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.