Metro Pulse/Cover/Quebec: Tearing Down the Fence

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First Person: Transforming the Streets
One protester's reflections on Quebec

Some thoughts on tear gas:

It's not really a gas at all, for one thing. It's a spray of solid and liquid chemical compounds, often of the bromine family. It was first widely used during World War I, but keepers of the peace couldn't help noticing that its effects—temporary incapacitation with no lingering consequences—made it perfect for, as my dictionary says, "dispelling mobs." Its use is so common, and its name so benign, that it doesn't register much in news articles. I had heard of it plenty of times and never given it much thought.

So imagine this: one moment you are standing there, face to the fence, watching police and demonstrators move closer to each other, each side advancing and retreating cautiously. The next moment there is a spurt of white cloud and immediately your face is on fire. The burning starts on your cheeks and even as you turn away and try to hold your breath it spreads into your eyes and nose and throat. You blink and gasp and a man yelling in French gets your attention; he's waving his hands and pointing at his eyes and it's enough to remind you that you're not supposed to rub your pupils the way you're instinctively tempted to. It will just spread the burning, and anyway the spray's on your hands too. So you stumble down a hill toward fresh air, clutching a notebook and camera, eyes and nose streaming with assorted unstoppable fluids, which mix with the chemicals on your skin and intensify the acid-bath corrosion on your face. A woman rushes by carrying a baby, its eyes flowing with tears and its red mouth squirming around the nipple of a bottle.

It will be five minutes before you can talk, 20 minutes before your shocked brain can think well enough to make sense of a map, a half-hour and a painful cold-water scrubbing before your face doesn't hurt. This is tear gas. When you smell it again that night on the clothes of an excited protester who has just come in from the streets, the acrid bite in the air is enough to compel you to wash your face and brush your teeth all over again.

Still dazed, I wander down to the People's Summit. Outside the markethouse, two graying men are joking about the street battles happening just a few blocks away. "Ah, the smell of tear gas in the air," one of them says. He sounds nostalgic.

Inside, a press conference is about to begin. It's in French, with no translator on such short notice, so I follow along as best I can. Two middle-aged women do most of the talking. One of them refers delicately to "this somewhat special afternoon," and then issues the official response of the "reformists" to the tactics of the "anarchists": "Indignation, yes, a thousand times yes; but violence, no." She goes on to note that it was "a very small group that decided to agitate," and blames "the creation of a sort of collective paranoia" brought on by the erection of the fence and the heavy police presence.

Several reporters from French and Canadian newspapers ask what the consequences will be for the People's Summit's planned protest march the next day. One of the women responds, with a half-smile, that that will be partly up to the media. If you choose to focus on the battles and not the other elements of the protest, she says, that is all the rest of the world will know.

On TV sets in the media tent, it's clear that question is already settled. All the major Canadian networks are showing live or taped footage of police and protesters clashing and tear gas canisters flying. In a televised press conference, the Quebec City police chief, a bald man in a uniform who looks like a militarized Humpty Dumpty, is assuring the public the situation is under control.

I find Hobbes back under the interstate, along with hundreds of other protesters. He has located the rest of the Knoxville party, who arrived last night. Gabe and Shinara and David are there, along with a diminutive young woman named Laurel and an affable blond-haired guy who says his name is Crack. Laurel is a student and a bookstore employee. Crack, it turns out, is homeless. I ask him what he does. He smiles and shrugs and says, "Drink and fuck shit up. But usually in Knoxville. Shinara and Laurel know I'm homeless and I don't have much to do, so they said, 'We're going to Canada. Wanna come?'"

They all have watery eyes and crimson cheeks, as do most of the people I see on the street. Exposure to tear gas quickly becomes a mark of battle, a red-eyed badge of courage. "It almost became a game," Hobbes says. "Like, how many times could you stand being tear gassed?"

We talk about going out to that evening's planned spokescouncil meeting, but it's a long ride. We settle for finding more free food (bean salad and soup) and then a neighborhood bar. Over pitchers of bad beer and a surreptitious flask of Jack Daniels, we hash out the day's events. Shinara is equal parts excited and ambivalent; it was all very dramatic, more so than marching in Washington, D.C. last year. Maybe too dramatic, almost theatrical. She says she kept a narrative running in her own head even as the action was happening. "I kept thinking, if I was writing about it, how would I write it?"

I can't help wondering how much the protest was against the fence and the FTAA and unrestricted global trade, and how much it was a way to build and feed on the community spirit of the protesters—a coming together that required an adversary to give it focus.

Other veterans of the day's fights congregate at tables around us. A squad of Radical Cheerleaders wanders by and does a series of routines on the sidewalk. A man with a goatee walks up carrying a hammer-and-sickle flag, and a large group of protesters at a patio table rises, fists in the air, and sings a beery rendition of the Internationale.

Saturday morning, the Quebec and Montreal papers are full of coverage of the protests. Hobbes is amused to find his face in a crowd shot at the fence. The papers report that the unrest delayed the opening ceremonies at the Summit of the Americas by a half-hour and forced the dignitaries (including Laura Bush) to close their windows to keep out tear gas.

We meet up with Gary at the Horizon Centre. Neither Hobbes nor I has seen him since he dropped us off Wednesday night, but he's been making his own forays. He spent Thursday wandering the city and talking to the locals. He reports that none of them liked the fence. "It's like Berlin," one old man told him. Friday, Gary stationed himself on a hill near the fence to watch the action. Three boys, 10 or 11 years old, rode up on bikes. Gary's schoolteacher side came out. "I asked them if they spoke English. They said, 'A little.' I said, this is a lesson. See how easy it is for them to shut down your city? And even if you think they're doing the right thing, what if it was being done by people who you didn't agree with?" He stayed into the afternoon, until the fence started to go down. He saw the first tear gas fired and started to worry about his car, parked on a nearby street. The last straw was an errant golf ball that clipped the side of his head. "Whoever was throwing golf balls, I want his ass," he growls.

Because of domestic complications, Gary has to leave Saturday afternoon. I ride out with him. Hobbes has decided to stay behind, to help with "clean-up" after the summit. Gary doesn't try to talk his son out of it; he gives him $40 in Canadian currency and a credit card to buy a train or bus ticket home. He makes a good show of seeming nonchalant, but once we're in the car, Gary sighs. "I hope he's going to be OK," he says.

On the way out of the city, we pass buses still arriving from Montreal and Toronto, and a city park rapidly filling with protesters for what will be the most vocal day of demonstration. It will culminate with a frenzy of tear-gas and water-cannon attacks by police and the arrests of nearly 500 protesters. Hobbes and the rest of the Knoxville crowd will manage to avoid jail and will end the day back under the autoroute, dancing with hundreds of others around a huge bonfire, while police watch from the overpass.