Al Parrish

Some years back, we finished playing our last show at Festival de Voyageur in Winnipeg on a Sunday afternoon; we were traveling in two vehicles, so the Ontario contingent headed east for the TransCanada to Kenora and the subsequent trees-and-rocks drive of about 21 hours back to southern Ontario. I was going to Ithaca to see my sweetie so I headed south, toward North Dakota. I was zipping down the road, making really good time toward the border station. Lo and behold, there was no line-up at all. I pulled up to the booth with absolutely no waiting.

Sometimes this is a great thing. Pull in; show your passport; take off. Other times it seems that a lack of traffic may make the gendarmerie feel bored or ineffectual. Then either they want something to do to pass the time or they feel a need to prove their value to the security of the homeland by flexing their mandated authority. Whatever the case, I was selected to get the second degree (it is pretty much like the third degree up to but not including the latex gloves).

I was okay with this because I had nothing to hide. I never do; it would be the zenith of stupidity to carry anything illegal or try to sneak something which needed reporting across the border. US crossing guards have always had the power to deny anyone (unless it is an American) entry to the country. And being denied entry once is grounds for being denied entry again (have you stopped beating your wife?). In fact, several years ago the front-line guys and gals were given the wherewithal to summarily ban anyone from entry to the Land of the Free for five years for any reason they wished or for no reason at all. And there was no recourse to the courts in such a case. Considering that about half of the playing that we did in North America was in the US, why would we put that significant portion of our living in jeopardy? We would not.

So, feeling no trepidation, I pulled into the search bay as instructed, took my bass out of the car, handed over the keys and went to the rather Spartan waiting room – about ten feet by five with a white, acoustic tile ceiling, off-white, oil-based painted cinder-block walls, one door, three plastic chairs, and one window. Because of the angle of that one window I could only see some of the official proceedings going on at my car, but it appeared that all was going well enough as a crew of three went through all my stuff. They would look at something and then set it aside as if finished with it. They fished through the glove box, pulled out my suitcase and rifled my socks, underwear and other dirty laundry (fun job, eh?). Then they began going through my brief case, one of them pulled out my writer’s notebook.

There is a lot of different stuff in that book. Mostly it is ideas for songs or stories or interesting thoughts that I have had or have heard, mostly written down while driving. Not two weeks earlier, I had been going through the book at home and had noticed entries in several places which were quotations from several members of the Bush administration speaking (prior to the invasion of Iraq) about the WMD which were the reason for the war. These inaccuracies, though they had not yet been proven to be such, rankled. So I had written down each hair-raising tale of the doom that awaited us all if we were fool enough to wait for international inspections rather than attacking sooner. Also included was each bold statement of the administration’s absolute certainty about what weapons there were, what quantities of these weapons there were, and even where they were secreted. Well, being the organised type (as I sometimes am) I consolidated all these quotations onto a single page, and at the top of that page, in block-cap letters wrote the heading “WMD”.

So you can probably guess what happened when the eyes of the customs guy fell on this page. He wanted an explanation… no, actually he demanded an explanation! But where the rubber hit the road, he did not really want one because when I told him that these were notes of things said by his President and His aides de camp, he said, “Normal people don’t do that”. He just did not get it. What he did get was his superior who also did not get it.

After that I sat by myself in the cinder-block cubicle… and sat… and sat. And finally, the superior’s superior arrived. He got it. He had been at home, 45 minutes’ drive away, eating Sunday dinner with his family when he got the call asking him to drop everything and come in to work to question some sort of potential/probable terrorist (me).

He asked me to tell him about the notes; I told him, as I had told the others that they were simply quotations from the administration in his country, about the WMD which were the basis for the war in Iraq. He invited me into his office at the opposite end of the facility from the search bay. So under the somewhat vacant smile of George W., and that slightly twisted leer of Dick Cheney, he read down the page of WMD notes. He then raised his gaze to me and, stifling what I perceived as a slightly embarrassed smirk, he took a deep breath and said, “I am required to ask you this…

 Are you a terrorist?”
“No,” I answered jauntily (or at least as jauntily as possible under the circumstances);
“Have you ever been a terrorist?”
“No,” I answered with an air of je ne sais quoi (though I’m not sure what it was);
“Do you plan to become a terrorist?”
And since I could not think of anything really clever to say instead, I answered “No.”

Wow. I sure was glad that I was not a terrorist or I would have had to answer, “Ah, shucks... Ya got me. Yes, by golly, I am; I have; and I do!” (because terrorists, as we all know, are honest to a fault) and then I would have been shipped off to Guantanamo and made to listen to Iron Maiden at 120 dB – enough to drive anyone mad.

He told me that, because of the required protocols, my name and identification numbers and all salient information about me had been entered into their gigantic terrorist-finding-database-computer-search-watchout-blah-blah-system and that it would take another 15 minutes to determine whether or not I had already been determined to be a danger by someone else, somewhere else at some other time. Turns out I was not. I could have told them that:

a) on the basis of my own knowledge of me, and

b) because I would not have been given the P2 that was stapled in my passport if I had not checked out as at least relatively squeaky-clean.

He told me that I would need to wait out those 15 minutes in the lobby – better than sitting in the solitary confinement of the concrete-block room anyway. I think it was less than ten minutes when he came back and without words, gave me a look that implied, “I’m really sorry we had to go through this”, handed me my writer’s notebook and my passport and said simply, “You’re free to go”. And off he went back to his now congealed gravy and rock-hard Yorkshire puddings, and off I drove in a very straight line south through North Dakota.

BROMSGROVE FOLK FESTIVAL – July 10, 2009

This is a great little festival at a bowling green not far from Birmingham. I think we all have a slight sense of dread anytime we approach that city. It is a big one and traffic, especially on the perpetually under-construction motorway, is invariably snarled and slow. This day though, we were not held up at all on the roads and so we were on-site with lots of time to spare. Gate security directed us to a driveway which led right to the main stage marquee and, in fact, right behind the stage itself. This made for a short carry. Huzzah!

When the gear was in, we discovered that all was prepared for us so set-up was pretty easy. The 220-volt electricity in the UK requires us to make some adjustments and we have done so, but here we thought that we were going to have 110-volt AC power (just like at home) since that is what they were using for the stage lighting. It is remarkable how excited I could get over the availability of 110. Maybe it’s because it feels more like home; maybe it’s because the step-down transformer we use can create circuit breaker problems... whatever the reason, my delight was short-lived as, unfortunately, their 110 plugs had the right voltage but the wrong shape and so were not compatible with ours. No big deal: we used our transformer as usual.  

Our tech support guy had a classic car that he apparently drives regularly - not just a ‘Sunday’ car. It was a beautifully maintained, small, slightly pudgy, 1961 Rover (in non-traditional Rover colours, I learned) and he was using it to pull a trailer so clearly, it is not a pampered car. It was parked back of stage right so I spent a bit of my spare time gawking at it. Cool.

Once we were set up we went for dinner and coffee at the club’s pub. We hung around and visited a bit with some folks who were in for the festival and some others who were regular club members attending regular club activities (e.g. lawn bowling). After we had eaten, we were walking around the grounds when a nice couple in the festival hospitality trailer offered us tea. We thought that would be nice and took them up on it. Terry felt like something cold and asked if they had any juices. They said that they did and brought some orange juice. We chatted a bit and after a while realised that... this was not the hospitality trailer. It was the weekend caravan of some fans who had come to camp out at the festival. Oops. We all laughed and they continued to be very generous.

Just outside the hospitality trailer that wasn’t, Wendy caught Robert on video working his way over/under a very small fence. You really had to be there but it was quite hilarious. It was the sort of thing that one might have seen on a 60s television comedy show: Laugh-In, Python, Benny Hill... Robert can be really unfettered and carefree in the way that many artists are. He makes serious use of his art/craft/worktime and he really enjoys his downtime.

It was the middle of a slightly muggy summer’s evening when we were scheduled to mount the stage under the main marquee. Those tents are great at keeping rain out. This is a good thing in the UK, but they also create a feeling akin to working inside a plastic bag, especially when it is warm and humid outside. Our set that evening was well received by a steaming-hot, capacity crowd. A lot of these folks were new to us so there was a fair bit of explaining going on after the show about just why it was that we were splitting up when clearly we had just been discovered.

Next day we left fairly early so that we would have lots of time up in Birdsedge before we had to play at the festival. Making our way across the M42 to the M1, we needed fuel so we pulled into a services and gassed up. I use the term advisedly. Not ‘fuelled’ up, but ‘gassed’ up. Unfortunately, the van takes diesel, not gas (petrol). There was some diesel left in the fuel line so that we got a couple of miles down the road before the van balked at the unfamiliar stuff in the tank.

It was a real “D’OH!!” moment; the van began hesitating and then gave up completely and before we had rolled to a stop, Steve said, “It’s the fuel.” None of us knew enough about what gas would do to a diesel engine to be sure if this was just a problem or whether it was a bona fide disaster. In spite of the looming potential for calamity, Steve who, when under stress, has been known to throw things, did not. He gave himself a bit of a talking-to but then, instead of getting angry, he joined the rest of us in the important business of speculating on the outcome of this faux pas. It was purest speculation since none of us had ever had a diesel vehicle, but Steve recalled that his mom had once put diesel into her car’s gasoline tank; apparently they had a tank of each fuel side-by-side at the farm. His dad took the car and ran it up and down the road at fairly high speeds to work this stuff through and out the other end in billows of smoke. The car came out the other end of the experience none the worse for wear. But this was a mistake in the opposite direction.

We have since discovered that every person we know who has a diesel vehicle has filled the tank with gasoline instead of diesel at least once and, apparently as long as you stop soon, the tank can be drained and all will likely be okay. We did not have this comforting knowledge as we all stood beside the motorway taking pictures of one another and watching the traffic pass – all except Terry who was doing super-extra-hyper-killer Sudokus, as he does.

“Terry, we’re at the gig”... “Let’s see, that’s a 6 so this must be a 5”.

“Terry, we’re home”... “3, 7 and... 9”.

“Terry your pants are on fire”... “and 8! I did it!”

We waited for the RAC which, before too long, recovered us and took us to a nearby garage. We sat in the waiting area of the shop admiring the photos of the many famous people (Sophia Loren, David Beckham, Roger Moore...) who had had cars repaired here. One picture was of Kenneth Williams; I listened to him for years on a Canadian re-broadcast of a BBC programme called Just a Minute. I began to wonder if someone was actually out ‘creating’ business – you know: tacks on the road; sugar in gas tanks; distracting traveling musicians at the pumps so they’d put in the wrong fuel... seems a bit of a stretch but maybe a hare-brained scheme worthy of a Carry On movie (speaking of Kenneth Williams).

The good folks at this service centre, who actually showed no signs of insidious plotting, acted quickly (but carefully) and in a matter of a couple of hours had pumped out the tank and the lines, replaced the gas with enough diesel to get us back to the services. Once there we filled up quickly (but very carefully) with diesel this time, and we were back on our way to Birdedge. We arrived later than planned but still in time for the gig.