CHAPTER 4: SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS, QUÉBEC CITY

At this point I’ll return to diary mode. What follows is built up largely from notes quickly jotted at the time, fleshed out from memory and later checked against those of other participants, and published (usually web-published) firsthand accounts.

Friday, April 20, 2001

2:30AM

I have always had a stubborn inability to sleep in moving vehicles. Kitty and the Connecticut crew quickly pass out in the back of the van. Karen and I, insomniac, end up having a long conversation with Janna, the Catholic Worker from Denver, who is there with the SOA contingent. Janna is actually a pagan, but for radicals in that part of the country, she explains, there’s not a lot of choices. “I’d have joined Pagan Worker if such a thing existed.” She was gassed in Seattle and had been in and out of hospitals for six months afterwards. On the third day of the protests, she explained, they brought in the National Guard, who started using CS, a form of tear gas so powerful only the military is allowed to employ it (when the Serbian army used it against rebels in Kosovo, the US government called it a war crime). One pregnant woman lost her baby; another activist died of complications some months afterwards. Janna’s doctors told her that her lungs had been seriously damaged, and that she should avoid any future exposure to such toxins at all cost.

“Which made her slightly crazy, I admit, to be going to Québec City. But some things are just too important.”

5:30AM, We Arrive

The SOA people drop us off at Laval University, on the edge of the city. Both New York and Connecticut Ya Basta! already have sleeping spots reserved for us on the floor of the main gymnasium. A teenager working the late-night desk points us in the right direction—yes, he remarks, the university has been quite generous with their facilities. “They were afraid we’d occupy the campus.”

The gym looks like it’s about the size of a football field. Its shiny hardwood floor is covered with perhaps two thousand sleeping activists, arranged in geometrical clumps separated by walls of bags and backpacks. We pick our way through the bleachers (also covered with sleeping bodies), eventually locate our appointed spot, D17, which is sectioned off with white tape, and toss our meager possessions on the pile.

The Connecticut kids never go to sleep, though. After almost an hour setting up, washing, and conferring, Kitty announces: “I know it’s really fucked up, but we’ve kind of decided we’d better start looking for some gear or we’re going to be completely useless on the streets today.” The three of them, Kitty, Lee, and Andrea, have pooled and are counting out their money, which comes to around forty dollars. I lend them a credit card and they vanish in search of supplies. This does, at least, mean that Andrea, who had been wise enough to carry a sleeping bag, leaves it behind (there was some discussion of using it as padding, but we conclude it would be too annoying to carry it around). Karen and I arrange it as a kind of long pillow, throw down our jackets and sweaters as mattresses, and grab a couple hours sleep.

8:30AM

Almost everyone is starting to get up. Groggy activists are yawning, stretching, fumbling for toothbrushes, searching for the bathroom. Karen and I decide to head down to the IMC to get Karen an Indymedia pass. This way she can be filming in some sort of official capacity. It might, conceivably, afford some slight protection against arrest. This requires padding about in the halls of Laval—one of those gray modernist complexes with vast fluorescent halls that make you feel like you’re underground even when you probably aren’t—with cups of bad vending-machine coffee, looking for some table with maps and information. Eventually, we find one, manned by a couple of bleary-eyed students who try to explain the local bus system.

Happily, busses are still running; though we never quite figure out the ticket system, and it looks like bus conductors aren’t bothering to collect them anyway. We follow the map up towards the IMC, which I vaguely remember from my last visit. Just a block away, we encounter a miracle. There, on the corner, plain as day, is an Army/Navy store. It’s still open! And there, in the plate-glass window, large as life, is a gas mask. I dash in and ask if they still have any in stock, and—equally miraculously—it turns out that they do. Precisely one. Forty bucks Canadian. And it’s one of those good, Canadian military gas masks, too, with the filter on the side, not like the crappy civilian-issue Israeli gas masks from the first Gulf War everyone complains about, where the eyes fog up and the plastic isn’t even shatterproof. This one is thick black plastic, with a dozen straps on the back in black with fine yellow stripes that are to my eyes, at that moment, strangely beautiful.

We also each pick up a camera bag.

The IMC (no one is calling it the CMAQ any more, at least, in English) is located on a cobblestone avenue on a very steep hill—so steep, in fact, that the building it’s in is two stories on one side and five on the other. It appears to be largely empty; you enter through a recently refurbished storefront area that looks like it’s temporarily attached to some radical group (it’s unfurnished except for a couple chairs and posters on the wall). Visitors have to proceed through the empty offices then head downstairs to the IMC itself—still half empty, though there are a number of media activists sleeping in corners and about a dozen more playing with equipment, or pasting up lists of tasks, collective rules. I glance at one sheet on which participants can assign themselves to cover different events (the operation has, as Madhava predicted, been successfully democratized). At the front desk is a short, bearded, gnome-like fellow who seems to be engaged in a prolonged flirtation with the two young women at the computers behind him (they do little but mock him, and he seems to take great delight in their mockery). He snaps a digital photo of each of us and then cheerfully remarks that because of some sort of computer glitch, it’s been impossible to print new press badges all day. He’s working on it. After about half an hour, we finally do manage to secure badges. I get one too: after all, I will definitely be covering this story for In These Times, a Chicago magazine I write for. Karen and I both sign solemn statements saying we agree to the IMC principles of unity, and to contribute at least an hour of our time to some sort of work for the IMC at some point in the future. “Don’t worry about that right now,” remarks one sleepy activist, “but we’ll probably be needing all sorts of help over the next day or two. Just check back in.”

Then, armed with gas mask and press badge, we head back to the university.

11:00AM, Convergence, Laval University

All the fuss about defending the Convergence Center turns out to have been something of a red herring. Once the idea of converging on the Plains of Abraham had to be abandoned for fear of preemptive attack, the decision was to fall back on the university. The university, however, is seven miles from the perimeter. It’s going to be a very long march.

By the time we get there, there are already thousands of people, most scattered across a vast open quadrangle near the gym where we’d slept, preparing for the CLAC/CASA Carnival Against Capitalism march. Almost immediately, I run into people I know. Sam, active with the New York IWW and DAN Labor, had not been with the caravan but had come to Akwesasne independently, and somehow got through. He had hitched up with a carload of radio activists and independent journalists: two couples, Shawn (not to be confused with Shawn Brant, the Mohawk organizer) and Lyn, Ben and Heidi. They are mostly in their thirties, which makes them—like me—rather old by activist standards. Since we’re all separated from our usual affinity groups, we decide to constitute ourselves as a new one, which I dub “the Akwesasne Refugees.” After a brief huddle, we come to a quick consensus about our parameters and role. We will follow the main action, acting partly as reporters, partly as participants. Our participation will be red/yellow in orientation, but we’ll concentrate on providing support rather than direct confrontation. We will stay mobile, try to avoid arrest, separate when we care to, but if we do, always establish times and places to meet up afterwards.

Happily, Shawn has secured a place to stay: Heidi has a friend Pierre who is building himself a house in the Lower City. It’s unfinished but perfectly serviceable if we don’t mind sleeping on the floor. Shawn also has a car.

Now, all this puts me in a rather odd situation because I am now, effectively, in two different affinity groups: since I’m also a de facto member of the Yabba group, even though this now consists of three kids, all around twenty years old, who have gone off to join the Black Bloc. Well, I figure, it will give me a certain flexibility to be able to go back and forth.

We select a large green banner near a woman on stilts dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and decide that if anyone wanders off, this will be our reconvergence point.

So I wander off, notebook in hand. Karen breaks out the camera.

This part of the campus was all huge quadrangular spaces and concrete, with a distinct lack of greenery. At the moment, however, it was filled with an enormous variety of colored banners, furled and unfurled, some just solid unusual colors—salmons and lavenders—but also endless variations on red and black. Everywhere, young people were sipping bottled water or cups of bad microwaved coffee, milling about, sitting in circles, playing snatches of beats on drums made from inverted five-gallon water bottles, fiddling with gear. The weather was still crisp, but gave every sign of wanting to turn into a genuine spring day. No cloud in the sky. The snow that had covered much of the city a month before had melted. I set out in search of Ya Basta! people, without much luck. At one point, I saw a cluster of men who looked, from a distance, like a Tute Bianche affinity group, but it turned out they were actually all dressed as the Québec City mascot “Bonhomme,” in smiling Santa-style masks and dirty white jumpsuits.

Jaggi, with an amplified megaphone was going around to each cluster of people to announce that the GOMM parade was to start moving at 12:30PM to the lower city, the CLAC/CASA Carnival Against Capitalism parade, due to leave at 1:00PM, was to proceed down Avenue Erné Lévesque because the Plains of Abraham had been determined to be a trap.

I grab him for a second.

“Hey, David,” he smiles. “So where’s Ya Basta!? How was Akwesasne?”

“Kind of a bust. We didn’t exactly make it through. As for New York Ya Basta!, at the moment, I think I’m kind of it.”

“So everyone else was turned away?”

“We’d made a decision it would be all of us or nothing.”

“Huh? Why did you do that? We need all the bodies we can get out here!”

“Well, because…” Come to think of it, why did we do that? I shrugged. “Solidarity. It seemed to make sense at the time.”

Jaggi had time to give me only the briefest rundown of what emerged from the last night’s spokescouncil. GOMM had their own parade, which would include SalAMI people, and various Trots. They were going to carry out pure Yellow, classic civil disobedience, with lockdowns and the like, below one of the security gates. The CLAC parade, much bigger, would be Yellow (but not “safe Yellow”) and also include a Green contingent. The plan is for Green Bloc to veer off before we got to the fence and occupy the area even further down the hill from GOMM, centered in a zone called Ilot Fleuriot beneath the highway overpass, and including the neighborhood of Jean Baptiste. Everyone else will proceed directly to the wall.

Then he ran off.

11:40AM

The Black Bloc at this point is at 250 people, maybe less. Mostly wearing black hoodies, though there are some in military-style gear or even vinyl raingear. All, of course, are in black. Most have gas masks pulled back on top of their heads, and black bandannas tied around their necks. They are mainly lounging about, at this point, smoking or napping, but there’s a huge red banner in the front of what is to be their column, and all sorts of red and black flags scattered around. Not far away is a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, on stilts, and a little further, a Medieval Bloc with tin pan hats and potlid shields. I am pleased to discover they do, indeed, have a catapult: quite a big one, twenty-five feet long. Around them are a variety of flying squads which seem to me half Black Bloc, with gas masks and bandannas, sometimes even hockey padding, only in cheerful colors, not in black.

A fair number of people in fact are already masked up; not so much for security reasons (there seem to be no police anywhere) as because they have, by far, the coolest bandannas ever: which, if folded in half, cover the bottom half of your face with a life-size picture of the bottom half of someone else’s face. I start noticing them everywhere: they come in red, orange and yellow.

Ben already has one, in orange. He proudly displays it: one side is the happy side, with a big smiling face; the other has a face with its mouth taped closed behind barbed wire.

“Yeah, apparently Reclaim the Streets, London, shipped over at least a thousand. They were handing them out earlier, but I guess you missed them. Story was they were designed by this old guy who used to work with the original French Situationists. Or something. I’m not completely sure.”

Inscribed on the margin, in French and English, are the following lines:

We will remain faceless because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity, because we are everyone, because the carnival beckons, because the world is upside down, because we are everywhere. By wearing masks, we show that who we are is not as important as what we want, and what we want is everything for everyone.

The big surprise is our numbers, which everyone is saying seem significantly higher than expected. I keep hearing numbers like five thousand, maybe even ten. There are no police anywhere in sight, though here and there are clumps of legal observers, easily identifiable in their bright yellow vests.

Jaggi keeps dashing up and down with updates and announcements; “In Ecuador, they’ve occupied the Canadian embassy in solidarity with us!” There are apparently also border actions going on in Mexico and people blockading a bridge in Chicago.

Finally, slowly, lumberingly, the Carnival Against Capitalism gets under way.

1:30PM, The Carnival Against Capitalism March Begins

Maybe twenty minutes into the parade, there’s some kind of altercation when a university security guard tangles with someone on the front lawn of a building by the parade route. I arrive as people are trying to de-escalate, and never find out what exactly happened. The house’s owner and an eight-year-old boy are standing right there next to their porch. Someone is yelling at him: “Get that kid back in the house! It’s not safe with all these cops around!” Someone else tells me the guard freaked out and drew his gun (only to be immediately surrounded by activists with video cameras), but it wasn’t clear what had sparked the incident to begin with.

Shortly thereafter (circa 1:50PM), there’s another minor tangle when some TV journalists try to drive a car through the crowd. Marchers swarm around it, some pound on it, others lay down in front. “He was an asshole,” people told me, but not exactly how—I’m guessing he was just arrogantly trying to push through. Eventually, the car pulls back to a side street and the march continues.

2:00PM

At first, we’re passing through a purely residential area, all family houses and the occasional small brick apartment block. There’s not a commercial establishment anywhere in sight. Chants are in French, English, even Spanish. Most are extremely familiar: “Ain’t no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people don’t stop!” “Who’s streets? Our streets!” “El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido.” Others would become so: “Sol! Sol! Sol! Sol-i-dar-i-té!”

Karen checks in, she has been ranging up and down the parade getting all sorts of useful footage. There are cameras everywhere, but this time, they’re almost all our cameras. Even the people photographing us from the side of the road seem not cops but ordinary citizens.

Marches, I note, are always somewhat accordion-like. They have a tendency to stretch thin over time, which means we have to stop periodically so everyone can reassemble their affinity groups. The Black Bloc, never large, is by now already becoming more diffuse. I take advantage to work my way into the middle and finally locate my Connecticut friends: who are now part of an affinity group of some six or seven people, having located a few other former New England Yabbas. They are calling themselves La Resistance (later it becomes La Resistance II, when they discover the name is already taken). Kitty has given herself the action name Kid A, though everyone keeps forgetting to use it. Lee—a strict vegan—is calling himself Cheesebacon, and Andrea is still just Andrea. She’s the only one who has a gas mask (it had been wrapped in her sleeping roll). The others sport newly acquired green military helmets and a variety of other gear they’d picked up in town earlier. “Thanks so much for the cash card,” says Lee, handing it back to me. “You’re a life saver. I promise I’ll send you back the money.”

“Oh, don’t worry about the money.”

“No, really. I promise I’ll get your address after the action and I’ll get it back to you.”

2:10PM

Whoops all around as the march stops.

Nobody around knows why.

The Black Bloc are marching immediately behind what seems to be some kind of Marxist group, carrying a dozen identical red flags emblazoned with images of US political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. You can tell the Marxist groups because, like union folk, they tend to wear some kind of uniform. In the States there’s a group called the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, who come to big actions in Black Bloc attire, except all in identical T-shirts under their hoodies and all wearing the exact same red bandanna—looking so perfectly like anarchists that you knew they couldn’t actually be anarchists, because, even though the whole idea of black blocs is that everyone is indistinguishable, no group of anarchists would ever really be dressed exactly the same. I don’t see any equivalent here in Québec City (though, I later learn they were in fact there, mixed in with the Black Bloc). There are, however, many sections of the parade that obviously represent one or another socialist group, usually identifiable by matching T-shirts and the fact they carry professional-looking, printed signs. The larger socialist blocs are conducted by marshals with matching arm bands, patrolling the perimeters, linking arms when the march stops. Even the smaller groups usually have a leader with a megaphone, often walking backwards, leading them in chants. This, of course, makes them stand out from the crowd, while the anarchists, with their hand-painted signs and banners, mostly blend in—giving one the vague sense that everyone not affiliated with a particular, identifiable group is most likely an anarchist of some sort or another. In this particular march, this is also probably true.

I sit down on the street for a second to watch the show. After the Mumia brigade passes, and the Black Bloc, comes the Medieval Bloc with their catapult. The catapult is followed by a wooden cart full of stuffed pandas and other soft toys to be used as projectiles. Then come the autonomous elements in all their affinity groups, their signs and flags and banners an infinite anarchist heraldry of every conceivable variation on red and black. (My favorite, a crimson heart on sable field, which I saw repeated with slight variations six or seven times, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by the caption “ANARCHY = LOVE”). There were signs: Autonomez Vous (Autonomize Yourself), Betail en Revolte (Cattle in Revolt), and dozens of plays on the FTAA/ZLEA acronym (FTAA, Forced To Accept Aristocracy). There are Radical Cheerleaders and Raging Grannies, jugglers, stilt-walkers, and at least one man on a unicycle. At one point, I detect a group chanting “Ya Basta!,” spot a Ya Basta! sign among them, and quickly close in—but they turn out to be some sort of Zapatista support group, in T-shirts without any sort of gear. They are immediately followed by the SOA folk wearing skeleton masks, with an enormous green banner.

The only thing missing is giant puppets: I’m told several were carried out the night before for the torchlight parade, but they’re hidden away now, waiting for the labor march tomorrow.

2:20PM

Someone announces we’re ten minutes from the wall. We’re starting to see stores now, mostly shuttered.

An activist in an Easter Bunny suit is trying to throw candies to a group of children watching the parade from an apartment terrace. He becomes an instant celebrity: the “bunny guy,” everyone calls him, as in, “Hey, did you see the bunny guy?” He is not however to be confused with the other “bunny guy,” a student who actually carried his pet rabbit with him during the march. Bunny Guy manages to land a few on one terrace, and the children eagerly scoop them up.

Onlookers still seem guarded, though their numbers increase. Activists are banging on street signs as they pass, more loud than particularly musical. Here and there are clumps with actual musical instruments.

Still not a cloud in the sky. In fact, it’s becoming quite hot. I’ve been stripping off layers steadily, and those geared up—such as, for instance, my Black Bloc friends—are really beginning to feel it. People are calling for water. I’m sometimes with the rest of the Refugees, who’ve positioned themselves behind and on the edge of the Black Bloc, sometimes exploring the parade, occasionally touching base with Karen. La Resistance, geared to the hilt, wants water too, so the Refugees scour the streets for someplace to buy some (we did decide we were going to do support work), but without much success. Eventually, I locate a convenience store that’s open, but it’s only letting people in in groups of two, with some guy posted at the door to lock and unlock it each time. Shawn and I wait in line for a while, but realize that, by the time we get in, we’ll have lost the parade entirely.

Shawn, who has been monitoring the local media for some time now, is amazed by the complete absence of police. “For months they’ve been waging a terror campaign, telling everyone we’re going to destroy the city. Now look! Have you seen a single cop? At any point? If anyone had actually wanted to, we could have burned down this entire neighborhood.”

“Maybe they’re hoping someone does, to give them an excuse to attack.”

“Maybe. But my point is: either they knew they were lying when they tried to convince everyone we were a threat to the city, or they don’t really give a shit about the people they’re supposed to be protecting.”

2:25PM

We pass a construction site. A small crowd goes up an alley made by two chain-link fences, but they’re not, as I first guessed, going to yank up a stretch of fence to carry with them. Instead, the men and a couple women pull on their masks and start breaking and gathering bricks and rocks. A (mainly female) chorus stands above them chanting “We’re Gonna Fuck Shit Up Tonight!” in slightly accented English.

They’re not, in fact, in Black Bloc attire, but appear to be students, or maybe just local teenagers. Actually I have no idea who they are, but I’m guessing this would have to be the Red Bloc.

2:40PM

Some Black Bloc’ers are carrying a mattress with them, as a kind of giant shield. Somehow, there’s now a truck ahead of them, just past the Mumia battalion, playing some sort of French rap music. Mac and Lesley come bouncing by, masked, in military garb. We exchange pleasantries. Then they disappear again.

The parade stops periodically. Starts again.

2:50PM

The Avenue de Erables is the point where the parade is supposed to split into two columns, Green and Yellow. The Green group will march north up Avenue Cartier, which is two blocks north, and then enter the working-class neighborhood of St Jean-Baptiste that lies on the steep streets that slope off just to the north of the perimeter. Heidi, who has been doing radio interviews up and down the parade, explains that the neighborhood itself, along with the area further north, around the highway, has been declared a Green Zone. Puppeteers and street theater groups will occupy the area and put on performances for the local community groups, who are working closely with us. (CASA had been going door to door in Jean Baptiste for months now with fliers and petitions, explaining what was going to happen.) Such was the plan. At this point, though, it seems not many Greens are actually leaving: even the dragonfly drummers—a theatrical group with diaphanous dragonfly puppets bouncing over their heads—and other obviously Green groups are continuing with us for the time being. Meanwhile, as we pause, someone in a food truck seizes the opportunity to provide a quick snack. Everyone is passing around plates of pasta. We grab some, but pass most of it to La Resistance.

3:05PM

While we are waiting, I head back to the convenience store with Lyn and successfully buy several bottles of water. As I’m heading back we hear rumors three squads of cops have been sighted heading our way (none materialize).

3:15PM

Finally, we’re moving. It turns out that, all that time, we were only a few blocks from the wall. Passing Avenue Turnbull, the march enters the area we had scoped out so carefully during our last visit. We pass Grand-Théâtre de Québec, entering a small park that is soon to be known to many of us as “Ground Zero.” The park is mostly just a huge lawn with some hillocks and a few small copses of trees here and there. At the far end is the wall, with its three-foot concrete base and seven feet of chain-link on top of it. It runs along the next north-south street, the Rue d’Amerique Francaise, then curves back sharply to the north. Squinting, I notice it is already covered in most spots with ribbons and images and sculptures woven into it during a women’s action the night before. The base has been liberally spray-painted.

In the middle of the park is a line of cops, maybe forty or fifty of them, ranked out in full riot gear. We never saw any police that day who weren’t fully armored. These ones seem to be there to protect access to a checkpoint/entryway opposite the northeast corner of the park. Otherwise, there’s nobody around. Even the two media trucks with satellite dishes sticking out of them seem unattended. Yellow surveillance helicopters rattle overhead.

The parade begins to pour into the open space. Everyone is marching directly towards the police. The police hesitate (one can only imagine what it might feel like to be in a detachment of forty-odd riot cops watching several thousand anarchists march directly at you). Then they turn around, march back behind the checkpoint, and we sweep into the park.

Next to me someone is shouting angrily in French and tossing a half-full bottle of water at the retreating cops. A companion takes him gently by the arm, as if to say: “We all know what’s going to happen. We shouldn’t be the ones to start.”

The Black Bloc isn’t at the head of the march. The vanguard is completely heterogeneous, though it includes some of the best prepared: many in one or another form of padding, some in helmets and shields. As I pull up to the front, there’s already one guy in a yellow jacket who’s scrambled up to the top of one section of the wall near the checkpoint (it does not, in fact, have barbed wire on top). He’s swaying back and forth, trying to use his own weight to make it wobble. A crowd converges around him with grappling hooks—or, really, they’re fist-sized, nut-shaped hooks attached to long strong cords. Others set to work with wire cutters. A faceless line of police, all in gas masks and battle armor, stand impassively, maybe thirty feet away inside the perimeter as the first panel comes off its concrete moorings and collapses to the ground. The police do nothing.

Before long, everyone has found some empty portion of the fence. Mostly, the procedure is like this: small teams with ropes will use hooks to attach them to the chain-link, then everybody streams in to help pull. When the wall starts to give, people will climb on top to force it down. By the time I arrive, there are eight or nine sections down and I have to move northeast of the checkpoint to find a spot where I’m needed. I end up pulling on the same rope as Mac and Lesley and one insanely large Mohawk Warrior (I’m later told such individuals are referred to on the reservation as FBIs, “Fucking Big Indians”) who probably has the strength of the three of us combined. Nobody is even wearing masks at this point. I, like many people, have my gas mask perched on top of my head. When our section of the fence comes down, we move on to another one. At one point, a section comes down directly on top of my head, and those of a couple people next to me. We all laugh, two of us shake hands, then we move on to the next spot.

Soon, twisted pieces of downed chain-link fence are scattered across the edge of the perimeter. For some weird reason, the cops are still doing nothing, just standing there. Apparently, they had orders to resist any attempt to enter the security zone, and are taking their orders extremely literally.

Finally, a small squad of activists, I guess about twenty of them, assembles for a charge. To me, it seems completely insane, but maybe they have some kind of plan. If they do, I never find out, though. Because, almost the moment they begin to sprint towards the police, pepper bombs start exploding all around them. Some start stumbling, fall; within seconds, the entire contingent pulls back in disarray.

From that moment on, for the next two days, it was continual chemical warfare. Police started firing up and down the wall at teams still pulling sections down (about 150 feet had been completely cleared at this point). Tear gas canisters started bouncing, spinning, exploding all around us. I pulled on my gas mask; so did about half the people there. (I saw at least a dozen makes of gas mask, Israeli, Czech, Belgian, Canadian, some kind of weird Russian thing with a long tube flowing down to a pouch strapped to your belt.) Others were using scarves, bandannas, whatever was on hand. I saw people fumbling with visors and plastic swimming goggles as tears and mucus streamed down their faces. At one point, as I looked for a new position on the wall, a pepper bomb must have gone off right next to me. Unlike the tear gas, it went straight through my gas mask and I was suddenly blind and couldn’t breathe. I stumbled back out of range, into the open air of the park, eyes still burning and unable to focus, gasping for breath, and wandered in a circle for a moment until I found a clear spot, pulled off my mask, and sat down on the grass. After maybe a minute, I was basically functional again.

The park was by then full of clusters of people, moving at different speeds in different directions; it was also spotted with increasingly numerous clouds of gas. At first, they dissipated fairly quickly: there was a strong breeze which, to everyone’s amusement, was blowing back directly on the police. Here and there were small groups of activists sitting in circles on the grass on patches of higher ground, engaged in earnest consultations—Yellow affinity groups, I’m guessing, trying to figure out what to do. For most, the decision seemed to be to stay in the park and create as much of a carnival spirit as possible, despite the chemical assault.

By the time I was back at the fence again, a few minutes later, it had turned into a standup battle. After laying down a wall of gas, the police apparently tried to advance, only to be driven back by a rain of rocks. Masked figures close to the perimeter, now marked only by the battered concrete base of the former fence, half of it toppled, were still lofting rocks and bottles at them when I arrived. There were a couple pacifists up there, for some reason—at least, a couple women were angrily shouting, “Stop throwing shit!” The cops were by now sheltered behind a line of plastic shields, firing tear gas canisters and plastic bullets directly at them. The pacifists beat a hasty retreat.

Me, too. I fell back on the park and jotted down a few notes.

3:43PM

[from notes I took during a quiet spell ]

The police at this point are still hopelessly outnumbered. Rock throwers appear whenever they try to advance, but otherwise largely seem to hold their fire. Nor does anyone attempt to advance on the shattered perimeter.

By this time, gas canisters are coming down pretty constantly, not just near the perimeter but everywhere. They’re falling like mortar rounds, soaring in arcs way up in the air, usually three to five at once, then falling in clusters, striking throughout the open area of the park. At first, each time one lands, it sets off a small stampede.

Still, it was becoming something of a carnival. People were dancing, drumming, and clapping, trying to create a festive occupied territory in and out of the tear gas clouds. I pass four women doing a dance with gossamer scarves, all of them wearing gas masks. Others are spinning around without even bandannas, just out of sheer defiance.

The Bunny Guy advances on the wall, arms swinging, with great drama. Gassed, he beats a hasty retreat.

There are activists with hockey sticks systematically thwacking the canisters back at the perimeter, and one guy in a gas mask scoops one up, runs up to the perimeter with a plume of gas billowing behind him, and chucks it back over the wall.

“Don’t do that without gloves,” a medic warns me. “They’re red hot. You can get major burns from doing that.”

“And that doesn’t mean any gloves,” says another. “It’ll burn right through thin leather. You really need a hockey mitt.”

3:50PM

When I find Shawn and Heidi, he excitedly reports that we’ve foiled the cops’ first attempt at a flanking maneuver. They tried to bring up a water cannon—it was basically an armored fire truck—from the northwest, behind the theater, to cut us off. Several Black Bloc affinity groups ran to the scene and disabled it, smashing the windows and attacking the tires until the driver, convinced he was about to be pulled out of the cab, reversed the vehicle and pulled a hasty retreat. No one was hurt, but there were rumors the accompanying squad of police nabbed a few random activists near the scene (not the Black Bloc kids, of course, that would have been too difficult) and took them off with them—possibly the day’s first arrests.

We watch from a distance as another line of cops marching towards the theater ends up getting pelted so heavily they too had to retreat. “The ones in blue,” Heidi points out, “are provincial police. The ones in green are local, city cops. They’re no big deal. It’s the blue guys who are the really scary ones, because they’re brutal and they get all the high-tech gadgetry.”

Someone is claiming they just saw one of the cops near the theater trip, fall down, and thwack the ground repeatedly with his baton in frustration. Another minor victory. Someone hears it, and smiles.

There were all sorts of cameras, everywhere. Many activists are carefully documenting acts of carnivalesque defiance; others are filming the cops. Karen finds us. She says she’s choking on the gas and can’t film any more; she’s heading down to the Green Zone. We say we’ll meet her down there later. Almost as soon as she left, I run into Time’s Up Bill, a bicycle activist from New York. Bill was unmasked, looking grimly indifferent to the gas, but armed with a huge video camera.

He spots me because I have my mask off for a moment.

“Hey, David, are you busy right now? Would you be willing to do a brief interview about Akwesasne?”

“Sure. Well, how brief are we talking about?”

“Just a minute or two.”

I smile. “You want to do it here?”

“Yeah.”

We stroll up to a spot with relatively clear air, about forty feet from the checkpoint, and I start giving a brief description of the caravan, the fish-fry, the crossing. About halfway through, we both look up and spot three canisters descending in a graceful parabolic arc directly at our heads. We start running, laugh, reposition ourselves a little further from the action, and finish the interview.

4:10PM

It’s turning into a standoff. No one is throwing rocks unless the police try to advance, and for the time being, they’re no longer trying. Instead, they just loft endless tear gas and pepper bombs into the park, as activists along the perimeter either toss them back, or throw anything that might look like a response in kind. It started largely as an exchange of tear gas for smoke bombs, which arc in a similar fashion. They are also completely harmless—a purely symbolic tit-for-tat, but somehow very satisfying. Later, people seemed to be shooting off flares, and I saw colored lights that I think must have been Roman candles, bottle rockets, or something. Further off, the catapult was flinging teddy bears over remaining sections of the wall. It was all purely expressive, almost like a matter of principle that we could give as good as we got.

At first, the landing of a canister in a crowd would create a panicked stampede, despite the people shouting not to run. It would happen especially when the police started using canisters that would burst into flames and start spinning crazily, obviously impossible to throw back. Before long, though, the panic subsided, as it was mainly gas-masked or sturdy people who had the wherewithal to remain. Someone showed me the trick of standing directly in front of a group of panicked, fleeing people with your arms spread out; invariably, they would slow down and then stop. But, before too long, the panicked flights pretty much stopped anyway.

4:17PM

At the north of the park, there’s a little cluster of trees that’s become a kind of observation center for noncombatants. Next to it stand several Mohawk Warriors, including Stacey Boots, who apparently never himself advanced to the wall, but hung back like a proper military leader, giving occasional tactical advice. There are also five or six metalworkers, some Anglophone, some Francophone, unmasked, but carrying bandannas and vinegar just in case. They’re not in action, but literally showing the flag: they’re surrounding a large placard they’ve arranged near a tree with their union colors.

It is around this point that I begin noticing, as I probe the zone near the perimeter, that a lot of the masked figures around me are actually friends. La Resistance emerges from the mist, with a general exchange of hugs. A bit further north is Buffy, entirely in black, with a reinforced bicycle helmet and a round garbage lid as a shield. Behind her are most of the other Prince Edwards Islands kids, similarly dressed. She pulls off her mask briefly to wave. If the PEI group is taking the role of peltasts, light and mobile, Montréal Ya Basta! are the hoplites. About twenty of them are standing in formation nearby—with a shield-wall of thirteen and five or six drummers: also in black, mostly, with black motorcycle helmets, black gas masks, and three-foot black plastic shields, but all covered in strange, foam, rainbow padding, with dinosaur spines down their backs, complex shapes emerging from their helmets, pentagram-like symbols on their shields. The drums were made of plastic water-bottles. It’s visually extraordinary, though, tactically, somewhat pointless. In such a wide open space, a phalanx is about as effective as the original cop line had been: unless you had a line of hundreds, one could be fairly easily outflanked and surrounded. The shields, however, are highly effective against tear gas canisters and plastic bullets (which the police are beginning to use fairly indiscriminately), if useless for holding ground. The Yabbas seem to have found something of a purpose in simply interposing themselves and drawing fire.

This seems to be the emerging division of labor. The Black Bloc, especially the Americans among them, are taking the role of first line of defense. They’re not themselves throwing projectiles, just holding ground—though they’re willing to grab any opportunity to rip down new sections of the fence. Everyone throwing rocks seems to be local; I’m guessing many might be those militant seventeen-year-olds Sebastien had been telling me about, who, unlike the Bloc, never subscribed to principles of nonviolence.

4:22PM

A lot of the action at this point is by the side of the area where the wall first fell: there is a wide street running just below, and another strip of wall as such.

I fall back to the observation post, where the huge Mohawk Warrior I’d shared a rope with earlier seems to have just come back from the fray, apparently for the first time. He’s joyously narrating the story of how the wall first came down. Stacey, ever stoic, allows himself a brief smile. He turns to two masked Black Bloc’ers, offering strategic advice.

“Careful to guard your left flank down there and allow an escape route, because, if they sweep up that street and surround you, it can turn into a ‘kill zone.’ That’s how massacres happen.”

The police strategy, now that earlier attempts to drive a wedge into the park or cut us off have failed, seems to be to simply pump tear gas—and increasingly nasty tear gas, I notice—into the zone surrounding the wall for hours, until our numbers start to thin. Then, presumably, they’ll move out and secure the area for the opening ceremony, scheduled for 5:30. Ultimately, there will be no way to stop them, because they are receiving reinforcements, while our numbers can only dissipate. We’ll never have as many as we did when we first hit the wall. Our aim then becomes to slow them down as much as possible.

Detail of Quebec City indicating the security perimeter (heavy line) and the approximate area of tear gas deployment (thin line, gray area), i) The site of the CLAC/CASA action on Friday April 20^th. It was at this intersection that the wall first came down. 2) Site of many of the Rue St. Jean actions. Designated as a green-zone on Friday, it became red when the fence was beached on Saturday. 3) Alternative media center. 4) Site of the GOMM action on Friday and continued confrontation during the days that followed. 5) I’llôt Fleuri, end point of the candle-light march from Laval, beginning of Thursday night’s celebration, home of both the free kitchen and green zone actions. 6) Gathering area and starting point for Saturday’s March. + = medical center. The medical center, sites 3 and 5 were all directly tear gassed by police, despite their green zone designations and distance from the perimeter. (Raphaël Thierrin and Steve Daniels)

The late afternoon turns into a kind of gradual, fighting retreat.

4:30PM

Major exchange of tear gas for smoke bombs.

The park is now under a continuous cloud of tear gas. Different affinity groups have taken positions in it, marked by flags: some red, some black, some multicolored. There’s one very colorful Native American flag with the head of a Warrior in red and yellow on it, which Mac tells me is called the “Flag of Many Nations,” displayed prominently in the middle of the square. People have been using it as a signal to indicate where the police are trying to advance. A moment ago, it helped rally people to drive back a line of cops by chucking bricks—the cops, Mac is careful to point out, were completely armored so it’s not like any of them are likely to get seriously hurt. For the most part, the projectiles simply bounce off their shields. “Still it’s pretty much impossible to maneuver, let alone begin arrests, under a continual rain of bricks, so it does, effectively, drive them back.”

Tear gas is continuously being thrown back near the perimeter. Medics, who at first had been largely at the far end of the park, washing out eyes and treating asthmatics, start moving up to treat burn victims—the cops are increasingly using tear gas launchers like guns, shooting them directly at people’s chests and heads. Over and over, I’m hearing cries of “Medic!” or more often, the French chant: “Sol! Sol! Sol! Soli-dar-i-té!” Whenever someone went down, hit by a canister or plastic bullet, people would gather and start chanting for solidarity. Other activists would come and form a human wall as medic teams ran up—usually three or four to a team, always in white, with giant red crosses all over them—to hustle the victims out of range. Medics had to run fast or the police would start firing at them.

Initial phenomenological notes on the QC actions, written shortly afterwards:

1. In a major action, there’s absolutely no way to grasp even a fraction of what’s going on. There are a hundred tiny dramas happening at once, later to be given narrative form by participants. At any given time, you are probably seeing tiny pieces of a dozen—someone running off in what seems a random direction, someone standing engrossed, a cluster of people doing something you can’t quite make out in the distance. Major events might be happening twelve feet away—behind a wall, under an escarpment—of which you have absolutely no idea; at least, until much later, when you start to synthesize accounts.

2. Tear gas creates an utterly hostile urban landscape. That which should be designed for our convenience, parks, streets, one’s own clothing potentially, becomes painful, but it also encourages the endless hugging and bonding, because everyone you do see who isn’t actually firing on you is your friend. Being gassed is a little like being set on fire; or, at least, what one imagines being set on fire might be like. Pepper spray is the same except more so.

3. Normally one can confront the cops. When one of them does something obviously unjust, you shame them: there are often literally chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” “The whole world is watching!” In New York, one popular chant during obvious acts of repression is “Go Fight Crime! Go Fight Crime!” None of this is possible here. Even when, as at A16, a policeman is beating you with a baton as you lie on the ground, you have some idea who is beating you. You can compare him to bullies who used to beat you up in grade school, or to police on TV. These cops are specters, ghosts, mechanical abstractions. It is utterly impossible to see them as individuals. They are only pieces on a board, and the sources of various forms of terror and pain.

4. Gas masks makes one feel a little like a machine oneself—the hugging and embracing is in part to remind you that you’re not.

4:35PM

More gas—periodic calls of “Medic!”—as people are hit by canisters or plastic bullets, which are now being used more or less indiscriminately. So much for the rules of engagement announced with such fanfare before the Summit. People are running up and lobbing smoke bombs and tear gas canisters directly back at cops.

Whoops arise as one cop trips in retreat. The battle is still very much seesawing back and forth. I see someone being carried off screaming, with serious burns and blood-splattered clothes.

Craig, the huge fellow from the spokescouncil, comes clambering up toward the fence, armed with a big two-by-four he found somewhere, carrying it like a sword, looking immensely pleased with himself. He’s in what can only be described as a black battle suit, wrapped in plastic bags, with a round shield and gas mask perched on his head. About twenty seconds later, two medics run up and ask if they can use the two-by-four for splints—someone’s been incapacitated, needs to be carried away. He sighs, shrugs good naturedly, and hands it over.

4:45PM

We’re starting to take serious casualties.

Kitty, standing some thirty yards from the wall, is hit in the foot by a tear gas canister. A team of medics runs up, removes her boot, confirms that nothing’s broken. Still, it hurts like hell and she’s limping for some time afterwards. Kitty doesn’t have a gas mask, just two or three bandannas drenched in vinegar. A bit in front, Craig is struck in the ribs and doubles over in excruciating pain. Medics ask everyone in the area to form a circle around him for protection as they investigate. At first, we thought he was hit by some kind of dowel or wooden bullet, but it turns out to be yet another tear gas canister, the kind that had been fired up in the air, but in his case, was fired directly at him. Apparently he had broken a couple of ribs in exactly the same spot at A16 a year before—hence the agony. People rush up with water, trying to help. In the end it takes four people to carry him away.

5:22PM

I fall back to check up on the Refugees, who are mostly hanging back for lack of gas masks.

The big question at this point was lines of retreat. Remembering Stacey’s remarks about kill zones, it occurred to me that escape routes were going to be increasingly important. Especially since we’d promised we would try to keep the action out of St. Jean Baptiste, and no one I talked to was quite sure how we’d be able to leave if they tried to cut off Erné Lévesque again and we couldn’t just fall back the way we came. We all agree this is going to be increasingly important as the Summit’s opening ceremony approaches. They’re obviously not going to be able to hold the ceremony with a major battle going on twenty yards away and tear gas everywhere, the police are beefing up their numbers and, presumably, preparing for a big push, to get us at least within what they consider some reasonable distance. We try to find a clear space to look at maps, but the maps we have are hard to read especially because they give no indication of gradients, so we have no idea if what looks like an open space is actually a cliff.

The Barricada collective, from Boston, seems have occupied the north end of the park. There’s a single masked figure, entirely in black, standing on the base of an empty fountain near some large colonial buildings that mark the north edge, looking not unlike a sable peacock as he scans the action below. I pull up my mask and ask him: “Do those streets go through behind here?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I’m just worried we’ll get cut off if they move into this side of the park.”

“Why don’t you check?”

I spend some time investigating. There are indeed cliffs, at some points, or at least very precipitous stretches with boulders (this was also one of the few areas still covered with dirty snow), but also stairs and several streets that look wide enough it’s hard to imagine anyone closing them off. Even the cliffs look climbable. So, it looks like there won’t be a problem.

Loud explosions ring out as new, even nastier tear gas is employed. There has been a persistent rumor, too, that the police were going to be bringing in attack dogs. Briefly, I actually do see one, a German shepherd on a leash, on a ledge occupied by police far off in the distance. It’s the only one I see.

“Not surprising they’re not using the dogs,” someone remarks. “If they let a dog out in all this for more than a few minutes, it would probably strangle on the gas.”

Someone else sighs philosophically. “You know I quit smoking a year ago. Now one day is probably going to do all the damage ten years of smoking probably would have.”

“That’s what we get for trying to fight pollution.”

5:40PM, I Descend to Get Coffee on the Côte D’Abraham

Mac is heading down the hill to meet Lesley and some friends for a coffee break on the Côte d’Abraham to our north, on the edge of the Green Zone. He assures me cafes are indeed open there. Would I like to come along? I find most of the rest of the Refugees, who decide it wouldn’t hurt to take a little while to clear our lungs.

In fact, the Côte d’Abraham is nothing like the shuttered expanses of Erné Lévesque (which was, after all, as we’d been warned, “the street of the bourgeosie”). Here everything is open: shops, restaurants, at least a dozen streetside cafes. Protesters mill about in clumps. Some have their gas masks pulled back like medieval helmets, most have bandannas wrapped around their necks and jangling action gear of one sort or another: backpacks, goggles, water bottles, ropes and grapples, binoculars, or silly masks and street theater props taped around their backs for safekeeping. It was hard to see them as anything but a random crowd or, at best, meandering bands, but underneath, one knew there was a whole invisible architecture of organization—collectives, clusters, blocs, affinity groups. I try to envision what it would look like if somehow, all the organization could somehow be made visible: streets suddenly lighting up with a hundred colored lines, circles, diagrams.

There’s a dramatic, strikingly beautiful church at the very foot of a steep cobbled street. In front of it is Lesley, talking to someone from MacLean’s, one of the more popular Canadian magazines.

“Hey, David,” she asks, “you want to talk to a reporter?”

“Uh, sure.”

The woman is in her early thirties, wearing a tasseled jacket and carrying a pad. She is cheerful, enthusiastic, even perky. I feel like I’m dealing with a visitor from another world.

“David Graeber? Isn’t your father or something a professor at Yale? He’s an anarchist of some sort, right? I was reading about him in a recent issue of the Montréal Gazette.”

“No, that’s me, I’m a professor at Yale.”

“Would you mind if I ask you some questions?”

“Um, no. I mean, yes, sure. I don’t mind. Go ahead.”

“Well, a recent survey showed that a majority of Canadian citizens are actually in favor of free trade. For me, that raises a lot of questions about how much you can really claim to be representing ‘the public’ in protests like this.”

I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about: what sort of survey, how the question was framed, what responses to other questions might have been. Even thinking about it makes my brain hurt. I consider raising the issue of what the word “free trade” is supposed to mean anyway, how it’s a loaded term, how even I would hesitate if someone asked me if I was against free trade. But that’s more complicated than I’m really capable of expressing at that moment. Instead, I try to make a case that the fact that the government is intentionally trying to keep the contents of the treaty a secret shows that they don’t believe the public would accept it if they had any idea what it actually entailed. At least, that’s what I was trying to say. I walk away with the distinct impression I had just come off like a blithering idiot. It also strikes me that at least now I understand why it is that anti-globalization protesters interviewed on television almost invariably look like blithering idiots. I’m normally a pretty articulate guy. In fact, one could say that, as a professor, being able to sound intelligent—even, to provide glib responses to unexpected questions—is kind of what I do for a living. If I can’t put together a coherent sentence on no sleep, coming out of two hours of chemical warfare, how on earth do they expect anyone else to?

Mac and Lesley have vanished again. The rest of us end up sipping cappuccino in a tiny restaurant in which even the waiters have bandannas still tied around their necks. The owner is handing out free bottles of water to anyone who looks like they’re back from the front, and activists are continually filing in and out of the bathroom to wash out kerchiefs, eyes, and faces.

“Careful,” the owner says, periodically, in French. “Remember, if you get the clothes wet, the tear gas will come out again. Remember, it’s also in your hair…”

There’s one question on everyone’s mind. Somebody’s got to ask it.

“So,” I say, “what happened? How did we win? I mean—so fast. Last month at the consulta, we were all assuming that we’d have to fight our way through thousands of cops to even be able to get to the wall.”

The general feeling is that we hadn’t been doing the math right. “After all,” Heidi reflected, “when they say there’s going to be ‘three thousand cops,’ that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be on duty at the same time. Even if they’re on triple overtime, only maybe half of them are going to be on duty at any given moment. Plus, they have to maintain a strategic reserve. So you have maybe one thousand cops to defend a seven kilometer perimeter, along with doing everything else they normally need cops to do.”

“Whereas our forces were all concentrated on one point.”

The big news on the street is that Jaggi has already been arrested—inevitably enough. Someone at the next table has all the details. Apparently, he had never gone near the wall, but turned off with the Green march. An hour ago, he was hobnobbing with some other organizers on the Côte d’Abraham when several plainclothesmen dressed as protesters nabbed him from behind. His friends—including, apparently, several women who’d been co-facilitators at the spokescouncil—tried to intervene and almost succeeded in pulling him back, whereupon they pulled out truncheons and identified themselves as police. Then they roughed him up and threw him into the back of a black SUV. It drove off and that was the last anyone had seen of him.

“Any news from the GOMM Green march?” we ask our new friends at the next table.

Someone grins. “The story I heard is they all sat down in front of the wall near the highway, flashing peace symbols. Of course, the police started gassing them, just like everybody else. Someone started up tossing the tear gas back and, before long, they’d ripped down their part of the wall, too.” “They went Red?”

“Spontaneously.”

“Wait a minute,” says a middle-aged woman with horn-rimmed glasses at another table. “I heard about lobbing back tear gas. But I’m pretty sure they didn’t attack the wall over by the highway. Anyway, I was passing by less than an hour ago and the fence was still up down there.”

“I was there when it happened,” says someone else. “What happened was—yeah, someone started kicking back the tear gas. But, almost as soon as they started doing it, some leader type with a megaphone showed up and announced that they’d made their point, and that the action was over, and they all retreated to the Green Zone.”

6:30PM, Back to Ground Zero

By the time the Refugees head back towards the wall, all the traffic seems to be going in the other direction. Perhaps seven people are drifting downhill and away for every one moving back up. We pass the dragonfly drummers, in a little circle in the middle of the street. They’re trying to rally people, but not too effectively. When we get to the top the reason becomes obvious: phalanxes of police occupy the middle of the park, and smaller squadrons are systematically taking up positions on each approach street, choking off access, then gassing like crazy everyone in sight. Lines of riot police are moving forward systematically, ten or twenty meters at a time. Eventually, they start moving down the three main north-south streets—Turnbull, Claire-Fontaine, and Sainte-Claire—that lead down the hill into St. Jean Baptiste.

It doesn’t seem they are trying to do mass arrests. At least not yet. They’re just trying to clear the area.

The Flag of Many Nations and a few black anarchist flags are by now at the bottom of the hill, along St. Jean, and the only possible game left was to delay the police advance. Where the Black Bloc is is anybody’s guess. Same with the Red Bloc: nobody in this crowd was even thinking about throwing rocks. It had become a matter of sitting in the streets, singing songs, and waiting to be assaulted. Simple stubborn civil disobedience.

6:55PM, Avenue Turnbull

There are about ten to twenty Darth Vaders occupying the heights at the top of the street, looming out of an anxious mist of their own creation, preparing to descend on us. Gradually a group of us assemble along Lockwell Street, and decide to march up to oppose them. We wade up through the mist—partly led by me, since I’m one of the few with a gas mask—and sit down on a stretch of street, with Shawn and Lyn following behind with minidisks to make sure every sound is recorded. A young woman carrying a bullhorn asks if anyone has a copy of the “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” from the Canadian constitution (legal observers had been handing them out before the action).

“I think I have one in my bag somewhere,” says Shawn. Lyn also produces a copy.

We sit on the cobblestones, about thirty or forty of us. I take off my gas mask. We are, I notice, in the middle of a purely residential neighborhood. The woman with the bullhorn, wearing a suede jacket and no sort of gear whatsoever, unfolds the paper and begins a dramatic recitation of the section concerning freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. An IMC radio journalist holds out her microphone right next to the woman, kneeling, one arm dramatically upraised. Behind us, I notice a couple of video cameras focused on the police.

We knew, of course, they’d gas us.

Only twenty or third yards from the police position, for the first time, in fact, we could actually look into their eyes and see their faces. Most of them weren’t wearing gas masks—probably because they knew they’d be firing at a distance, and downhill. We all stared transfixed as one woman cop, with a simple inoffensive face and blond hair pulled back severely behind her visor, pulled out her launcher and began to take aim.

People started calling out to her: “Don’t do it! Please! Don’t gas us!”

“This is a nonviolent assembly!”

“We’re not your enemies. Please, don’t shoot!”

Then she fired. The canister sailed a few inches past the upheld microphone and exploded directly behind us.

Within a matter of seconds, it was a barrage. Eight, nine, ten cans were spinning all around us, exploding in flames, scattering everywhere. We scattered too. The young woman with the megaphone started walking slowly, defiantly backwards—then, turned over her shoulder and picked up the bullhorn one last time. “I just want to point out that you just broke the law!”

Another tear gas can landed about a foot away from her, then spun, flames shooting out of it. Another smacked into someone’s window right above us, where for all we know some family had just been sitting down to dinner. The entire area turned into a cloud of CS.

That was, as Shawn pointed out, the first use of tear gas we’d seen in an obviously residential neighborhood.

Before long, we’re back on the Côte, where the Flag of Many Nations waves. Someone tells us that, while on Turnbull the police were distracting themselves by gassing pacifists and local residents, on a nearby side street—Burton, or maybe Claire-Fontaine—a couple Black Bloc affinity groups had moved up, thinking to do some kind of flanking maneuver, and discovered three empty black SUVs completely unguarded. These were the vehicles used by snatch squads, quite possibly the very ones earlier used to nab Jaggi. They smashed the windows and made away with scores of plastic shields and other supplies, including several documents on cop formation tactics.

Shawn and Lyn, still sputtering from the gas, head off to find their car, which they think they left somewhere in walking distance the night before. We’re all going to be meeting in an hour or two anyway, back in Laval.

7:27PM, Along St. Jean

By this time there’s a strong feeling that things are winding down. We hear the opening ceremony has been delayed until 10PM (this turns out to be untrue: it actually began ten minutes later, at 7:30, but nonetheless hours behind schedule).

Another gas attack: this one quite close to us. Flaming canisters come spinning all the way down to where we are gathered on St. Jean, on a little intersection near a deserted lot. People come streaming down the same street. Some of the Refugees go out and spread our arms to prevent a stampede, but there’s no use trying to hold the position. One young man with a red flag tries advancing, nearly alone. Before long, he has to retreat again. Another guy with a Québec Soviet flag (!)—half fleur de lis, half hammer and sickle—plants it next to the Flag of Many Nations. Some CLAC fellow with a megaphone is trying to rally everyone in the vicinity in French. A small group drags a dumpster to the middle of the intersection and sets a fire in it. It’s a flat space and well ventilated, just above another steep slope; seems as good a place as any to try to make a stand. I notice, too, that several of the people milling around the dumpster do not look like activists, but appear to be local residents, pissed off about the tear gas. And they definitely don’t seem to be blaming us. One of the CLAC people is explaining to them that a fire will burn away the residual tear gas.

After a while, another CLAC person—a tall fellow with long, brown, shaggy hair—turns to me. He remembers me from the consulta.

“We are going to Laval: there is a spokescouncil,” he says. “Would you like to come?”

“Oh, yeah. Actually that’s where I’m supposed to meet the rest of my affinity group in a few minutes. How are you getting there?”

“There’s a bus.”

I head off with the CLAC team, one man and two women, but before we get there, they decide to stop first for a beer. Would I like to come along? I consider it, it occurs to me that I’m completely exhausted. So they direct me to the bus stop, and after a pleasant chat with a friendly LA Times reporter in the next seat, I arrive in Laval.

8:07PM, Stupid Little Spokes

The room, which has every sort of banner draped all over the walls, contains maybe two hundred people, but only half, at best, are taking part in the meeting. I soon see why. The conversation has degenerated into yet another argument about diversity of tactics. There are people complaining bitterly about rock-throwing, others insisting it was the only way to deal with indiscriminate attacks by the police. Nobody seems to be listening to anybody else, or talking about plans for the next day (or maybe that’s later? I don’t see an agenda on the wall). The whole spokescouncil just seems to be a chance for people to sound off.

Most of the Refugees are already in the room, or nearby, lounging about, playing with their minidisks, and watching images of the action from other peoples’ video cameras. I check in and we all agree to head back to the house in an hour and a half.

It was at this moment I also discover that I am no longer the only member of NYC Ya Basta! in Québec City. Laura, the Italian woman and CUNY grad student, had just arrived with a carload of Yabbas—that is, Yabbas of the genuine, Italian variety: Beppe, Sandra, and Roberto. Laura starts laughing the moment she sees me. She runs up to give me a prolonged embrace. “Ha! This is so perfect! So wonderful! All the big pragmatic men of action in Ya Basta!—not a single one got through. They all gave up. And who actually makes it into action? Just you and me. The two intellectuals!”

Her friends are dressed to the nines in gorgeous Italian suits. “It was the only way we could get through,” Roberto explains to me cheerfully.

“Yes,” Laura said. “When we tried to drive through customs, the man asked where we were going. We said Québec City. Then he asked the purpose of our trip and Beppe said “tourism.” So he started going through Beppe’s passport, looking at the stamps. ‘Hmmm…Geneva, June 1999; Seattle, November 1999; Prague, September 2000. So you just happened to show up at every major protest at a globalization summit for the last three years? I don’t think so.’”

“So, what did you do?”

“They all just started screaming at him: ‘WE ARE ITALIAN CITIZENS TRYING TO VISIT CANADA! HOW DARE YOU? WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? I WILL NOT STAND TO BE TREATED LIKE THIS! WHO IS YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER? WHAT IS YOUR BADGE NUMBER? WE’RE GOING TO CALL THE ITALIAN CONSULATE AND LODGE AN OFFICIAL COMPLAINT! WE’RE GOING TO MAKE THIS AN INTERNATIONAL FUCKING INCIDENT!’ And, finally, he just backed down.”

“You mean that actually worked?”

“The suits helped.”

The one thing that really worries me is that no one has heard anything from Karen. I was pretty sure we’d explained to her the importance of making sure other members of your affinity group know your whereabouts—or at least of getting word to them before you simply leave town. Anyway, it seemed like basic common sense. I find a place to check my email. Nothing. My cell phone is dead, all my numbers thus inaccessible (for instance, Sasha’s), but I borrow a phone from which I can check my messages. Nothing. The obvious implication is that she’s been arrested, which is both possible (I am told they have been targeting independent journalists) and disturbing (since she has no idea what she’s doing). I’m trying to remember: did we even make sure she wrote the legal number on her arm? Yes. We did that at the IMC. I borrow the cell phone again and call Legal. All I get are busy signals. I call the IMC. No information.

Finally, I give up. The Italians have a car, and invite me to join them on a brief spin to scout out the action. We end up taking a tour of the Upper City, passing down Erné Lévesque and the Fields of Abraham, watching occasional night battles—at one point I was pretty sure I saw someone throw a molotov, off in the distance. Somehow, after about ten minutes, all of us were singing:

Riot riot–I wanna riot
Riot riot–a riot of my own
Riot riot–I wanna riot
Riot riot–a riot of my own

(We had all, without noticing, dropped the “white” part.) I think I actually started it. Which is uncharacteristic, since I can’t sing a note. Not that it matters much with the Clash.

“Ah,” sighs Roberto, whose English is not fluent. “Even when we can hardly speak to each other, we all know the same songs.”

Saturday, April 21, 2001

We arrived at the house around midnight, only to discover Janna, of all people, already there. It turns out she’s a friend of Lyn’s.

One result of Janna’s medical ordeal is that she had become something of an expert on the effects of “non-lethal” chemical weapons. Clothing, she explained to us, absorbs toxins. It’s important to wash out everything we’re wearing very carefully before we take a shower or else the next time we get wet, it’ll be just as bad as when we were gassed the first time. My clothes were clearly saturated with all sorts of toxins. On the other hand, I had no bags and, therefore, nothing to change into. I ended up wandering around the house naked at 2AM while everyone else was asleep, doing laundry in a machine in the half-finished basement. My sweaters weren’t washable, but, fortunately, most of them could be left behind since, according to all reports, Sunday was going to be even warmer than the day before.

Then I caught a good six or seven hours sleep—a rare luxury for a day of action.

For breakfast the next morning, Heidi had fetched croissants, pain au chocolate , and a copy of every local paper available. She’d also found several foreign ones. We passed them around while watching TV newscasters endlessly replay the high points of Friday’s marches and confrontations. The coverage was amazing for its detail. There were the sort of headlines American media activists dream about, the kind you would never see in the US in a million years: “THE WALL FALLS!” “THE TEARS OF DEMOCRACY,” (the latter referring to people’s reactions to the tear gas), and so on.

Information available to us was a confusing mix of rumors, news reports, rumors reported in news reports, and official police statements—pretty much all of which could be assumed to be substantially untrue. At the bakery, Heidi had heard that a group of eighty nuns, enraged by the gas, was preparing to march on the main checkpoint to rip down the wall. The TV was reporting only fifty arrests on Friday, but Ben and Lyn, who had been on the phone with someone at the IMC, heard much higher numbers: including 126 in a sweep just a few hours before (both numbers turned out to be wildly inaccurate). The police had thrown a press conference Friday evening, announcing that a special operation had nabbed “the leader of the Black Bloc”—obviously meaning Jaggi. Jaggi’s current whereabouts were unknown. (Only several days later did police acknowledge holding him; he was officially charged with “illegal possession of a catapult.”)

Even the American press was far better than usual:

Protesters Seize Day in Québec Trade Foes Tear Gassed at Summit of Americas

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 21, 2001; Page A01

QUÉBEC CITY, April 20—President Bush and 33 other Western Hemisphere leaders seeking to build the world’s largest free-trade zone opened a summit meeting today as clouds of tear gas and violent demonstrations played havoc with schedules and delayed meetings.

Bush remained holed up in his hotel as the summit’s opening ceremonies were delayed more than an hour. He was forced to cancel one meeting and postpone or abbreviate others because the movements of heads of state around Québec City were hampered by the anti-globalization protests.

“If they are protesting because of free trade, I’d say I disagree,” Bush said. “I think trade is very important to this hemisphere. Trade not only helps spread prosperity but trade helps spread freedom.”

In the lobby of the Loews Hotel, confusion reigned, as Bush aides scrambled to keep track of the changing schedule while watching the riots on television. Colombian President Andres Pastrana waited out the delays in the cocktail lounge…

There were rumors of huge numbers already assembling: twenty-five thousand at the Vieux Port, at the very foot of the city, to begin the labor march and People’s Summit; a student group massing on the Plains of Abraham; huge numbers at Laval. Everyone, including the newspapers, were going on about the sheer size of the event: there’s simply no way the police can handle this. The big wild card, we agree, will be the labor march. The organizers, predictably, have set it up so that everyone starts ten or fifteen blocks from the perimeter and then marches off in the other direction, to end up in a rally in some distant lot. The question is whether rank and file will be satisfied by this. We know that both CLAC and NEFAC (Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists, a labor-oriented anarchist group) will have people there, trying to divert people to the wall.

Comparing notes, we also try to piece together more of a picture of what must have happened yesterday. Akwesasne we decide we’ll never figure out, not until we have more information. Obviously, something fucked up in a big way. Shawn wants to know: why the hell were you guys four hours late? Half the Warriors had left already. I honestly can’t tell him. And what was this idiocy of “all or nothing”? The irony about Friday was that, while we were all at Akwesasne eating fish, CLAC people at the spokescouncil were in a near panic that the Carnival Against Capitalism would be a bust. The torchlight parade and women’s action were beautiful, but relatively small. No one had any idea how many people would show up Saturday. That’s why there had been so much jubilation about numbers Saturday morning.

Janna comes in late, sniffling, in a nightgown—she, at least, got through with all her baggage. She says she’d spent most of Friday in the Green Zone, whose center was below the highway at the foot of the hill, and had caught a glimpse of the Living River.

“Oh, right, the Blue Bloc! I was wondering if those guys even got through.”

“They were there all right, a couple hundred of them, actually. I saw them on St. Jean, not long after we heard the wall came down. They had this whole complex organization with four flags each representing one of the four elements—green for earth, blue for water, red for fire and… was it white for air? No, I think it was yellow. Starhawk was there with a little drum and they put on a spiral dance and called on the power of the river to put the elements on our side.”

Sam is looking dubious, as if trying not to mutter something cynical into his coffee.

“Well,” I remark, “for what it’s worth, we did have remarkably good weather yesterday.”

“Yeah, the breeze was at our backs the whole time,” said Lyn. “You saw how it kept blowing all the tear gas back on the police? Especially at first, when they were firing right in front of them, it all just streamed right back into their faces.”

“The earth is on our side,” said Janna. “I really believe that.”

“Maybe we should make a sign to carry to the park,” I say: “‘We Know Which Way the Wind Is Blowing.’”

11:00AM, Orsainville

Still worried about Karen, I end up wasting the rest of the morning and early afternoon on some scheme planned by Heidi and her friend, a Frontline producer named Claudia, to visit the local prison, in a forest some miles out of town. Claudia has a car. There are already a handful of activists doing jail solidarity in front on the prison, but they have only a limited list of who’s inside, and no one has heard word of any IMC or other freelance videographers being held there.

Later, that handful is to expand to a veritable “Solidarity Village,” as people pitch tents, bring in jugglers and musicians, and create a continual rhythm of chants and music to ensure the prisoners know they’re out there. A squad of riot cops will appear, and entertainers with megaphones will tell jokes and try to crack them up. There will be vegetarian cookouts and an endless supply of journalists. Not now. Only about twenty people who have reason to believe members of their affinity groups or close relatives are behind bars, a couple legal reps, and one rather pathetic middle-aged couple worried sick about their sixteen-year-old daughter.

Everything takes longer than it ought to. Finally, after a marathon cell phone session, Claudia says she wants to catch the tail end of the People’s Summit—which the organizers had intentionally placed far, far from the action, near the port several kilometers away. The parade was supposed to set out at noon, marching to the summit; we’ve definitely missed that. Anyway, I’m reluctant to head that far from the city without knowing how I’m going to get back. She offers to drop us both off at the IMC, where Heidi has to do a radio show. We agree to meet with the rest of our group at the party under the highway in the Green Zone that evening, and I head up toward the park to see if I can find La Resistance.

3:20PM, Finally Back in the City

There’s graffiti everywhere: a thousand Circle-As, “FUCK THE COPS,” “NO CHOICE,” “MURS BLANCS, PEUPLE MUET,” gas masks painted onto the faces of every half-dressed model on a bus-stop advertisement, not a billboard anywhere left unaltered or undefaced. By the side of the highway, at various spots:

QUI EST LE CHEF DU BLACK BLOC?
THE GATES OF HEAVEN WILL BE TAKEN BY STORM
Y’EN A PAS EPAIS
PROPERTY IS THEFT

At the café, it’s still all activists. Within five minutes, I have most of the story of the day. The parade was enormous: the news is saying sixty-thousand people, with an endless display of puppets, banners, floats, and theatrical performances. It ended in a rally with speeches by Jose Bové, Maude Barlow, and all sorts of international celebrities. “Did anyone break off to go to the wall?” Well, not in the thousands, no, but there have been a lot of trade unionists who at least have visited the perimeter. One column of several hundred auto workers formed affinity groups and marched up to a gate somewhere way on the east side of the perimeter, and ended up getting seriously gassed. Many are still there, thinks the fellow at the next table. At any rate, things will really get interesting, he thinks, when the rally breaks up, because a lot of the participants are saying they’re going to go to the party underneath the highway.

“That’s the Green Zone, right? The Ile Flueriot?” I ask, looking at my map.

“Yes, there. Boulevard Charest Est. You see, there’s this huge intersection of six different roads? It’s not far from the IMC.” A few minutes later, I’ve resumed my climb towards the Old City. The cops have been gassing all day. There is, literally, a thick cloud of the stuff, hanging like a noxious wall over St. Jean Baptiste, and extending well below it. One thing is a pleasant change, though: by now the loyalties of the surrounding community have become utterly explicit. It was as if, Friday, they were still observing, measuring, waiting to see whether the anarchists would really trash the city, as the federal authorities had been promising them, whether the cops would really gas them, as the anarchists had said they would. By now, they knew. We had hurt no one and damaged nothing. We had done our best to avoid making a battlefield of their neighborhoods. The police had responded by gassing and attacking everyone indiscriminately, firing toxins directly into their patios and gardens.

By Saturday afternoon, half the houses are hanging out some sort of banner or sign: “We are with you!,” “No FTAA!,” or even, once, “We support the Black Bloc” (except, of course, in French). Many have also brought garden hoses out to their stoops or are dangling them from windows to provide free water for protesters. Grandmas wave and smile from porches. Children giggle and follow us around. It’s like some crazy anarchist fantasy. The one exception, as I pass, is a stocky, middle-aged man who is throwing some kind of tantrum at a handful of Black Bloc kids in front of his building, right at the end of the steep street leading to the park. “Why are you still here?” he’s shouting, “I understand yesterday, you tore down the wall, you made your statement. That’s good, I support you. But enough now! Still you have to fight the cops, still they’re gassing, my home is full of tear gas, for two days it has been full of gas, I’ve had to send my infant son away to an aunt in the suburbs because he was choking on it. My mother has had to abandon her apartment. Enough! Right now there is a labor march in the Lower City, it says on TV there are 60,000 people marching. Why aren’t you marching with them? Why are you still here bringing the gas on us?” The Black Bloc kids seem flustered; they appear to know enough French to understand him, but not enough to make any kind of articulate reply. Finally, three or four neighbors gather and try to calm him down. “It’s not their fault, they just want to make sure the heads of state hear their message.” “You can’t expect them all to march away from where the delegates are actually meeting.” “It’s not the kids who are gassing us,” one woman insists, “it’s the police.”

3:35PM, Ground Zero

The park is ours again, with scattered collections of people in the square sitting on the ground, putting on performances. Gas explosions are periodic, but nowhere near the same intensity as the day before (they’re landing approximately once every three minutes now, says someone with a pocket watch).

The Black Bloc is not in evidence. I’m told they’ve been scattered in small groups for most of the day, going against exposed sectors of the perimeter. I’m disappointed, though, to see that the section of the wall we’d pulled down yesterday was up again. There’s a new, somewhat jerry-built gate. Right behind it, they’ve positioned a water cannon—actually a pretty clever move, since this means we can’t get near enough to trash the thing. The water cannon seems to be set to autopilot, shooting an huge plume of water which slowly swept back and forth across an arc of space in front of it. It is as if they had found a lawn sprinkler that worked at a thousand times the pressure and volume. As a defensive weapon, it was quite effective. A coordinated assault on that section of wall would now clearly be impossible. On the other hand, the presence of plumes of water—no matter how high intensity—on a hot day is apparently just too much of a temptation in the middle of an anti-capitalist carnival. People keep dashing up and making a spectacle of themselves splashing about in the water. Some get knocked off their feet and slide about merrily. Others lean into it and stay up—looking like street mimes walking against the wind—or otherwise clown around. Everyone seems to be enjoying the show; anyway, the cops don’t seem to be firing at anyone. Despite repeated warnings about getting my toxin-drenched clothing wet, I can’t help myself.

I take a brief dip. It’s kind of refreshing.

Back in the park, people are playing Frisbee, bouncing beachballs. Half the time I have my mask pulled up on top of my head.

Old friends are everywhere. At one point Janna appears, entirely wrapped in an elaborate protective outfit made of plastic garbage bags, goggles, poncho, and high plastic boots, carrying a large bag of medical materials for the treatment of the effects of tear gas. She sets up shop by a tree at the very edge of a huge toxic cloud.

“Jesus, Janna! What are you doing here?” asks one of her fellow Refugees.

“I just couldn’t sit back and do nothing while people are being gassed.”

“Are you crazy? I’ve heard they’re using CS again. Who knows what would happen if you were exposed again!”

“CS? Is that really true?” Several bystanders confirm the rumor. The matter becomes a spontaneous group discussion. Eventually, Janna agrees to move back down to St. Jean and set up shop there instead. Two of the bystanders accompany her.

Eventually, I notice scattered clusters of Black Bloc anarchists coalescing on the far edge of the park. Looks like some kind of pre-arranged convergence. At that moment, I had been talking with some friends about the feasibility of a flanking maneuver of our own against the southern portion of the wall, which seemed undefended. Scouting out the territory, I run into Dean, who had been lying on a long flat rock in a rather dashing trenchcoat. I explain my project.

“Count me in,” he smiles, producing an enormous pair of wire clippers from under his coat.

But the spot turns out to be better defended than it appeared. Tear gas canisters land directly at our feet, and five robocops appear with what look like giant shotguns, either for the firing of plastic bullets or pepper-soaked beanbags. We don’t really want to find out, and quickly back away.

By this time, though, the Bloc, still only about forty people, is masking up and about to move out. La Resistance is not among them, but I do spot two friends from yesterday, who suggest I come along. We can always do lookout, they say. Anyway, apparently, there’s a plan. I zip up my hoodie, rendering myself entirely dressed in black, mask myself, and follow.

4:00PM, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

What follows is one of only three major instances of targeted property destruction during the Summit. The target is the local headquarters of one of Canada’s major banks, the CIBC—one of the main forces lobbying for passage of the FTAA, along with profiting from government student loan programs while pushing for massive cuts in health and education funding.

The bank offices are only a couple blocks from the park, on the edge of a residential neighborhood. There’s some kind of confrontation between pacifists and a line of riot cops a couple blocks away, but I can’t really make out what’s going on there. We find the bank itself, on the first floor of some minor office building, already under siege. However, matters are also a bit more complicated than we anticipated. Two members of the affinity group that planned the action have picked up a police barricade and are preparing to smash in the bank’s plate-glass windows. Standing in their way, though, are two fiftyish hippies, apparently a married couple in identical rainbow jackets and tie-dyed clothes. The two are methodically trying to interpose themselves. Eventually, the woman gives up but her husband is persistent. Spry, dancer-like, he keeps leaping in front of their trajectory every time they pull back to swing. The two kids with the barricade are determined not to hurt him, but neither are they about to give up. There follows a peculiar ballet of feints and thrusts, until the Black Bloc kids figure out a system: one bluffs him, and the other swings hard in a different direction. Before long there’s shattered glass all over the sidewalk.

We’re scouting for cameras or police, and seeing neither. There are a couple of bystanders who are probably reporters, but they’re only carrying notebooks; the police line two blocks away seems oblivious, or maybe they just haven’t received orders yet to move. What there are is extremely disruptive pacifists, who seem to have gone through some SalAMI “de-escalation training” and are trying out all their techniques. As we walk along the edge of the scene, one bearded pacifist, looking rather like the lumberjack fellow from the Spokescouncil (but no, it’s not him) is following us along repeating over and over again, in exactly the same words: “These are not the right tactics to use. These are not the right tactics to use. These are not the right tactics to use.”

I’m considering asking him if he considers this a form of argument. My companions tell me just leave him be. Which seems wise.

A little further off, things look they might be about to descend into shoving matches or actual scuffles.

It’s time for some de-escalation of our own. The Bloc march off, led by a tall blond guy singing “Kumbaya.”

Except for one small team, one of whom stays behind to spray-paint:

Banks don’t bleed. Protesters have.

Another pastes up a cardboard sign prepared for the occasion:

I Owe You One for the Broken Window

—The Revolution

And a third splashes the interior with a bucket of white paint.

We march west, away from the park, but before we’ve gone more than a block or two, we are met by a delegation of middle-aged townsfolk (I think to myself, “I am tempted to call them ‘burghers,’ except that none of them are fat”). They ask us not to go into their neighborhood. It is residential.

One of the anarchists in front is trying to explain that they have nothing to fear from us: we never attack small businesses or personal property. Only corporate establishments.

“Well, there are none of those in this direction. Just people’s homes. So there’s no need to go here.”

After a bit of uncomfortable shifting back and forth, the man next to him is more direct: “Don’t destroy the town,” he says, pointing back to the park. “Go fight the cops!”

“Yes, fight the cops,” says someone else. “We realize you are fighting on our side. We support you. But people are afraid for their neighborhoods.”

For many of the Black Bloc, this must be a moment of ultimate moral confusion. After all, most anarchists believe targeted property destruction is legitimate because it’s not really a form of violence. You can’t be violent to an inanimate object. Because nobody actually gets hurt. This is why the rainbow fellow could act the way he did: he knew none of us would be willing to harm another human being—or anyway, certainly not one that wasn’t directly attacking us, whereas if he had tried to interpose his body like that against a cop, the cop would simply hit him. Suddenly we were faced with members of the public urging us to forgo property destruction, and instead engage in violence. With the pacifists, we could argue, even scream at each other, but we were screaming in the same language. Here we were dealing with a completely different moral universe.

After brief exchange, we turn around and march back towards the park, to the usual loud cheers and applause. Someone shouts: “It’s the People’s Riot Police!”

4:20PM, Jean Baptiste

The park is all celebration: “We won! Summit closed for tear gas!”

Not true, of course.

After a bit I finally find La Resistance, to a general exchange of hugs. I tell Kitty about the bank. She tells me that all day there have been running battles along the north side of the wall, where it cuts through Jean Baptiste. Police lines are so thinly stretched, it’s usually possible to find a spot that’s undefended. Mostly they’ve been using hooks and ropes and clippers like on Friday, but sometimes you can take advantage of abrupt slopes to roll flaming dumpsters or even just shopping carts into the fence.

The Refugees are nowhere to be seen, so I figure I’m La Resistance for the rest of the afternoon. Before long, we end up on the edge of an ancient church graveyard, where the fence has been particularly heavily festooned with signs and slogans, yanking away with grappling hooks, using paving stones to mash away at the main posts, or to chuck over the fence at police vehicles or even, on one or two occasions, individual police. Much of the wall is already down in this area. Every trash bin seems to have a fire in it—to burn away the tear gas—which means as we march we find ourselves moving through alternating streams of smoke, toxic white, and acrid gray.

Kitty explains they’ve been paying particular attention to the churchyard because it’s directly behind the Congress Center where the Summit is taking place.

Notebook Entry, written the next day, 4/22/01

The Black Bloc was never large that day, rarely more than thirty or forty people, actually, though it would occasionally reconverge at fifty or sixty. People would get scattered, affinity groups of normally six or eight get reduced to two or three people, due to injuries or exhaustion. Though, occasionally, we’d also get reinforcements from people who just arrived in town: like the three Connecticut Yabbas who showed up Saturday morning and joined La Resistance. Just about everyone had been hit by something at some point—often feet or ankles, mostly by tear gas canisters. But plastic bullets were being used increasingly, and from guns with laser sights so at night people could often see that the cops were intentionally aiming for heads or groins. “I got hit in the groin. But I was wearing a cup!” declared one of our new arrivals, triumphantly.

When a scout spotted a plausible target, we’d gather everyone available and form a circle to discuss it. This always involved first getting a couple volunteers to do a camera-check, circling through the surrounding crowds, since there always was one, asking anyone with video cameras or photographic equipment not to take pictures of the meeting. This despite everyone being masked all the time anyway. (Brad told me it was just the same in Prague. The trick is to approach looking vaguely scary, all in black, masked and usually helmeted; and then be scrupulously polite and gracious when you actually open your mouth. The combination proved remarkably effective.) Discussion was pretty free-form, but consensus-based. Then we’d move into action—often greeted by cheers by demonstrators and increasingly, townspeople, whenever we show up in a new place.

The Bloc had only minimal communications—at one point I think our entire comms system consisted of two guys connected via Nextel, whose job was to coordinate so as to make sure we didn’t get cut off and surrounded by cops. When we charged—as on St. Jean—one person also hung back to scout. But that was it. This seemed typical of the whole action, though: if CLAC had a comms or scouting system, which presumably they must have, I never saw a sign of it. It must have been very small. Time’s Up Bill, who spent some time circling the perimeter on a bicycle, later complained that he’d seen numerous unguarded breaches in the security fence all day. If there had been any sort of proper organization, people would have been able to burst right in. But of course most of us had long since decided we didn’t want to invade the perimeter.

In part, too, the attacks on the wall are meant to keep the police off balance, to try to keep them from amassing forces and invading the surrounding neighborhood again.

Not far away from the cemetery, at Rue St. Genevieve, was a huge press of people, a kind of focus of intensity, where the Bloc had earlier been attacking a section of the wall. Apparently, they’d set fire to a dumpster, and rolled it into the fence. It crashed through and flipped over inside the perimeter. Cops then tried to block the breach with a bulldozer, but the Bloc had managed to disable it—by the time we saw it, it looked thoroughly trashed, with revolutionary slogans spray-painted all over it—and escaped just as a squad of maybe thirty riot cops marched up in formation to secure the area. When we arrived, the dumpster was still smoldering, the tractor broken and askew, and the thirty police standing absolutely motionless, surrounded by hundreds of pacifists. The alley was tight enough they had managed to completely cut them off. The police had maybe a couple yards clear in front of and behind them, after that, it was an impenetrable wall of human beings. Someone told us the standoff had now been going on for almost an hour. There was a sizable band of drummers and other musicians a little bit up the slope, playing slow rhythmic music—actually, it was extremely good, with all sorts of intricate syncopation—and people dancing in hypnotic style. Occasionally someone would leave the human wall and join the dancing, or vice versa. Entranced, I fell away from the Bloc for a moment, promising I’d rendezvous later.

5:25PM, The Park

Now the story is the Summit is delayed because the tear gas has gotten in the ventilation system. Or, alternately, that the Brazilian delegation have used this as an excuse to refuse to go in. (Everybody has been counting on the Brazilians to spearhead opposition to the treaty.)

The police are starting to move down into Jean Baptiste, despite our best efforts to delay them. One unit has encircled a nearby intersection.

They’re also trying to take the park again, making liberal use of concussion grenades and pepper spray. The response is an almost dizzying diversity of tactics. There’s a cluster of about thirty activists, mostly students I think, in jeans and T-shirts, some without even bandannas, staging a sit-down. They position themselves right in the path of a police line, those in front raising both arms in the air to flash peace signs. They’re chanting:

We’re nonviolent, how ’bout you?
We’re nonviolent, how ’bout you?

As the cops get nearer, the activists break into “the whole world is watching!” and two police officers start firing plastic bullets directly into the middle of the crowd. Someone screams. Someone carries someone off, but the rest hold their position. A priest appears and interposes himself. He’s talking with the police. Some Radical Cheerleaders, with black and red pompoms and outrageous hairdos, walk up and begin one of their elaborate chants nearby. Apparently reassured, the cops return to the fence.

Almost immediately thereafter, four molotov cocktails sail over the fence after them. I see a few figures running off in the mist. Oddly, they don’t look much like activists: the two I see most clearly seem stocky, fortyish. One rather reminds me of the fellow who’d been complaining about the tear gas on his stoop a few hours before (but I’m pretty sure it isn’t him).

I never saw anyone with a firebomb that weekend who wasn’t speaking French.

Finally, the pieces started to fall together: Montréal Ya Basta! explaining about how there are different standards about violence in Québec, CASA’s confusing refusal to disallow molotovs, even as they appealed for community support, the delegation of citizens telling us to fight the cops—even Mac’s diatribe in Little Italy about how the truly oppressed either sit back or fight back, and are not interested in elaborate codes of nonviolence. This is a community with an extremely militant tradition of resistance. Both the priest and the bombers actually represented the same phenomenon: a community beginning to actively intervene on our behalf.

A bearded guy on stilts, in an elaborate green-sequined costume, strides up to the fence with an enormous peace sign. The cops turn on the water cannon and blast him square in the chest. He flies backwards about twenty feet. Medics run up, make sure his spine isn’t broken, then turn the stilts into splints and quickly, keeping their heads low, whisk him away.

5:53PM

A huge plume rises over the park. Helicopters rattle overhead.

Another mortar round. Cheers as someone throws it back. Two smokebombs go with it.

“Hey, nonviolent!” someone shouts.

Someone else: “Is there anyone who might be pregnant? They’re using CS gas!”

A police squad starts nabbing activists at the edge of the park. It’s perhaps the first time I’ve actually witnessed an arrest. I leave the park and head downhill again.

6:00PM, Jean Baptiste

What follows is something of a blur. I completely gave up on taking notes. I somehow wind up with a column of about twenty-five or thirty Black Bloc’ers who attempt a charge on a fenced position… I think it was along St. Jean again, where a flaming shopping cart had almost collapsed the wall an hour or two before. About halfway through the charge, we’re pepper-bombed; at least, it’s the same blinding sensation I had experienced at the wall, going right through my gas mask. I stumble back a ways. By chance, there’s a medic on a nearby stoop, a young man of eighteen or twenty who looks like he’s from Senegal or Cameroon, with spiked hair and a hefty plastic first aid kit. He offers me the full anti-pepper treatment, and we find a sheltered space where he carefully washes my eyes and face with some kind of antacid solution, then scrubs and washes it out with mineral oil. I feel considerably better.

By the time I find the remnants of the Bloc, though, there are only a little over a dozen of them, and a big blond fellow remarks sternly that no one recognizes me. Where’s my affinity group? Maybe you should go try to find them. I look around for Kitty and the rest of La Resistance, but no one is around. I could have sworn I was with them earlier. Still a little dazed, I can’t remember anyone’s names, let alone action names. Buffy is a ways off resting against a wall with her eyes closed. I’ve forgotten her name too. I tell him, good idea, yeah, I’m sure they must have moved down to the park or something, and head off to take myself a breather.

Big blond guy suddenly takes on a kindly tone. “Hey, good luck! I’m sure it won’t take long to find them.”

At the park, things are getting ever more intense. A small squad of people with fire bombs are trying to destroy the water cannon. Every time they get close to being in range, carefully diving in between its mechanical sweeps, police open fire with plastic bullets. I watch two molotovs make beautiful arcs and land within a few feet of the machine, producing spectacular, but momentary, splashes of flame. They don’t seem to do any damage.

No snatch squads appear to be operating at the moment, so I lie down to rest; but it seemed almost as soon as I had rested a few minutes Buffy is there, tapping me on the shoulder. “Hey, David! We’re trying to gather some folks together to head down towards the highway. There’s a main entry point there that’s really lightly guarded.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Are there any other members of your affinity group in the park?”

“No, I think I lost them.”

Within a few minutes I’m back with the Bloc, in the same spot as before, but this time everyone is there: La Resistance, Craig’s group, the PEI kids—only Montréal is missing. We head down St. Jean, then downhill to the occasional cheers of pedestrians, descend to the highway and scope out the situation.

The situation though turns out to be a little too hectic for my taste. There’s already a battle going on, with at least five or six cops crouched in the darkness behind a wide chain-link gate, red lasers from their sights sweeping and darting everywhere. There’s a huge empty stretch of asphalt, and sheltered spaces where people—I think they’re students, definitely not Black Bloc, but really I have no idea who they are—are mixing molotovs in empty glass coke-bottles. Every minute or so one will emerge from their cover and loft it over the gate.

“It doesn’t look so lightly defended any more,” I say to Buffy.

She furls her brow as another splash of flame lights up the gate momentarily. “Well, we’ll see what we can make of it.”

The Bloc itself had long since consensed on no molotovs, but now that the genie was out of the bottle, as it were, some of us were at least willing to help prepare them. “After all,” someone says, “we said we’d follow the lead of the local people.” Others—Lee for instance—are looking extremely skeptical. I found the whole scene enormously disturbing. CS was landing everywhere. Cops were firing apparently indiscriminately. There was one weird guy twirling slowly around in the very middle of everything, dancing in and out of the lights and clouds to a music that must have existed only in his head.

“Jeez, what would make someone act like that?” someone asks.

“I’m guessing Ecstasy.”

I figure this is why they tell you never to bring drugs to an action.

Myself, I have no interest in helping anyone try to set someone else on fire— even police in flame-retardant body armor—so it occurs to me this might not be a bad moment to check in with the IMC. I will make one last attempt to locate Karen. They’ll probably have a clearer idea what’s going on in the city, too, and whether we’ve really shut down the Summit. Retreating to a nearby streetlamp to consult my map, I realize it’s quite close. I wave good luck to everyone (nobody really notices), watch for a moment as they descend to positions closer to the gate.

A few minutes later, I’m passing under a highway ramp where Food Not Bombs is rolling out vast tureens for an upcoming free kitchen. There’s a small tent village, and punk-rockers setting up a sound system from the back of a truck. This must be the Ile Fleuriot. It’s kind of a grimy, clammy space, but there are already a few hundred people starting to gather for the party. I make a note: I’m supposed to be meeting people here at the party later on. Then I pass the now shuttered Army/Navy store and, finally, descend into the IMC.

7:15PM, I enter the IMC

At the IMC, everything is different. For one thing, there’s security now. No one is allowed inside without an Indymedia ID. There’s a big fellow at the door, who seems to belong to the building. Downstairs, where once there had been a handful of drowsy, happy activists, the space is now crammed and full of grim efficiency. On the tables are rows of computers and video cameras; there are laptops all over the floor. Wires cover everything. Every electric socket has an extension cord and seven or eight devices plugged into it. Near the door is an enormous pile of gear, gas masks, raincoats, water bottles, every sort of protective equipment. On the walls, lists of rules, work shifts, teams, phone numbers, events. Next to the door is an improvised security desk where you show your ID a second time; behind it, a girl with dark curly hair who looks like a high school student. I flash my IMC card. It turns out she is, in fact, a high school student: part of a small group from another province who are in the city on some sort of alternative media grant. She looks more than a little overwhelmed.

Maybe a third of the faces are familiar to me from other actions. I spot Celia, who I met in the IMC in Philadelphia during the Republican Convention. At the time, we were both working on the team doing liaison with the corporate media. I was a complete neophyte. She, in her mid-thirties, was an experienced media activist, who ended up organizing most of our press conferences.

“Hey, Celia!”

“Oh, hi, David. Just get into town?”

“No, I got through at Akwesasne. One of the few. Been here since Friday morning. You?”

“Me? I’ve been in town since Wednesday.” She paused. “So, what do you think?”

“I’ve never experienced anything like it.” I started going on about Friday and the exhilaration of bringing down the wall.

Celia, however, is unimpressed by macho heroics, and starts telling me instead about her own high point: a ceremony on the first day conducted by the Living River. Had I seen it? She had just been editing images from it on a nearby computer: the blue stream coming to rest along the streets of St. Jean, everything falling silent, then, suddenly, a hundred people simultaneously throwing rolls of toilet paper into the air, creating an effect like a fluttering, billowing sea. After which a Wiccan offered a beautiful incantation.

The images on the computer screen were small and I doubted they really give a full sense of the moment. Still, they were impressive. I look them over even after Celia is called away a moment later, then poke around until I find the legal person who has been keeping track of IMC arrestees. There have been several, but most of them within the last several hours and none of them were Karen. Neither has anyone been in contact with her.

I do find someone who knows Sasha’s number, so I use the IMC phone to call him. But it goes straight to voicemail. I check messages. Call friends.

Nothing.

Is it possible she just went home and didn’t tell anyone? For an activist, that would have been incredibly irresponsible. But of course, Karen is not an activist.

7:30PM, still in the IMC

Independent Media Centers are another institution born of the WTO protests in Seattle: they are meant to be a way for activist journalists to provide their own account of events, and actually convey the protesters’ message, which the corporate media almost never does. By 2001, there were permanent IMCs in most major North American cities and, increasingly, across the world. Huge ones would also come into being temporarily during every major mobilization. IMCs ran on essentially anarchist principles. Everything was done collectively: people edited each other’s stories; there was no hierarchy of editors and reporters; all decisions were made by consensus. The IMC would host live radio shows, prepare videos, and during the key days of action, release a daily newspaper reporting on events. Most immediately, though, it maintained a web page, where one could find up-to-the-minute information on the actions as they happened. One side of the page was open—anyone could post—and, therefore, it largely resembled the rumor mill on the streets; but the center of the page was all dispatches from IMC reporters, who prided themselves on maintaining more exacting standards of accuracy than the corporate press.

Here at the activist info hub, I was finally able to start piecing together the kind of comprehensive, panoramic information that is simply unavailable on the streets. The picture was frightening.

The police had been moving downhill steadily since 6PM, much more rapidly than they had the day before. This time, their strategy was first to seize key points and intersections, then to follow up with mop-up operations and arrest anyone still on the streets within occupied territory. They were also adopting a posture of hands-on brutality. Several Indymedia videographers had already been beaten and arrested. One of the first police targets was the Clinic, where our medics were treating all the worst injuries. First, police had lobbed tear gas directly through the windows, shattering glass and forcing the medics to evacuate the wounded. Fifteen minutes later, a squad of police showed up at the new, makeshift clinic they’d created in the alleyway outside and marched everyone out at gunpoint, rousting patients out of stretchers, appropriating medical supplies, stripping everyone of goggles and gas masks and even vinegar-soaked bandannas, then driving them down the long stairs that wound down from the Côte d’Abraham. The big battle had now shifted to the heart of the Green Zone. Thousands of people had gathered for the free food and dance party that was supposed to celebrate the day’s action. Many were coming from the march and People’s Summit; there were children and old people. Then, suddenly, the police attacked. The acre-wide “Temporary Autonomous Zone” under the highway was transformed into a vast cloud of tear gas. Would-be partygoers responded by occupying the highway overhead. The police were currently trying to dislodge them, but there were by now at least three thousand of them and they were putting up stiff resistance.

We didn’t have clear numbers yet for arrests and injuries. Official numbers, dutifully repeated by TV and wire services, were sheerest fantasy: the cops were reporting about forty injuries since Friday, of which, they claimed, about half were police. Our medics were reporting they had treated over a thousand injuries on the first day alone: including several asthmatics who nearly died from the gas, dozens of broken bones and some very serious burns. The authorities were also still claiming that only a few dozen had been arrested, despite the sweeps in the Old City. This also could not possibly be true. We were already receiving the usual frightening reports, by now familiar in the US, of intentional abuse of prisoners. Busses full of handcuffed detainees were being driven in circles around the city for twelve or thirteen hours to avoid legalities; arrestees who actually were booked were being hog-tied, denied access to water or toilet facilities; injured activists were being denied medical treatment, stripped, hosed down with icy water and left freezing in unheated cells.

Everyone is worrying the IMC will be the next target. This is not just because of its obvious strategic importance in giving activists (and everybody else) some idea what’s going on. Apparently, someone had scanned several pages of text that appeared to be from the police SUVs broken into the night before, with detailed intelligence reports and contingency plans on police strategy, and uploaded it to the IMC web page the night before. The editors immediately removed it and passed it on to the IMC in Seattle, who published it—noting there was no way to be sure whether it was forged or genuine. A few hours later Seattle police closed down the IMC there. It seemed reasonable to expect that, given the circumstances, the Québec IMC might be next.

The worst news, however, is that it now looks like one protester has actually been shot dead. It’s not completely certain. The report first comes in by phone, from an IMC reporter by the highway. This creates a major crisis, because the question now becomes what to report. A meeting is called. It starts with maybe a dozen people huddled around a desk and ends up including almost everyone:

(From notebook, 4/21/01, 7:50PM, emergency meeting, Québec IMC)

Chuck: Well, let me present this as a formal proposal then. We have an eye-witness report that a protester has been killed after being shot in the throat with a plastic bullet near the highway. Apparently some medics tried CPR, and when he didn’t come around, they eventually managed to get him to an ambulance and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him. So I’m proposing we put the information we have on the web page. Bearing in mind that, in doing so, we’d also be effectively releasing it to the corporate media.

Celia: There’s also a counter-proposal that a small group of us do the leg-work to get full confirmation before we run anything. We’re not the corporate media. For them, one confirmation would be enough; our job is to do it better. So the proposal is not to run with the story unless we have at least two confirmations.

Chuck: Well, I agree we should definitely create such a team in any event.

Helen. I’m taking stack for anyone who wants to express concerns now, or commentary. Bill?

Bill: Well, for my own part, I’d prefer, if possible, to keep corporate media out of this, because they’re fuckers.

Suzette: I agree with the second proposal. We have to check further.

Andrew: I also managed to get through to a street medic who confirmed the first part of the story: a young man was shot in the throat, he collapsed, he wasn’t breathing, medics tried to revive him, and he was eventually taken to a hospital.

Helen: So we can report that as confirmed?

Ben: I’d say, since that part is confirmed, let’s assemble a small team to investigate; see if we can get any further information from the hospital.

Helen: So you’re supporting the second proposal?

Ben: Yeah.

[There are people coming in from the stairs, stripping off gear, talking excitedly]

Helen: Quiet please! We have a consensus process going on!

Annette: I think we should think seriously about the effects of releasing anything this potentially explosive without having absolute confirmation.

Randy: As for first proposal, I agree with Annette. We have over ten thousand people here facing several thousand cops. It’s already halfway to a war out there. If we spread the word that somebody died, do we want to be responsible for the result?

[A couple people shout “yes!”]

Annette: Look, we know the corporate media is watching everything we’re doing. We put it out there, they’ll run with it. If we say something that isn’t true, I don’t even want to think about what’ll happen.

Noah: And people out there are already pissed off enough at the cops.

Chuck: …and more likely to be in the streets, getting it from the rumor mill. Word will go out that this happened. It’s possible, if we run a story saying only what’s already confirmed, then someone who knows the rest of the story will call in and tell us. It might be the only realistic way we could have of finding out.

Riley: We’ve already had reports of several molotovs having been thrown, several points where there have been pitched battles with the cops.

[Everyone is standing in a circle by now.]

Suzette: There have also been a lot of incorrect rumors about the Summit being shut down. How do we know any of those stories are even true?

David: Well, I can confirm the molotovs. I’ve seen quite a few of them by now.

Sheila: Excuse me—point of process. This entire meeting is being conducted in English. Is there anyone who doesn’t speak English and wants an explanation of what’s going on?

[One woman does. Sheila gives her an update in French and provides simultaneous translation for the rest of the discussion.]

Helen: Well, it sounds to me like we’ve come to…

Jamie [newly arrived ]: Look, I saw this guy get shot! This happened.

Andrew: Wait, you were there? You saw it?

From the Door: COPS ARE ENTERING THE BUILDING!

The meeting dissolves into a scramble. The cops must be in the upstairs offices, since apparently they’re not yet on the stairs. Someone shouts: “QUICKLY, GET THE KEY! GET IT RIGHT NOW!” Someone else is checking the stairs; others grab phones, punching steadily trying to find an open line, trying to contact IMC reporters on the street. After a moment, the crisis subsides. It looks like the cops hadn’t done more than poke their heads in, shoot a bullet down the stairs just to scare us, and then make off. Slowly, everyone tries to breathe again, change registers, exit crisis mode. The meeting reconvenes and Jamie, the eyewitness, still geared up with a red bandanna and green goggles on top of his head, provides more details: this one guy, the victim, was for some reason by himself not far from the wall, maybe twenty meters from the police. Suddenly two shots rang out and he was hit twice in rapid succession, once in the shoulder, once in the throat. You could see from the lasers that they were aiming directly at his head.

I had a horrified thought: was this that same guy I’d seen dancing in the middle of the melee down by the highway. It had to be. Who else could it be? It would be amazing if that guy hadn’t gotten shot. Or, no… didn’t someone else say it happened in an area outside of the action?

Helen: So it sounds like the emerging consensus is around the second proposal: not to send anything out immediately, but to try to confirm the story. Does anyone have serious concerns with that?

Bill: I’m still not clear how we would do that. We don’t know the guy’s name. The only way to confirm the name would be from the cops.

Celia: We can contact all the local hospitals. I’ll volunteer to be in the team so we can, eventually, publish this.

Joe: I’m really afraid that if we spread false rumors, we’ll seriously discredit ourselves.

Riley [on the phone]: I’m getting a report from an IMC reporter on the streets outside; he says there’s all sorts of police brutality going on up above. Apparently six cops are surrounding the door right now…

Someone else: Some medics say they’re coming down. It’s an emergency.

Annette: We have to bear in mind the whole world is watching us. If anything we report turns out to be inaccurate, no one will ever forget it. I wouldn’t even mention the fact that there are rumors at this point.

(Medics enter)

The medics were, unsurprisingly, looking for a new space to set up shop. Could they use the upstairs offices for a temporary clinic? The consensus seems to be that it’s not likely to be a very safe location, since we’re probably about to be invaded ourselves, but there are not a whole lot of viable alternatives. The medics take off to alert their network.

As a space, the IMC was particularly vulnerable. First of all, there was only one point of access: the stairs. If the police did show up, we’d all be instantly trapped here in the basement. Second, the building did not seem to have a functioning ventilation system. One tear gas canister down the stairs would make it uninhabitable. Already people were jamming scarves and sweaters under the cracks of the doors to prevent bad air from seeping in. The question is, if the cops do try to enter, should we try to defend the space, should we practice nonviolent civil disobedience (everyone sit on the floor, refuse to comply with orders, go limp if they try to carry us), or should we surrender and comply? An earlier meeting had consensed on the second strategy, but in light of developments it was critical to make sure everyone was still on the same page. Also, to try to ensure we have enough advance warning that anyone unwilling to risk arrest was given an option to get out beforehand.

Hardly has this meeting begun, however, when we’re faced with another medical crisis. A young woman is escorted down the stairs, carrying a seven-month-old baby. She’s sobbing quietly. The baby’s screaming. Her IMC escort is desperately searching for a medic.

“Medics? I think they just left.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Is the baby sick?”

“The fuckers gassed it.”

“What? They gassed a baby?”

Her escort explains the mother is a Food Not Bombs volunteer, who was down at the Green Zone ladling soup when the police attacked. She immediately grabbed her child and took off for higher ground, but a canister landed directly at her feet as she was fleeing.

“Wow. Do you think it was an accident or do you think they actually saw the baby?”

The mother, who up to now had been silent, glared at him. “Of course they saw the baby!” she said, in thickly accented English. “They were thirty meters away from us!”

“The motherfuckers!”

Half the people in the room were speechless. Two women offered to hold the infant, whose face was bright crimson, tried to bounce and quiet him. His name, we learned, was Gabe.

“I can’t believe they gassed a fucking baby.”

“And they wonder why people throw rocks at the police.”

Someone fetches water; someone else suggests they wait for the medics at the very top of the stairwell, where there’s a landing on the sixth floor with an open window and relatively untainted air (it had previously been used as the IMC smoking section). It’s after eight and I’m beginning to think it will actually be safer under the highway, where at least there’ll be escape routes. A woman who is part of some locally based documentary collective is at the pile of gear, holding up my gas mask. Can she use it “for just ten minutes?” Her crew just wants to go outside to get a few shots of the police.

“Well, is there chance it will be longer than ten minutes? Because I really have to leave.”

“No, no,” she says. “We will be right back.”

I hesitate, make a subjective assessment of the situation. She is a professional videographer, with the kind of air of abrupt efficiency that, to me at least, suggests “person who would lie about this sort of thing without even thinking about it.” On the other hand, we are in the sort of communal situation where one cannot really refuse a direct request without an explicit reason, and I really can’t say I have one.

“Okay. But I really am going to need it back in ten minutes.”

Half an hour later, I’m still waiting. I spend some time futzing around the office, once again confirming that none of the innumerable cell phone rechargers in the IMC will, in fact, recharge my make of phone. I try to see if there’s work I can do—I did promise to contribute an hour’s work, back when I got my ID card. But everyone is far too distracted. Neither is it possible to find a free computer on which to check my email. Without my mask, I’m basically trapped here. Anyway, if I leave, I’ll definitely never get it back. So I head upstairs to help with the baby, who is still up on the landing. Even there, there’s not too much I can do other than provide moral support, but it’s a fascinating space, all concrete and industrial, with two big factory-style windows tilted slightly open. From one, you can see a rooftop now occupied by police. They’re only twenty or thirty feet away, some of them, though, still utterly impersonal in gas masks, visors, and armor. They don’t seem to be aware of us.

With nothing better to do, I started to scribble:

(From my notes again)

The problem with the IMC is it’s a bubble—not just in the literal sense (no one wishing to open doors or windows and risk the tear gas getting in), but also because it’s sealed off from the sense of immediacy, fellowship, and spontaneous intimacy you have on the streets where you’re facing continual, tangible danger. Here, everything is mediated. You’re in a florescent room full of screens and monitors, you see nothing for yourself but still you know each and every one of the worst things that are happening: every arrest, every grievous injury, every new police outrage. The resulting mood isn’t exactly one of hysteria; it is more a kind of manic jumpiness that comes from having far too much information.

But, on reflection, isn’t this what news basically consists of? A national report largely consists of the worst things that happen, in any given day, in America. An international report lists the worst things that have happened in the world.

Finally, around 8:45, the video crew returns, chattering animatedly in French. Then they’re about to leave again.

“Excuse me, my gas mask?”

“Oh, yes.”

Upstairs, the building security guy is only allowing people out in groups, for fear of letting gas inside the building. “I really don’t recommend going outside right now,” he tells me. “There are cops all over. It’s extremely dangerous.”

I tell him I’ll take my chances. Finally, after about five minutes, someone is rapping on the glass door from the outside, and I’m back on the streets.

8:50PM, Outside

Free at last! At least, oddly, that’s what it feels like to be back in the war zone.

Riot cops occupy the wooden stage at the very top of the great stairs leading up to the Old City; they seem to have taken all the commanding eminences. This entire area of the city is wreathed in gas. They’re using the more powerful, military grade stuff that everyone refers to as “CS” though I don’t know if it really is (the IMC people weren’t sure). Just breathing without a mask is already physically painful; passing through low-lying areas leaves the unprotected coughing and gagging; new rounds are falling regularly. There are only a few shadowy figures on the street. I take a lane behind the IMC that seems like it’s leading to the highway, and almost immediately run into Kitty. We both start laughing.

We hug. It’s probably the seventh time we’ve hugged today.

“So what’s up? Where’s everybody? Are they all okay?”

“Well, Andrea got hit twice and went home. She gave her gas mask to Lee (I get the sleeping bag). Everyone else is okay. We’re all down at the Temporary Autonomous Zone under the highway. We’ve been under attack for at least an hour now. It’s amazing! There are thousands of people there now, more coming all the time. There was a pitched battle, and we won.”

She goes on to describe the building of a giant bonfire in the TAZ space to neutralize the tear gas. The police brought up a water cannon to try to put it out. But people stuck it out. Meanwhile, more and more ordinary citizens are joining us. There are now thousands on the highway. They’re calling them the “bangers” because, for an hour now, they’ve been just banging rhythmically on the metal barriers on the side of the highway, making so much of a racket that it can easily be heard at the Convention Center ten blocks away. The police started mortaring the highway too, and sent lines of troops to clear the area using beanbag guns and plastic bullets, but to no avail. Even when they started using the water cannon. Old people, families, union folk, everyone started raining bricks and boards and flaming debris down at the cops. Finally, the police withdrew.

“So what are you doing here?” I ask.

“We heard a rumor they might be moving on the IMC. I came to check if people need any help down here. What about you?”

“I was checking for news of Karen and ended up getting trapped in the IMC for an hour when someone borrowed my gas mask.”

“Oh, I heard someone got in contact with Sasha, who said Karen was arrested and they took her to Montréal.”

“Really? Who did you hear that from?”

“Somebody.” She thinks a second. “No, can’t remember. Maybe someone from New York? And do you know anything about this rumor that somebody got killed down by the highway?”

“It’s all they’ve been talking about at the IMC for the last hour or two. But nobody seems to know if the guy is really dead.”

As we scout the police positions around the IMC, we keep running into old friends. Simon, from New York, strolls out of the mist in a helmet, shield, and arm and shin guards, of exactly the sort we had been using in Ya Basta! He seems as surprised as we that he managed to get it through, and about as pleased with himself as anyone could possibly be. A lot of New York people, he reports, are finally getting through. We join most of the Refugees, various Black Bloc elements, and local residents, and set up a makeshift defense of the IMC. As police helicopters buzz overheard, people strip the boards from shops that have been boarded over, create a bonfire. Then we all start building barricades, making use of metal fences collected from the little park near the foot of the stair.

It’s not a moment too soon, as busses and vans full of police reinforcements are beginning to concentrate just a block or two up the road. Battles ensue. We’re driven from our positions, disperse, return, build the barricades again. We make endless phone calls trying to get reporters from the corporate press to witness the scene, hoping their presence will keep the police from invading the building. They never respond. Nonetheless, despite a few tear gas shells lobbed in windows on the stairwell, police never end up entering the building itself.

10:45PM, Côte D’Abraham

We finally get a chance to pay back our work commitment to the IMC. Shawn has a radio and agrees to do street reports for the 11—4 shift. This also gives the Refugees a new raison d’etre, and an excuse to more or less follow the action in this part of the city.

The city itself has taken on a near insurrectionary quality. It soon becomes apparent that the police have completely overplayed their hand. By dispersing their forces so far from the wall, they’ve ended up with no clear zones of control whatsoever: even most of Jean Baptiste is liberated territory again, with barricades and bonfires being built at a dozen different locations. We wander along the Côte d’Abraham, a winding path along the bottom of a steep bluff, the very foot of the Old City, trying to find a way back up. Isolated clusters of people are walking along the road. Many seem to be apolitical, local boys out for a good time. One good-natured crew toast us as they pass, “This is a very good night for drinking beer!” Another young man had been hit by a plastic bullet on the buttocks and is showing the welt to everyone he meets. (“Look at that! Can you see what those pigs did to me?”) It’s as if the easy camaraderie of the day before has now extended to the entire city—though, as we climb into the Old City, we do see a couple acts of drunken randomness as beer bottles fly through closed shop windows.

One was a corner print shop that seemed pretty obviously of the “mom and pop” variety.

“Tsk, tsk. That’s not a legitimate target, is it?” says Lyn.

“On the other hand,” Heidi observes, “compared with what happens after a hockey championship in this town, this is nothing. There’s usually hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage. I think even the hooligans are holding back.”

Up in the Old City, African and Asian immigrants are among the crowds defending positions against the police. Children and old people have already been evacuated. We keep running into activists from New York. Brad Will, an eco-activist living in the NYC IMC, has just got into town; he’s got a huge backpack and his face is swathed in a ripped T-shirt, reeking of vinegar. “The problem,” he says, “is that people just can’t take the gas. We’d have driven them out of the entire neighborhood if it wasn’t for the gas.”

Brad directs us to a particularly dramatic scene further up the hill that might be worth reporting. Ben and I climb up the hill to investigate. There’s a major battle going on as residents crouch behind a barricade of sofas, wooden doors, and bric-a-brac obviously dragged out from their basements; cops are firing on them from a position behind three or four police vehicles further up the street. Young men are pouring gasoline and sugar into empty bottles from a big plastic canister; then they stuff the bottles with rags and leave them near the edge of the barricade. Periodically, someone will take one, dash up to a little lot between two buildings, light it, and hurl it at the police—then run back again. The police, in turn, are firing pepper bombs behind the barricades to try to force people to come up for air, then shooting at their heads with plastic bullets. I watch as a molotov sails up, misses its target, and lands on the wooden lintel of a second-story window, setting a tiny fire. No one seems particularly alarmed.

“Jeez, they’re going to burn down their own neighborhood!”

A moment later I was blind and couldn’t breathe. Another pepper bomb. I have a distinct memory of telling myself “keep your head down, keep your head down” and, a second later, feeling like someone had just broken a bottle over my head. This is odd because no one has ever broken a bottle over my head and in fact I have no idea what it would feel like, but that was my first reaction. Apparently, I did manage to keep mostly down, and the bullet ricocheted off the very top of my head, coming to rest thirty feet behind us. I sat on the ground a second, then retreated as someone ran past, shouting something helpful in French. Back at the foot of the hill, Brad, still sputtering from the tear gas, presented me with the bullet—or anyway, it was probably the same bullet. “If that’s your first,” he said, “you might want to keep it.”

“Thanks.”

The bullet is gigantic: made of something that felt like hard green rubber, mallet-shaped, large enough to fill the palm of my hand. I tell myself: it’s a lucky thing I swallowed one of those codeine tablets an hour ago, just in case.

We end up, a few hours later, at a little shop-lined park on the edge of the lower city, at the corner of Coronne and Charest, where another huge bonfire has become the center of a spontaneous street party. Someone’s brought out a sound system, people are smoking dope and dancing in the flamelight. Others stream in from the highway, or get called away to battles a few blocks away. Cars occasionally appear, take one look at the scene, and desperately U-turn away. When we head home around 4AM, there’s talk of making yet another attack on the wall, this time from the Plains of Abraham. There are also rumors that the government was calling in the army.

Sunday, April 22

The next morning we were all aglow.

Ben: “That was just hugely successful.”

Shawn: “It was definitely the most impressive demo I’ve ever been in.”

“And I know the people of Québec City are going to have another one soon.”

I asked: “So, who exactly were all those people making noise on the highway all night? Were they really union people from the People’s Summit?”

“That was the amazing thing,” said Lyn. “They were everybody. Union people. Kids. Grannies. Old hippies. Ordinary citizens of every kind.”

“I saw high school kids,” someone chimes in, “mothers with kids, one mother-daughter team both banging away at the guard-rails with sticks. People formed a kind of impromptu rotation system to make sure the sound never started to die down.”

“A lot of the union people had come with masks and bottles of vinegar with them on the bus, already organized into affinity groups and everything.”

“If you think about it,” said Shawn, “it was the perfect civil disobedience, because we could make this huge racket that you could hear a mile away. They could definitely hear it at the summit and the hotels where the delegates were staying. But at the same time we just couldn’t be dislodged. People were already starting to bang at noon and I came back hours later and it was still going just as strong.”

“Also, they were so high up I think the delegates in the Convention Center could actually see them.”

Conversations like this were to continue for days, even weeks, to come, and gradually crystallize in formal “report-backs” to groups at home, web narratives, and published IMC reports, the movies and books that we all knew would eventually come out of this, if restricted to an almost exclusively activist audience. During an action, after all, one is surrounded by an almost infinity of potential narratives, some more immediate (“the cops are moving in on the IMC!”), others more abstract (“the Brazilians are looking for an excuse to sabotage the Summit”), all open-ended, uncertain, most of which everyone knows will turn out irrelevant or untrue. No one, not even at the IMC, is in a position to begin to speculate about how the story as a whole will be told afterwards, especially who won. Insofar as a game was being played, the rules of the game—even the precise nature of the field and players—were being negotiated and renegotiated continually, in action. No one involved was in direct contact with more than a tiny percentage of it (I, for instance, never saw the parade, the Bridge CD or Living River), and it was only in retrospect that we could come up with a plausible theory of what the stakes of the battle even were. Not that there is ever one definitive story, even years later—there never is, with any historical event. But these conversations played a crucial role in narrowing things down.

By noon we were back to yet another CLAC spokescouncil, somewhere on the Côte d’Abraham. The night’s battles were all over, the bonfires not even smoldering—all out. The barricades, even, seemed to have been systematically destroyed by bulldozers, and large numbers of activists had already left town. Much of the discussion was about whether it would be possible to round up enough people to march on the Ministry of Justice to protest the weekend’s police repression. There was also supposed to be a demo going on at the Grand Théâtre, near the water cannon, and a party somewhere else, but nothing inspiring enough to keep us from falling back to the University, to start gathering up our things to go.

Wind-down days of an action are always the most dangerous. In big mobilizations, activist numbers tend to peak at the beginning and then decline steadily, owing to injuries, arrests, and before long, people simply returning to their lives or jobs. Police numbers, on the other hand, remain constant. As soon as the balance of forces begins to tilt significantly, they will usually start to take revenge for perceived humiliations of the days before. Actions of any sort become increasingly dangerous; so, often, does walking down the street, as the cops will often begin the sort of random mass arrests they weren’t able to earlier. Anyone walking alone in gear, or even in green hair, piercings, or tattoos, might be a target; but small groups are not necessarily safe either. At the same time, it’s only during the wind-down that those who participated in the actions begin to get a clear picture of what happened—are able to sort the good information from the bad and, above all, start constructing some overall picture of the event as a whole. The result is a combination of increasing paranoia on the ground and an enormous flow of new and retrospective information. It was as if the sense I’d had at the IMC—the combination of sweeping panoramic view, and claustrophobic terror—had now expanded to fill the entire city, or at least, those parts that activists inhabited.

2:15PM

Back at Laval, Mac was hard at work answering phones and going through lists of arrestees at the legal office. Shawn carried out an interview with a CASA organizer from the Comité Populaire du St. Jean-Baptiste, who emphasized the need to move away from summit hopping and do work within communities. Rumor had it more people had just got in from New York. I returned to the gym, now largely empty except for endless piles of backpacks, to find them. There were at most a hundred people left. Montréal Ya Basta! were performing a little improvization on the drums. I spent a while chatting with them, taking notes on gear and tactics to bring back to New York Ya Basta!, if, indeed, one still existed.

There was, in fact, an affinity group of seven who had just made it through, including Eric and Enos from New York and a famous activist called Bork, from D.C. Meeting them was a little disorienting at first. I had just spent two days on the streets, where anyone you met who wasn’t actually shooting at you was your brother or your sister; they were just heading into action, full of secret plans and grim intensity. Still, I got to learn a little about what had happened to my friends. After everyone turned around at the customs gate at Akwesasne, they gathered to decide what to do next. Night had fallen, our few Mohawk patrons had all crossed the border and abandoned us, and figures in the darkness began shooting the occasional paintball at our vehicles. The caravan only got back to Burlington around 3AM. Some went home. Some tried to submit themselves to customs at other places the next day. Some got through. All reported aggressive questioning aimed at establishing if they were in any way associated with an organization called “Ya Basta!” Warcry joined a crew dubbed the “Snowshoe Brigade,” that crossed on foot through a forest in the middle of the night. They got caught when one inexperienced kid panicked and asked a cop for directions. The remaining Ya Basta! contingent tried to take the legal route, but, after submitting themselves to customs twice, all ended up in immigration detention. Except, amusingly, for Moose. He was just turned away. Sasha was locked up with them: that’s why his phone was dead. All of them were all being taken to Montréal for processing and presumably being released in a couple days. Karen, who it transpires did indeed just take off on Friday without telling anyone, is already in Montréal trying to find some way to reach Sasha.

Eventually, we hold a small New York meeting. Brad reports that the streets are growing increasingly dangerous, with black SUVs everywhere, along with stretch undercover vans, with guard windows, that seem to be Canadian intelligence. They’re picking up anyone with gear—padding or shields, certainly, but even medics or IMC journalists with video cameras. Simon was arrested just this morning. Several other New Yorkers showed up in the city only to be immediately caught in sweeps.

We come up with a plan. Those who have been in action had probably best get out of town. We’ll fall back on Montréal and do jail support for our friends in immigration detention, who should be coming up for hearings soon.

Returning to the law offices, I’m surprised to discover Rufus, an old friend and legendary action medic from New York, waiting in line for vegetarian burritos at a free kitchen that’s been set up in a nearby hall. Kitty and Lee are there too. Rufus had been working with the medical team since Saturday and has all the details about casualties. It turns out someone was indeed shot in the throat, but he isn’t dead. He’d stopped breathing for a while because his larynx was crushed, but medics managed to get him breathing and doctors later saved his life by performing a tracheotomy. He will never speak again. That was the worst single injury. Another man had his finger ripped off trying to tear down the wall but a medic sewed it right back on again. (Kitty: “Oh, I saw that happen! It wasn’t from close up, but…he was gripping this cord and trying to pull down a section of wall, when this cop climbed on top of a fence and yanked back at it. His finger came right off. He was just standing there, stunned, and everybody was screaming “Medic!” Then one ran up, grabbed the finger, and went off with him.”) There was another who lost an ear when a tear gas canister hit his earring. A lot of broken arms and fractured ribs.

“You weren’t hit yourself, were you?” asked Lee. “Because they were definitely targeting street medics. I saw that. Not just shooting to scare them, aiming at them.”

There is a long line of busses on the main road through campus; every hour, four or five leave to carry people back to Montréal. There is some question of whether one has to be a student but no one seems to be checking IDs. The big story in the local newspapers is that all the big hotels and restaurants had to throw out tons of food because it was tainted by gas, and that, supposedly, George W. Bush tried to take a swig out of a tainted bottle and had to spew it all out—though it’s hard to imagine how this would really have happened.

We pull together a little group: Rufus, Kitty and Lee, Janna, a couple more.

4:25PM

A march is passing by Des Jardins, maybe two-hundred people, led by red and black flags. I think they’re heading down to the Ministry of Justice. Kitty, who’s going to join us in jail support, has somehow acquired a black flag and banner for us too.

By some miracle, the legal office has a compatible cell phone recharger. With about fifteen minutes worth of juice, I call Alison Haynes, the Montréal Gazette reporter I’d been meaning to call all weekend. It turns out she was at the CIBC bank too, probably one of those reporters I noticed among the onlookers. She says she’d interviewed the rainbow couple afterwards. They were from Vancouver. After we’d left they wrote a note to the CIBC saying “We’re sorry, we did our best to save your bank.”

I haven’t talked to her for more than a minute or two when Rufus comes to tell me we’re going to miss our bus. Then, of course, the phone dies. The next day in Montréal I pick up the paper and find an article with a brief quote from me, explaining it was cut off by my having to high-tail it out of town.

6:25PM, Bus to Montréal

On the bus, everyone is exchanging war stories. A couple of Montréal Yabbas are already heading home. Greg is listing the three corporate targets that got hit: the CIBC, a Shell Oil station that got trashed (the attackers spray-painted the words “Viva Ken Saro Wiwa!”), and a Subway sandwich shop. Not a McDonald’s, as some people were saying. Subway was chosen because it was the second-largest fast food chain in North America, and Canadian owned. Also, some people trashed one of the TV news trucks left in the middle of the park to protest the coverage on the corporate media. He’s pretty dubious though about the “little riot that night. That was pretty lame. I didn’t see it, but I heard a bunch of Québécois nationalists went crazy and ended up wreaking havoc all over the Old City. I heard they even broke the windows of our clinic!”

“No, no,” I said, “that was the cops.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Absolutely. I was in the IMC at the time. I even talked to the medics who came in afterwards to find a new space.”

“Oh. Still, I don’t know. I wasn’t involved in choosing the targets, but I know that a lot of thought went into it. One bank, one oil company, one fast-food chain, one television network. I just hate to see a bunch of drunken frat boys go out and dilute the message.”

Two kids from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory are talking about how they were there for Akwesasne, but couldn’t get across the police line at Cornwall.

“Really?” I ask. “Because none of us were really sure we really had any community support.”

“No, no, we just couldn’t get in because the police were out there with shields and batons blocking the road to everybody. Fucking pigs! This is our fucking home and it was like it was under military occupation.”

“Yeah,” says the other kid. “We were ready to start a riot. We’d been with the caravan in Windsor, and we wanted to join you guys in Akwesasne. But there were just too many of them.”

“Really?” I ask. “Wow. I only wish we knew that at the time. We were feeling awfully lonely out there.”

Mainly, though, everyone is just exhausted. Kitty stares out the window for a while. “What a strange come-down,” she says. “You know what it’s like? It’s like coming down from acid. You know, like when you’ve been tripping for days and you come down and suddenly everything just sucks?”

Lee agrees. He’s still feeling weird about the molotovs. “I feel dirty and used.”

Kitty: “I don’t. Well, not used, anyway. But the problem is, when you’re coming down from an action, there’s no way to just take another hit.”