Ground by Dusk, about him and her family’s search for the truth about his death. Now journalist Jon Krakauer, author of the best-selling adventure yarns Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, has added to the body of knowledge with his book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.
Both books portray Tillman as a young man whose joie de vivre and need to delve further into life was insatiable — and led to his fateful army enlistment. His mother writes about him repeatedly hurling himself out of the crib as a baby, while Krakauer describes him leaping over and over again from a cliff to a tree branch as a young man.
Mary Tillman writes in straightforward prose, a mixture of present and past tense, telling an agonizing, step-by-step story of her journey from grieving mom to crusader for the truth, intertwined with memories of her son. Boots on the Ground is filled with tiny, tangible moments that carry personal weight: “I looked up at the eucalyptus tree where Pat would so often sit when he was young. The light shining through the leaves and shredded bark was so bright, my vision blurred and I diverted my eyes,” she writes of a day when people had come to pay respects to her deceased son.
“We all look around uncomfortably at each other. Something isn’t right about this,” she says when describing her family’s meeting with an army official. “At the close of the meeting we agree to disagree, but I promise them we are not going away,” she says of the end of another unsatisfying summit.
But while Mary Tillman’s story is of a family driven nearly mad by the army’s lack of empathy for its pain, Krakauer has a different purpose. Where Men Win Glory depicts a government driven senseless by the need to justify its aggression. War is an inherently dark and messy thing, he reminds us in a book that ranges from intimate personal excerpts taken from Pat Tillman’s diary to a history of foreign engagement in Afghanistan. What made the wars of the Bush administration so singular — and senseless — was a culture in which the appearance of “mission accomplished” mattered more than the reality.
As Krakauer shows, Tillman didn’t die simply because a group of soliders fired wildly and indiscriminately at its own comrades. It was also because, in order to make it seem as though they were getting something done in the “War on Terror,” desk commanders insisted on splitting Tillman’s unit up, disregarding the ground officers’ orders, and on rushing the soldiers through a dangerous area during the daytime when they were vulnerable to insurgents. The desk commanders wanted, quite simply, “boots on the ground by dusk.”
Perhaps even more chillingly, the effort to keep up the appearance of success by masking the ugly truth of Tillman’s death from the public and his family went far up the chain of command. The evidence, says Krakauer, indicates that Tillman’s regiment “engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to deliberately mislead the family, and high-ranking officials at the White House and the Pentagon abetted the deception.”
Where Men Win Glory is also an interesting counterpoint to The Terror Dream, in which author Susan Faludi focuses on the story of Jessica Lynch, who was “rescued” from a hospital in Iraq and, like Tillman, falsely branded as a hero to boost wartime propaganda. Krakauer notes the similarities between the two cases — as did the congressional hearings that examined both of them.
Ultimately, the Tillman books complement each other: Mary Tillman’s is personal and detailed, Krakauer’s is tightly written with a wide scope. The story is so compelling that many will want to read both, although those with no previous knowledge will find Krakauer provides the clearer introduction to the story.
To the current there is a hook, an undercurrent of darkness braided with light.
The bustle you are, somber & vivid.
The little receipt which is old fashioned like the tall laced boot of our town.
The name sticker “Margaret N. Cutt” to whom the used book belonged.
Your language, “O dear,” and “quite the town,”
Vivid lipstick out of the forties.
The overwrought city, the muscled imagination.
The bustle in a dress. Free-floating angst in ceiling chandeliers, & the purple sweater I have taken to sleeping in with wool circles like those a child draws on a blackboard, a child of ten:
Filmed
Marcella Goldsmith would understand.
Preparing for the stone city of age, myself I am slowing, never leveling
See in dream
Steps washed over by water,
The thin air of antiquity’s room
I reach for every twig for the nest
The storyteller with leukemia habits our planet still
unlike the poet who grieved his wife’s death it was years before he habited his own skin.
Landscape tonight fades into Federal gray as I turn out lamps on reading
Knowing I can never have you,
Knowing John Donne’s words, “If I dream I have you, I have you,”
Are true & untrue like a bird flying with one wing.
Not bogged down in sateen daughter
Chylde
Sister
But rising
To surge above the plains of rainy Tuesday.
Now will become later like after the anguish of an infusion
Meantime Lindt Fioretto assorted chocolates
Stand in a round hatbox on my desk
& I start trying chocolate, moka doll hats on
With plumes
The plumes are “chocolat croquant” Caramel & hazelnut
we are two long-legged children in the attic on a dark day
Making lights
Revolve like at the planetarium:
A peacock & his hen:
I am the little drab one
Bringing up the rear
Bustle rustling
Am I the dark one serving the blonde one or are you the dark one serving me?
Roxbury Hall, Mass this would bow me to sateens:
Lady Robe
I do not often rove but rove now
For whom I leave / for whom I love.
Duvet sale
A four season 550 loft power goosedown
Blowout Price-Slasher
“Sweet Dreams”
Dare I imagine us under it? How do I write? I open a vein.
Ink barely dry on the death certificate
Sharp as a tack if I’d sat on you in life I’d have bled:
This way it’s an uproar, an otherworldly bed:
Dream up a pillow fight, Paul Bunyan daughter
Feathers aglow an albino snow blown in a fan: I’m yours. You’re down:
Four posts, gold maple bedsteads:
Cold polishes lenses & silver pen nib
From swan.
No swan, tall woman, yet egret feathers would look good upon
A hat you wore tearing at drabness like a lion with roar:
Cape
Flung over shoulder with that bravado of a very large woman.
Just a touch of mascara
Diminishing such mirth would be
Like cutting off the hands with a blowtorch.
That touch
Is over the top
Too little
& too much
The way Sappho’s odes
Were unbearable
Yet not enough.
My shower restores me
Between bouts of loneliness
(Which strike now I am laid off work with a broken ankle)
Its colours sepia, silver salts, gelatins like an old photograph turned liquid
But its script is virginity: non stop
Vocal chords closing down.
Only two globes back
(Two “Globe & Mails” that is)
I received accolades:
Now, although I trace the alphabet faithfully with my wounded foot as the doctor tells me to, there is no full telling this thing, this loss.
Screams of “$@$^%&*!,” “*&$#@,” and “#$%@^$%,” sirens piercing, fire alarms sounding, reggaeton blaring, and fists banging were all common sounds in the Cheetos-littered halls of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. Middle School in inner-city Los Angeles, California. The school houses roughly 2,000 students nearly exclusively of Latino and African American backgrounds and from extremely low-income families. It had been named Mount Vernon Middle School after George Washington’s estate that included farms worked by a few hundred African-descended slaves. But in 2006, the school changed its name in memory of its alum, the attorney who defended O.J. Simpson during his murder trial with his “If (the glove) doesn’t fit, you must acquit” catchphrase.
By then, Cochran’s debate team had long disappeared from the school, along with other extracurricular activities. Cochran the school is under-resourced and failing, primarily focusing on keeping the peace and secondarily on raising test scores and receiving funding.
When I first arrived there, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach and palpable fear. The campus was empty, but the school’s dilapidated state, graffiti, and omnipresent gates and bars worried me. Was this a school or a juvenile detention center, I wondered. Veteran teachers referred to the students as “little terrorists,” or worse, by four-letter names. They warned me and my other fresh-faced newbie colleagues not to smile for the first six months or expect anything from the little “$#@&s” since they were, after all, terrorists. Not surprisingly, after getting such advice, I questioned my decision to join Teach For America, and I tried to get accustomed to my queasiness at Cochran.
America’s prison system is the biggest in history.
Of the roughly nine million prisoners in the world, over two million are in America (World Prison Population List). The United States incarcerates more of its own people (an estimate of 2,357,284 according to the incarceration clock on January 27, 2009, at 12:56 p.m.) per capita than any other nation. This rate is 6.2 times greater than Canada’s, 7.8 times greater than France’s, and 12.3 times greater than Japan’s.
Why?
The simple answer would be because of our crime rate, only this is not really true. America’s incarceration rates and crime rates do not correlate. The imprisonment rate does not reflect the general population growth either; population growth is a molehill compared to the ever-growing mountain of incarcerated Americans (Punishment and Inequality in America, 2006).
If imprisonment and the creation of prisons are not direct responses to crime, what are they? Marxist scholars say that the elites have seized upon the idea of mass incarcerations as a new answer to an old question: What shall we do with the poor? Political historians note that, after Nixon made drugs and crime his chief campaign issues, a “tough on crime” image became a political sine qua non. (Before the ’60s, crime prevention was an invisible, unglamorous political duty, like road maintenance. Then Goldwater and Nixon and Reagan, no longer allowed to comment directly on “the Negro problem,” used crime as a wedge issue to secure the white vote, and the Willie Horton age was born). Racial bias theorists see the “War on Crime” as a war on African Americans, and incarceration as an extension of slavery.
But prison is not merely a theory. A prison is a building. A building sited on 50 acres of flat farmland. It has towers, offices with shaded windows, surveillance screens, uniformed guards, lights along its perimeter. Penetrate further inside and the imagination grows dim; it darkens with every locked door, but even on the inside of the inside there are people. People playing Scrabble, trying to pray, outlining letters in their head, napping before class, eating three meals a day. And outside the prison compound there are people, too. Outside the prison walls there is a town.
Once a factory town
A lot of American towns are begging for some kind of stimulus — any kind. When a town is desperate enough and it has the right kind of flat, fallow land, the corrections people swoop in and mount a public relations campaign. They support pro-prison candidates for the county board. They woo the town fathers. They talk up the industry: clean, quiet, no slow season. The worse things get out there, the better things will get for you. Almost always, the town buys it.
New York state has built 43 prisons since 1976, all of them in small upstate towns.
Albion, New York is one such town.
If you’re driving into Albion from the east on New York State Route 31 (NY Route 31), the Orleans County Economic Development Agency (EDA) is on your right. You’ll have to squint to make out the blue EDA logo because the building won’t catch your eye; it’s one of those anonymous one-story office buildings with exactly three boxwoods, and coffee-brown trim. If you pass a row of bright orange tractors for sale, you’ve gone too far.
A lot of people remember when this whole part of town was all one factory, the Lipton canning plant. Everyone worked for Lipton back then. Now it’s hard to imagine the factory during the ’60s and ’70s, humming, clanking, chugging, growing, growing, still growing, running out of space, till Lipton had to ask the town to block off Clinton Street on both sides, and the factory spilled out into the street. It doesn’t hum now, doesn’t look like much of anything but broken glass and concrete and mud, and it has a stench so bad, the neighbors swear someone’s hiding bodies in the basement. The two factory smokestacks now fossil in Albion’s elegiac skyline. The smokestacks no longer smoke; they just sit, and late in the day they cast boxy shadows over sun-bleached brick walls, stacks of crates in the lot, unhitched trailers, dead dandelions, empty window frames. The rusted crane with the key still in it. Eerie how the workers, on whatever the last day happened to be, just left. Like Pompeii, only without the desperate rush; not a bang but a whimper — slow and nonchalant, like they just forgot to ever come back. But the people in the town still need to make a living.
Another mile west on NY Route 31 — past the Save-a-Lot, past the Family Dollar, past the new Wal-Mart Supercenter perched on a knoll — and you’ll come to two more signs you’re likely to miss. One says “Albion C. F.” and one says “Orleans C. F.” Take a right at the first one, galunk over the rusted train tracks, and as the road curves, you’ll come face-to-face with one of Albion’s stately historic buildings, dressed in brick and white wood. And ringing the perimeter of the brick building, between it and you, the ribbons of polished metal. Floating, sort of blinking in and out of focus like spokes, drifting alongside the road in two ethereal layers as you drive (slowly now), the thousands of tiny points glinting in the sun, silver wire stretched thin — you’ve never seen metal shine like this. Maybe you roll up your windows without thinking and turn on your air conditioning. And then a tiny green sign on a post, so small you almost have to stop the car to make it out: “Correctional facility inmate work crews. Do not stop to pick up hitchhikers.”
Like a nation within a nation
I asked around about the mayor of Albion, and was told that the mayor was an idiot and probably a cokehead. Everyone told me this, from all political camps, and no one seemed to care much about him as long as he didn’t screw up anything important.
On the afternoon of our meeting, Mayor Michael Hadick was 20 minutes late. He was a young man, maybe in his early 30s, with watery blue eyes and thinning hair. He walked into Village Hall briskly, blinking a lot, making fast small talk and slicking back his hair with his free hand, and placed his jumbo Iced Capp on the table. “Long line at Tim Horton’s,” he said.
During our conversation I asked him what he thought about prisons. Growing up in Albion, he noticed them occasionally.
“Well, you know when we used to walk, where we used to come in from Eagle Harbor, they used to have the numbers up. I never could figure out what it was, but we used to drive by and my parents used to say, ‘That’s where the bad boys go.’ Obviously it was a lot smaller then, but you always wondered what those [were], cuz they had big blue numbers on it. One through eight, if I remember, and you always used to go, ‘What did they do, the bad boys, that they put ’em in these cages like this?’ Almost looked like, uh … reminds me of … uh … like the boxes, for uh … greyhounds, now that I think about it. But they were a lot bigger. They musta been — what do you call ’em — garage bays. That’s what I’m thinking now it woulda been. But back then, I had no idea. And they put the fear in me.”
As an adult, though, he seemed to lose interest. Now, he doesn’t “really see the interaction or the tie-in to the village whatsoever. It is what it is. They’re on that side of the fence, we’re on this side. I don’t think about it much.”
Albion is a prison town — how could the mayor of the town not think about prisons? Following national census policy, the 2,500 prisoners are counted as part of the town population, even though they do not pay taxes or vote or actually live in the town. By reporting a total population of 8,000 instead of 5,500, Albion gains representation in state and county legislature, improves its chances for state grants, and makes itself more attractive to national chains like Wal-Mart. The prisons buy their water from the town every month. The prisons give contracts to engineers and plumbers, and free labor to the town through work-exchange programs. I did not see how any of this could be uninteresting to any Albionite, much less the mayor.
Apparently, prisons did not seem as weird to people in Albion as they seemed to me. I had assumed that asking about prisons in a prison town would be a delicate subject, like asking about the mafia in Sicily or Katrina in New Orleans. Instead, it seemed more like asking people in Manhattan about the hot dogs, or the sewage drains. Everyone in the town was both perfectly willing to talk about the topic yet already bored of it. I would stop people and say, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the prisons,” and they would looked confused.
“Well, sure, well—I don’t know much, but … what do you want to know?”
I kept asking my interview subjects to go over the same ground with me, kept asking the obvious questions, because I couldn’t believe that you could drive your kids here for soccer, that you could look out your window and see the prison’s water tower always on the horizon, and not think it was strange.
I asked the state assemblyman from the district, Steve Hawley, whether he saw prisons as an opportunity for economic growth.
“Oh, absolutely. It’s good for the local people, it’s good for the county, it’s good for everyone.”
Everyone? So he wouldn’t prefer other businesses — factories, let’s say — to prisons?
“No, I don’t think so. Because, as I say, our citizenry around here has become accustomed and used to having facilities that … are meant to house … prisoners. They … no, I think that they’re fine.”
James Recco, a correction officer at Orleans who lived in Albion, underscored a point I’d heard again and again: Correction officers were good for the local economy.
“If you paid the correction officers with cash that’s tainted pink, you’d see most of all the retail stores, the gas stations, would all of a sudden be flooded with these pink bills.”
I asked him if Albionites appreciated this interdependence.
“Well, it’s … A prison is a part of the life of a town, but not … on an everyday level. Everybody knows it’s there, but it’s not a part of their lives. Is sort of like a sovereign nation — it’s like a nation within a nation.”
A revolving door
Yesterday, in another city hundreds of miles away — another world practically — someone found out her life was ruined, and tomorrow she will drive all night in a van, her hands locked behind her back.
Some of the incarcerated are violent and some nonviolent. Some of them didn’t do it, but some of them did. Some of them took the fall for someone else. Some of them took a plea. Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some don’t know right from wrong. Some of them molested little boys. Some of them stole medicine for their dying wife. Some of them killed strangers, for no reason. Many of them are mentally ill, and are not receiving treatment. Many of them cannot read, and are not receiving education. Many of them are drug addicts, and they will be drug addicts when their sentence is over. Tomorrow some of them will catch the next Greyhound back downstate, and many new bodies will arrive to take their place.
2008 was a year of tumult and turmoil around the world. A massive earthquake shook China. Months later, a figurative earthquake shook the global financial system as the world credit markets ground to a halt. Oil prices climbed to record peaks over the summer and crashed with the global economy as demand vanished. Chaos in Iraq has started to wane, but the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. As we enter 2009, it seems that there are more uncertainties in the world than guarantees.
Now that 2008 rests in the history books, it is safe to look back over the year. Here at In The Fray, we published another eleven great issues, all of which featured the hard work of our volunteers, contributors, and editorial staff. In The Fray would like to extend heartfelt thanks to each and every person who has worked to make our magazine as extraordinary as it is.
In that spirit, ITF’s editors would like to highlight a few of the best stories from 2008:
Help keep us publishing by visiting inthefray.org/donate and giving what you can. Thanks, and keep reading in 2009!
Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.
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