Climbing the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt

I’ve been bogged down in research for our next travel destination, so the next post on ol’ Malcolm – aka Dr. Feelgood – will have to wait.

In the meantime, here’s a travel story from November, 1980.

There were signs all around the base blocks: It Is Strictly Forbidden to Climb the Pyramids.

It was also Strictly Forbidden to do a lot of things, but there were a lot of men in flowing white robes ready to offer young backpackers a variety of opportunities.

“HelloEnglish! HelloMister! YouWantToBuyCamelYouWantToBuyHorse?” The Sphinx, eternally mute and stately, had had to endure these men for centuries, but I was getting tired of them after five minutes.

I knew they’d already stuffed their pockets with tourist dollars the whole day, and I’d be damned if I was going to be just another camel-riding tourist at the Pyramids.

In the end I spent six months in the Middle East without once getting on a camel. I regret that now.

But after paying a few Egyptian piastres to an unlicensed guide and crawling behind him through a narrow opening inside to marvel at how completely underwhelming the interior is – no brilliant heiroglyphics, dusty mummies, carved wooden chests, or gold-covered masks here – I’m glad I didn’t just leave to go back to my Cairo hostel.

I knew I had one chance in my life to do this.

The shadow was getting longer on the east side of the Pyramids as I looked both ways, placed both palms face down into the sandy grit covering the first block, hopped and swung my left leg around high to the left, and hoisted myself up.

Suddenly I felt exhilarated at the thought I was on my way to the top of one of the world’s most ancient free-standing structures, for centuries a magnet for travellers, grave-robbers, mystics, poets and archaeologists, the subject of endless speculation as to how they were built so many thousands of years ago, and until 1889 when the Eiffel Tower was completed, the tallest thing man had ever built.

I surged ahead, hauling my body up to the second level.

HelloEnglish!HelloMister! YouComeDownItIsForbiddenToClimb!

I turned around to see a man in a dirty yellow robe waving his arms in the air as he yelled at me to get off the Pyramid.

Meeting him sort of half-way, I jumped down from the second block to the first.

Crouching low to be at eye level I said to him: Many people have climbed the Pyramids.  I can see how people have carved their names in the blocks up there!

He didn’t understand me, or pretended not to, because he kept on waving his arms at me to get down on to the ground.  It is forbidden to climb!  It is forbidden to climb! he wailed.

Suddenly I remembered where I’d been over the previous five months and what I’d picked up on the way.  A few hundred Italian Lira. Portuguese Escudos, Spanish Pesetas, Greek Drachma, French Francs, a few Swiss Franc centimes, German Pfennigs, Dutch Gilders – even Yugoslavian Dinars and Swedish Kroner -  all sitting loose in one of the pockets of my canvas and leather day pack, the leftovers from a few months of waiting in train stations, checking out of youth hostels, museum entrance fees, ferry rides, buses, food stalls and more than a few bar bills.

It’s what you gathered without even trying in the days before we traded in all that colour and variety for the cold, antiseptic uniformity of the world’s most soulless currency, the euro.

I’d wanted to leave the coins in the youth hostel, but was wary of thieves, so I always carried them around with me.

Stuffing my hand in the bag and pulling out a fistful of coins, I took a few out and handed them to him.

He looked at me incredulously, then smiled.

“OK, English” he said, sweeping his hands as if to brush me away.  “You go up now.”

Backsheesh.  The eternal currency.

No points for guessing where we’re headed.

Money is meaningless! And other great quotes from a great man.

Flipping to the preface of Outlaw Journalist, a book about the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, I read the following quote:

Word of his death was a shock to me, but not particularly suprising… More than anything else, it came as a harsh confirmation of the ethic that [he] had always lived but never talked about… the dead-end lonelines of a man who makes his own rules…

I don’t even know where he’s buried, but what the hell?  The important thing is where he lived.

It’s not only a perfect introduction to a fascinating book about a great American writer, it sums up what I’ve been feeling for two years now about the death of a dear friend.

A few days before Christmas, 2007 I also got a shock.  I learned from a mutual friend that an old friend I’d met in my first days as a student reporter had died, found in his ramshackle house along a stretch of road across from a farmer’s field about a mile outside a very small dot on the map.  As the police put it, he’d passed away “on or about November 15,” so I guess he’d been there in the Quebec autumn cold for a while even before someone found him.

I’d heard about Malcolm Stone a few weeks before I met him.  Our journalism school teacher, Peter Scowen, simply called him Dr. Feelgood.

Malcolm Stone was the man who went out with me on my very first assignment for a real newspaper: the kind that people actually pay money for. I was on a summer break from school in Montreal, and at the suggestion of that same Peter Scowen – who was also the paper’s owner – I spent a week in the rolling hills of the Eastern Townships working for the Stanstead Journal in Stanstead, Quebec.

“You know Ian,” he told me as we were hanging out in his kitchen my first day there, “there’s this horse-breeder fellow I know who’s just started breeding elk. Elk! Can you believe it? You’ve got to get out there and do a little story on this guy.”

And he leaned back and slowly broke out in his wide smile. “I’ve already got the headline for it!” he said, tobacco-stained right finger waving in the air.

Stanstead farmer breeds horses of a different elk

That was back in the day before Google Search Engine Optimisation killed pun-filled headlines.

Malcolm was someone I deeply admired.  He came up in conversation I had one morning in the kitchen of a prominent Montreal television personality, the wife of the journalism school teacher whose paper I worked on.

“So is living in the middle of nowhere on the edge of poverty some sort of lifestyle you aspire to?” she asked.   It wasn’t a challenge, just an off-hand remark about how the man obviously had very little money to spare, but I said, yeah – if I can live my life enjoying what I want to do where I want to do it without having to answer to anybody and not have to wait ’til I’m 67 to do it, then sure.

Malcolm’s career path abruptly stopped somewhere in his mid-30s, about 25 years before I’d met him.  He was working as a flack, er… public relations officer and mouthpiece for one of the two schools that merged to form Concordia University in Montreal, when he got into an ugly mud-fest with his employer.  He was going to quit, but before he got a chance to, they offered him a whack of cash if he’d just leave.  So he took their money, bought an old two-storey wood-frame house on a plot of land near a farmer’s field outside a tiny town in the Eastern Townships, and lived out the rest of his life.

Not many retire at 37, but he knew what he was doing, that’s for sure.  The town was smack on the border with the States.  When Malcolm wanted to stock up on Camel cigarettes and cheap gas for his beater car, he’d head over the line and be back home within 20 minutes, pushing a bit of blue all the way.  If he needed to see a doctor, he ‘d of course stay on the Canadian side of the border and go to the guy in town.

He lived alone, so if the house hadn’t seen a spray of paint inside or out for the past 30 years, if the floorboard cracks in his kitchen were caked black with grime the dog brought in, if newspapers were piled to the ceiling at the top of the stairs leading to his scatter-house bedroom, if he walked around barefoot everywhere in an old shirt hanging out of his pants, if he got up at nine to walk the dog, tend his garden, listen to some jazz or NPR talkshow on the radio, have another smoke while contemplating his next move, he’d nobody to tell him to do it any differently.

I admired him because he had absolutely no need for the very things most of us strive for, yet was the happiest guy I knew.

“I want to leave The Record,” I told him one day after another of our rousing games of Scrabble.  “Two hours into the drive down from Quebec City last week I looked out the window and thought, if I’m going to start earning some real money, I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Ian! Money is meaningless!” he shot back, slapping the table and, in a way, me upside the head.  “Fuck it!” he said.  “Fuck ‘em.  I’ve got everything I need here – a place to go when I feel like writing or doing a bit of farting around, friends who come loaded with tunes, toots and juicy local gossip. What more do you want?”

Part 1 of 2   (or maybe 3)

on not giving a pig’s arse about swine flu

The little red-haired girl is getting over swine flu.  Well, I say swine flu because it’s the hysteria du jour, but it could have been anything that lays a kid low for a few days.

She is one of 16 from her grade 7 class of 28 at home instead of school right now, though we don’t know how many of those kids have simply been taken out of school because their parents got the jitters, or whether they’re genuinely ill like she was.

We also don’t know for sure if it was swine flu, but the symptoms seem to match.

Temperature about 38?  She got up to 39.3C – or nearly 103F – at one point, though thankfully she’s now back to just above normal.

Headache? Runny nose? Sore throat? Lethargy? The British National Health service says if you’ve got only two of their laundry list of symptoms you may have swine flu, so with five already, she had more than a double dose, I guess.

Never mind that most of us have headaches, a runny nose, sore throat and feel like crap when we have a common cold, too, but we’ve got to keep the worry up, right?

The other day the headlines in Germany screamed that a healthy 15-year-old girl died of swine flu within a few hours of her first symptoms, that 14 in Germany have died so far, that we’d all better get vaccinated or the numbers will only climb, and on and on.

Tell you what, people.  When the headlines start to blare about how dangerous it is to go outside and move about in traffic, I’ll start to take swine flu seriously.

The number of people in Germany who die in traffic accidents – that includes cyclists, pedestrians, bus riders, car drivers and passengers, the works – was a little under 5,000 last year, or around 13 – 14 every single day.   The annual death toll is always framed as GOOD NEWS, because the figure has been falling steadily from a high of around 20,000 per year four decades ago.

But if we’re all potential victims of swine flu, and are told we should get a vaccination, we’re also all potential traffic stats, against which there’s not much you can do but try to follow the rules and hope for the best.

Every morning when I haul the little red-haired girl’s bike out of the basement to carry it up the stairs for her, I try not to think of the dangers  she faces in rush hour traffic, armed with only a good light, reflectors, reflective vest and helmet.   I shake my head and imagine her steering well clear of those roving one-tonne tin cans of death she has to make her way through, arriving at her destination safely.

Just before the kiss good-bye, I always slip in a “be careful” in as many ways I can think of spread out over each month, a verbal talisman to pin on her as her rear light fades from view, round the corner and out of sight.

I remember rolling my eyes a bit whenever my own mother said that to me.   Every time, without fail: You be careful, now!  It was her standard send-off, though she’d often tack on short summaries of her more harrowing shifts at the Lion’s Gate Hospital emergency intake.

Ya shoulda seen this guy on a bike who came in lass week, I tellya, he was a mess! Car smucked him going down Lonsdale and they brought him in within five minutes, but his head was so bashed in you couldn’t tell what he looked like.

If I was headed up to Whistler skiing I’d hear about everything from torn ligaments, spiral fractures and quadraplegic cases to ski pole impalements and guys getting lost in the woods, their corpses recovered the following Spring.

Anything to ward off a parent’s worst fear, the fear that came true when her first-born was killed in a car accident at 18, and the constant worry that it might happen again to us.

No, we didn’t get swine flu vaccinations, and don’t plan to.  Too late for our daughter anyway, who got hers the hard way.

I know it’s only human to fear a new disease whose final impact is not yet known more than it is to cower at the daily sight of a throng of traffic at an intersection, but I wish there were a vaccine to protect cyclists.  A pill to pop that would shield us from the dangers lurking around the corner.

I wonder if it would sell, though.  First you’d have to whip up the hysteria, but all we do is take for granted that 5,000 people will die a horrible death in this country every year, and hundreds of thousands  more around the world, and hope to hell it isn’t us.

Masked Monday

Monday, November 9, 2009 is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As life-changing that event has been for this country and for the world, as much as life for millions has changed in the two decades since the old order fell, 20 years is but an afternoon in Europe.

This year is the 2,000th anniversary of the Varus Battle – or the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest -  in which a band of Germanic warriors defeated three Roman legions in 9 AD at Kalkriese, in northwestern Germany near Osnabrück.

That long-forgotten battle also changed the direction of history.  It was a decisive clash which put an end to Roman expansion into Northern Europe.

Those three masks are reproductions of a magnificent Roman cavalry mask at the centre of a display of Roman artifacts unearthed at the battle site.

If you’re anywhere near Osnabrück, go to the museum site for a day and marvel.  It’s really worth it.  I’ve been back four times and find something new every time.