the cassandra pages

At a Safe Distance

Beneath a photograph of the refugee camp at Calais, France, known as "the Jungle", in yesterday's New York Times, this caption appeared:

"The squalid camp, growing and festering for over a year, has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis."

The sentence was a quote from the article itself. This morning, the first thing I saw when I checked my Instagram feed, were the photograph and caption, posted by Teju Cole, with the following comment (quoted here with his permission:)

Sometimes it's not the photo, it's the caption. Sometimes it's not the caption, it's a single word. What work is the word "festering" doing here? The caption is an excerpt from the article, which you can find yourself. "Squalid" is permissible in context but imperfect, but there are at least two problems with the framing of Calais as a "symbol of Europe's faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The first is that this is a crisis for those who must leave home, not for those who receive or refuse them. Europe does not have a migration crisis. The second problem is that Europe is not a country. There's a reason there's no "Jungle" in Germany, and there's an opposite reason there isn't one in Switzerland. Whatever is happening in Calais is about French policy and British policy. Italy is another thing. Hungary is a different thing. But that's all about the framing.
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What I keep coming back to is that word "festering." I've heard it before. What festers? What instinctual response do we have to that which festers? I think I know the kind of work the word is supposed to be doing. That work is all about mislocating the crisis. And when the crisis is mislocated, when it is about those who must witness the crisis rather than those who must undergo it, then other actions, otherwise unimaginable, become compulsory. After all, what is one to do with people or places that are "festering"?

[Later this morning, I note that the caption has been changed to read "The squalid camp has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The text remains the same in the article itself; the New York Times does follow TC (one of their own critics and authors) on Instagram.]

What, then, is actually "festering?" In my opinion, it is our hatred and fear of "the other" who will somehow take away or undermine what we feel is rightly "ours" -- our jobs, our health, our security, our resources, our prosperity...and, if we dig deeper, our very whiteness and privilege: god forbid, one of them might intermarry with one of our children.

Well, you know what? That's exactly what I did. 35 years ago I married the son of a Syrian immigrant and a refugee from the Armenian genocide. And that changed forever my ability to be indifferent to or distant from those who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, American, Protestant, English-speaking, Euro-centric...you can fill in the adjectives yourself. I was already a young person leaning in the direction of difference; I was curious and open. But I had not yet been broken open. And if we carefully defend ourselves forever, if we hide behind words and never take action, our hearts will never be broken and we will never truly understand or help the other out of that brokenness. We will simply sit at a safe distance, maybe spouting outrage and sadness at the world's ills, but our empathy will be temporary and we will not have to change, grow, or give anything that is an actual sacrifice of self. Outrage is, frankly, cheap. My question to you is, what are you willing to do?

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Language does matter: I agree. We have seen it at work in this deplorable election season, both for good and for ill. We are not, in general, careful with it, but taking great care with words is supposed to be the job of journalists, as well as speechwriters.

I would like to recommend another article, "What Does it Mean to Help One Family?", about the Canadian response to the plight of the refugees, which shows the complexities of both immigrating and helping. We will be welcoming a refugee family through the cathedral sometime in the coming year; at the present time they are still mired in paperwork in Beirut. This will not be the first time I've tried to help people making a new life in a new country, nor will it be the last, and every single time I know that I am not doing enough. I feel compelled because of my parents in-law, who had been helped by others and who never forgot that. Their story changed me: for their sake, as well as my own conscience, I cannot turn away. And then I became an immigrant too -- an immigrant with money, relative security, and language skills, to be sure -- but I found out firsthand what it means to leave your past behind, with all its practical and emotional connections and knowledge, and have to begin again to build a new life in a new place.

We all need to be more careful with the language we use. We cheapen our empathy by spouting  platitudes, we speak when we ought to be listening, we use words for effect and shock value that linger and cause great harm, and in this word-intensive internet environment, we invest a stream of empty words with weight as if they represent acts of actual sacrifice or self-emptying.

Words matter; they descend from our heads to our hearts and continue to live there, as a sort of compost for our emotions and actions. In the heart, certain things fester, and others flower; which way it goes is ultimately up to us.

Peak: A Fall Trek up Noonmark

We had intended to climb Noonmark Mountain, in the Adirondacks, on our anniversary (August 1), following our tradition of going out somewhere in nature for an adventure on that day. But circumstances got in the way and we ended up putting it off...until yesterday. And what a glorious day it was to be in the mountains: the autumn foliage at its peak, the air cool but not freezing, the sky absolutely blue. (The only problem was that my camera battery was dead, so I had to forget about taking photos -- all these pictures are by Jonathan.)

 

We hadn't bargained on quite such a challenging climb. Noonmark is not one of the highest peaks in the Adirondack Park, but it has one of the best 360-degree views from its bare summit. Still, it's 3,556 feet (1,084 metres) high, and the Stimson Trail to the summit, which we took, is steep, especially in the last couple hundred metres, and includes high rock steps and sections of exposed, bare rock.

We were glad we'd brought trekking poles and had worn hiking boots with good ankle support. Although we shed progressive layers of clothing, there was frost in shadowed places on the ground as we approached the summit, and ice in the little pools on the rock.

On the way up, we met another couple about our age coming down, who said they had stopped short of the summit and decided to just enjoy the views from there. "You know, it gets pretty dicey -- a couple of ladders, and a lot of scrambling over bare rock," the man said, shaking his head. "Yes - these are pretty old knees!" said the woman, with a sweet, resigned smile. I'm pretty stubborn, and I'm afraid this exchange just stiffened my determination to make it all the way up. As we climbed, the trail did get steeper and harder, but it was also beautiful and well-maintained: narrow ridgelines along rock walls, bare rock ledged without handholds that required some thought to scale, decisions between going straight up the difficult rocky steps or the edges filled with branches and roots, and enticing lookouts on Giant Mountain to the east, and the high peaks to the northwest that gave a hint of what we'd see from the summit. Meanwhile we observed the progression from a climax northern forest of beech-hemlock-maple to hemlocks and cedars, with more tundra vegetation like lichens, and finally krummholz, the stunted,wind-pruned pines of high altitude.

After climbing over some tall boulders, we emerged from the trees onto bare rock: we had made it!

We'd brought a lunch, and sat to eat it on the sun-warmed, worn, pinkish granite, sparkling with mica chips and adorned with round green and white lichens.

When we arrived, a high school group from Ontario was also on the top, talking excitedly, but soon their teacher sent them to each find a spot by themselves, and they sat for fifteen or twenty minutes in complete silence, so we did too, looking out over the high peaks of the Adirondack range and the vivid array of trees below us.

 

In spite of growing up in central New York State, my family never came up to the mountains in the north, and then I spent my adulthood in the broad valley between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Whites of New Hampshire, visiting both often. I've only started to get to know the Adirondacks, mountains of quite different character, in the past few years. Since I stopped downhill skiing, due to a knee injury twenty years ago, I've deeply missed being on the tops of mountains, especially in the winter: the solitude; the raw beauty; that particular, crystalline quality of air.

Jonathan attended the North Country School in Lake Placid for several years, and he had climbed a number of these peaks as a child, ridden through them on horseback, gone apple-picking and hauled sap out of the woods for maple sugaring. At his request, I photographed him with Cascade Mountain and its dramatic rock slides behind him: a favorite of those early days. He told me that when you hit the rock on the top of Cascade, it sounds hollow.

The father of a close friend (who we visited in the previous post) was the author of the Time-Life book on the Adirondack Park; reading it a couple years ago reminded J. of his early love for these mountains, and piqued my interest in exploring more. A while ago, we met our close friends Dave, Rachel and Lucy near Lake Placid, and went for a much less demanding but beautiful hike across the valley from Noonmark. With our other friends we had done easier hikes, and swum in the ice-cold Cascade Lakes, but this was the first time Jonathan and I had climbed one of the big peaks together.

Soon the school group departed and for an hour we had the summit to ourselves.

And then it was mid-afternoon, and time to start our descent. Going up, you have the challenge of climbing and all its aerobic demands, but in the other direction, you have the slowness of picking your way down steep ledges and stone steps, and rocky, rooty ground that's covered with fallen leaves, but the worst is the ever-increasing pain in your knees. Poles help, but this descent was steep and long, and by halfway my skiing-damaged knees were really yelling at me; meanwhile there was less and less light on the trail so we needed to keep moving. We were glad when we finally came out of the woods and reached the parking area. Soon the full moon rose over the Ausable River, and kept us company all the way back to Montreal.

This morning, I was less stiff than I thought I'd be, with minor blisters on both big toes, and the knee, which hadn't swollen, had stopped complaining. Maybe we're not too old for this sort of craziness, after all.

All photographs (c) 2016 Jonathan Sa'adah

Lyre, Lake

When I was a young girl, my grandfather, who had a real estate and auction business and was also a skilled woodworker, gave me a pair of antique Hitchcock chairs. They were small, with low, caned seats suitable for a child, and traditional stenciled decoration, but instead of fruit or flowers, my chairs had a lyre in the center: I was the musical child. For almost sixty years, those chairs have been with me, too small and delicate to be practical, but impossible to part with because they were such an early affirmation from someone who didn't need words to tell me he loved and knew me. The cane seats have been replaced once, but the stencils are in remarkably good condition. I ate my lunch today, as I usually do, seated on one of those chairs, with its golden lyre pressed against my back.

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We slept in that bedstead with the carved lyre last week, while visiting friends on Lake Champlain, in a small old town that used to be the summer home of affluent families from New York City, as well as longtime local families. The town has the mansions and summer hotel one might expect, but the storefronts along the one main street are mostly empty now, the hotels and inns turned into rental apartments, or even torn down. So, the town and the lakeshore were quiet except for migrating flocks of Canada geese and smaller groups of ducks, or the occasional hawk or vulture or heron overhead, and the lake itself was calm, with long ripples instead of waves that caught the light and slowly progressed from the opposite shore towards us, as if a long knife had sliced the water at an angle from below.

Our hosts took us for a short but steep climb up a nearby mountain, to a rock outcrop that gave a panoramic view of the high peaks, the lake, and Vermont's Green Mountains beyond it; we lounged on the warm rock, eating apples and almonds, while their basset hound crunched acorns with his strong teeth. My knees were grateful for collapsible hiking poles, especially on the descent, but we were happy to find we were in pretty good shape for hiking.

 

Later, we sat on the porch in sweaters, drinking vodka and eating homemade gravlax, watching the lake until the sun set, and then ate dinner at the kitchen table, and talked into the night.

Camel's Hump, in Vermont, seen from the New York side of the lake.

In the morning, a long breakfast of eggs and Montreal bagels with labneh and grilled peppers, another walk, and then a slow drive back to the city, along the lake for a while. We stopped at a farmstand where workers -- there to dig potatoes? pick cabbages? apples? -- were sleeping in the grass under the trees, and again for lunch at a diner in a deserted village, bought some apples at an orchard, and made it back to Montreal in time for choir rehearsal, feeling like we had been away far longer than we actually had.