Toronto

Saturday April 8, 2000
2 pm
Anarchist Free Space, Toronto

After weeks of preparation, I finally get to co-facilitate a Video Activism workshop with two of my friends from the Toronto Video Activist Collective. With an unexpectedly large and enthusiastic turnout - over 20 people - we discuss the benefits and pitfalls of video for social justice movements: outreach and empowerment, versus the drain of energy and resources, and the lack of effective, direct distribution. We break down the surprisingly various subsets of video activism: witness video, documentary, campaign video, news footage, "art." We discuss several project concepts - real and theoretical - and the need for a clear sense of goals, audience, structure and deadlines. We watch several examples.

One of the points I emphasize is that video work is not quite the same as front line activism. Documenting civil disobedience is less of an immediate physical risk, requires less absolute commitment - basically an act of the brain rather than the body. If you don't step out from behind the camera occasionally, I say, and take on more active and challenging roles, you risk becoming alienated from your movement.

I have been a video activist for two years.

Sunday April 9
11 pm
Crawford Street

Me and Siue are just heading for bed, when the phone rings. It's late - who the hell is it?

Well, it's our pal Pat - and when Siue answers, he realizes that he has called the wrong number. When we're done laughing about this, he somehow lets slip that he's riding down to Washington, DC on Tuesday, and that there may be an empty seat in his friend's car.

Hmmm.

Weeks ago, I made up my mind that I would not be going to Washington for the World Bank/IMF protests on April 16. At first I had planned to drive down, and went so far as to solicit friends to come along. But I just moved back to Toronto in September, and I still didn't feel settled. Travelling like that now would be weird. I had thought about it, and decided not to go.

Besides, ther's a lot of important 'activist' stuff going on right here in Toronto - such as homeless people dying in record numbers. And gas is expensive. And I am newly unemployed, and broke.

And I definitely don't like the idea of taking a union bus down and putting around for a single day of hey-hey-ho-ho. Having failed to secure a ride to Seattle, I had watched from home as that enormous labour demonstration was dwarfed by the tenacity and organization of the Direct Action Network - and, yes, the Black Bloc anarchists, who traded broken windows for the protesters' broken bodies, which I considered entirely just.

No, if I was gonna do one of these things, I had to do it right. And having no way of making it happen, I wrote it off. But here, on my telephone, entirely by chance, is an open invitation - my passport to protest.

I tell Pat to save that seat for me. The gears are turning.

Monday April 10
10 am
Crawford Street

For all my reluctance to travel, the logistics are actually pretty easy - not much going on. A planned video release screening - a political documentary on my old alternative school, Maple Grove - has just fallen apart; so has my job, an easy but deadly boring gig at an internet company with serious organizational sickness. I have also been completely frustrated in my efforts to start a new band, so that's no obstacle either. I n the meanwhile, a job is being dangled in front of me for May: curating a screening gallery for a local video co-op. If I win that one-year contract, there will be no travel for a long time. That's the clincher - I have to go NOW!

The one Herculean obstacle to my journey is my commitment to record a video soundtrack by the end of this week. It is for an anti-chip mill piece by my friend in Tennessee - featuring their inspiring and creative organizing work against such environmentally crummy corporations as Willammette. I have to lay down five short but complex pieces on my four track. This takes me a frenzied three-hour morning to record and mix.

My last task is to get a sub for my radio show, so I call the station manager. Having not heard from him one single time since I started at the station half a year ago, I am somewhat surprised when he tells me that he doesn't like my show and he is going to pull it soon, giving no substantive criticism, constructive or otherwise. But since the station in question is being transformed by the campus Tories from genial open-format community radio to Molson-driven, tightly streamed, onegroove.com-pimping corporate wannabe, I'm hardly scandalized.

It is now time to pack.

Monday April 10
4 pm
Crawford St.

I return home from an errand. Siue tells me that Pat has phoned back - my promised ride has fallen through.

I have spent the day manically preparing to go to DC, now I'm all ready to go, but I have no way of getting there. What do I do?

The momentum of nervous energy is carrying me out the door like a tidal wave. I have to go. I have to. Commercial bus? That would be admitting defeat, and anyway I'm broke. Bicycle? I would have to clear 150 km a day after four years of utter sloth. Hitch-hiking? For some reason I'm feeling paranoid about that.

That leaves only one option. I will travel to Washington DC on a freight train.

Monday April 10
10:30 pm
Vineland, Ontario

I arrive at my mom's place - stopping for the night on my way to the border. Mom feeds me tomato soup and grilled cheese while I formulate my strategy.

For years I have read, planned and discussed freight hopping, and in '98 I tried to do it, several times, to no avail (see SJ #1). Now is my chance to do it, and do it right.

You don't train hop with expensive equipment, unless you want to die. So I have left my video camera at home. This is fine with me - no third-person journalist-observer shtick this time. I am going as an ACTIVIST. Total commitment. Something I've never done before.

I spend hours poring over my information resources - a four-year-old 'hobo bible' given to me by my train-hopping friend in St. John's; a sketchy train map photocopied from the Toronto Reference Library; and a road atlas. I am playing a game of probability - does this track still run? Are the schedules even close? A lot can change in four years. I rule out hopping from Buffalo when I find it in a list of the seven toughest yards in America - a bad place for an amateur.

Then I find a crew change in Salamanca - a mysterious town about 100 miles south of Buffalo. After poking around on the internet a while, I have my plan. I will take the bus to Salamanca, and catch a crew-change, hopefully all the way to Baltimore.

I explain all this to my mom, who listens with quiet interest as I describe the vagaries of hobo strategy as they exist in my ill-informed brain. Eventually - I think I was describing how not to get your legs cut off by the train - she sighs and says "I think the less I know about this the better." We both go to bed.