peace bridge

Traveling across New York State to Toronto last weekend brought me to the Peace Bridge, one of three spanning the Niagara and up river from the Falls.

This was the day after another day of horrors in the US, a day that began with televised video of a senseless fatal shooting at a traffic stop, live streamed by the man’s fiancée with her four year-old daughter watching in the back seat, and ended with the Dallas shootings.

I began writing this post last Sunday while still in Toronto, and tried to finish multiple times but kept falling asleep on top of it. Literally.

Then early evening July 14, Bastille Day for us, le quatorze juillet for the French– just like we say 4th of July rather than Independence Day– news began to trickle in of events in Nice. No.

Friday began with more of the story being reported. No. As I was pulling out of my driveway to pick fruit for the day, the radio told me July 15 is said to be the sweatiest of the year– who knew?– it came close to it for me, 90 and sunny and humid out in the field. Picking berries in the Hudson Valley, felt very far from Nice. And yet.

Finally home and feeding the dogs around 10 that night, reports of a possible coup in Turkey. As one commentator understated, televised images of a western nation in the throes of a takeover are not seen every day. You think?

I was six the summer of 1968 so don’t remember much, except having my tonsils and adenoids removed and the sultry, talk about sweaty, D.C. summer heat. But I wonder if it felt like this, as upheaval and violence rolled through the world. Like, the world is on fire.

Following is an amalgam of the post I was writing somewhere from July 10-13, about what had happened the week following July 4, along with what’s been happening since.

The shootings in Baton Rouge and St. Paul: WTF. Like everyone else, I’m thinking when does this end? This is becoming a rhetorical question. These were policemen, after all, who should have guns, but in at least the St. Paul shooting it seems to have happened in response to Castile’s telling the officer he had a permit to carry, and then reaching for his wallet/papers was misinterpreted as reaching for a gun.

Too many firearms. We all thought Newtown had to be it: change was surely, positively going to come in the aftermath of little children being shot with their teachers in school. But no.

I don’t even know what the debate should be about now. Make it about guns, and the gun folk say we need to do the opposite of limit guns, we all need to arm to the hilt to protect ourselves. That’s after they cite the Founding Fathers on the right to bear arms, because this anachronistic comparison is so useful, and the right to bear a musket for protection in 18th-century frontier America is just like the right to bear an arsenal of assault weapons here in the 21st century.

We haven’t managed to come up with anything to steer the gun issue away from utter chaos, and this is paving the way for an array of unimaginable consequences. Days bookended by horrific shootings, televised, sometimes live. Mornings where we wake up and hear the worst mass shooting just occurred in an LGBT bar in Orlando, FL. But the wildfire spread is now furthering race divisions, and even class divisions, and it is going to be a long, hot summer.

But now to the Peace Bridge, and the tiny, comical allegory of my experience there. Construction and God knows what has rendered the approach about as confusing as it can be, with u-turns and ridiculous, circuitous on-ramps. My aunt had written to take the Queenston-Lewiston further north, but without my paying attention Google had navigated me to the Peace. It was only after several crazy turns, including one where a tractor trailer was nearly jackknifing in front of me to make a turn, that I realized at some point in the approach my phone navigation had stopped talking to me. I was getting no vocal prompts, and it left me lost.

In a rare exception I had not gone over the route or directions prior to leaving and as a result was pretty much driving blind. I hadn’t driven to Toronto in ten years, but how difficult could it be? Well, I am someone that needs to have a birds’ eye view of the route, and I need to look at a map. It orients me. I also just love maps. I came very close to going to Harvard rather than Princeton for graduate school in part as Tom Conley had recently arrived at the former, doing very cool work with literature and maps– more formally, that would be relations of space and writing in literature, cinema and cartography. An If of history for me.

But I had not looked at a map, I did not even get to re-read my aunt’s mail about the bridges, it was all I could do to get on the road sometime after 1, many hours late.

There I was about to cross over to Canada, discombobulated, disoriented, in a rental car with a great Bluetooth system but that seemed to hijack my phone’s navigation audio, and I could not get it back, and I was frustrated that I was helpless in the face of a gadget loss. Because what if my international plan didn’t pick up and I had no phone access once over the border? Bring a damn map.

At this point we’re stopped in a line of approach to another line of approach to another to the customs booths. I’m trying to figure out what happened to my navigation audio. My foot is on the brake, but this is not my car and I’m not used to the nervy brand-new brakes; my foot must have eased up ever so slightly and BAM! Into the beautiful Mercedes SUV ahead of me go I. Merde. Ontario plates, to boot. Damn.

I’m trying to put the phone down and detach myself from the seat belt to jump out, but the driver of said Mercedes is already there, examining. Tall, slender, like a tennis player maybe. He does not so much as glance at me, in my white Corolla with NY plates. He examines as I’m saying, out the window still trying to get out, so sorry!!! Is there damage?? I’m finally opening the door when he turns on his heel and gets back in his car. Huh.

I wanted to shout, half my family is Canadian! I’m not some dopey American texting and driving!! Canadians, my cousins included, tend to view Americans as the brash sibling who may have lucked out in the looks and earning categories but is not always quite there between the ears. They are often right to feel quietly superior, frankly. Eh.

Into the next corral we go and thankfully I lose the Mercedes. But then unbelievably at the final customs approach he is smack (no I didn’t hit him) in front of me again. Finally he is at the booth and I am next, then insult to injury, again distracted– no excuse but I’m just exhausted here, too little sleep and a bit too much emotional shock these past weeks– I pull RIGHT THROUGH the Stop Here sign, like I’m pulling up behind him!!! Oh no. I back up, cringing, expecting alarms to go off and agents to come running, pull me out of the car and haul me off to a soft prison term.

No such luck. I sit, now in the correct stopped position, in PARK, and watch the gesticulating arm of the Mercedes driver. I imagine he is giving the agent an earful about the American driver behind him. He is there quite awhile, no joke, and then it is my turn to pull up. I am close to tears at this point, just worn out and and expecting a terse exchange– these guys can be tough. The agent asks me how I am, and I only muster an Alright. Totally off my game. But it is standard where you headed, how long, any gifts, have a nice trip. I could be overreading here. But I think he too decided the Mercedes guy was maybe an AH.

Finally at my destination, Saturday I’m reading The Globe and Mail, getting Canadian perspective on the Dallas story. Elizabeth Renzetti‘s opinion piece most spoke to me, especially as she quotes Susan Sontag, a writer whose work I often turned to while developing and writing my doctoral thesis.

“The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence,” Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others. For Renzetti, “the darkest prophecy has come true. It doesn’t just seem like a movie: it is a movie.”

These videos could, in the best possible world, open Americans’ eyes to the cancer of race hatred and gun violence in their midst. In the best possible world, viewers might look at a four-year-old girl in a red T-shirt in the back of a car where a black man lies bleeding to death from gun wounds and think: This has got to stop. They might look at the footage of a 37-year-old black man wrestled to the ground and shot by police for the crime of selling CDs, and the subsequent video of his sobbing 15-year-old son calling “Daddy,” and think: What led us to this place? Where is the path out? Or they might think, “another day at the office,” and swipe to the next video in their feed.

Man. Harsh and spot on. It’s true, one or two views, numbness creeps in.

Renzetti concludes:

We have no map for these interactions. We’re sailing blind into margins marked “here be dragons.”By the time we do have a map, it will be obsolete. It’s tempting to look away but now of all times, it’s a luxury no one can afford.

No map. Sailing blind. Yes, and sure resonated with my mapless border crossing of the day before. Including the Mercedes guy who did not speak, much less look at me. Seems ridiculous in comparison, a Canadian-American miniscule traffic contretemps. But anywhere, anytime, making others the Other, well we have seen some pretty horrific examples of that in any number of genocides the past 100 years and more. It doesn’t spring up fully formed, mistrust and misunderstanding and fear leading to unthinkable endings, it starts at home with the one on one. Look at me, see me, hear me. We live in this world together. Gun question aside, it has got to start there, is my totally reductionist response. Start there and then let’s talk.

Oh, Nice: A beautiful city I spent a few days in many years ago, of which one of my first impressions was surprise at the rocky– smooth rocks, but still– beach. Thereafter I knew it mostly for the airport we flew in and out of when visiting the beaux-parents an hour down the coast. As a city, it is as lovely, the sky as blue, the food as good, as the photos would have you believe.

Fireworks over the Mediterranean, le quatorze juillet on the Côte d’Azur. Whether this truck attack was Isis terrorism or not remains unclear, and makes no difference at all for those who died or are horribly injured and their families.

WTF. I guess because I have this sense of the world being on fire, the line from Chris Isaak’s song about desire keeps floating in my head. The world was on fire, and no one could save me but you.

The cavalry, it’s us. We have to find our way, mapless, through these times. It is going to be a long, hot summer.

News addendum: As I was finishing up this epic post, now Sunday July 17, news that three police officers have been shot dead in Baton Rouge. No.