V 1 N. 32 Following the George River in Northern Labrador

  The following interview was done with Arnold Zagaris in Noranda, Quebec where we were both teachers.  Since then Arnold has become a very respected wildlife photographer specializing in the Arctic but has also been to other parts of the world as well and has published several photographic books.     For more information on Arnold's work, see below photographs.            

                                     Following the George River in Northern Labrador

                          Interview with Arnold Zageris, Noranda, Quebec January 16, 1986

                                                             By George Brose

The north Labrador bush has twice drawn Arnold Zageris into its domain and it threatens

to seduce him back again this summer.

In the comfort of his beautifully remodelled house that he shares with wife Joan and

three-month old son Matthew, in the northwest Quebec town of Noranda, Arnold takes a pull on

his second Labatt’s, and we are deep into the Labrador canoe trip that he and fellow teacher,

Alex Goubko made in the summer of 1980. The 37 years old high school biology teacher,

rapidly becoming one of Canada’s most sought after wildlife photographers, shows a hearty

enthusiasm for something that happened almost six years ago. Staring wistfully into space, he

wishes he could put a foot back into that imposing land, “Wow, just for five minutes, right now!

What is must be like in January!”

We run through about 100 slides he has culled from his massive files to show me what

the camera can convey. He shyly admits that this was before he was getting heavily into

photography, and that he wasn’t doing much planning before shooting. Nevertheless the view

of rivers, lakes, mosquitoes, caribou and the tundra are awesome.

Asked why he chose to follow the George River up to Ungava Bay brings out a two-word

answer, 

“Leonidas Hubbard”. Further query lets me know that Hubbard, an American outdoor

writer and would be explorer, led an ill-fated expedition into the Labrador interior in 1903.

Hubbard starved to death on the expedition, and one of his two companions Dillon Wallace

wrote a book about the tragedy, The Lure of the Labrador Wild. Two years later Hubbard’s

widow Minah completed the same route on which her husband had failed to return. In her book,

she was harshly critical of her husband’s companions. By her account there is a complete

absence of reference to them. Arnold was intrigued by the books and fascinated at the aspect of

going through the territory 75 years later.

Arnold’s view of adventure is one of using purely low tech equipment and common

sense. Readers of the Hubbard expedition can perceive a distinct absence of the latter. Zageris

and Goubko travelled in one canoe, there was no back up, just a 250 mile walk through tundra if

they had an accident. “You don’t go that far in the bush to get high on risk taking.”

If risk isn’t the reason to go, what is? What do you personally find that draws you out

there? 

“ I Everyday is a surprise; it’s a total learning experience. You literally open a Pandora’s

box to problems, and you have to devise solutions. That’s what got us hooked.”  Had any canoe

training or schooling been done before this adventure? “The year before, Alex and I canoed 25

days on the Abitibi River up to James Bay; that was our only schooling.”

What else can one expect to see in this part of the world?  What can attract you there

besides the thrill of following Hubbard and Wallace through the Labrador past?   

“We hoped to see the George River caribou herd in its annual eastward migration. It was a rare chance 

that this might happen, and as it turned out we were extra lucky, as we rode right through them. Literally

thousands . They were early, and when we informed the Inuit at the George River Post, they

started their annual hunt accordingly. The size of the herd was incredible. After they swam the

river, the water was full of their hair. Eddies coiled it into large wads. Upon examining the hair

we could see that the ends split and panned out giving a natural trap for air underneath. This

provided insulation for winter and perhaps even buoyancy for swimming.”

Was fishing a good means of survival in an area so little touched by man? 

“We caught all the fish we could eat. Lots of speckled trout, five and six pounders. We kept throwing 

them back. But from a nutritional point of view, trout aren’t a very good way to survive. You’d have

to eat 10-12 pounds daily to maintain your body weight. The meat is just too lean. Salmon

would be much better; they have lots of oil in them. Unfortunately, there were no salmon in this

particular area.”

What did you take with you as far as food was concerned? 

“We shopped at the local grocery store. Lots of oatmeal, flour, macaroni, salami, and chocolate. Made 

bannock with the flour or pancakes with wild berries thrown in. Roasted fish over the fire. Very few 

tinned goods.

A treat was a can of beans occasionally. I backpacked up the Fraser Valley in Labrador a few

years later. That was a different story as we did all the carrying ourselves rather than letting the

canoes do it. Then we got into freeze dried foods. Still we travelled quite light. Our portages

could be done in two trips. One for the canoe and another for our gear. We brought a simple

sheet of construction plastic to cover us in the canoe in rainy weather. We had a thirty dollar

tent. Used the fly sheet as a sail when we struck open water when the river became a lake. Old

bleach bottles were used to carry water up to our camps.”

Do you consider yourself more able to rough it in the bush, as opposed to the guy with 50

pounds of equipment valued at several thousands of dollars? 

Arnold leaned back pensively before coming out with his reply. “Anyone can rough it. It takes no talent 

whatsoever. You justhave to accept new standards. The art of living in the bush is to make everything go 

smoothly.

When you make lots of mistakes, you waste time and energy. We usually started our days early.

Woke at sunup, cooked breakfast, broke camp and got into the water. We stopped for lunch if we

were on fast water or ate in the canoe if we were on calm water. By five o’clock we called it a

day. That far north in the summer you have light until quite late, but we found that by five we

were mentally exhausted. Not physically, mentally with all the decisions that had to be made.

There is never a let up in decision making on a fast river. The last 125 miles on the George were

constant whitewater.”

“In the bush you’re gonna need an axe, and a long handled one, I might add. Short handles are 

dangerous and require too much work to get the job done properly. The other cutting tool I like is a 

collapsible saw. Looks like a big jack knife. They are incredibly efficient cutting tools and quite safe to 

use.  As you get further north the trees are pretty small. It is sometimes called the Krumholz effect,

where anything that tends to grow higher than the next winter snow usually freezes and breaks

off. You naturally need a means of making fire. We managed with waterproof matches and Bic

lighters. You also need plenty of insect repellent. The flies and mosquitoes are fierce. Cover

your exposed skin with repellent and wear a double thickness of clothing, so they can’t bite

through.”

What do these bugs live on when people and caribou aren’t there? 

“Their ecological role is that of a pollinator, so pollen is their basic food.”

If you had damaged the canoe beyond your repair capabilities, what were your plans?

You travelled with only one canoe and at times were 600 miles from the nearest road. 

“The simplest solution was to walk out. We could have paralleled the river following caribou trails.

They meander somewhat, but they’re easy to follow. Portaging was made a lot easier thanks to

those trails. As for walking in the tundra, it was fairly easy as there is a minimum of vegetation,

and the permafrost is only an inch below the surface. Sometimes you break through the upper

surface, and then you go sliding.”

Did you have any other plans or precautions in case of an accident? 

“Not really. However we did let people at both ends of the trip know about when to expect us. I carried a

couple of cherry bombs with me as signals. Didn’t want to pay the price for flares and rockets.

We were quite sure that by being prudent, by accepting to portage rather than taking a chance in

a difficult rapids, that we could avoid accidents. I did take along a .22 caliber rifle in case we

needed to shoot small game to stay alive, but I never used it. We never considered carrying a

radio transmitter.”

Did you find that skills and confidence improved as the journey progressed? 

“No question that our confidence improved . It took three to four days to get to the idea of being out

there, only the two of us. Water that looked difficult at first, of course became easier. The end of

the George River, after 15 days of canoeing was still a heavy experience. As I mentioned

already, it was 125 miles of whitewater, an incredibly swift river. There were virtually no calm

spots to beach the canoe. It would flow around bends along a cliff wall, and it seemed almost

like the water rose up the cliff as if on a bobsled run. We made that 125 miles in 3 days arriving

at the George River Post a few miles from Ungava Bay. Mrs. Hubbard’s party took almost seven

weeks to do this stretch. I really don’t know why they needed that much time.”

If you made the trip again, what would you take along to improve it? 

“This may sound ambit ridiculous when you think of all the choices, but I would only add to the 

enjoyment by bringing along an extra pair of jeans. We got wet a lot due to the almost continuous rain, 

and it would have been nice to pull some dry clothes out of the pack at the end of the day.”

What was your itinerary for the trip? How did you get into the bush? 

“We loaded the Volvo and drove down the north shore of the St. Lawrence past Quebec City about 300 

miles to Sept Illes.  In Sept Illes we boarded a train for another 300 miles up to Schefferville, a nearly

abandoned mining town. That was a really scenic ride along the Wacoano River. At

Schefferville we chartered an aircraft to haul us and canoe about 40 miles east to the Pas River

which flows into the George. We couldn’t follow Hubbard’s route from the east as much of it

was flooded by the construction of the Smallwood Reservoir. Initially we wanted to be set down

about one lake away from the Pas, but the pilot thought the lake looked too shallow to land on.

We were flying a twin engine Otter. So we had to land a few miles away on another lake which

with portages added a day on to the trip. At the end of the trip 18 days later we flew out on a

scheduled flight from George River Post but could not take our 18 foot Kevlar canoe. Ended up

selling it one of the Inuit at George River Post for $100.”

You said that you might be going back to Labrador this summer? 

“Well, it not 100% on yet, but I’m close to deciding to try canoeing along the northeast coast of 

Labrador this summer. The Torngat Mountains on the shore rise 5000 feet right out of the water. That’s 

as much elevation as you can see in most parts of the Rockies. Icebergs will be down there in the

summer, seals, whales, should be spectacular. This time I’ll be taking pictures with more

intention of publishing them.”

I noticed it was already 1:30AM, and Arnold had to have a bright shining face for his

students in a few hours, so we left discussion of his adventures in the Yucatan, the Galapagos

Islands, and volcanoes in Colombia for another winter evening and another run on the Labatt’s

brewery.

Arnold Zageris

37 years old, biology teacher, Frederic Hebert H.S., Noranda , Quebec

Honors: Grand prize winner of Response and Recognition Contest sponsored by

Anglophoto Ltd. In Canada. His winning photos was published in Nikon World

and displayed in Nikon House, NY.

1986-87, travelling exhibition of 40 of his works sponsored by the Natural

Museum of Canada.

Recently feted by Minister of Culture of Quebec for his contributions to Quebec

culture through his photography.

Below are several slides from that George River trip:

                                                           Pick up at Scheferville

 

                                             Loading Up (Arnold on left, Alex on right

                                                                Setting Off,  Arnold

                                                                 Caribou Crossing

                                                                  Getting a Close Up

                                                            Alex with Inuit Children

Canoe Hand

Alex and Friendly Black Flies

Arnold with Supper

             

More Caribou

George River Post

Portage

                                                              Dining Out  al fresco

For more information on books by Arnold Zagaris see   Arnold Zagaris, Photographer

V 1 N. 31 Sometimes You Get Into Stuff When You Are Not Even Trying

 

My Affair with L’Affaire Maschino

Dayton, Ohio, 1977

by George Brose

 

            Sometimes we walk on the periphery of important events without knowing it.  Other times we wet our feet and still others we become totally immersed.  This story is about the second level of circumstance.

 

            First I have to tell how my life and the other persons’ lives came to merge for a brief time.  Marie and I married in Germany in 1970, when I was still in the US Army, and a year later we found ourselves expecting a child and moved to her home town in Northwest Quebec where socialized medicine made having a child financially feasible.  We had a nice life in Noranda Quebec, despite the raging winters and hordes of mosquitoes in the summers.   We made lots of friends in fellow teachers, Quebec Separatists, runners, and the like.  One of our good friends were a French/English couple Ovide and Wynanne Bastien.  In early 1973, the Bastien moved to Chile to experience the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende.  We remained in correspondence with them and they both eventually had to flee the country after the CIA led coup d’etat that resulted in hundreds if not thousands of people being tortured, killed, or disappeared.  While they remained in Santiago after the coup, the Bastien were involved in hiding people who were being sought after by the Pinochet regime.  At the same time Ovide wrote a book about the involvement of the Catholic church and its support of the Pinochet gang.  Wynanne smuggled the manuscript out of the country, even though she was in the early stages of a very delicate pregnancy.  She had had several previous miscarriages.  But she managed to get past the authorities on her own while carrying the baby and  the manuscript of Ovide’s book which would later be published as Le Coup Divin (The Divine Coup) which condemned the Church.   Ovide was able to leave Chile before the book was published. 

 

            By 1976 I had run out of options to stay in Quebec and continue to teach and coach without getting more educational certification.  So Marie and I and our two young children Marie Dominique and Jacques Andre moved to Muncie, Indiana where I had been accepted to study Exercise Physiology at Ball State University’s renowned Human Performance Lab. 

 

            While in Indiana, we continued to be in contact with our Quebec friends through phone calls, Christmas cards, and the occasional trips back to Canada.  The Bastien had moved down to Montreal and Ovide was now teaching economics at Concordia University, and Wynanne was raising a bunch of kids at home.  

 

            Shift forward a few years to about 1978.  One summer evening in Muncie, I received a phone call from Ovide saying he was planning to be in Dayton, Ohio,  my hometown, and would he and a couple of other guys be able  to meet me there and perhaps spend a couple of nights at my parents’ house?   He knew my parents from their visits up to Northwest Quebec when we all had lived there. 

 

            “No problem,  I’ll see you tomorrow in Dayton.”  I drove over alone, leaving Marie and the children behind in Muncie, about 100 miles from Dayton.  When I got to my parents’ home there was a message to meet Ovide in downtown Dayton at a hamburger joint in the arts district.  I drove down to the place and found Ovide and two other men waiting patiently in the parking lot.  He introduced them to me, one being a Denis Maschino and the other a journalist from Agence Presse France (AFP).   They cut to the chase and told me why they were in Dayton. 

 

            Denis Maschino, a French citizen, was a student of Ovide’s at Concordia.  He had lived in Algeria, the son of a French diplomat and had met and married his wife Dalila, an Algerien citizen from a very well placed family.  Her brother was chief of the Algerian secret police.  Being a Moslem-Catholic union in a strongly Moslem country was not something that was easily accepted by Dalila’s family.     The young couple had to flee the country.   France was too close to Algeria, so they came to Canada where French was spoken in Quebec.  Their marriage had occurred in 1975, and they had been living peacefully but also cautiously in the Montreal area.  However Dalia’s family was not about to give up on this seeming disregard for her culture. 

 

            In a short time Dalila’s sister and husband moved to Montreal as well and connected with her and Denis.  However Denis was very suspect of the intentions of the sister and brother-in-law.  He would never allow Dalila to be alone with them.  But after several years of this cat and mouse game, Denis let his guard down and when the relatives came to visit one time without her guardian present, she was drugged and taken to Dorval airport in Montreal and put on a private plane and flown back to Algeria.  It was correctly assumed by Denis that Dalila’s family would finagle a divorce and marry her off to a ‘respectable’ Algerian.  He was correct in his thinking. 

 

            My first question to Ovide, Denis, and the French journalist was,  “Why the hell are you bringing this affair to my attention in Dayton, Ohio?”

 

            The French journalist answered that query immediately.   “Because the plane that flew into Montreal to bring the kidnapped Dalila out of Canada, came from a small airport near Dayton.”

 

            My response,  “Holy freakin’ tamales !”  or something close to that. 

 

            It seems that the papers that were filed by the crew when they arrived at Montreal indicated that the plane had  from Wilmington, Ohio about 30 miles southeast of Dayton.  It was at a former Ohio National Guard airbase now converted to a private airport.  The trio who had come to see me in Dayton wanted to go down to Wilmington and snoop around and find out what was going on at that former airbase.  They had the name of the pilot of the aircraft and intended to ‘interview’ him.    They were also quite concerned that they might be being followed by Algerian security. 

 

            That said, I brought them up to my parents’ home in a blue collar neighborhood in southeast Dayton and told them some story that didn’t quite jibe with the truth.  Okay, I lied.  I just told my dear parents that the lads were doing some research and didn’t have a lot of funding.   So the four of us slept downstairs on the living floor and pretended we were researching.  Actually Maschino did not want to stay in the house and possibly draw attention to them so he took the car several blocks away and slept in it.  I stayed up all night watching to see if there was any suspicious activity on our street.  My dad was not big on weapons, but he did have a 12 gauge shotgun in the basement, but I couldn’t find any shells near it.  Interpret that as you wish.

 

            The sun rose and Denis returned, and in the afternoon the three of them drove down to Wilmington to see what they could see.  When they came back late that night they informed me that they had met the pilot, but he didn’t want to be interviewed.   He was quite shocked that they knew who he was and had come 800 miles to talk to him.  By prowling several bars around Wilmington they had also found several people who occasionally worked at the airport.  They would get called when there was a shipment to be loaded.  This happened sporadically, not on any fixed schedule.  What they were loading could be anything from Mercedes Benz cars,  to sheep and guns.  You name it.  It was going mainly to the Middle East and they were paid cash under the table.

 

            In a separate incident several years later I learned that Bob, a hoodlum high school acquaintance, had gotten into some trouble running guns out of that same Wilmington airport.  I wasn’t shocked.      Hoodlum Bob is another story entirely which I may recount someday.  He was a reform school dropout who also could run a decent 440 yards in track and on relays would intimidate other runners by telling them before their turn to run on a relay that he could have them severally injured by some of his ‘friends’ if they didn’t move over when he was passing them.  They knew Bob meant it.  Bob could be counted on to run well on relays, and he didn’t need performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). 

 

            That is about all that went down with the visit of my three ‘friends’ from Montreal.   When they went back to Montreal, the story continued.  The kidnapping had become public in France, a cause celebre , and many folks from the Left Bank were staging protests about the abduction.  Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir were among the leaders protesting “L’Affaire Maschino” in the streets of Paris.

 

            The Pierre Trudeau led government in Canada preferred to sweep the story under the table, because at the time, Algeria was a major supplier of oil to the Canadian nation.   The Alberta tar sands were not yet being exploited at home. 

 

            What would happen to Dalila and Denis?  Would there be a fairy tale ending?

 

            By 1988, I crossed paths with Denis Maschino a second time.  We were back in the Montreal area, and I was in the process of getting coaching certification in Canada.  You had to go through several stages of training, and in the basic one which dealt with all sports, I was in a class and the role was called, and I heard ‘Denis Maschino’ called on the attendance list.  Wow, ten years ago I had met this guy under very different circumstances.  He was there to begin his coaching certification in Karate or some other martial art.  I asked him what was going on in his life and he said he had remarried.  All the time we talked he seemed a bit evasive.  We chatted a bit more and never reconnected. 

 

            Later I met Ovide Bastien on another occasion and he told me the story.  After years of living in social isolation in Algeria with her new husband,  Dalila had gone with her family to Switzerland or France for a ski holiday.  When they let their guard down, Dalila fled and came to Canada to be with Denis.   She did not know he had remarried, and eventually she returned to France.  She continued her education and now is a professor of feminist studies at a university in France.  And thus you may conclude that life does not always have that fairy tale ending.

V 1 N. 30 The Ongoing Saga of the Canadian American Family in Beijing

 

A recent story that appeared in The Guardian reminded me of some of my past transgressions while spending three years in the US Army.  The story I’m referring to is about an 86 years old French woman who was arrested recently for an immigration infraction.  Apparently she came to the US on a 90 day tourist visa to marry an American soldier she had met in the 1950’s.  Both she and her new American  husband had had previous marriages, and after those marriages had ended, they re-connected, gotten together,  hitched up and were living in Alabama.  (French woman in Alabama?  That is grist for a William Faulkner novel.) But when her new husband died, and she stayed past her visa, the ICE Capades came skating in  and threw her 86 year old bones into a holding tank in Louisiana.  The center could have been anywhere, but God, that’s where  Mike Johnson is from.  Could it be any worse?  Why didn’t they just send her back to France?   Oh, that’s right there are French speakers in Louisiana.  But if I were Cajun these days, I wouldn’t be speaking that lingo in public.  After all those guys’ great-great grandpas and grandmas all came from what is now Canada and used to be called Acadians.  ICE dudes might think they’re some kind of ‘ferriners’  Especially when they play zydeco music.

 

After having served two years in the Peace Corps from 1965 to 1967 in Tanzania and Kenya I was asked to serve my country some more by going into the Army.  In joining the Peace Corps in 1965, I had mistakenly assumed that the Viet Nam war would be over by 1968, but I was so wrong.  How could the mighty US of A not have been able to subdue that little country with all the armaments at its disposal and dropping more bombs on it than we had dropped on Germany twenty-five years earlier?  My answer to that is a question.  How much chance do you think China would have trying to conquer Eastern Kentucky and taking over the moonshining business?   No chance whatsoever.

I was also not thinking of another battlefield in Europe, where something called The Cold War was being fought.  Besides all those guys in Viet Nam trying to save people from the Domino Effect of Communism, there were a lot of guys in Europe wearing fatigues and short haircuts.  No, kids, I’m not talking about Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers.  I’m talking about American soldiers and  the war that never really came to blows.  That’s why they called it the Cold War.  At it’s height from about 1960 to 1989, the US had as many as 300,000 troops stationed in Europe on any given day,  hoping the Russians would not try to invade those ‘friendly’ nations.  We had basically divided up Europe with the Commies into two zones of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ and let nothing cross those lines without cutting a lot of red tape, the exception being a few ballet dancers in tights.  To help maintain that realm of co-existence I was asked to get a short haircut and wear army green.  God it was 1968, long hair, the Beatles, flower children, peace and love. That was my sacrifice for my country.  

Today’s army is populated with guys and gals who want to be there.  By the end of the Viet Nam war, which we lost, the Army had learned that it wasn’t going to be easy running a show with people who didn’t want to be in their organization.   So they dreamed up the all-volunteer army.  In my time there were a few men who were career soldiers.  We called them ‘lifers’.  The rest of us were putting in time but not really interested except to know how many days it was until we were getting out.  When you were down to a couple of months you became a ‘short timer’.   When you woke up each  morning you yelled, “Short” to let your buddies know you were almost there.   In those last weeks, you would get called in by your commanding officer (CO) and given a re-enlistment  speech.  He would offer you a bonus to re-up for another two or three years.  The bonus was usually about enough to by a new car.  Did you ever try to drive a big Oldsmobile or Pontiac through small towns in Germany?  You scraped the corners off of a lot of buildings.  American car companies would deliver those cars to you in Europe.  It must have been financially worth the effort by the car companies to put a sales staff over there. 

I declined the re-enlistment option as I had bought a very used DKW German car for $40, drove it two years, broke a drive shaft a week before going home, and sold it as is for $50.   The only car in my life that I ever made money on, a ten dollar profit.  That DKW was the precursor of the Audi, but it had a long way to go to get to that level of vehicular transport.  My DKW which  the German public referred to as Das Krankenhaus Wartet, meaning the Hospital is Waiting, had a three cylinder, aluminum block, two stroke engine.  You had to add oil as well as gasoline into the fuel tank when you filled up.  Then you had to shake the car to mix it.  It still blew a lot of smoke out the exhaust, and I had to clean the spark plugs after every two fill ups.  It also had a standard transmission but no clutch pedal.  To shift you had to ease up on the accelerator.  Took a bit of practice.  Just like learning to live in another culture.

Well, to my opening point about the French lady being arrested.  By my second year in Germany, my life had evolved to the point of getting married to a French lady of Canadian origin, a Quebecoise to be precise.  We had met briefly in Tanzania five years earlier and had carried on a torrid correspondence, to the point she had visited me once in Germany in 1969, and we decided that we would get married a year later there in Germany. 

 

 My ‘job’ in the army was working as an area analyst for a PSYOPs unit. There were more mundane sides to that job, but I won't go into them at this point,  apart from keeping my Jeep clean and the ash and trash detail.   I had a mate in the unit named Jack, another ex-Peace Corps Volunteer.  He had a German wife, Ina who I'd introduced him to a year before.   Jack was the only Arabic linguist in the military in Europe at that time.  I spoke Swahili  and  German, but our usefulness to the forces was limited by whom we were hooked up with.  I think the rationale was that we might be giving away our country’s secrets while talking in our sleep.   In  Jack’s case it was particularly bad because we were there during the Black September uprising in Jordan and were supposed to go in to help evacuate Americans while King Hussein of Jordan was trying to kill off as many Palestinian refugees as he could in his country.  And you thought Israel was the first to try to rid itself of Palestinians?  This eventually led to the Munich Olympics fiasco two years later when the Black September movement kidnapped four or five Israeli athletes, and they were all killed by the Germans while trying to rescue them.    The reaction of our CO was to hide our Arabic linguist, so no other army units might get him transferred to their unit, because of his language skills.  Our CO made him go on leave and basically hide in Europe, but to phone in everyday to see if he should come back in case he was needed by our unit.   What the army ended up doing was sending in a couple of M.A.S.H. units to provide medical support and get some good publicity for its ‘humanitarian action’.  However not having someone versed in the culture, the field hospitals had painted big red crosses on their tents and nobody knew what they were.  No one came for medical help.   Should have been re-painted with Red Crescents in the Middle East.   Jack could have told them that.

 

Okay, what does all this have to do with the old French lady getting bottled up in an ICE detention center?   Well, the co-incidence is back in 1989 when my family by then with two teenagers was returning from a year of teaching in China, we  all entered the US and Marie applied to renew her Green Card to be able to live in the States with her American husband and American children.   Not knowing she had to remain in the US while that renewal was being processed, she went to Canada to visit some of her family members and upon returning to the US, she was denied re-entry, because she had left the country.  The irony of all this was it happened on the day the Berlin Wall came down and everybody was crying about the end of Communism and the new freedom in Europe.   It took almost a year for that Green Card to be processed and our family was kept apart, one kid staying with me in the US and the other staying with Marie in Canada. 

It all boils down to the whims of nationalism and politics and who is in charge at the moment.   You Americans,  don't forget to vote this November.   'Nough said.  

V 1 N. 29 A Canadian-American Family in Beijing 1988-89

 

A Canadian-American Family in Beijing

                           1988-89

This piece was written more than thirty years ago when we had returned to North America after living for almost a year in Beijing, China during one of that county’s  most tumultuous times in its long history.  Our base was Beijing Normal University in the northwest portion of that city.  It was a thirty minute bicycle ride to Tiananmen Square, and we made that trip often, especially in the Spring of 1989 when the Tiananmen Student Movement was blossoming in the city.  But we also saw other parts of China in that year.  During the Lunar New Year celebrations in February of ’89 when the country all but shuts down and people go on holiday, we travelled south then southwest and finally very far west to Tibet to see that part of  China.  Then we returned to Beijing and unexpectedly became witnesses to those world shaking events in April, May, and June.  The Tiananmen events themselves will be covered in another chapter of this blog.

 

March 6, 1989

It is a sunny day in Beijing, but the industrial haze almost obscures the mountains just west of the city. After six months in the Chinese capitol, we've learned to use that parameter to judge the quality of the air and  weather, when we look out from our fourth floor apartment. Winters with additional coal dust from heating and Spring dust storms carrying soil from Mongolia also affect the visibility.

It is almost a year since Marie-Andrée was notified that she had been selected from amongst five hundred applicants to teach English at the Canada China Language Center in Beijing. Our two children Dominique, seventeen, and Jacques, sixteen, were eager to go, but at the same time a bit reluctant to start a new life. They had been through this before when we had taught for three years in Zimbabwe and had endured several moves between Canada and the States. Selling our house and furniture in Montreal and selecting what items to take to China and what to store for our eventual return to North America occupied much of the Spring of 1988. Studies of Putonghua, the official Chinese language, also filled many of our hours. Jacques and I probably saw more Montreal Expos games than normal knowing we would not see baseball for a year.

The house sold in April and we had to vacate immediately. We moved into a 2 bedroom apartment subleasing until the end of June. We looked on it as a preparation for the much smaller apartments in China. A third move to another temporary home in July prepared us in case we joined a group of nomads in China. My father's serious illness in May made our decision to leave more difficult but my mother gave us her blessing to make this trip and in exchange we promised to return to the States to live near her at the end of the year.

Leaving a scorching North American summer in August 1988, we arrived in a scorching Beijing summer. The latitude of Beijing and Dayton, Ohio where my parents live is almost identical.

What hits the North American visitor first about China is the number of people. The density of people in the cities is unbelievable. Stores are constantly jammed with shoppers, streets packed with vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, and horse drawn carts. I had to return to the States at Christmas and at the peak of the American holiday shopping season, the stores seemed deserted after the Chinese experience.

But despite these crowds the city of Beijing is amazingly clean. Garbage trucks come through our neighborhood several times a week. The streets are swept everyday. People rarely litter the streets with paper.

In China there is very little home or apartment hunting. The unit you work for is responsible for accommodations. Where does a family of four settle? We were given a two bedroom apartment in the Foreign Experts building of Beijing Normal University. It is a 2 year old building that looks much older. The apartment was furnished and we managed to rearrange wardrobes in one of the bedrooms to serve as room dividers and give Jacques and Dominique some privacy from each other. There is a small kitchen with a gas stove and fridge, luxuries the ordinary city family has only recently begun to realize. We have a color TV, English news broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on weekdays. Education is free. We enrolled the children in full time study of Chinese at the university. This was one of the decisions we knew we would have to make before leaving N. America for China. At our arrival there were no high school level classes available for foreigners in Beijing.  It was fairly much accepted that kids would probably lose a year of high school while in China but we felt the experience actually gained living in China would more than compensate their loss. Beijing Normal University, a teacher training facility, has a special foreign student department that has several hundred foreign students studying Chinese. Most of Dominique and Jacques' classmates were Japanese who had a lot of experience with characters which are quite similar to Chinese Characters. The teacher failed to appreciate this distinction between Eastern and Western students and taught his class assuming everyone could read characters, thus leaving our children in the dust. But by Christmas time their Conversational Chinese was showing great progress. After Christmas we pulled them from the language courses and enrolled them in high school correspondence courses offered through Indiana University. My daughter, whose high school experience has been in French Canadian schools, is now struggling with  printed English letters.

I arrived without a job but found that virtually any foreigner is considered an expert at least in the teaching of English. A number of untrained Americans were busy teaching English at university level and I was quickly drafted into teaching two courses of composition and a course in newspaper reading.  My pay was somewhat less than what I had earned in the 1960’s while serving in the Peace Corps. 

I've taught in six other countries but I found the Chinese university students to be the most polite and eager students I've ever worked with. Lessons are done and handed in on time. Long hours of study are evident. The toughest thing to deal with—the biggest difference between them and other students I have met—is their unwillingness to question a teacher. The authority of a teacher in the classroom is conceded by the student. It took several weeks to alter some of their entrenched habits to meet some of my expectations in the classroom. I gave them a lot more freedom than they were accustomed to having, but also explained that they now had responsibilities that they would have to learn to deal with. One of the reasons I decided to teach this way was not to introduce North American ways just for the fun of it, but because many of these students planned to go to work in the private sector of the new Chinese economy. Only a few years ago all students were assigned to jobs for life by the university or obtained these lifetime positions by connections or "guanxi" so commonly used in China to obtain the unobtainable. When the Chinese government allowed the formation of privately owned businesses a few years ago, many new jobs opened in this sector. However, nothing was guaranteed for life and a number of social benefits would be lost. The lure was higher pay. Professional people's salaries in China are abysmally low. A street corner fruit seller can do better than a teacher or a doctor. Most of my students were planning for careers outside of the teaching profession, so my classes were geared to prepare them for a bit more independence and self-reliance. Brainstorming, where the students set their own tasks and planned their work, were used. Group work rather than individual work was emphasized, preparing them for teamwork on the job site. I emphasized that what went on in my classes would probably best be kept there for the moment. It would be too much of a change if they were to request such teaching from their more tradition-bound Chinese professors. They said they wouldn't dare make such demands.

After two months with these wonderful students I learned of my father's death and returned home to be with my mother through the Christmas holidays. By the time I returned it was too late in the semester to continue the classes. Classes did not stop for Christmas. But hopefully some seeds were planted that will help these students to survive in the new Chinese economy. Because of my extended absence for my father’s funeral and some medical treatment while home,  the university decided to cancel my classes. 

When I returned to Beijing in January I received a request to teach American Studies at an adult night school for several weeks. My degree in exercise physiology was again not going to serve me very well. After meeting the students the first night and learning that there were many professional people in the class, I decided to make a class of comparative lifestyles, contrasting what I had seen so far in China. I taught them about credit, costs of operating a car, finance companies. Their response was that Americans must have a lot of worries about payments and taxes that the Chinese do not yet have to deal with. They were interested in courtship, marriage, divorce, school systems, and costs of college. They pay almost nothing for university education, but the chances of getting accepted into a college in China are very slim and almost nil for a rural peasant.

During my Christmas absence, Marie-Andrée and the kids decided they wanted to experience some real Quebec-like weather, and took the train 24 hours north to Harbin where they got everything they hoped for and more. Harbin, one of the northernmost cities in Heilongjiang province, once called Manchuria, is famous for their ice sculpture festival and construction was going on full throttle. It was cold too and fur hats and winter boots had to be purchased.

On my return in January the children were able to get themselves out to the airport on public transportation at 1:00 p.m. and negotiate minibus transport back to our apartment. Their increased self-confidence was quite evident in the way they were now taking care of their father.

By February, Marie-Andrée had completed her first term of teaching and we had a month free to travel through China! Many of our colleagues were heading out of the country either home for their vacation or south to the beaches, but since this would be our only chance to get around China we decided to remain in-country. We rode the trains for two days south to the city of Guilin where exists some of the most famous scenery of China—the small sharply pointed limestone mountains, almost a forest of hills. It was only a few degrees warmer than Beijing but so much greener, a big change from the greys of the capital. We spent several days in a smaller village called Yangshuo, well on its way to becoming a backpackers' haven/stopping point on the Li River. From there we visited surrounding villages by bicycle. From Guilin we flew to Kunming, one of the main landing points for the Hump pilots of World War II. Kunming is famous for its year-round springtime weather and we were warmly treated not just by the weather but by the friendly peoples of Yunnan Province. Had we more time to spend, Yunnan would have been a place to explore more intensively. Many colorfully costumed minority groups lived in the area! However, the main goal of our three-week trip was to visit the autonomous region of Tibet.

To arrive in Tibet meant travelling another day by train north from Kunming to the capital of Szechuan province, Chengdu, a bleak industrial town once inhabited by long dynasties, poets and philosophers. Rain and cold gave us few pleasant memories of Szechuan. We secured tickets for Tibet and flew in to Lhasa on February 22. Travel stipulations required that we spend 2 nights in the Lhasa Holiday Inn at $120 per night compared to the $15 average we had been spending up to that time. We managed to get the requirement cut to one night and gladly moved into the less luxurious but friendlier, more vibrant Yak Hotel for $8.00 a night. The Yak was right in the middle of town where a steady stream of prostrating pilgrims circled the Jokhang Temple, weaving between the stalls of merchants of religious objects, prayer flags, juniper for burning in the stupas, antiques, and Coca-Cola. Sights and sounds of Lhasa were magnificent. The 12,000-foot altitude provided freezing nights and skin-scorching days. Costumes of various Tibetan tribes reminded us of Amerindian groups who are certainly not distantly related! Our clothes absorbed the smell of burning yak butter lamps found in every temple. Dentists with foot-cranked drills were busy drilling and capping front teeth for sixty cents bottom price to $2.50 top. Dogs were everywhere in Lhasa—so noticeably absent in Beijing. They are thought to be the incarnation of lamas who didn't quite make it into a better life. They are well fed and fairly friendly, though we didn't approach them intentionally, not knowing whether a rabies situation existed.

The Potala (the Dalai Lama's residence) was a major effort to climb up to see at the 12,000-foot altitude. Jacques and I had both been quite sick our first night because of the lower oxygen pressure! In the week we spent in Lhasa we visited several monasteries outside of town and walked, climbed, and scrambled up some of the minor hills around the city, getting up to 15,000 feet, but coming back down each day. We still felt dwarfed by the 20,000-foot mountains surrounding the city.

The Yak Hotel proved to be a good meeting ground for backpackers, which we were essentially. The backpackers have all the latest information on costs, places to stay, people to be aware of—that even the best guidebooks cannot possibly contain. At the time we were there most of the backpackers were waiting for the road from Lhasa to Kathmandu to open. It was still blocked by knee-deep snows and required a dangerous 125-mile walk to get to the Nepalese border.

In addition, at the time of our visit the Tibetans were disturbed by the curtailment of Tibetan New Year celebrations by the Chinese authorities. The day of our arrival Marie-Andrée and I, in a high-altitude stupor, walked into the middle of a demonstration against that decision. As we approached the main square in front of the Jokhang Temple (Lamaism/Buddhism's holiest shrine), we saw a contingent of policemen or soldiers jogging in file into the crowd in front of the Jokhang Temple. Shortly afterward about ten women came running out of the crowd screaming. We continued into the square, not certain what was happening, but did see a few other Western tourists milling about. A couple of Frenchmen who spoke Tibetan said that several nuns had been putting on a 'manif'—the French slang for manifestation—against the New Year decision by the Chinese.   One Tibetan young man came up to us and quietly said in English, “We are fighting for our freedom.”   I was carrying a video camera, and concerned that the film might be confiscated or I might be arrested,  I shot from the hip, not letting on that I was filming the scene.   We stayed in town for about three days before flying out directly to Beijing. 

Security on the plane was bizarre.  The stewards asked all the Tibetan men to hand over their swords after they got on the plane.   Most Tibetan males carry a short sword about a foot long.  But before we landed, the stewards re-armed those passengers.   This of course was before the   9-11 attack on New York and Washington.  We landed safely in Beijing and returned to our campus not knowing that the next chapter in Chinese history was about to unfold.

 

George Brose  (below a few scenes from South China and Tibet)

Upper Left outside the Jokang Temple,  Lower Left Dominique and Marie

Upper Right  George and Dominique in Gulin, Right Center,  Jacques lounging at the Yak Hotel,  Lower

Right, street near the Jokang Temple

Comments:   What a marvelous experience for all four of you.  You say Dominique and Jacques were eager to go.  Having raised four children, I was stunned.  They were 17 and 16, in the full throes of teenage angst.  They had the best friends anyone ever had, perhaps a boyfriend or girlfriend, a school they enjoyed, etc.  China?  I had trouble getting my son to move off the couch.  Much as I love my kids, had this move been suggested, they would have slit my throat as I slept.  Granted Dominique and Jacques were not normal teenagers, but there is only so far I, who suffered through his kids' high school years, can stretch my imagination.  You and Marie- Andree did a good job.  Roy Mason, Ukiah, CA

Roy,  If you recall, we visited you on our way to China and immediately when we got back to the US.   George

V 1 N. 28 The Tracks of Memory

 

The Tracks of Memory

By George Brose

An Essay on Trains, Family, and Growing Up in Ohio

My first memory of trains was watching from two blocks distant at the corner nearest to my maternal grandmother's house in Northeast Dayton. I wasn't allowed to go beyond that corner, but from there I could make out the cars as they rolled between foundries and factories on their way north, maybe to Toledo or perhaps Detroit.   Trains going directly east would have required taking the tracks running parallel to Third Street. Yes, I'm sure those trains were headed north. I could stand on that corner formed by Chapel St. and Milburn Ave. and look as long as I liked, but there was a crack in the sidewalk I dared not pass alone. That was in 1947, and I was four years old, conscious that there was a greater world beyond that crack, but not explorer enough to risk the penalties of transgressing that line in the concrete.

Halfway down Chapel St. to the tracks sat Falb's Cafe, a working man's bar where my father took his afternoon beer on hot summer days. He often brought me along with him and sat me at a table in the back room, the afternoon sun roasting the windows on the west wall and filtering the tubes of light that worked their way through the darkened room. I could see the cigarette smoke soaring from the tables up through those light rays and returning downward in cloud-like patterns over my arms, and I could touch them and disturb them and feel the difference in temperatures between the smoke-filled rays and the sheltered darkness of the room. We shared a waxed paper bag of potato chips. My father had his bottle of beer, I had a Tru-Ade orange drink. He drank a ratio of two to my one. We both drank straight from the bottle, my hands holding steady on the raised bumps of the bottle covered with the cold wet moisture condensing on it. We contested every day who would find the biggest chip in the bag. Somehow, even when he found it, I would get to eat it. We never stayed for more than two beers and one orange, then it was back to the house where supper would be ready by five.

My father worked in those factories although his was across town. He left home early each morning driving one of several cars that seemed to pass through the family. The one I remember distinctly was Josephine, a 1937 Dodge Coupé, black, with running boards on the sides, a two-seater with a high wobbly gear shift between the two passengers. There was a recess in the gear shift knob with a place for a picture to be attached. Patrick, one of my father's hunting dogs from between the wars, could be seen on that knob. My place in that car was the shelf in front of the rear window. I could stretch out comfortably on it and see out all the windows. I could sleep if we were returning from somewhere late at night. I don't recall ever riding on the passenger seat, because sitting there, I could not see where we were going. A unique feature in Josephine was a crank on the dashboard that when turned would allow the windshield to open slightly on the bottom edge, giving better ventilation in summer. We opened it occasionally but the windshield always leaked afterwards in wet weather.

We took that car occasionally to visit my paternal grandparents and drove a seemingly endless fifty miles north of Dayton on the major north-south artery running from Detroit to Florida, Route 25, a two-lane thoroughfare that crossed Route 40, the old National Road in Vandalia, Ohio, making it one of the true crossroads of America. We travelled up through the farmlands passing through Troy, Piqua, switching to Route 66 and carrying on through Houston (pronounced House-tun), then Fort Loramie (I dreamed of a great rampart to protect the settlers from Indian attacks), Minster, and then the family homestead on West Monroe St. in New Bremen where people who were born there still spoke German and had strange-sounding names like Fledderjohan,  Landfersich, Meisenbrink, Dietrich and Dammeyer. The names around us in Dayton had been more of an East European nature and the accents of my grandmother, a Dombrowski from Lithuania, more indecipherable when I heard them spoken with Mrs. Andretchik when they visited in each other's homes.

The common tie between these two places were the trains. A small rural line connecting a few of the farm towns in West Central Ohio provided a daily freight service. I was lucky beyond belief. The railroad ran right beside my grandmother's house and I could stand in the vacant lot between her house and the tracks and see the trains so closely that the engineer quickly became a familiar face to me. He must have been a man who liked children, because each day as he passed slowly going south he would throw candies or lollipops to the two or three kids who stood by the line. Just across the road was a dairy where the train turned off on a spur to deliver equipment or pick up milk, and on one occasion the engineer brought us ice cream from the plant. Twice we were given rides with my father and aunt in the caboose down to Minster and back, a round trip of four miles, but an adventure that seemed a lifetime in duration to me. On one run back to New Bremen, they brought us into the cab of the locomotive, a steam engine that probably finished its active days on that country line that ran from Lima each day to Minster.

                                             Patrick (1931)

George Brose on the running board of

Josephine (note the Dodge Ram hood ornament)

                           Falbs' Cafe, 77 years later and still going strong.   Now I drink the beer.

COMMENTS FROM READERS

"Your aptitude in painting a picture has put me there, seeing the 4 year old George watching his dad knock off a beer or two, seeing you riding below the back window in a time when seat belts were unknown and marveling at the magnificence of trains, experiences my own sheltered childhood didn't allow.  Thank you for laying this out for us."  Roy

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Being raised in Christian Science, my childhood was deprived of experiencing coffee drinking, let alone the consumption of alcohol.  The first time I saw a beer being drunk was 1953 when, at the age of 14, I sat at the next table to that occupied by Hank Sauer, the 1952 National League most valuable player (led the league in HRs and RBI with 37 and 121) whose baseball card was in my collection.  Long story short, 10-12 years before my mother had been the private tutor to the children of the Wrigley family which owned the island of Catalina where the family lived Nov - March before returning to Chicago.  As Bill Wrigley owned the Chicago Cubs, the town of Avalon is where the team spent it's spring training.  Mom was reliving memories of living there and treating me to the joy of spring training.  All the players lived in the Avalon Hotel and ate in its dining room.  There was Sauer, the epitome of a man's man, eating a steak and drinking a beer, unconcerned that it's consumption would cause him to burn in hell forever.    Roy (again)