A Change in Scenery, A Change in Attitude

I was out walking yesterday, enjoying the incredible day we were having, clear blue skies, temps just under 80 degrees, when my thoughts turned to how just one year ago, on that very day, I was still living in California, and recalled those hot summer days, the temperatures in Bakersfield stuck at 115 – 120, of how we would still have another good two months to go before these hot summer days moved into what we called “paradise season”…the cooler, 80 degree weather of ‘fall’, november and December, when low 70’s, mid 60’s temps would move in for several months and make living in the central valley bearable. The long summers of Bakersfield, the Central Valley, WERE long and hot, hot, hot. And to make matters worse, Bakersfield held the undisputed title of “worst air quality in the NATION”. Anyways, as I breathed in the fresh clean air here in the NW yesterday, and today, and everyday now, as I walked through the lovely neighborhood we now live in, inhaling the heavy scent of pine, I also breathed out a long sigh of relief, to be here, now, at last. All things DO come to an end. If I were to list how many times I would tell myself “this too shall pass”, that list would be miles and miles long. But it gave me comfort and made it easier to move from day to day over the years.

When I read of the major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area yesterday it brought back the memories of those times… the always present, nagging ‘knowing’ that at any time, the BIG one could hit! Knowing first hand how everything can change in a heartbeat, in a split second, and be FOREVER changed, I also breathe a sigh we are now far removed from California. Aside from earthquake danger, we in Bakersfield lived under the fear the Lake Isabella Dam would breach and cover the city in 30 ft of water within hours. In my googling I’d read funds were not available for the needed repairs, how studies from 5 or 6 yrs earlier (at that time) had detected serious repairs being needed but that no work was slated on the dam for several more years. I did read, more recently this article on the Sacramento Corp of Engineers website:
“An operating restriction is currently in place, limiting the lake’s normal storage capacity, to reduce the risk of the seepage and seismic concerns while a permanent solution is investigated. USACE has implemented increased surveillance and monitoring; stockpiling of emergency materials; warning sirens in the town of Lake Isabella; installation of additional instrumentation for monitoring; and continued public outreach with Kern County and the local public. In 2013, following the signing of the Record of Decision in December 2012, the Corps entered the Pre-Construction Engineering and Design phase of the project. A number of procedural tasks must still be completed in preparation of physical construction, which is scheduled to begin in 2017.”

So it appears nothing is currently being done PHYSICALLY to fix the problems at the dam, since discoveries were made in 2006. The Corp is just taking measures to lessen the damage IN THE EVENT OF, and IN THE AFTERMATH OF, the dams breaching. Even living in the SW of Bakersfield, where I read we would have a good two hrs of warning if the damn breached, trying to plan an ‘escape’ route was an exercise in futility. The panic caused by such an event, from ANY major catastrophic event, would make usingthe freeways/and/or any singular roads, unusable. I have to believe most Bakersfieldians are either totally ignorant of the looming fiasco hanging, literally, over their heads (the dam is due east, up in much higher elevations), or have adopted a zen attitude that allow them to ignore its presence.

I think that when living in California one must live in a constant state of denial. Live in the moment, which in itself a good philosophy but considering the ramifications long term it isn’t always the best solution, well its NO solution at all except in preserving ones state of mind… the Buddhists feel when one can’t change a situation one CAN learn to change ones attitude towards such a situation, in order to preserve peace of mind. Unfortunately I was not always very good at that, I am more a realist, what gives ME peace and optimism is knowing I’ve taken steps towards prevention of, and minimalizing any damage done, in the aftermath of, any emergency. THAT gives ME peace of mind.

To that end all the years we resided in Cali I was in the habit of collecting water in used milk gallon jugs, adding a few drops of bleach, and storing in the garage, in accumulating Emergency Food stores, large containers of your basics, including medical supplies, batteries, radios, books on surviving crisis or catastrophic events, you name it. I had quite a little section of our garage organized and well stocked for just such an event. Rod and Corey would laugh at me, all my ongoing endeavors, and at how I was addicted to a show on tv called Preppers! Well scoff if they will, I always felt he who laughs last, laughs best. LOL I actually learned a lot from these often overly zealous folks but a good bunch of it was things I’d never thought about and that could prove helpful at some time, when needed.

I haven’t felt the need to watch this program (is it still even on?) nor to further my emergency stores (though what I DID collect is still in storeage in my cellar) since returning to the NW. Somehow just being here, with access to more ‘open’ roads, being in the ‘vicinity’ of our lake cabin, amongst family and friends, has all contributed to the sense of calmness and optimism I was lacking the past ten years.

All this isn’t to say our time in Cali was depressing and fraught with fear, LOL, because it wasn’t! I have many, and mostly wonderful, memories of our years in the Golden State. I felt grateful, for one, that Rods job allowed us to travel throughout the State, Bakersfield was a central hub really, within two hrs drive in most cases, of the amazing beaches that line the California coast, the attractions of Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco,Santa Barbara, as well as the smaller beach communities I especially liked to spend time in, such as Pismo Beach, Summerland, and Morro Bay. Rods 'area' extended into Nevada, where we would spend several days a month when Diverified's crews were put to work there. I strangely enjoyed the surreality of Las Vegas...talk about an "escape", LOL. The State of California is beautiful to behold, the many natural delights it has been gifted with, though endangered, remain for most to enjoy. I simply found the California of ‘today’ a much different version of the California I visited in the past and that I spent an entire summer exploring (backpacking) back in 1970. But then what hasn’t changed since the 70’s, other than the state of war this country still finds itself engaged in. Besides, my reasons for being there, and my state of mind, were very different then.

As Jean Paul Sarte once said,“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”

The Prince of Pot returns to Canada

A friend of mine, Marc Emery, has finally completed his 5 yr sentence for selling marijuana seeds. Marc is a fellow Canadian,who had been extradicted to the US from Canada (B.C.) to serve time in a US prison, and though we’ve never met, we became correspondants and ultimately friends not long after he entered the US prison system. I’d somewhat followed his case while we were living in California, having come across the story on some news site (Canadian no doubt). He was and had been for many years, well known in Canada as the Prince of Pot, for his outspoken, direct and in-your-face crusade to legalize marijuana. I read that in the presentencing hearing, Emery’s lawyer, Mark Troberman told the judge and courtroom "The only thing that makes Mr. Emery unique or different from most of these other seed sellers is that Marc donated his proceeds to help fund lawful marijuana legalization efforts throughout the United States and Canada.” Marc himself estimates he contributed, across the border, roughly $4.5 million in seed revenues from his Cannabis Culture shop, to help pay for drug-law challenges between 1995 and 2005. If you are unfamiliar with Marc Emery, Canada’s leading and most steadfast activist in the fight to legalized marijuana, you can google him for all kinds of information.

Marc was first sent to D. Ray James Correctional Facility in Louisiana, the facility is designated low-security for INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) ‘deportable alien’ inmates. It is, in fact, run and controlled like a medium-high security prison. But in regular BOP medium-security prisons, you get a two-bunk cell to share; here in this “low”-security prison, 60 men share one big dorm with no privacy. About two years later Marc was transferred to Yazoo Medium Security Prison in Mississippi after his applications to be transferred back to Canada to serve his sentence (as many Canadians are entitled to do in accordance with a Treaty between the US and Cdn Govt’s) were denied.

I first wrote him at D.Ray James, a letter of ‘solidarity’ more or less. Living the ‘prison’ world as we (my husband son and I) had been doing for around five years at that point I knew getting letters in the mail was the highlight of any inmates day, and that he would likely appreciate all and any support. I imagine being extradicted, to serve five years in a foreign country’s prison system (even though that foreign country is ‘next door’) would have to add just one more level of anxiety, to an already over-stressed and anxiety ridden man in this situation, to anyone actually, experienced or not, with the prison journey.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised, since my sons arrest and ten year foray in the US prison system, since my eyes were opened (my ‘enlightenment’ if you will) to the broken, corrupt and draconian prison system our taxpayers (mostly through ignorance) and the Govt’s ‘drug war’ supports, I have been a strong supporter of legalizing marijuana, decriminalizing it, for ending the U.S. Govt’s failed “war on drugs”, so was sincerely sympathetic and supportive of this man and what he stood for. The US Prison system holds more drug offenders, serving overly long sentences, than it does convicted felons of any other crimes, with convicted marijuana ‘criminals’ filling more beds than any other. The ‘politics’ behind the surging levels of marijuana encarcerations and our prison populations exceeding 137% of capacity, after 40 years and 1 Trillion being spent on the failed ‘war on drugs’ being the reason….cha ching, cha ching.

Marc had, to all accounts and purposes, always been fully transparent in his business dealings in Canada, in his ‘head shop’ business in downtown Vancouver, his Cannabis Culture magazine and website, and in his mail order seed selling business. The Canadian Govt was fully aware of Marcs business enterprises and politics, and gladly accepted and spent the taxes he paid on his profits, most of those profits having been donated to efforts aimed at furthering the legalizing of marijuana in the US and Canada. The US Drug Czar however saw things differently and placed him on their ‘most wanted’ list, Marc was ultimately arrested by the DEA for selling seeds to a US customer. The arrest and prosecution was mostly all political, as immediately following Marcs guilty verdict and extradition papers being signed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency hailed his capture as a “significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the legalization movement.”

The Prosecutor in Marcs case, John McKay, has, four years ago, taken a 180 degree turn re his stance on the drug war, having come out and stated that "he has come to see the futility of continuing to enforce marijuana prohibition. "As Emery's prosecutor and a former federal law-enforcement official, I'm not afraid to say out loud what most of my former colleagues know is true: Our marijuana policy is dangerous and wrong and should be changed through the legislative process to better protect the public safety." Marijuana prohibition "has utterly failed," McKay concluded. Failed, yes, and in the process destroyed countless lives of young (and old) men and women, and the fabric of the lives of their family and friends.

I can’t even remember what I wrote in my first letter to Marc, other than, in introducing myself, I recounted "our story" re Coreys arrest and lengthy sentence for a first time, non-violent marijuana offender and my own thoughts on America’s ‘drug war’, the draconian and overly severe sentences imposed on all drug offenders (including first time, low level offenders) and wished him well. Within two weeks when I opened my mailbox I found a letter in response from Marc and we became regular correspondents from then till his release just last week, August 17th. At some point, I think after he was transferred to Yazoo Medium Security Prison in Mississippi, he had access to an inmate email service (Corrlinks, the same private ISP Lompoc Prison used and that Corey and I used daily his last two years at Lompoc, Ca) and we corresponded in that fashion thereafter. After he was released from prison, about a month ago, he was first sent to an ICE Detention Center to await his deportation to Canada, and had access to a cellphone, so we talked and texted a few times while he was there. He was clearly enjoying himself and in great spirits! SO excited, as you can imagine, to soon be back with his lovely wife Jodie, on Canadian soil and rejoin the movement he was perhaps due more credit towards advancing than any other pot activist in the past twenty or more years in Canada.

I always enjoyed our conversations and our correspondence, I found Marc highly intelligent, well read and educated, world travelled, witty, clever and v funny. Also possessed of the most positive attitude, likeable personality, and I learned first hand, highly exuberant quality in conversation. The man can tell a STORY! The Canadian Govt will have their hands full going into this next election with Marc supporting and campaigning for the opposing Liberal Party (led by Justin Trudeau) who have taken on support for the Legaization of marijuana as a key issue. Marc has vowed to seek political revenge against the Conservative Govt for its role in his extradition.

He also has a university tour booked in Canada starting in Jan. 2015 and will begin a 30-city Canadian tour on Sept.10, 2015 continuing until Oct. 17, the day before the next scheduled federal election. He also has invitations to speak in several EU countries this and next year, many of which we spoke about. Good luck to you Marc, my thoughts and prayers go with you.

"If I had to sum up Friendship in one word, it would be Comfort". ~Terri Guillemets

“OK, whats your story folks?”

That’s actually the first thing the young US Customs Officer asked my husband and I one evening we were crossing the border into the US from Canada. We had been returning from visiting my mother one evening in the nearby town of Osoyoos, B.C. for a few hours on one of our twice yearly trips up from California. This was about a year ago now but the incident came back to me this morning, in the wee hours as I first awoke. Perhaps reading the recent news articles regarding the “militarization” of local police forces had something to do with this being in my stream of consciousness, as things heat up in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting and killing of an unarmed young black man by a police officer. But, to return to MY ‘story’, this one particular evening of which I write, Rod and I had been up from California for a week, to relax at our cabin and visit old friends in our local community of Oroville, just miles from the US/Canada border, where our cabin sits on a nearby fishing lake. It has been our retreat for the past 13 years or so, we kept the property after selling our Oroville home and relocating in Taft, California after Corey was sentenced and designated to Taft C.I. to serve his decade long sentence for selling marijuana. Every year while living in Cali we’d make two trips up, spring and fall, to check on our property, make any needed repairs, do some maintenance, and go up to visit my folks, both now elderly. My father has since passed away, from a stroke, just 3 years after we moved to California in fact, so we’d make a point to go see mom, have a good catch up, these few opportunities we had. My folks resided (and I was raised in) the small town of Osoyoos, just four miles from the US Border, and Oroville, where I had lived for a good 34 yrs with my husband and family prior to Coreys arrest, was only four miles south of the border.

This particular evening as we were clearing US Customs, as we returned from just such a catch up visit with my mother, having handed over our I.D.’s, and answered the standard questions from the Officer, he told us to pull our vehicle over and go inside. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it had been a while since the last time, a few years perhaps. We did as instructed and went inside the large, multimillion dollar complex (completed about 12 or 13 years ago to replace the two small stations, US and Canadian, that had existed up till then). We sat and watched several officers busy at their desks, some chatting with other officers, and after about twenty minutes one gets up from his desk (one who had been chatting and laughing with another officer after taking a phone call, perhaps from the outside Officer in the booth, in regards to his sending us inside?) slowly swaggered up to the counter, looks at us, smirks and says “ok, whats your story folks?” Whats our STORY??? Are you kidding me? We gave our names, where we were from, where we had just come from and why. He then asked a few other questions including did we have more than $1000 on us to which we said no (even though it is legal for us to carry just under $10 THOUSAND dollars with us across the border without reporting it). He then said to sit back down and wait as our vehicle was thoroughly searched and proceeded to call up two Officers to do the deed. At this point I was surprised he wasn’t having us both strip searched! We were clearly ‘under suspicion’ and being treated like we were hiding something.

It turned out this particular evening one of the other Officers in attendance, and who had come up to the far end of the counter, was someone we knew from Oroville. We had known her many years, and she had been a US Customs officer at this port for many years. After the Officers left to search our vehicle and we’d sat back down she came out from behind the counter to say hello and gave us both big hugs in greeting, asking us how we were, that it had been a while since we’d last seen each other. The other Officer who had so roguishly questioned us, who seemed bent on making the lives of two senior citizens a misery for the time he had them in his ‘control’ watched on, seemingly in surprise. We chatted with our friend for about twenty minutes, until the men searching our vehicle returned with a clean bill of health. It was only then the Officer ‘in charge’ smiled and said something to the tune of “OK folks, thank you very much, you can go now, have a nice evening”. His manner seemed apologetic almost, and I have to wonder what conversation took place, if any, between he and our friend after we had been ‘let go’. And I am certain, had she NOT been in attendance that evening, he would never have changed his gestapo behavior to that of the friendly, respectful, public servant that he was!

It was after Coreys marijuana arrest that Rod and I began to be routinely pulled aside and searched whenever we crossed the border from Canada, almost every single time we returned from visiting my parents in Osoyoos (we were never searched on the Canadian side upon entering). Mind you it wasn’t that often we were able to get up there to visit, our lives were crazy busy and stressful at that time, maybe just two or three times during that first year of Coreys prosecution. Thereafter, twice a year, spring and fall, for the next ten years we were living in California and returning to our cabin to make sure all was secure there. Those earlier years we’d be up most times the Officers we’d get at the checkpoints were members of the Oroville community, someone we’d know, be acquainted with, and they’d be apologetic in asking us to pull over into the bay for a vehicle search. In recent years there seem few ‘locals’ that work this huge new Port of Entry, I’m sure,‘by design’.

Anyways, clearly our I.D.’s and licence plates were flagged in their computer data base. It was annoying but not unexpected. Though we always wondered how stupid they must think we must be, that we would even consider ‘smuggling’ anything (!!!) across the border with our sons recent arrest and prosecution for selling marijuana! Not that we’d ever smuggle anything regardless of the current situation. We’ve crossed that border thousands of times and never broken any laws.

I speak of these events now because as I awoke this morning it was with thoughts in my head of how simple and uncomplicated life was not so many years ago, and how it has changed in such a small amount of time. Whistleblower Edward Snowdens revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance of our citizenry, data bases collecting and storing every little bit of information possible about all of us, to be used against us how and when? The ‘militarization’ of even small and local police forces, armed to the teeth and using force as their first answer to community conflict. I can still remember riding my bicycle across this same US/Canada border crossing as a 14 or 15 year old, often with another young friend, off on a days adventure, biking to the small town of Oroville, ‘just across the border’ (never even really thinking about it being in another country!) to buy some small item or just have a “cherry coke” made up at one of their local drugstore counters (something OUR drugstores didn’t have and that we thought were pretty cool)…no proof of I.D. was even required of us to enter the US, or to return to our home turf of Canada. I know!! That is Unimaginable today, a mere 50 years later. Most all the Customs Officers back then, at each small border station, were long time members of their communities, known and respected, and treated incoming visitors to their country in kind. There were of course requests to ‘please open your trunk’ for random inspections, and I’m sure on more than one occasion someone had merely “forgotten” to declare a few items that would have put them over their dollar import ‘limit’, and who then had to just go inside to pay the ‘duty fees’ before being allowed to proceed home. Today such a person would no doubt be arrested and prosecuted, maybe even do jail time, for ‘lying’ to a US Govt Official!!

I have to worry about the world my children, and my grandchildren, are now living in, and how my grandchildren, and their children, will never know any different. How they will never know real privacy, or the security and freedoms that were guaranteed by our Constitution, our civil rights stated within crumbling faster than we can recall what they even were. It truly IS a Brave New World. It is the ‘brave’ I wonder about, and how and why it will be necessary to be so.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” ~Abraham Lincoln