minor encounters with violence while traveling

I was thinking a bit more about the sorts of things Graeme Wood has been able to see, both as a tourist and now as a professional journalist for The Atlantic, one of the highest-quality magazines I know.

The Kandahar visit is the sort of thing that he will now be doing in bucketloads, and one of these days he’ll probably break a major story in some derelict hellhole. But even when I knew him in his early twenties, he’d been in Peshawar on 9/11, crept across the border from Ethiopia into Somalia, and used a frequent flyer ticket to go to Sierra Leone and tour the whole country on a rented motorcycle. It’s a level of physical adventurousness that I don’t quite have; for me, going to Baalbek in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and spending the night there alone was already a pretty big adrenaline rush, as was touring Syria.

Although I have an eerie knack for being at the site of major terrorist attacks just before they happen, my own encounters with violence and danger while travelling have been remarkably few. I could only think of four, none of them worth an article or anything, but perhaps interesting or even amusing.

1. My first visit to Europe was in the summer of 1989. I spent the summer in Bremen, and was able to take a side-trip to Berlin in August. I did have the chance to see old East Berlin shortly before it disappeared. It’s worth remembering that there was not yet any hint that it was soon to disappear. I’d recently had a discussion with some Germans in Bremen about eventual German Reunification, and while the discussion was interesting, it felt at the time roughly as relevant as talking about an eventual manned mission to Mars– it sounded decades away, at least.

In any case, I took the train from West Berlin over to the Friedrichstrasse station in what was then East Berlin, and was startled to see the heavily armed DDR guards. I spent the day doing everything that Western tourists would do in East Berlin in those days, including buying the incredibly cheap hardcover set of Marx’s Das Kapital and a few other books, including one about “German bourgeois philosophy,” meaning Kant and his successors. I also greatly enjoyed browsing the books in the U.S. History section, which to say the least gave a very different account of American history than the one on which I was raised. And, of course, I went to the Brandenburg Gate to see the Wall from the Eastern side. It’s still astonishing to walk around that part of Berlin and remember what it was like in August ’89, about which my memories are still fresh. Getting out of East Berlin was also a trick, since I happen not to bear a very close resemblance to my quirky first passport photo, and the border guard was extremely suspicious.

The “violence” part of the story is trivial. I stopped to use the washroom in the Friedrichstrasse station, and a vicious older woman was the attendant. You had to pay a tiny amount to use the facilities. I paid on the way in, but she was distracted and apparently didn’t see me. As I was walking out, she accused me of not paying. I calmly explained that I had already paid. She didn’t agree. I think I did pay again just to end the conversation, but that didn’t stop her from slapping me in the face and shouting: “Go back to your homeland!”

Just a couple of weeks later the DDR began to unravel, and I’m glad I had the chance to see a bit of it first.

2. The next story comes from the USA. In April 1992 I flew from Chicago to San Francisco for a conference at Berkeley. Lingis was going to be there, and I also wanted to see Zizek lecture for the first time, since his reputation was already growing; I first heard his name in 1991, from a classmate who had stumbled across The Sublime Object of Ideology while randomly browsing the shelves. (In the end Zizek cancelled. They specifically had a woman read his paper, so that no one would poke their heads into the room and assume that a random male reader was actually Zizek himself– there was no world-wide web in 1992, and his face was not yet internationally recognizable as it is today.)

I got in at night, with plans to stay with Lingis– with typical generosity, he often shared his conference hotel rooms with whatever graduate student needed a place to stay, and he did that for me twice. I had dinner, but then had no clue how to find Lingis; it wasn’t a very well-planned trip. Being only 23 years old at the time, I thought, “to heck with it, I’ll just sleep outside on campus and save money the first night.” I managed to find a dark and safe-looking grove on the Berkeley campus, though I’m afraid I don’t know Berkeley well enough to describe where it was. I covered a well-shaped rock with my jacket to form a pillow of sorts, and if memory serves, there was a sort of charming brook or small waterfall nearby that helped me go to sleep. The next morning I went into a campus washroom to clean up. I must have looked like hell, because a homeless man was in there and offered the phrase “homeless like me” as a token of solidarity.

The previous night, I had noticed an agitated mood on the streets, though I thought that must be typical of the place; I’d only been to Berkeley once before, as a 16-year-old on a school trip. A couple of people had menaced me aggressively on the streets that first night, though I thought nothing of it since nothing happened.

But in the morning, after washing up a bit, I purchased a newspaper and learned that the Rodney King verdict had just been handed down, with all of the police found not guilty. I realize that Los Angeles exploded immediately upon the news, and maybe San Francisco as well. But in Berkeley it took a day or so. The next day looked something like martial law. For the first time in my life I had police ordering me to go certain places and stay away from others. But all I saw was a large group of young men tearing the plywood off of The Gap and smashing the windows. I don’t remember if I saw them take any clothes out.

3. 1994, Leipzig. A drunk or crazy foreigner approached me late at night to ask directions as I was walking someone home through Connewitz. His German was incomprehensible, and I had to ask him to repeat his question 3 or 4 times. Finally, he accused me of not knowing German and punched me in the face. But it was a glancing blow that barely hurt, and since I was in the midst of walking with someone very nice, it hardly seemed worth pausing to deal with that guy, who stumbled off into the night.

4. 2008, Sri Lanka. There were many places in Sri Lanka that had a “martial law” sort of feel. One was the center of Colombo, and another was Kandy. In both places I was allowed to walk around freely at night, but roadblocks were everywhere and tensions were high. Already the newspapers were reporting major gains by government forces against the Tamil Tigers, though I wasn’t sure whether that was real news or just pro-government spin; in retrospect, it seems to have been real news.

In any case, my hotel in Colombo was in the center of the city. One night I was awakened by a barking dog. It barked loudly and long enough that I eventually got out of bed and looked out the window. There were searchlights looking in the clouds, not sweeping lazily as a matter of routine, but probing surgically as if a plane were already reported in the area… I’d read before arriving in Sri Lanka that the Tigers now had a small air force of light planes, and had already bombed Colombo a few times, with limited success. I was told (by Sinhalese) that the Tigers were trying to bomb gas stations to create big explosions in the capital.

It wasn’t exactly frightening to see the searchlights– I knew the Tigers weren’t likely to bomb a hotel. But it was eerie enough, even though there seem to have been no planes that night.

A week after I left, a suicide rickshaw slammed into a barricade near the hotel and killed a number of police in a bomb attack. I’ve been wondering ever since if any of the police I’d asked for directions were among the dead.

That’s all so far… Fairly minor moments with a sense of danger, though otherwise I’ve practically been the Angel of Death in my uncanny appearances at terror attack sites just days or weeks before the attacks occurred.