Red Zone Reflections – Part 2

Posted by Mika on Jul 1, 2010 in International Summits | 0 comments

I feel kind of like a dumbass writing about the G8, now that I’m back in Toronto and every other person I run into wants to show me their home video of some hippie getting hit in the face with a baton, but hey… when I learned I could only cover one conference I picked the G8 for a reason. Up in Muskoka, shit was happening too! There were police… I saw some helicopters…it’s strawberry season… why are you asking me all these questions? I imagine my dilemma is similar to those of police officers who returned from Huntsville to their home stations in Kenora and Moosonee and had to swap stories with the guys who were sent to Toronto. “Oh, yeah, the G8 was great, I rode around the woods on an ATV and this guy Steve from Sudbury, he brought a guitar, how was the G20? …. what do you mean, they were throwing poop?”

So, I left off with my sister and boyfriend abandoning me in the Red Zone with an earthquake to go back to Toronto and make like employed people, yes? Well a few days alone in a cordoned off security zone kind of fucked with my head a little. What would you do if you were alone in a cottage on an empty lake for a few days? Be naked, am I right? WRONG! You constantly think about being naked as you watch the sky in fear of low flying military surveillance aircraft! I couldn’t go swimming in a one piece without six dudes in berets asking me for some ID.

Thursday I largely spent hiding in my cottage, feeling twitchy and eating pie. At some point in the afternoon, it stopped raining, and feeling I needed to legitimize my existence in some way, I got on my bike and went in search of some protesters. I never found any. When she left on Wednesday, my sister reported back one Buddhist guy on Highway 60 surrounded by three cops, by Thursday, even that guy was gone, so I hung out with my only friends, the cops.
They were just tickled to see me. No really, they were. They were just chatting about this and that and how nice the area was, and how excited they were to be doing the G8 and I explained to them what a blog was… it was a good time. One kept offered to take pictures of me posing with the other cops, and she was really helpful until I asked if she could take a photo of her colleague pretending to pistol whip me. After that I went home and watched the army playing with their boats on the lake. They kept trying to get air across each other’s wake. Cute.

Friday was finally conference day, and the day my dad dropped in to keep me company/avoid the G20 while he could. He wanted to go through some serious security to get in, but apparently he was just sort of waved on because the police officer on duty needed to pee. True story! Since the security was clearly not actually a problem, we thought it would be cool to go into Huntsville and buy some cabbage. Downtown Huntsville has always been a little precious. Besides the two hundred odd police officers squished into a three block radius, summit day was no exception. It was like a street festival, full of clowns and G8 themed desserts. All the journalists I saw in town were super bummed that they couldn’t find any protest action. I pointed out the fry truck where the protesters were supposed to be, but there were only a few kids there, and they were clearly on their way home from a swimming lesson and not about to flip over the capitalist fry truck and torch the deep fryer. I was a bit excited that night when I was walking my dog along some of the roads around Pen Lake and a police car stopped by and warned me not to go any farther.

“Why?” I asked, hoping against hope that the answer would have something to do with confiscated explosives.
“There have been some sightings of a bear around here.” the police man said very seriously, as if there aren’t bear sightings every day. “We’re shooting to scare it away.”
“Ok… great,” I said… ready to go on my merry way.
“Don’t worry, Miss,” they continued “We’re not shooting at the bear.” Somehow I thought saying “I don’t care, please, shoot the bitch” would make me look mean. So I just nodded solemnly as they zoomed away.
It only got stupider from there. On Saturday, I was wracked with guilt about my weeklong diet of pie and went for a run. After getting stopped by the army, then the cops in search of ID, I kept on saying that I lived close by and would be finished the run in ten minutes, by which I clearly meant thirty, to account for my liberal walking breaks. About fifteen minutes after I left the checkpoint, and was running down a rather steep downhill, a siren beeps at me and I nearly fall on my face. Then a megaphone appears at the window of the police car. “It’s been more than ten minutes, RUN FASTER!”

That was the only time during the G8 summit that the police was in any danger of dealing with violence.

Related posts:

1. Red Zone Reflections