#underground lake that's the resistance's main water supply?

[leisi-lilacdreams]

this....was not supposed to be a full on illustration :S was very much inspired by @sheep-turtles-and-pizza's lovely drawing of mikey with flowers in his hair

i was rereading somerandomdudelmao comic (again lol) so the hair matches more in that comic than algae like in the original design

i just...kept tinkering and adding to it and playing around with CSP brushes

would like to do the crypid version but i'm not good with drawing spooky stuff so i put all my self-indulgence in this

i hope crypid mikey becomes a fandom darling

[shenanigans-and-imagines]

We’re The Bad Guys: Part 7

We’re the Bad Guys: Masterlist

Poe Dameron x Reader (eventually), First Order!Reader

Summary: From the day you were born, you were taught the rebels and their New Republic were the bad guys. But, after you crash land on a remote moon with only the Resistance’s poster boy for company, things begin the change.

Based off of this drabble and headcanon

A/N: Look at me having another part up within the next week instead of the next three months. Sorry, no Poe in this chapter either, but he will be back in Part 8, pinkie promise.  And as usual COMMENT AND REBLOG IF YOU LIKE THIS! I NEED VALIDATION TO LIVE!!!

Word Count: 2.0K

          Getting to Takodana was easier than one might expect for a member of The First Order.

          For troopers or lower ranking officials, landing anywhere closer than the outermost rim of the galaxy was near impossible without clearance.  But for a Commander, slipping in and out of First Order space did not take much imagination.  A switched ship here, a bribe there and one could get as close as the inner rim if they put their mind to it.  Of course, most officers took it as a chance to visit a pleasure planet or two without word of a scandal getting sent up the ranks.  For your purposes, however, you risked a lot more than personal embarrassment. 

          You had started by taking leave on a small base not far from Rakata Prime.  It was a place common for officers in search of some relief from the stress and monotony of space travel.  It also was the perfect jumping off point to the outer rim.  The security was notoriously lax if not outright corrupt.  The right amount of credits in the right hand could get you just about anywhere.  

          It didn’t take long for you to track down a cadet willing to recommend a lovely little spaceport on some planet you never heard of. Apparently it had some of the best underground gambling one could find this side of Hutt Space, which meant pilots, but more importantly, pilots in need of fast, no questions asked, credits.  

          The cadet dropped you with the promise to pick you up in three days.  There was no need for him to follow. What you did while on planet was your business. The fact you had even left the base was blackmail enough. No doubt he was going to factor that into your service fee for the trip back. 

          After that, it was easy.  Within a few hours you were able to track down another ship heading in the direction of Takodana. Like any pilot bordering the Unknown Region, you couldn’t be sure where exactly the captain’s loyalty’s lay.  It meant a small risk every time money exchanged hands, but it also ensured anonymity.  

          You haggled a place in the cargo hold and by the next morning, you were walking down the ramp onto the forest planet. 

          It was beautiful.  Any word less would be a disservice.  The lush greens of the forest and clear shimmering lake water served as another stark reminder of where you came from.  

          No polished blacks.  No filtered air.  Just green and life. 

          You were so caught up in the moment, you almost forgot why you had come. A hard push from one of the crew members snapped you back to reality. Your eyes followed his path to the infamous castle just off in the distance. There was no going back now. 

          Securing the cloth placed over your nose and mouth, you kept your head low and followed. 

          The bar was just as crowded as you had expected with an assortment of humans and aliens from every point in the galaxy.  You would give this to Maz Kanata, despite her castle’s reputation for being a safe haven for pirates and explorers, the place was shockingly bright and clean. Cluttered and eclectic, but open and generally lacking the layer of grim that seemed to stain all spaceports along the mid and outer rim.  It left the impression that one could keep their blaster securely in their holster and actually enjoy a drink without fear of being taken off guard.  Still, you knew better.  This was a neutral space for Resistance and First Order alike.   Any one of the patrons could be a spy for either side.

          Making sure not to make eye contact with anyone, you made your way to the bar. 

          “I’m looking for Maz Kanata,” you said, in a low tone.  “I need to speak with her.”

          The bartender, an Artiodac, rumbled something in their native language you couldn’t understand. But, the dismissive laughter that followed was universal. 

          “It’s urgent,” you insisted.  “Commander Dameron sent me.” 

          “What trouble has that boy gotten into now?” a voice asked. 

          You turned around and immediately had to look down. 

          A small orange alien of a species you couldn’t name stood before you. Their head was huge compared to their small frame, wrinkles for days and eyes enlarged by giant magnifying goggles. 

          “Maz Kanata?” you asked. 

          “That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” she replied dryly. She then turned her attention to the Artiodac.  “Table five needs three more of the same.”

          The other alien nodded and quickly busied themselves with their task. 

          “Now,” Maz said.  “What trouble has Dameron brought to my door?”

          “No trouble,” you said. “I just need to get a message to him.”

          “Do you, now?” she asked, skeptically. 

          “Yes.”

          “And who are you, exactly?”

          “I’m a friend.” 

          “A friend who covers their face?” 

          Your hand went instinctively your mask.  Maybe it hadn’t been the best idea.  

          Maz gave a dry laugh. “Do you have a name at least?”

          You shifted uncomfortably. This was not going how you had pictured.  You had hoped to be half way off this planet by now. 

          “Not one he would know,” you admitted. 

          She raised an eyebrow. “Not much of a friend then.” 

          And with that she walked passed you out of the main room into the back. She must have assumed that meant an end to your conversation, but you hadn’t come all this way to be turned away now. She barely made it two paces before you followed after her. 

          “Fine, not much of a friend,” you said, “but certainly an ally.”

          “An ally?” she scoffed. “For what cause?”

          “To put an end to The First Order.”

          She paused. It wasn’t enough for her to turn to face you. She kept going about her task, moving a few crates, but you did get her attention. 

          “Bold words,” she said, “but why should I believe you?”

          “Because--”  You stopped.  

          Why should she believe you? Who were you, really?  A Commander for The First Order? A child solider? A pawn? Who were you to her? To The Resistance? To Dameron? 

          And that’s when you remembered. 

          “Because, I’m Pilot.”

          She turned to you, the surprise evident in her eyes. 

          “I’m Pilot,” you repeated, bolder this time. “The Pilot.”

          She stared more openly at you then, carefully examining your features.

          “Dameron’s Pilot?” she asked. 

          You shrugged, unsure how to feel about being called Poe Dameron’s anything. Still, it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. 

          Maz nodded in understanding.  Setting down the crate she was carrying, she silently indicated for you to kneel. 

          You felt a tug of uncertainty in your gut, but knew better than to question her orders.  You sunk down to your knees conveniently landing at the alien’s eye level. 

          She stepped closer to your, peering directly into your eyes. 

          You didn’t dare blink as she performed her examination, even adjusting her goggles to a higher intensity until the eyes reflected in them took over her entire face. 

          For a long moment neither of you spoke.

          “I see why he likes you,” Maz said, warmly as a wide smile spread across her face. “You have stars in your eyes.”

          You frowned, unsure of what to make of her comment.  Nobody had ever called your eyes anything before, let alone filled with stars. It made you think of naive thinking and childish dreams, neither of which you had associated with yourself at any time of your life.  But for some reason, you didn’t think that was what she meant. 

          Maz stepped back, her expression once again all business.

          “What’s the message?”

          You blinked, allowing yourself a moment to come back to reality.  Reaching down, you pulled the data card from your pocket.  

          “This is everything I had access to,” you said, handing the card to her. “Tie patrols, base coordinates, supply lines, everything. Make sure this gets to Resistance and...tell Commander Dameron that we’re even.” 

          She took the card, frowning slightly.  “Why don’t you tell him yourself?” 

          “I’m not joining The Resistance.”

          Her brows furrowed. “But you are leaving The First Order.” 

          “Yes.”

          “So what are you planning to do?”

          You shrugged, rising to your feet. “I’m a pilot.  I’m sure I can find something.” 

          Maz Kanata said nothing, but it was clear from her expression she wanted to say a lot of things.

          “You disapprove,” you stated rather than asked.  

          “Let’s just say, I don’t think the smuggler’s life is for you,” she said, dryly.

          Your lip pressed into a fine line. “And what do you propose? I’ve spent my whole life fighting a cause that wasn’t my own.  You would ask me to do the same thing, but for the other side?” 

          “It’s not the same thing if you choose to fight it.”

          “And what if I’m tired of fighting?”

          She shook her head, chuckling lightly.  “No. You were born to fight.”

          A sudden flash of anger fired in your heart.  It was a familiar feeling. The same one you felt towards Dameron when he had made certain presumptions about your family.  Of course, he had been right.

          “It wasn’t my choice,” you said, tightly.

          Maz shook her head again.  “No Pilot. Even if you were raised by peaceful monks, you would find a way to fight.  Maybe not by hopping in an X-Wing and blowing things up, but still fight.  You’re fighting The First Order right now.”

          “I’m settling a debt.”

          “By fighting,” she insisted. “You said it yourself; you are an ally to put an end to The First Order.” 

          She held up the card, waving it for emphasis. “With this alone you’ve just saved countless lives and struck a harder blow against The First Order than the entire Republic Senate has done in a year.” 

          “And now I’m done.”

          Maz let out a sigh, her bright expression fading to one of disappointment. 

          “Then you still fight for The First Order.” 

          “I’m fighting for myself,” you snapped.  

          “If one knows there is evil in the world and does not oppose it, that does not make them neutral,” Maz said, calmly. “There is no neutral stance.  Indifference, selfishness, this is what allows The First Order and all others like them to prosper.”      

          “So is every person going about their lives as bad as The First Order.” you said, sardonically. 

          “No. Most don’t have the power, or the means to fight.  But you do.”

          You scoffed. “So, I still don’t have a choice.”

          “Of course you do.  Everybody had a choice. But, it’s important to keep in mind that no choice is still a choice, just not an obvious one.” 

          You let out a sigh. This was what it was about, wasn’t it? Having a choice? It was proving to be a lot more trouble than people let on. 

          “Why are you so insistent I join The Resistance?” you asked. “You don’t know me.”

          She smiled then.  It was a knowing smile, like she was in on a secret; not one she was trying to keep, but one she was dying to tell. 

          “Like I said, you have stars in your eyes. Clouded over, faded, but still there; begging to shine.” 

          For the second time that day, you didn’t know what to make of it. You knew better than to ask.  Maz Kanata seemed exactly the type of person to answer anything as cryptically as possible. 

          “Seems to me Pilot, you have three options,” she continued. “Number one, you go back out there and ask if anyone needs a co-pilot.  You go off into the Outer Rim and nobody hears from you again.  Number two, you take this back and deliver it to Commander Dameron yourself.”

          You fought the urge to roll your eyes. “And number three?” 

          “You choose to fight in your own way.” 

          “By what? Freelancing as a fighter pilot?” 

          She shrugged. “As I said, there are more ways of fighting than hopping in an X-Wing and blowing things up.” She held up the data card with that same knowing smile.  “More effective ways.”

          You half expected her to hand the card back to you, but instead she tucked it into her vest and picked up the crate she had been carrying earlier.  

            “It’s your choice Pilot,” she said.  “It always has been.”

          And with that she left, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your choices.  

[sciencespies]

Why Did the Maya Abandon the Ancient City of Tikal?

https://sciencespies.com/news/why-did-the-maya-abandon-the-ancient-city-of-tikal/

Why Did the Maya Abandon the Ancient City of Tikal?

In the ninth century A.D., the Maya abandoned the great city of Tikal after hundreds of years of prosperity and expansion. Researchers have long sought to explain how and why the city collapsed, but despite extensive study of the site, unanswered questions remain.

Commonly cited explanations for Tikal’s downfall center on a confluence of overpopulation, overexploitation of the surrounding landscape and a spate of withering megadroughts. Now, reports Kiona Smith for Ars Technica, a new study of the ancient city’s reservoirs outlines evidence that mercury and toxic algae may have poisoned Tikal’s drinking water at a time when it was already struggling to survive the dry season.

Located in northern Guatemala, Tikal dates back to the third century B.C. Once among the most powerful city-states in the Americas, the rainforest metropolis boasted multiple stone temples standing more than 100 feet tall and, at its zenith in the mid-eighth century, supported upward of 60,000 inhabitants, according to David Roberts of Smithsonian magazine.

Tikal’s residents built reservoirs to collect and store water after rainfall slowed to a trickle during multi-decade droughts in the ninth century. These reservoirs were essential during the dry season, as the city had no access to lakes or rivers, and the local water table, or level at which the ground reaches saturation, lies more than 600 feet underground.

Per the study, published last month in the journal Scientific Reports, the Maya sought to collect as much water as possible during the region’s rainy season, developing huge, paved plazas that were sloped to send water sluicing into the reservoirs for storage. As the researchers argue, this system inadvertently contributed to the city’s undoing.

A model of Tikal at the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography in Guatemala City shows the impressive palace and temple reservoirs that fronted the city.

(Nicholas Dunning / University of Cincinnati)

To assess the factors at play in Tikal’s demise, the team took samples of sediments at the bottom of four of Tikal’s reservoirs. Chemical and biological analyses of layers dated to the mid-800s revealed the grim history of the lakes’ contents: As Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz, two of the largest reservoirs were not only dangerously polluted with the heavy metal mercury, but also carried traces of enormous toxic algal blooms.

The researchers attribute the mercury pollution’s presence to the mineral cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide. Members of the Maya civilization mined this mercury-based ore and combined it with iron oxide to create a bloodred powder used as a versatile pigment and dye. The brilliant red—found coating the interiors of almost every high-status burial in Tikal—may have held special significance for the Maya. One grave unearthed by archaeologists contained roughly 20 pounds of powdered cinnabar.

Tikal residents’ widespread use of cinnabar, especially in and around the city’s temples and main palace, likely resulted in dangerous quantities of the mercury-laden powder washing into the reservoirs during heavy rainfall.

“The drinking and cooking water for the Tikal rulers and their elite entourage almost certainly came from the Palace and Temple Reservoirs,” the researchers write in the study. “As a result, the leading families of Tikal likely were fed foods laced with mercury at every meal.”

Another factor in Tikal’s decline was an explosion of toxin-producing blue-green algae. The team found traces of DNA from two such algae species in the reservoirs’ sediments.

“The bad thing about these is they’re resistant to boiling,” says lead author David Lentz, a paleobiologist at the University of Cincinnati, in a statement. “It made water in these reservoirs toxic to drink.”

During the late 800s, sediments from Tikal’s two central reservoirs were loaded with phosphate, a nutrient that blue-green algae needs to proliferate. The study’s authors write that these high levels of phosphate accrued after centuries of “smoky cooking fires and ceramic plates washed in the reservoir added organic material to the waters.”

One of Tikal’s elaborate temples

(Alison Ruth Hughes via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The researchers also note that a midden, or trash heap, filled with food waste was located close enough to one of the reservoirs that “during the rainy seasons, effluent from this trash pile would have washed directly into the reservoir.”

When the city’s phosphate-filled reservoirs erupted in blooms of toxic blue-green algae, locals were probably able to tell that something major had gone wrong.

“The water would have looked nasty,” says co-author Kenneth Tankersley, an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati, in the statement. “It would have tasted nasty. Nobody would have wanted to drink that water.”

Even without the poisoned drinking supply, losing the use of two huge water stores would have been devastating for Tikal. Prior research has identified a period of drought between 820 and 870—a timeframe that corresponds with the layers of sediment in which the blue-green algae and mercury were found.

Taken together, the dry weather and befouled water supply may have led the Maya to suspect their rulers had failed to adequately appease the gods.

“These events … must have resulted in a demoralized populace who, in the face of dwindling water and food supplies, became more willing to abandon their homes,” the authors write.

Poisoned water wasn’t the sole cause of Tikal’s downfall, but as the researchers conclude, “The conversion of Tikal’s central reservoirs from life-sustaining to sickness-inducing places would have both practically and symbolically helped to bring about the abandonment of this magnificent city.”

According to Ars Technica, the researchers may pursue similar tests at other former Maya settlements to determine if the phenomena documented at Tikal influenced the decline of other cities across the empire.

#News

[bulgariahit]

Population was the richest among Christian states

Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. “For my part,” says La Brocquicre,8 “I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else.”

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. “These cisterns,” says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, “resemble lakes, or even seas.” Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

[everybg]

Population was the richest among Christian states

Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. “For my part,” says La Brocquicre,8 “I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else.”

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. “These cisterns,” says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, “resemble lakes, or even seas.” Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

[bulgarialive]

Population was the richest among Christian states

Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. “For my part,” says La Brocquicre,8 “I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else.”

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. “These cisterns,” says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, “resemble lakes, or even seas.” Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

[varnabulgaria]

Population was the richest among Christian states

Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. “For my part,” says La Brocquicre,8 “I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else.”

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. “These cisterns,” says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, “resemble lakes, or even seas.” Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

[mybulgaria]

Population was the richest among Christian states

Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. “For my part,” says La Brocquicre,8 “I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else.”

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. “These cisterns,” says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, “resemble lakes, or even seas.” Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

[enbulgaria]

Population was the richest among Christian states

Its population was the richest among Christian states, and its wealthy citizens were proud of such possessions as evidences of their wealth, and were glad to purchase the favor of the Church by bequeathing them. But Constantinople had never possessed so many relics as at the time of the fourth crusade, and these stores of wealth were always to be seen by those who wished.1 The unceasing turmoil in which Asia Minor and Syria had been kept by the Saracens and Turks had made the Christian populations ready to transfer their wealth to the strongest city in the world, but especially to take sacred relics out of reach of the infidel. In the East, as in the West, the churches, or the buildings adjoining them, were often used as storehouses for the deposit of articles of value. They were strongly built and safer than ordinary houses from fire and thieves.

The Church had, from early times, preserved these deposits with extraordinary legislation, of which we have still traces in our law of sacrilege, and it has been suggested that the number of relics was exaggerated by Latin travellers who visited Constantinople in consequence of the great store of wealth which they saw in the churches. But, however this may be, it can hardly be doubted that not even in Borne itself has there ever been amassed so great a number of articles of veneration as existed in Constantinople at the opening of the thirteenth century. The treasure of sacred relics in the city was immense, says one writer. There were as many relics in the city, says Villehardouin, as in all the rest of the world put together. We may despise the veneration of relics because we doubt the authenticity of the objects. But we are dealing with the Ages of Faith, and the Crusaders fully believed both in their genuineness and usefulness. “For my part,” says La Brocquicre,8 “I believe that God has spared the city more for the holy relics it contains than for anything else.”

Valuable The city treasures

The city which guarded so much wealth and such valuable The city treasures was encircled with strong walls and towers, which gave it a strength such as no other city in the world possessed. On the side bordered by the Sea of Marmora and that by the Golden Horn, access to the walls could only be made by an enemy who had command of the sea. On the landward side there were two walls with strong towers at short intervals, and along more than three fourths of the length a third wall and a ditch. These walls terminated at the Marmora end in a fortress, now occupied by the famous Seven Towers, and at the Golden Horn end by another near the imperial palace of Blachern. The walls were lofty, the inner one sixty feet high, and the ditch between them thirty-five feet broad and twenty-five feet deep. Even in their present condition they give a good idea of the resist once which could be offered by their defenders at a time when cannon were unknown Visit Bulgaria, and constitute perhaps the most superb mass of ruins in Europe.

Emperors Valens and Justinian

To enable the city to stand a siege there were underground and other cisterns for the storage of water which are still magnificent in their ruin, and one at least of which has not to this day been explored. Some of these were supplied through subterranean pipes which invaders were unable to discover. “These cisterns,” says Manuel Chrysoleras, with pardonable exaggeration, “resemble lakes, or even seas.” Those which were uncovered were surrounded with large trees. At ordinary times the city was supplied by the ancient aqueducts which had been restored by the emperors Valens and Justinian, and the first of which still gives the main supply of water to Stamboul.

Public buildings in Constantinople

Most of the palaces and public buildings in Constantinople were of white stone, but everywhere then, as now, there was a general use of marble, such as might have been expected in the chief city situated on the Marmora.

There was, no doubt, another side to this picture. While the nobles and the merchant princes of the capital class occupied marble palaces, the workmen and the poorer classes were crowded into the narrowest streets, and were left, as a writer of the time of Manuel remarks, to stench and darkness.

The houses of an inferior class were built of wood, as, indeed, they have always been in the same city on account of the absence in the neighborhood of Constantinople of any other cheap building material. Palaces crowded the hovels together, as they did in all the cities of Western Europe for centuries after that with which I am concerned. It was, indeed, the very wealth of Constantinople, as compared with that of Paris or any Western city, which made the distinction between the luxury and poverty more visible than that with which Western writers were familiar. What they saw in the capital of the East, their descendants were destined to see in Venice, Marseilles, Paris, and London.

[adposto1]

Life at Gulberg Residencia

Indeed, it was one of the best decisions of my life… we can’t regret the fact that our environment has a great influence on us. In other words, if we can’t adjust in our surrounding, nothing else can make us happy, neither money nor luxury. On the other hand, peace of mind in this fast moving era is not that easy to find. Cities are getting more and more crowded and so when I was capable of making an investment, all I could think was… PEACE! My residence  was living in central area of Rawalpindi. The daily traffic block added extra half an hour to my office distance which was only 10 km away. And not just travelling, I was sick of the noises, pollution and altogether, I was unhappy with my lifestyle… even going for outing was not a fun thing for me. I know many people are happy the way they are but not me and I couldn’t help it. I had imagined a better life for my wife and my two kids who meant the world to me. One day I crossed a newly emerging society, the Gulberg Islamabad and I felt the urge to visit it. Though the elegant entrance with wide roads and amazing farmhouses, I thought this place is only for the elite class.  Out of curiosity I asked a shopkeeper who showed me the way to the Gulberg Customer Dealing office. Again I was impressed but hopeless for I knew my savings were not enough. Gathering up my confidence, I told the Sales Executive guy Mr. Mohsin about my total saving. Of course his response surprised me with a proposal not just for a living opportunity, but it offered an exceptional lifestyle, beyond my expectations at Gulberg Residencia. Though I could only afford a 5 marla plot, it was more than enough for me and my family. I thought it was the best gift I could give to my family and so it was. When I brought my wife my kids and my parents to show them my plot, my wife was in tears of happiness and my mother couldn’t be more proud of me. I can’t wait for the time when I will move in to spend my dream life with my family. At Gulberg Islamabad, live your DREAM with SERENE AND GREEN LIFESTYLE!

If you are finding houses apartments and plots in Islamabad Click now.

D8 Heights, Gulberg Islamabad

D8 Heights Gulberg is Located On Plot No. 01 Main Boulevard Gulberg Residencia Islamabad. Shop is available On 20% to 25% Down Payment with 3 years easy installments.. D8 Heights gulberg is one of the newest projects in the constantly developing Gulberg, Islamabad. It is all set to become the iconic shopping, leisure, and lifestyle destination in the area and attract numerous visitors from the twin cities on a daily basis. Its stunning architecture, excellent retail outlets, amazing entertainment facilities, and stellar residential options make D8 Heights a project to watch out for. Let’s take a look at the location, features, facilities, properties and payment plan of D8 Heights, Gulberg Islamabad.

LOCATION

D8 Heights is located in Block C of Gulberg Residencia near the Blue Area Main Boulevard on Citadel Circular Avenue. D8 Gulberg, a shopping mall being constructed by the same developers in the commercial centre of the community called D-Markaz, is also located at a 3-minute drive from the project. The ideal location of D8 Heights will ensure the residents have easy access to public transportation, educational institutes and recreational spots among other facilities. Moreover, with Gulberg Expressway situated at a short 6-minute drive from the project, the people living in the apartment complex as well as the visitors won’t have any trouble commuting to the twin cities. Some of the notable places in the vicinity of D8 Heights include: Mall of Gulberg: 3-minute drive Islamabad Expressway: 9.2 kilometer The University Of Lahore in Her Do Gher: 10.1 kilometer Koral Chowk: 10.2 kilometer T-Chowk: 13.8 kilometer

FEATURES AND FACILITIES

These are some of the facilities available at D8 Heights in Islamabad: Earthquake-resistant structure Three separate entrances for the residents Double-storey underground parking Separate elevators for residents and visitors Around-the-clock security and CCTV surveillance Firefighting systems Backup electricity generators Cable TV and broadband connections Water, electricity and gas supply Modern reception area for the apartments Recreational area Prayer area Children’s play area Well-equipped fitness center

TYPES OF PROPERTIES

D8 Heights in Gulberg Residencia features both commercial and residential properties. The lower ground floor, ground floor and first floor of the project will house retail outlets. Meanwhile, the food court will be located on the second floor along with Fun City, covering the area of about 5000 sq ft. The area size for the commercial units varies from 120 sq ft to 520 sq ft. Third to seventh floors of D8 Heights are dedicated to the apartments while the eighth floor is meant for the penthouses, which are not for sale. Furthermore, apartments for sale in D8 Heights, Gulberg Islamabad include 1, 2 and 3-bedroom options, featuring all the latest amenities.

Floor Plan & Payment Plan

Blue World City Capital Smart City Islamabad Gulberg Greens Islamabad Gulberg Residencia Islamabad Rudn Enclave Rawalpindi  Booking Prism Heights Gulberg Islamabad Booking Gulberg Rabi Center Booking Gulberg Mall & Signature Living  Booking D 8 Heights Gulberg Greens Islamabad Booking Dha Quetta Booking OPF Valley Zone V Islamabad Pakistan Naval Farm Houses Simly Dam Road Islamabad Karakoram Greens Islamabad Booking Lotus Lake Towers Bahria Town Phase 8 Rawalpindi Booking FOECHS Rawalpindi Up Country Enclosures Rawalpindi Bahria Town Rawalpindi / Islamabad / Karachi / Lahore Maps Gulberg Islamabad Latest Updated Maps 2019 Islamabad All Sectors & Societies Maps Gulberg Islamabad Properties For sale (Full List) List Your Business Online and grow your brand name world wide Website Development (Packages start from 18k) Click here if you want to sell your plot in Gulberg Islamabad Click here if you want to sell your plot in Bahria Town Rawalpindi/Karachi/Lahore/Islamabad List of Registered Architects & Structure Engineers of Gulberg (IBECHS) Islamabad. If you are finding houses apartments and plots in Islamabad Click now.

[valkyrie-echo]

Project Echo, Part 2: Chapter 24 (The Secret Messenger)

Part 2 Summary: A new enemy surfaces with a team of the Avengers’ greatest foes, hand-picked for their destruction. Meanwhile, Inessa’s pre-Hydra past begins to surface, casting doubt on where her loyalties truly lie.

Chapter 24: The Secret Messenger

God dammit, would you turn around? He had a feeling this one was a bit more important than the others, and he felt like on this occasion he couldn't simply wait and hope for a better picture. The man's silhouette was hardly useful. If he got into the building without- a small flock of birds, startled by some unknown predator, took off to his east and the man's head whipped around. He looked like he was ready to kill. The man hiding in the tall grass snapped a few close pictures before the other one turned and entered the shack along with a dozen Hydra guards- judging by their black tactical suits.

The Avengers (damn stupid name) probably knew this guy already. He dressed weird, and the eccentric ones tended to be more well known. The guy looked like he came out of some sort of Norse painting- long flowy white beard, big eyebrows, and more muscles than a man that old had any business possessing. He was also eight feet tall- which kind of added to the Norse-God look. The eccentric ones weren't just well known- they tended to be more dangerous.

He backed down the low slope he'd been laying on and extended his senses in all directions around his position- smell, hearing, sight- he could feel the ground humming with the lowering elevator as the man descended. Shack my ass. That was the entrance to a bunker. But he'd already figured that one out. As he adjusted his position, no movement betrayed a watcher, no sound signaled someone turning as well. He was going unobserved as always. Perfect. He rose up a bit and jogged away at a low crouch until he rounded a bend, then vanished into the trees of a small creek that wound through the land. He ran in the shallow stream of water for several miles, until he was soaked, exhausted, and panting.

The creek ended in a lake where kids loved to run and jump and play- the perfect place to hide. Stomping around, he'd found where the lake bed hid a sort of U-bend. With his enhanced abilities he'd found his way down to it the first time. Kids had probably died trapped inside- there was a metal grate over the rocks that marked the entrance, but he'd removed it easily enough. It must have been down there for decades, if not a century or two. The thing looked ancient.

He pulled the bars aside and dove down, then angled up sharply with the contour of the tunnel. When he reached the air pocket, he resisted the urge to gasp for air- it stank to high hell down here. From his backpack he pulled out plastic bags that protected a mobile printer and all the accoutrements it would require. In the secrecy of the cavern, still half in the water, he printed out the photographs he'd just taken. He tossed them in a folder, drew a red hourglass on the cover, and slipped them back into the plastic they'd come from. He had to keep moving.

He didn't know why he was taking these pictures for the Avengers. He didn't even try to puzzle it out- he just did it. It had kept him alive up through now, his policy of just doing whatever seemed natural. He only hoped they got their heads out of their asses long enough to figure out whatever this Sebastian Morris guy was planning- if that was even ever his name. He was a whisper at the back of the minds of several of Hydra's higher ups- a faint, nagging sensation no one could really pinpoint in their records. Whoever he worked for, they were powerful, and not in the buy-the-police kind of way. In the hire-a-psychic kind of way.

The Psychic, now there was another issue. He had pictures of all the men Morris was recruiting, he'd shared them all, but he didn't dare take a picture of the psychic. He'd only ever met one other, but that girl always knew when her picture was being taken, no matter what. He wasn't about to blow the whole thing on one photograph. Besides, the kid living with the Avengers looked smart enough. He had a feeling she wasn't fooled. There was something in her eyes, an icy blade, that told him all he needed to know about her. The psychic couldn't be all that good anyways, if she didn't even realize the kid wasn't on her side. The other Avengers didn't know about the psychic, and he didn't exactly trust the girl to clue them in, but it was beyond his control.

He dove back into the water once everything was sealed up tight and swam for the far end of the cavern. He'd laid out a rope through the area with the least amount of underground projections to watch out for, and on either side of it he'd installed buoys with internal power supplies to feed a dim light. The guy he'd bout them off of swore up and down they'd last for a week apiece. So far he'd been right.

In the water, here and there, corpses floated. Side caverns and tunnels were filled with more bodies. Silver leaked into the water here, but it didn't matter. The poison (as he thought of it) didn't seem to harm anyone it touched- so long as it didn't hit blood. No pipes or wells drew from the cavern either, probably a decision made by the same early farmers who put the bars on the tunnel. They didn't want to drink water that probably held the remains of their children (and indeed there were a few small skeletons down here). He had a good enough idea who was responsible for the corpses. The kid really didn't like Hydra.

It took about half a hour to swim across the cavern slowly. On the other side it was an easy enough matter of following a dirt path down several marked side tunnels and branches, crawling in some places and squeezing through others. Clint Barton thought he was so smart, building his farmhouse on top of an underground tunnel system- the perfect escape should anyone try to take out the SHIELD agent. If he'd been a bit more careful, perhaps he'd have found all the tunnels. Or even any of the interesting ones. Clint's tunnels ran for several miles, then angle upwards to a hatch he'd installed. These tunnels came from beneath, and scooped around the entire property. The man who ran inside them now had only to feel for where the vibrations were quicker, more tightly connected, then break through into the main tunnel. On his way out he was careful to pile up the rocks. They'd at least pass a cursory inspection.

He followed Clint's tunnels until he reached the hatch under the farmhouse porch. This was where the man got nervous every time. He pulled the folder out, removed it from it's plastic bag, and listened carefully for the other Avengers. They were inside the house and the barn, separately working on the riddle of the other photographs he'd delivered. He lifted the hatch and dove out from under the porch. He grabbed a rock that lined the flower beds and set it atop the folder, which he placed in front of the back door, before running back into his tunnel as fast as possible. He didn't know if Stark's suits were on alert for new life signs suddenly popping up inside the perimeter, but he wasn't willing to find out. He just hoped the Avengers weren't stupid about the photographs he was risking his neck to deliver.

As he ran back through the tunnels, covering his tracks all the while, he wondered what they would do if they knew their enemy was camping out just ten miles down the street...

Chapter 25: One Worse Than Apocalyptic

[jingdajiancai]

Waterproof materials are the building envelope. They should prevent the infiltration of rainwater, snow water and groundwater, the erosion of moisture, steam and other harmful gases and liquids in the air, the invasion of rainwater, groundwater, industrial and civil water supply and drainage, corrosive liquids and moisture and vapor in the air into the building, and the separation structure should prevent the infiltration of water supply and drainage General term for impermeable, leaky and erosive materials.

The traditional typical waterproof method is three felts and four oils, which has been eliminated. Great changes have taken place in waterproof materials. In terms of waterproof materials, we will focus on the development of SBS, app and other modified asphalt waterproof rolls, and actively develop EPDM, PVC and thermoplastic polymer rolls.

There are mainly six changes as follows:

First, asphalt based waterproof materials have developed into rubber based, resin based and polymer modified asphalt;

The second is the development of linoleum carcass from paper carcass to glass fiber carcass or chemical fiber carcass;

The third is the development of sealing materials and waterproof coatings from low plasticity to high elasticity and durability;

Fourth, the structure of waterproof layer also develops from multi-layer to single layer;

The fifth is the development of construction method from hot melting method to cold sticking method;

Sixth, non asphalt polymer self-adhesive membrane waterproof roll.

Since the 1960s, the variety development of waterproof materials in many developed countries is more and faster. Since the 1980s, the development of new waterproof materials in China has been rapid. Through the efforts of colleagues in the field of waterproofing for more than ten years, there are five categories and hundreds of varieties of waterproof roll, building waterproof coating, rigid waterproof and sealing materials and special waterproof materials in China, which have formed a material system with complete varieties, low, medium and high performance grades.

There are many kinds of waterproof materials, which can be divided into four categories according to their main raw materials:

1. Asphalt waterproof materials. With natural asphalt, petroleum asphalt and coal asphalt as the main raw materials, the asphalt felt, paper-based asphalt felt, solvent type and water emulsion type asphalt or asphalt rubber type coating and ointment are made, which have good adhesion, plasticity, water resistance, corrosion resistance and durability.

2. Rubber plastic waterproof materials. With neoprene, butyl rubber, EPDM, PVC, polyisobutylene and polyurethane and other raw materials, it can be made into elastic tire free waterproof roll, waterproof film, waterproof coating, coating material and sealing materials such as ointment, mastic and waterstop. It has the characteristics of high tensile strength, high elasticity and elongation, good adhesion, water resistance and weather resistance, and can be used cold, Long service life.

3. Cement waterproof materials. The admixtures, such as water-proof agent, air entraining agent and expansion agent, can enhance the hydrophobicity and impermeability of cement mortar and concrete, and the cement and sodium silicate as the base material can be used for plugging and waterproofing of underground engineering.

4. Metal waterproof materials. Steel sheet, galvanized steel sheet, profiled steel sheet, coated steel sheet, etc. can be directly used as roof slab to prevent water. Sheet steel is used for metal waterproof layer of basement or underground structure. Thin copper plate, thin aluminum plate and stainless steel plate can be made into waterstop of building deformation joint. The joint of metal waterproof layer shall be welded and painted with antirust protective paint.

In the housing construction project, the waterproof of building materials is an important project. From the design, use of waterproof materials, construction quality, etc., it directly affects the quality and service life of the project. If not handled well, it will reduce the use function of the building, affect production and life, and bring a lot of inconvenience to people. Therefore, the development of new waterproof materials has been paid attention to all over the world, and become a relatively active field. Waterproof technology has also become a new comprehensive application science.

Since the proposal of the 12th Five year plan was published, people have paid attention to people's livelihood and the emphasis on energy conservation and emission reduction. Among them, large-scale construction of security housing is regarded as one of the highlights of China's economic development during the 12th Five Year Plan. The large-scale acceleration of building construction will bring considerable market demand for building waterproof materials, building coatings, adhesives, sealants and other new building materials and building chemicals.

It is understood that China's building waterproof materials mainly include SBS / APP modified asphalt waterproof roll, polymer waterproof roll, waterproof coating, fiberglass asphalt tile, self-adhesive waterproof roll and other new waterproof materials, as well as asphalt felt type waterproof roll mainly composed of asphalt paper-based felt and asphalt composite flexible waterproof roll. Strengthening the research of special waterproof technology, and strengthening the formulation, specification and strict implementation of new waterproof material standards will greatly promote the healthy development of our waterproof coating market.

Zhejiang Jingda Building Materials Technology Co., Ltd., 18 years roof waterproof strength guarantee. Main products: New West Lake fiberglass asphalt tile, new West Lake colored stone metal tile, people's petroleum asphalt paper asphalt felt, people's polyethylene polypropylene polymer waterproof roll. The variety is complete, the quality is excellent and the material is beautiful. Welcome to inquire and purchase.

[campsparrow]

Standing Rock Diary

In its entirety Pre-Edit, without photos

Standing Rock diary

is my memory of a week living with the Indians at the

Oceti Sakowin encampment near the  

Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, November 2016.

The Camp, located on Army Corps of Engineering land

at the junction of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers,

is a historic gathering of tribes of Indigenous Nations,

allies and people from all over the world

to join in solidarity to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline.

According to ancient Lakota prophecy,

a Black Snake would slither across the land,

desecrate sacred sites and poison the water before destroying the Earth.

To the Native Americans, that Black Snake is the Dakota Access Pipeline.

*****************************

"Humanity confronts a great dilemma:                        to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. "

- The People's Agreement    World People’s Conference on Climate Change     and the Rights of Mother Earth April 22nd, 2010 Cochabamba, Bolivia

*****

"Standing Rock is everywhere in the whole world."

-Chief Arvol Looking Horse

Preface

*******

I went to Standing Rock because it was finally time for me to do something that I really believed in.  Although I had many opportunities in the past to become active in environmental issues, this time there was an additional subject I felt very strongly about: the rights of American Indians. The Standing Rock Sioux were asking us all to come and be part of their camp of protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. I took the invitation almost personally.

I intended to write this as a diary of my week's visit that would take about 7 pages. It is not a work of art. I woke up each morning with one compelling thought, that I had to write down everything that I remembered. Even today more than two months later I remember a few details that I will be adding to this body of text before I print it out and send it to a few people for reading.

Initially, when I wrote, I did not have an intended audience, or purpose. At times I censored myself. I don't want my participation in ceremonies to be mistaken for belief. I value my personal rituals, equating spirituality with psychological strength. Intentions are a quantum of manifestation, but action is usually required. This became clearer to me by being at Standing Rock: I believe the pipeline must be stopped. I joined in the ceremonies and prayed with the people, listening to their stories of oppression, gaining compassion, knowing that the color of my skin has its own privilege. I went home and wrote a letter to President Obama; the next day the Army Corps of Engineers halted the construction of the pipeline.

Since I asked no questions while I was there, I found myself researching sources on the internet during the process of this re-membering. I did not document these with footnotes or bibliography. This wasn't intended to be an essay, a research paper, a manifesto, a propaganda piece. Trust that my sources were reliable ones: mainstream press, official websites, and a few books.

There are probably dozens of people documenting their unique experiences and thoughts about living at the Standing Rock camps. Many are doing this with their cellular phones, filming, photographing, taping. I imagine that right now, it's just too cold there for ink to flow out of a pen, and the no one is plugged in to their personal computer long enough to  write at length. They are more likely to be documenting in the form of direct messages: short emails and text messages, photos and videos, and posts on social media.

I have done a few proof-reads myself, checking for redundancies, errors, and sentence structure. It does not flow like a story I would tell over beers to a friend, but now it is time for me to finish this writing as I believe that it is timely. Finally, it does have a purpose: it is a call for Unity and for Action.  

Thank you to Frank DePonte for facilitating and funding

and to Howard Cohen for his constant support, tolerance and love.

Monica Lee Shimkus

January 2016

******************************************************************

Introduction

**************

Bakken oil fields

The Bakken Formation is the name for  a rock unit underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba that is a natural source of crude oil. The oil is extracted by horizontal drilling technologies and by hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" in which water, sand and chemicals are shot underground to break apart rock and free the fuel. The result has been a boom in Bakken oil production since 2000. Production is near a million barrels a day and is conducted by over 35 different active companies and lease operators, including the Halliburton Company. The light "sweet" crude oil in the Bakken Formation is found “trapped” between layers of shale rock about 2 miles below ground with no surface outcropping that might allow volatile or gaseous compounds to escape. As a consequence, when the oil is extracted it often contains high levels of these compounds and is more prone to explosion than other types of crude oil. There have been many accidents in the field and in transport of Bakken oil resulting in explosions and fires. It is hazardous to extract and to transport by rail or by any other means.

Energy transfer partners

Energy Transfer Partners  began in 1995 as a small intrastate natural gas pipeline operator and now owns and operates approximately 71,000 miles of natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined products, and crude oil pipelines within the United States. ETP is building the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.8 billion, 30-inch diameter underground pipeline intended to carry oil 1,172-miles from the Bakken oil fields across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois to an oil tank farm near Patoka, Illinois, a hub that connects many oil pipelines.  This pipeline will transport 470,000 barrels of oil per day. An early proposal for the Dakota Access Pipeline called for the project to cross the Missouri River north of Bismarck, but one reason that route was rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers was its potential threat to Bismarck’s water supply. The population of the Bismarck metropolitan area is 130,00 people, of whom more than 90% are white. The new proposed route runs about 30 miles to the south,  less than a mile from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation boundary(of which the population is 78% American Indian) at Lake Oahe, a 231-mile long reservoir on the Missouri River.

Dakota Access Pipeline executives say that they knew nothing of the tribe’s concerns about the new pipeline and continued to build it. However in an audio recording from a Sept. 30, 2014 meeting with Energy Transfer Partners, Standing Rock Tribal officials expressed their opposition to the pipeline and raised concerns about its potential impact to sacred sites and their water supply. On December 18th 2015 the United States Congress voted to put an end to its 40-year-old ban on oil export. Some say that all the oil from the Bakken fields is not intended for US consumption. In April 2016, Hess Corporation sent 175,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

#nodapl

The Dakota Access Pipeline protests, also known by  #NoDAPL, began in April 2016  and are at this writing ongoing. At the heart of the protest is the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and Tribe.  There are three reasons for Indian opposition to the pipeline. First, they want to protect their water from oil spills. Second, there are sacred sites in the path of the proposed pipeline: graves, stone prayer circles, stone cairns, and some have already been destroyed by construction workers. Third, the  pipeline is being built on some nearby land that Dakota Access bought but Standing Rock Sioux claims as their own.  The land was granted to the Sioux in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty which was signed by eight tribes and the United States government.  The Sioux say that they never  ceded this land in a later treaty.

The Sacred Stone camp was formed on private land on Standing Rock Reservation. Situated on the south side of the Cannonball River, it was created to shelter people who were coming in to pray and peacefully protest the pipeline at the construction site.  In July the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed suit against the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the pipeline's progression. The suit alleges that the Corps violated multiple federal statutes, including the Clean Water Act, National Historic Protection Act, and National Environmental Policy Act, when it issued the permits to Energy Transfer Partners . In a few months, the Sacred Stone camp population grew and overflowed to the other side of the Cannonball River and the protests began to draw international attention.

The world is watching

On September 20, David Archambault II, Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman, addressed the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland to garner international opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the reservation. By late September NBC News reported that members of more than 300 federally recognized Native American tribes were residing in the three main camps, a historic gathering, alongside an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 pipeline resistance supporters. In spite of the protesters' non-violent prayerful stance at the construction site, police had responded with pepper spray, attack dogs, mace, tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets. At this writing there have been hundreds of arrests during protests at the site of the construction and at other locations, such as banks that are funding the pipeline and Army Corps Of Engineers offices nationwide.  Reporters, journalists and officials have also been arrested, including Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Tribal Chairman David Archambault. Mainstream news reporting was sparse, but stories, photos and film footage are available to the public on social media. On October 31, a United Nations group was sent to investigate human rights abuses by law enforcement at the protests. Much of the pipeline has been completed as of late 2016, so the Missouri crossing has been an increasingly contentious issue. On December 4, under President Obama's administration the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not grant an easement for the pipeline to be drilled under Lake Oahe. In the meantime, the Corps will prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for alternate routes. However, many protesters continue camping on the site, in spite of the harsh winter conditions, not considering the matter closed. On their website, Energy Transfer Partners vows that they "fully expect to complete construction of the pipeline without any additional rerouting."

pipelines leak

Throughout the United States, there are 1,079 different crude oil pipelines that cross inland bodies of water, including eight that cross the Missouri River, amounting to more than 38,410 existing river and waterbody crossings. In 2016 alone there have been thirty reported major crude oil and natural gas pipeline breaches and accidents in the United States, causing property damage,  fires, death, harming wildlife, and fouling water. On December 5, a leak was reported to regulators that an estimated 4,200 barrels of oil spilled from the Belle Fourche Pipeline with an estimated 3,100 barrels going into the waters of the Ash Coulee Creek about 150 miles from Standing Rock.

***************************************

the complicated way to prepare for a journey

It took a relatively long time for me to get there, from the time my friend Frank DePonte sent me a message, “My wife, a journalist, is covering the Dakota Access Pipeline story for a Russian magazine. We will be at Sacred Stone Camp in ND for the holiday weekend. Will you be there?” That message came to me before Labor Day weekend when the action was beginning to get heavy and the press was beginning to take notice. I had not been following the story, and I was learning that a pipeline was being built that the local Indians did not want. That was the short version of the issue as it was known to me then. Of course, I should be there.

Autumn is my usual travel time. I am very poor but I love to plan travels. In reality, I get out the door with some psychic difficulty. Indecision is a state of mind I have accepted but nevertheless struggle with. There are so many choices of where to go, how to get there, where to stay, people to visit, and what I might want to do along the way. Two months passed while I agonized over taking what was going be my “Summer Vacation.” When I travel, I am usually going to be working or studying. Sipping a cocktail on the beach is not my image of Somewhere Else. Occasionally it is quite clear to me what I want to do, and where I want to go, and then I just do it. When I make up my mind I can be on a bus out of town first thing tomorrow. I began to foresee that this year my destination was going to be Standing Rock. I wasn’t sure for how long, or what I would be doing, or if I would enjoy being there. The way I see it, the Indians have every right to hate me and all my race. If I went, I would be camping out in cold weather, and there was plenty of reason for me to believe I would be in a situation where I could be arrested as there were reports of protesters and police colliding.

I learned that protesters were planning to camp out on the land over the harsh winter and I came to rationalize that I needed to assist with building housing for the people who would be staying. I have some knowledge of construction, architecture, native structures, and small experience with Habitat for Humanity, and I was growing excited with the idea of being busy using what I know. I spent my mornings researching the people who lived in North Dakota when the Europeans arrived, the Arikaras, the Mandans, the Hidatsas, before the Sioux came to live there. I studied quickly-built sustainable as well as temporary housing forms that could protect people from the cold: quonset huts,  strawbale, earthlodges, yurts, and insulated teepees. I began reading Grandmothers Counsel The World: Women Elders Offer Their Vision For Our Planet by Carol Schaefer and Rolling Thunder by Doug Boyd. I was becoming conscious from the contents of both books that Spirituality and Environmental Stewardship are interconnected to many indigenous people. The current events were pointing my attention to the fact that legal and diplomatic struggle for the Indigenous peoples of the whole earth is coming to a head at Standing Rock. It was becoming more evident that I needed to go, and if my going were not going to effectively help the people who live there or the campers or the protest, then I simply I needed to go to fill an educational gap in my life’s experience. I would go to learn.

**********************************

Late in September while I was still in an aggressive state of indecision, I packed up my tent and went camping at the ocean. It took a few attempts to actually make it to the beach due to self-sabotage, including leaving my wallet at home, setting out too late in the day, and locking my keys in the car. Finally, the day I picked to go camping happened to be very windy with rain in the forecast. When I finally arrived I found that I had the whole lonely campground to myself.  I took a walk on the beach; there were a few brave  or crazy surfers on the  especially rough-breaking waves. Before I picked my campsite I found a dead sparrow. Should I be superstitious since Sparrow is my nickname? I picked a site and set up my tent. The wind was fierce and provoked a kind of misery; I slept badly and was prevented from making my own coffee in the morning. At dawn I left my tent and stood in the wind and prayed out loud. I never know what good praying does.  I renounced sleeping out of doors.

But the wind was preparing me for Standing Rock.

**********************************

In October I wrote a letter to my friends in a few places who had been expecting that I might visit them, with my thoughts that I was considering instead going to North Dakota. I had credit card points that would translate into free or cheap travel, and this limited my airline choice.  Inexpensive voyage often only happens during the off-season, away from holidays, midweek, and during off-hours. Bismarck did not appear  to be a convenient airport and area to get in and out of. I could arrive by airplane sometime late at night and when I would leave it would have to be very early in the morning. I was having a hard time visualizing a pleasant easy passage. The autumn days were growing short, and I was not able to plan weeks in advance to insure the best bargains. Tensions were escalating at the site, the pipeline construction was growing nearer to the Missouri River, and I kept watching the weather report. Summer was having an extended stay in North Dakota, just as it was in New Jersey. It would be a good time to go; if I waited too long I would miss the best building weather. I had read that there were 2 camps at the site, and one  called Sacred Stone,  was on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on private land owned by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard. They were calling themselves a “prayer camp” and were accepting money and material donations on the internet. From the pictures I was seeing on social media I imagined that in the future this place could also become a permanent educational facility. There was also a public fund for legal aid, which was growing steadily, and had already far exceeded its goal. There was another camp, as I understood it at the time, that was called Red Warrior, and my impression was that it was for activists who were planning civil disobedience actions. I had decided that if I went, I would be staying at Sacred Stone Camp. I kept picturing myself at the "front line" carrying a sign that read, "This is your water, too." But I still had not made up my mind to go.

I still had a few things to do around my home to get ready for winter. I had to repair my garage door that had been damaged by snow plows last winter. I sold off a few things on ebay to raise money. And then an opportunity came to buy a good used car for very cheap. I did not need a car but I took the opportunity and bought it anyway. It was quite a hassle, full of anxious days, as the car had been sitting in a driveway and not driven for 5 years, the original title was missing, and the owner was disabled. It was a lot of footwork, money I didn’t have, insurance, towing, mechanical repairs. But, if I wanted, here was another way to get to Standing Rock if I didn’t mind adding six days driving to and from North Dakota into my travels.

*********************************************

Then, I had a sudden flash of a long-ago memory of waking up and seeing the Missouri River for the first time: it was around the 24th of June, 1981. I had just spent a month in St. Paul, Minnesota working to pay my way during my first cross-country road trip. While I was at work one day I heard that the Sioux Indians were planning to occupy the Black Hills in an ownership dispute and I wanted to be part of the experience, somehow. It was time to pack up my car and head toward Wounded Knee, South Dakota. I was driving with very little money and some camping gear. I picked up a hitchhiker earlier in the day and we stopped in to check out the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. We continued driving on I-90; night fell, and I was getting tired from driving. My hitchhiker suggested that we pull over at the nearest rest stop and just roll out our sleeping bags, and so we did. I remember the night being comfortably warm and lightly breezy. I looked up to see a sky filled with thousands of bright stars. It was my first time sleeping under an open sky at night. In the morning I woke to the  strange and beautiful song of a meadowlark. I also saw that I had been sleeping on a hillside, and down below, way down at the foot of the hill was a river that I found on my map to be the great Missouri. It was impressive, about half a mile wide, surrounded by green grassy hills of early summer.  In researching for this Preface to my Diary, I learned that there are many dams along the river that make it wider than it is by nature. They were  built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers for the purposes of irrigation, flood control and the generation of hydroelectric power. The dams flooded ancient Indian villages, resulted in the forced relocation of nearly 1,000 Indian families, and “caused more damage to Indian land than any other public works project in America.” I now know that the river at this point was the Eastern border of the Great Sioux Indian Reservation that covered half of South Dakota according to the original Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

*******************************************

On November 1, I phoned Frank with my dilemma of  being crippled with indecision. I was needing to be talked into going to Standing Rock. Frank offered to fly into Bismarck himself and rent a car to facilitate my journey, his wife would come with him and gather more research for her article, and he started singing the song “Chicago” by Graham Nash to me:

"...In a land that's known as freedom how can such a thing be fair Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bring ..."

This was the tipping point. I hung up the phone and made my one-way plane reservation to Bismarck. I would meet Frank in Denver to get our connecting flight on the same plane to Bismarck. I had already been packing for this trip, and a large part of my anxiety lay with my bringing the right versatile gear, and not too much for me to carry. This was all going to be remedied by Frank’s renting a vehicle to transport to Standing Rock, which was 50 miles away from Bismarck. I finished the repair of the garage door and in the process cut my hand, a short gash. I cleaned it and bandaged it, it was not going to be a problem but it was to become an image later that would represent my journey.

On November 2, I went out and voted in our upcoming national election. Later that day I was in a store that had a television on, and as I was shopping there was a news broadcast showing film footage of a violent clash between protesters and police that took place only a few hours earlier in North Dakota. In the scene people were wading in the Missouri River at the pipeline construction site.  Police dressed in military riot gear were streaming mace at protesters and shooting them with rubber bullets. I wanted badly to see these police put down their weapons and join the people. My decision was still to go in support of the protest, and not with the intention of getting arrested. My hope, although unrealistic, was that the issues would all be resolved before I returned home and that no one would have to camp over the winter and no one would have to show up and protest anymore.

Thursday November 3, 2016

Before I left home, I made a return flight reservation. I wasn't sure how I was going to manage to be on an airplane out of Bismarck at 6:20 in the morning, but I trusted that somehow it would happen. I was going to be gone 8 days and nights. Packing is normally for me difficult business and I can alternate between being very fussy and very adaptable. The day was warm so I wore a long black skirt and sports sandals. It felt like I might be carrying too much, but I was greatly relieved to find that my bags were easy for me to handle. My partner Howie said he wished that I was not going, but he said he respected me because I was going and this made me feel really good. He drove me and my bags to the train station.  I didn't have to wait more than a few short minutes before the train to the airport arrived. I was early for a change and I had plenty of time before take-off. I got to the airport and there was a little bit of a hassle regarding the manner in which I was carrying my sleeping bag, but I got it onto the airplane just fine.  I visited the United Airlines VIP lounge for some free soup and salad and a glass of wine. I had brought a book with me to read, 33 1/3 ’s Marquee Moon, the story of the making of the 1977 album by the band Television. It was a conscious choice for me, a small portable book about the 1970s New York city art and punk music scene. I knew that where I was going was going to be far removed from the story contents of this book, but I felt I might need a reference, a touchstone, connecting where I was going with where I was from. Then I boarded the plane, flew into Denver and met up with Frank and his wife Radjana, a Russian anthropologist who was working on the story of the  pipeline and the resistance for the Russian press. After Denver I was not going to have any cell phone reception so I sent out a few final text messages. On the connecting flight from Denver to Bismarck I was seated next to peace activist Reverend Patrick McCollum who told me he was in contact with the United Nations and President Barack Obama, and on that day over 500 clergy had converged at Standing Rock. He told me that a Peace Pole was being shipped from Japan and that he was going to carry it to the site.

We arrived in Bismarck, around 8:30 PM. Frank rented an SUV and got us a hotel room. The neighborhood was not far from the airport, full of chain hotels and restaurants presumably designed to serve business people and travelers.  I was hungry and requested that we get something to eat so we picked out a restaurant very nearby. We walked in and were greeted by girls about 18 years old, wearing football jerseys as their work uniform.  We took our seats at the bar.  There were at least 70 very large televisions on the walls surrounding us on all sides, all tuned to broadcasts of different sports events. When I travel I like to get a feel for the locals. I looked around to study the clientele, mostly white male, about early 20s in age, mostly wearing sports clothes, as if they had come in from a game themselves, and all very well-fed.  If there were cowboys among them, they were out of uniform. It was after work hours. There was a feeling of familiarity among patrons and staff alike.  I would take a wild guess that there was a University nearby and these were students, possibly of agriculture, mining, or business. For the next 7 days this was going to be my last contact with mainstream white American culture. I ordered a hamburger, because it seemed like the most local food choice, and a beer.  By the time we finished eating it was about 10 PM. We went back to the hotel and I took what might be my last shower for the next week and I went to bed.

Friday November 4

The next morning, I turned on my laptop to look at a map, the weather report, and find out what news there might be from the front lines or the camps. Frank had heard rumors of roadblocks and communications jams. I already had no phone reception, and I knew I would not have internet connection for possibly the whole week. The mainstream press was not fully ready to commit to reporting the story in general or about the conflicts that were regularly occurring between armed police and unarmed demonstrators. I sent a message to my family that I had arrived. I was following several Facebook pages that posted news from Standing Rock daily, often up to the minute, mostly in the form of videos, some of them posted live. There I found news and photos of the 524 interfaith clergy that had arrived yesterday, publicly demanding justice for indigenous peoples. As part of their demonstration, they renounced the Doctrine of Discovery, a concept that allowed European colonial powers to lay claims to lands inhabited by indigenous and non-Christian peoples, and enslave or kill them, and take their resources under the guise of discovery and spreading Christianity. The  idea of the Doctrine goes back as early as the Crusades in the 11th century and over time was written into official documents and laws.  At their demonstration the clergy sang hymns and burned a copy of the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” that was issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, declaring Spain's rights to lands discovered by Columbus the previous year.

It was a beautiful sunny cool morning. We got some breakfast and set out for the Reservation. The cities of Bismarck and Mandan, on either side of the Missouri River, were old prairie towns, and had been sites of settlement over thousands of  years by different waves of people. There is archaeological evidence of 11,000 years of human occupation in North Dakota. The Mandan Indians were the inhabitants of  the  Bismarck area and estimated 15,000 in number when the Europeans arrived in the 16th century.   Lewis and Clark passed through the area in 1804 on their Expedition.  A series of smallpox epidemics reduced the number of Mandan to about 125 by 1845. Today white northern European descendants, mostly Germans and Norwegians make up the largest ethnic group in North Dakota.

I looked at the houses as I passed by; and I wondered what it might be like to live there. The direct road highway 1806 to the reservation was indeed blocked and we had to take a detour. The landscape as we drove out of the cities is grassland with very few trees. There was an occasional small farm with corn growing, and occasionally a small cattle ranch. But mostly the land appeared fallow, or grazing land or else the grass itself was harvested as hay which was rolled in large bales scattered around the countryside.

When we arrived at the junction of roads near where Cannon Ball was on the map, there were Indian police units parked. We could not guess what their presence signified, but we pulled over and checked our directions. When we had ourselves set on the correct trajectory, we found signs pointing to Sacred Stone camp at a roadside shop. We followed the signs until we found a gate that had its own camp with a big army tent and many people roving around. A woman came to the car and we rolled down our windows to talk with her. She spoke with an Australian accent and questioned if we were agents of the FBI or other government agency or the press and what we were planning to do here. She told us that no drugs, alcohol or firearms were permitted, and photography was not allowed unless we asked for permission, and then she let us into the camp.

We parked the vehicle and walked through the camp which was a mix of tents and teepees, and tarp structures built into the shrubbery. I was interested in the primitive tarp shelters, but looking into the shrubs I saw that they had lots of big thorns, and I was glad that I had a free-standing tent with me. Being situated on a series of hills, it was not possible for me to see the extent of the camp or to guess how many people there were. Everyone was friendly and many were dressed colorfully. Although there was no running water, no one appeared as if in dire need of washing. I soon found that same Australian woman that had greeted us at the entry gate walking on a path. I asked her to give me a quick tour and she showed me the kitchen. In the midst of the kitchen was a Sacred Fire with seats around it and the rules to be observed there were no cursing, no gossip, no political talk. Praying was welcome. There was a dish washing station. Although there was no open food, except for whole fruits, there were a lot of common houseflies landing on the tables. I asked about winter structures and she brought me to a spot where there were people constructing what they called “Wagonagons” - quonset style long houses made of bent saplings that were going to be covered with blankets and tarps. I was looking forward to helping out.

However, the Sacred Stone Camp was not the center of activity that Frank and Radjana had visited the last time they were here. We walked on and came to another gate that closed the road to vehicular traffic. It was another formal checkpoint, with a large canvas tent, a few chairs around a small fire, a young man who had been awake too long with a walkie-talkie and his dog. We talked with him about the logistics of this gate, and I got the vague sense that it could be locked at any time, as a defense in the case of a raid. I did not understand much of what he was trying to tell us. These were “war” language terms that were unfamiliar to me. We continued to walk along past the gate and there in front of us was the Cannonball River. On the other side of the river was a huge camp, as far as I could guess, a mile from one side to the other. There was a surveillance airplane flying overhead, circling the big camp. I would find this was a constant presence that people tended to ignore, and sometimes in addition there was also a helicopter. Often there were photographing drones above us. Many of them belonged to people in the camp with press credentials. We kept walking passing many campsites with more teepees and tents set up along the river. We came to another checkpoint at a bridge with a paved roadway that crossed the river. There were a few vehicles and many people on foot crossing. I thought it was curious that although the weather was warm and there were no showers in the camps, I did not see anyone in the river, washing, swimming, or wading.

On the other side of the bridge, on the north side of the river, there was yet another checkpoint, the official camp exit. We waved and passed on and I could see far ahead that there was an unpaved road with hundreds of flags on both sides of it that represented over three hundred Indian Tribes and one hundred countries from around the world. Even though Frank and Radjana had been here only two months before, the landscape did not look familiar to them. In September this camp had 500 people living in it. Now there were easily 5,000. My guess was that the total population of the camps on both sides of the river was about 7-10,000 people.

camp with flags photo here

There appeared to be a center of activity, where people were gathered. It was another Sacred Fire, the first one that had been lit in April and had been burning continually. There was an altar with cow skulls, baskets of tobacco, sage, cedar, braids of sweet grass and other ceremonial objects on the Northeast side of the fire (later there would be questions about this position… altars were usually placed on the East side of a fire) and about ten folding chairs encircling it. There was an area that I refer to as "The Stage" where there were 3 canopies set up in front of a long army tent. There was a man speaking into a microphone connected to an amplified public address system. He was telling a story. When he finished speaking someone else came up and took the microphone. He addressed the crowd as "Relatives," spoke a few words in an Indian language and then in English thanked everyone for being there. Then he said, “We are one family,” I looked around and saw many people with brown skin and long black hair and I got choked up. I wished I could pass a DNA test and be in this family. The microphone was passed around to a few more people who told us we were in ceremony, we were in prayer, we had to respect and love one another. Furthermore we were asked to pray for the people who were building the pipeline, and for the police who were defending them and reacting with violence toward demonstrators. Instead of “Protesters” he referred to all of us as “Water Protectors.”

Radjana stopped to interview people whenever possible, and we eventually found ourselves at a great Buckminster Fuller-style Geodesic dome. Outside the dome was a mobile flatbed unit with an array of solar panels and a full bank of batteries. There were hanging LED lamps inside the dome but I never did find out what else was plugged into this large system which I estimate could generate enough electricity to run a household refrigerator or two throughout the day. Inside the dome a meeting was about to begin. It was a support group for people who had been arrested. We had heard a few horror stories about a recent Action (or was it the recent raid on the the North Camp?) where people were arrested and confined in what looked like dog kennels, and women were strip searched. There were people who had physical and psychological post-traumatic stress and they needed to come forward and be cared for. Radjana went in to collect information for her article. Frank walked with me to the spot where in September they had camped in their vehicle. It was far away from the crowd near a small creek or pond. I could not see the source of the water. Frank told me it was a good place to camp. Curiously, there was a large house on a flatbed truck nearby that I could use as a landmark. It was somewhat isolated, like a cleared cul-de-sac in a field of tall prairie grass. We went back to tell Radjana  that we were going back to get the car and bring my camping gear and we would pick her up in about half an hour. We walked back over the bridge to the Sacred Stone Camp. I was hungry so I stopped in to the  kitchen for a bowl full of  venison stew leftover from lunch. It was very good. I felt a little sad that this was not where I was going to be staying, but it was a place I could explore and hang out at later.

By this time it was late afternoon. We got into the vehicle and went back out the way we came in. The road leads around the small town of Cannonball on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and back past the convenience store, we turned right this time, onto route 1806, crossed the river on that same bridge we had walked over. Heading north on the road about a half mile away there is an official main entrance to the large camp with its own checkpoint, another that is guarded by a person who asks if you are new or returning. This is the road that is lined with the four-hundred-and-growing flags. We parked and dropped my camping gear at my campsite and walked back to pick up Radjana who was still inside the dome listening to people’s stories. Not wishing to disturb them, Frank gestured to Radjana that we would be waiting outside for her.

In that same instant a man walked up brandishing a camera with a big long telephoto lens. He was an Indian and I didn’t feel like it was necessary for me to police him about photographing. He asked us “What is going on in here?” I told him it was a meeting for women who had been arrested. He stood near us and questioned us why we were there. He introduced himself as Frank White Bull, and that he was on the Standing Rock Tribal Council. He told us that he questioned “all this Green stuff” gesturing to the solar array. He seemed serious, but I couldn't tell if he was. It wasn’t as if we were at a trade show, no one was selling anything, but there were solar panels and wind generators on the site. He said that the stuff was detracting from the main issues: Water and the Children who were not born yet--the Future as it is often referred to by the Indians with the expression "The Seventh Generation." I didn't feel that the Green Stuff was distracting at all, rather it was powering the camp and serving as an exhibition that oil is not the only way to get electricity, but he was making his point that he felt that people in the camp had gotten distracted. Then he told us that the camp was going to be closed down in a week. Oh, it would take about a month to clear everyone out, but it was not a legal camp and it was not necessary for us to be there. The Standing Rock Sioux would handle the Pipeline issue as a legal one themselves. For one thing, the tribe was paying for our toilets and trash removal. I didn't challenge him or ask questions. On the surface, I would have argued, that the protests and the subsequent violent police reactions were garnering media attention and support from the public. But to him, I think it may have seemed an unnecessary waste of time, energy, and resources. I kept trying to  second guess why he was telling us these things; maybe he was trying to test our sincerity. In the short future I would be able to tell him that by being here I learned a lot about the struggles of the Indians and a lot of other things. I could tell him now that this was a historic camp, that this gathering of people all appreciated his hospitality.  He gave us his business card. By this time, Radjana had joined us. She had a press pass, and asked him a few questions. He showed us some photographs that he had taken that were stored on his cell phone. They were beautiful skillfully taken photos; one was of the Milky Way, a bright mass of stars in the night sky, the other was of the green-hued Northern Lights, taken “right from that bridge over there, last month.” But we would not see these things in the sky at this time, he told us, because the Dakota Access Pipeline construction site was lit up at night, with bright stadium lights that polluted the night sky, in order to discourage protesters from chaining themselves to equipment or other “mischief” on the work site.

My reaction was both disappointment and relief at the same time. My understanding of what White Bull had said was that we were not needed to go on the “Front Line” of protest action, did not have to camp out over the winter, I was not needed for support. But here was my opportunity to learn, help out, and report what the people back home were not seeing because the news was not covering most of what was really the heart of what was going on.  It had taken a lot for me to get here, and I was expecting to take something back with me. "So I should go home , " I said. White Bull said, “No, you don’t have to go home,” and I thought, but where else can I go now? I was having a vision of roaming around on foot on the Great Plains for the next week. I felt like my whole reason for being was challenged. I was stunned and confused. Two months later I am still wondering what his intention was by imparting this "information" to us. It was to be my only encounter of this kind during my entire stay.

*********************************************

My mind felt poisoned, and I wanted to share what Frank White Bull had said to me with other people. But I did not. I had a feeling that if I did, his words if repeated would have had the effect on the camp like an oil leak running over the territory that the Missouri River feeds, all the way down to the Mississippi, and on to the Gulf of Mexico, before it could be stopped and corrected. I asked around if there were Tribal Council members on site that I could talk with. I was also told and would have suspected anyway that there were "plants," and agents provocateurs, and untrue rumors being spread, and that I needed to be aware of these things. I wanted to find out if what he said was for real, that the Indians did not want us there. Everything else he said sounded legitimate. I was trying to gauge what he told us and why. Was there division among the tribe to have this pipeline go through,  was there money to be made, if not by the whole tribe then possibly by some who had invested in it? These were only my speculations, but I knew nothing. I was going to have to keep quiet and listen.

Sundown was approaching, and Frank and Radjana walked with me back to my campsite. I took note of landmarks, so I would not become lost when I needed to find my way back to my tent. My touchstone would be the house on wheels nearby. While finding my way back to my base, I looked around me and I felt like I was on a peninsula covered with 2-feet-deep coarse grass, a few mid sized trees. I could see the body of water nearby, but other than that I was pretty much alone with about 75 feet to myself on all sides. There were wide pathways all around that had been made by some kind of vehicle. I hastily set up my tent in the middle of a pathway. Frank offered me his sleeping bag as an extra, and with some deliberation I took it. I didn't know yet that I would be very glad to have it inside my other down sleeping bag. I said good night; my comrades would be back the next day. I rolled out my sleeping bags and put on a sweater, and found that my flashlight was not working. Oh well. Then I walked the longish distance, maybe about a quarter mile back to the center of activity, the Sacred Fire, just to get my thumb on the pulse of things. My psyche felt infected with White Bull’s words and I needed to adjust. On my way to the fire, I took note of where the “Spiffy Biffs” - the port-a-potties were and inspected them for toilet paper and cleanliness. Everything checked out fine, which was remarkable given how many people were using them.

By the time I got to the fire it was dark. Someone was talking on the microphone over the public address system, which I could see was hooked up by thick wires to a battery bank on another mobile trailer with solar panels. I had located the coffee station, on a couple of long tables about 30 feet away from the Sacred Fire on the west side. I asked about kitchens, where I would find food. I learned about a kitchen called Winona’s “over there behind that brown teepee” where I could get fry bread and native dishes. From the “stage” about 30 feet to the north of the fire, Native persons took turns speaking, making announcements about available rides to Bismarck, found items, lost items; keep your dogs away from this circle, women please wear skirts; please check in if you are with the press and receive a press pass, please attend the Community Meeting and Orientation at 9 am at the Community Hall in the big army tent over there. We were addressed as welcome Relatives; we are all family, thank you for being here to support us; Hello, my name is ___________ and I came out from _________ reservation in ________; prayers, songs, stories. Often someone took the microphone and introduced themselves as '"Nobody." I was still feeling unsure about what was going on, and after what White Bull had told us, to me everything I was experiencing had taken on an aura of being contrived. I could not shake it but I was not going to repeat what I had been told. However I could sense that everyone else was enjoying a serious connected feeling. It was OK for me to be alone in my skepticism. I noticed that there is an unmistakable style in the way that American Indians speak when they are delivering a monologue. They take on an air of authority, deliberation, and articulation. They seem to get to the heart of the matter quickly. I had heard Indians speak before at pow-wows, sweat lodges, and in movies.  Each speaker ended their soliloquy with “Mitakuye Oyasin,” which means “All My Relations” in the Lakota language. I was meeting people from all over the world: Maori from New Zealand, a group of founding members from Black Lives Matter,  people from Japan, and France, and Indians from India! There were a lot of people newly arriving. An speaker announced that some runners from Arizona would be arriving on foot in a few hours.

Suddenly there was a ruckus around the fire. I was nearby but I missed the cause of it: someone had thrown the cremated ashes of his friend into the fire. A really big fuss ensued, this person had desecrated the fire, who knows if the cremated person had been a good person? And an effort was made to extract the remains from the ashes in the fire. The person who threw them in had already vanished into the camp. The man at the microphone kept asking the person to come forward and collect his friend, repeating no, we aren’t going to hurt you, or offend you, and telling us all that corrections to our behavior were not acts of aggression. I reasoned to myself that whatever the person was like, whose ashes had gone into the fire, they were now purer because of being put into the Sacred Fire. But that was just my point of view. I am still an outsider, a colonizer, a settler, and a guest to these kind people who were feeding me and letting me camp with them and giving me coffee and stories and prayers and who would be educating me.

I walked from the circle back in the direction of my tent. I stopped by a crowd that had gathered around a big drum where there were people singing in some Indian language. I didn’t ask anything, I just stood and listened. I was not a stranger to Indian drumming and singing but I am slow to learn songs or I would have been singing along with the strange syllables, melodies, and heart-beat rhythms. Nothing about this small gathering felt artificial. These were Indians who had either come from a few miles away or had traveled a great distance carrying their drum and their songs.

I went to my tent, there was a group of people set up nearby around a small campfire, I said Hello, my name is Monica, I am camped here, and pointed to my tent.  Then I went into my tent, changed into my night clothes but did not fall asleep right away. I could still hear the drumming and singing, and I could hear musicians taking turns at the open microphone which had turned from information and prayers and added entertainment into the mix. I was again feeling like there was something wrong, something unreal, but I eventually fell asleep and slept well I do not remember having any dreams.

Saturday November 5  

I was awakened by a loud voice, “KIKTA PO! KIKTA PO! WAKE UP! WARRIORS, SMUDGE YOUR PIPES! CHRISTIANS, POLISH YOUR CROSSES. PRAY! THEY HAVE BEEN UP FOR THREE HOURS ALREADY WORKING ON THAT BLACK SNAKE! KIKTA PO! WAKE UP! IT IS GOING TO BE A GOOD DAY!” The air was cold and it was still dark. I didn’t want to get out of my sleeping bag. I turned on my phone to see what time it was. It was 6 AM. I changed into my day clothes and navigated in the darkness to the Sacred Fire. On my way I passed by the Spiffy Biffs just as a truck pulled up to clean them out. Later I would find that at 6 AM sharp every day, the toilets were emptied and cleaned and new paper was placed in them, enough to last all day and night. They were always rather clean.

At the main circle which was a camp around the Sacred Fire, a kind of town square with a big winter army tent on the north side with 3 canopies connected worked as a kind of stage and shaded sitting area for elders. On the east side there were open canopies with folding chairs underneath, and on the south side there was a large dry-erase board that served as a message kiosk.  There was a coffee station on the west side, with a lattice fence behind it. Their coffee was always fresh if weaker than what I was used to but with just enough caffeine to keep away pain and fatigue and contribute to our mental clarity.

The old man with the microphone was a medicine man from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He continued by saying morning prayers in Lakota and in English. He thanked the Great Spirit for a new day to make himself into a better person. He sang to the rising sun. He passed the mike to a Navajo who had driven out from Oregon, who also prayed in his native language. Again we were thanked for being there in support, and again told we were all related, and we were fostering a spirit of forgiveness, and respect, and if we had just arrived, to please attend the Community Meeting at 9 AM at the dome. "Mitakuye Oyasin! Mni Wiconi!" Throughout my stay the cry "Mni Wiconi" - "Water is Life" could be often be heard in sudden bursts of call-and-response throughout the camp.

As the horizon grew pink with the rising sun, the crowd of worshipers (and coffee drinkers) grew. Someone announced that a women’s water ceremony was going to take place at 7 AM. I was going to discover that some events or ceremonies had time structures and exact locations, but some did not. Anyway, I was not wearing a watch and seldom turned on my phone. By the time 7 o'clock came our crowd grew to about 200 people. A group of women, maybe as many as ten of them dressed in winter jackets and long skirts went up to the front "stage" area. They began singing a water song in English; one woman carried a hammered copper pitcher. She went around the circle and stood in front of each person and poured a little water into our cupped left hands from which we drank. The water tasted very sweet. I read later on that the tap water at the nearby town of Cannonball is also sweet. The taste of the water, as if there had been peaches floating in it, was more reason to protect it. Then the women lined up and we walked down the dirt road with some men following behind to the bank of the Cannonball River, about a quarter mile away, singing along the way, and giving water to people who came up for a handful. The walking ceremony consisted of about a hundred people. When we got to the bank of the river, the men lined up along both sides of the steep pathway to help the women down the bank to a small dock where the ceremony continued. It was chivalrous and felt so respectful, to see these strangers putting out their hands to offer assistance. I have heard the Sioux men told they have to respect all women. In the line I saw a man who looked like my friend David who died very young, six years ago. I thought of him and his depression and addiction. I wished that he could have been here. In that brief moment I also thought about the suicide epidemic among young people that had taken place not long ago on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. When we got to the bottom of the bank, we women were each, one at a time, given a small amount of tobacco which we sprinkled into the river and poured in water from the pitcher. Next men who identified themselves as women were invited to pour water, women who identified as men, and people who identified as both or neither. As I understood this ceremony, it was to thank the Creator for giving us Water, in an open group setting, in a formal way. Although this ceremony was sexually segregated, both sexes were needed to participate, and there was more than one way for a person to define herself as “female.”

**********************************

After this ceremony was over, I went to Winona’s kitchen for breakfast. I was already finding that I was often not so hungry, and that one small helping of whatever was available 2 or 3 times a day was plenty of food to sustain me. When I got back to the main circle I found that Radjana and Frank had returned. Frank told me that the house that was my landmark was gone! (Where do you move a house on wheels to?) We spent the next few hours roaming the camp, found some yurts that had been erected, Radjana conducted a few more interviews, we took turns posing for our own photos to post on Facebook. I picked one for Frank to post of me when he got back to internet lands to let my friends know I was OK

The weather was beautifully warm, high in the low 70’s and sunny. I was told that usually by this time of year there was snow on the ground. Behind the bulletin board kiosk, there was a large army tent where there was a big stash of winter clothing and blankets being sorted and given out.  I was still harboring hope that no one would feel a need to stay the winter. Of course it would be kind of an adventure, but I was feeling that it was not going to be easy to sustain. It was not easy to realistically prepare for the eventual reality of arctic conditions, especially with the deceptive tease of a seemingly everlasting summer.

At noon there was a commotion: People were coming into the camp on horseback. They were Indians, and they were headed to the next ceremony, to light the 7th Council Fire. Oceti Sakowin means “seven council fires,” and is the proper name for the people otherwise known as the Sioux. “The Sioux tribe was made up of

                                                    arriving on horseback photo here

Seven Council Fires. Each of these Council Fires was made up of individual bands, based on kinship, dialect and geographic proximity. Sharing a common fire is one thing that has always united the Sioux people. Keeping of the Peta Wakan (Sacred Fire) was an important activity. On marches coals from the previous council fire were carefully preserved and used to rekindle the council fire at the new campsite.” My understanding now is that probably those who came in on horseback were another band of Sioux arriving. The ceremony began with a few people gathering around a fire pit that was in the middle of a ring of teepees. 1,000 people gathered in an outer circle. There was a 20-foot-wide track between the inner and outer circles of people, where the horseback riders rode around. Everyone was quiet, even the babies. All photography had been strictly forbidden at this ceremony. A drone flew above us. Many people shouted at it and waved it away. Someone at the inner circle began to speak. I had to strain to hear what was being said. Even if I could not hear most of it, I felt like it was an honor just to be present. The fire was lit, I heard a cheer, and saw the smoke rise. People around the fire who had pipes held them up; someone was praying. Soon coming up the pathway there was a parade of children who entered the circle. There were more cheers, and songs, and shaking hands with the youth, and then the pipe carriers came out of the circle to offer us their pipes to smoke from. I shared a sacred pipe with probably a hundred of people that day. When the ceremony ended I found Radjana again and I found David McCollum, the man who sat next to me on my plane ride from Denver; he was carrying his peace pole that had come all the way from Japan.

Frank, Radjana and I milled about some more, Radjana continued to interview people, and I followed.  Not used to being idle, I was still looking for work to do. Eventually we returned to the car and took a ride to the Prairie Knights Casino seven miles to the south for buffet supper . While I was having dinner I found that I had internet reception so I dashed off a message. I began, “What a great time and place to be in History!” Frank disappeared for a short while and came back to the table and tossed me a hundred dollar bill. He had just won on a slot machine. He possibly didn’t realize how much I needed and appreciated it. I found a pay phone in the lobby and took note of the location as I might be coming back here over the next few days. For a dollar I could make an outgoing 4-minute call and I learned that it was easy to get rides to the Casino. Plenty of people at the camp came here, took a room, and let many people come to share their shower, internet, and other amenities. I made a couple of phone calls from Frank’s cell phone to let people at home know that I was OK.

We drove back to camp and I said goodbye to Frank and Radjana. They were flying back home to Arizona the next day. I crawled into my tent and although it was still early I went right to sleep.

Sunday November 6

Of course, I woke up early too. I had no idea what time it might be, although I was used to waking up at 4 AM in the Eastern time zone. I went to the Sacred Fire still in my pajamas and there were a few men sitting in the circle of folding chairs around the fire. There were unfortunately very bright stadium-type lights shining in our direction from the pipeline construction site which was about 3/4 mile away. Many of the more distant  and dimmer stars were obscured by the glare, but the position of bright Orion was a reliable way to tell the time at night. We took turns guessing what time it might be, and then someone looked at his cell phone and told us it was 2:50 AM. That seemed kind of early until we realized that this was the night when we set back the clock an hour for the winter, and the cell phone reset itself automatically, so in keeping with my own circadian rhythm I was actually right on time. The men expressed how tired they were, they all wanted to go to sleep, but keeping the Sacred Fire going has to be done by a designated Firekeeper. A Firekeeper was the only person allowed to place logs on the fire, insured that people respected the fire, and that they didn’t throw anything foreign into it, except for tobacco, cedar, sage or sweetgrass, while praying. A Firekeeper also kept everyone mindful that nothing bad was said in front of the fire, that we kept our intentions as well as our language good: no gossip, no politics, no cussing. I told them that I was an old Girl Scout, knew how to keep a fire going, and was familiar with ceremonies; I volunteered myself for the role of Firekeeper, and they accepted. To me, this was a great honor, and was something that I had always wanted to do. They all left to go to sleep. I saw how quickly firewood was being consumed so I took a conservation approach, allowing the fire to burn down a little before adding another split log. I ended up being mostly alone under the stars  for a few hours just feeding the fire and feeling grateful to be there; occasionally someone came and sat. Apparently traditionally a Firekeeper is usually a male and native, and a few people asked me, “Who is keeping the fire?”  I was joined by a woman who told me her name was April and that she was from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana. She was very friendly, identified herself as Sioux; she had driven all day to get here, and had not yet been to bed. I asked her about life on her reservation, and she told me there was a problem there with methamphetamine abuse. It was a story I was going to hear again from other Indians from other places. She eventually left the fire to go to sleep. After some time had passed, an Indian man inserted himself between me and the fire, moved some logs around and threw a big handful of cedar needles into the fire, accidentally dropping a glove in as he did so. The glove started to smolder, and I pointed to it and he pulled it out; then, just as quickly as he had come into the circle, he left. I reasoned that he probably thought that the fire was not being tended to just because it was not blazing and because there was a lone woman sitting by; he just made an assumption and didn’t think to ask who was keeping the fire.

Eventually the old Lakota Medicine man came into the circle, and he asked me, “Who is keeping the fire?” “I am,” I replied. He chuckled. Soon by asking “Is the microphone on?” he revealed himself as the person who calls out the morning wake-up prayers. A man with technical experience appeared and turned on the electricity that came from the solar battery bank. The coldest part of night was noticeably just before sunrise. There seemed to be an extra gust of cold wind that I felt just as the old medicine man was thanking the Creator for a New Day.  Gradually and steadily the wind was, in fact, increasing. A small crowd was gathering, someone came to the fire to gather some coals to light a fire to make fresh coffee. He introduced himself to me as the Firekeeper, and he thanked me for keeping it going. I took leave for the latrine. On the port-a-potty door was a leaflet that read that there would be a Peace Walk to Mandan at 8 AM. The Peace Walk was intended to surround the Morton County courthouse and forgive the police force for brutality during a raid on a Water Protector’s camp on October 27. I wanted to be a part of the walk. In spite of my intention to come here and be helpful building winter housing, I was finding that there was a lot going on to witness, be part of, and learn from. I didn't know anything yet about that particular raid, but there had been enough police brutality in the news that I thought it could have been a collective forgiveness gesture. I wanted to walk in support of the group; it could be a way to learn how to heal some wounds from my own past and a way to move forward in whatever I might be doing in my future. I wanted to see what forgiveness in action looks like.

I went back to my tent to change into my day clothes, but when I got back to the main area I found that I missed a ride with the cars going out to Mandan, So I went to the 9 AM Community Meeting. It was my third day in camp and it had been highly advised that everyone attend a Meeting and a workshop on non-violent Direct Action. The first meeting was supposed to take place in a big Army tent that was the designated Community Center, but I was re-directed to the Geodesic dome, which was big enough to comfortably hold well over a hundred people. A small crowd had gathered outside the dome. After we seated ourselves inside, about a hundred of us, our facilitator Johnnie opened the session by again thanking us for being there, told us how the formal process of these meetings worked, that each session began with a prayer and ended with a prayer. He asked us all to agree with that precept and went around the circle to find out if anyone had an objection to it. How many of us were newcomers, raise our hands; there were about forty of us who had arrived in the last few days that came to the meeting. How many planning to stay the winter, raise their hands please; at least ten were planning to stay.  He told us there was a hill where there were better probabilities at receiving cell phone signals and internet, and to go up there to be issued a media pass if we represented press, there is a school if we have kids who need to be in school. He suggested going out and picking up trash, volunteering to help out at kitchens, erecting winter tents; there would be a “Wellbriety” meeting at the Emotional Wellness teepee, (Wellbriety is a movement much like the 12-steps addiction recovery campaign “advocating for Native American Recovery and Wellness”) and then all of the newcomers were sent out to receive orientation instructions in another place inside the aforementioned Community Hall big army tent.

I left with the large group of newcomers to attend that meeting. The facilitators were Occupy-trained people, who gave us a crash-course on racism, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and to correct other misconceptions we might have. I had been to meetings with seasoned activists before, but here we were all  basically being reminded that if we were not natives, then it would be disrespectful to dress and behave as if we were.  Wearing feathers was mentioned. I didn't ask any questions, but I should have. Inspired by the pretty ribbon shirts I had seen Indian men wearing at pow-wows I made one for myself. I brought it with me on this trip; to me it is much more than just a decorative piece of clothing. I endowed it with spiritual intention while I was sewing it, and I wore it on my personal vision quest.  I didn't ask if I could wear it and I wasn't going to take the chance if it could possibly make anyone upset.  

The facilitators asked us to introduce ourselves, why we came here, and to identify if we had come to participate in the Direct Actions. Someone announced that if we intended to participate that we should expect

                                  photo of ribbon shirt here.

to get arrested and that it was mandatory to attend a Direct Action training. We should attend a training even if we were not going to be involved on the front lines of protest. They suggested that we also go to a few other meetings, one on media, one on legal and arrest issues.

On our way out I briefly connected with a few people who wanted to attend the Direct Action meeting. I went in search of some labor to do while I waited for the time of the training. There was a big wooden shed nearby being built to shelter a water supply truck for the winter. It had windows facing south, using passive solar principles so it would be more likely to stay above freezing inside. The construction people were busy but were short on tools so they did not need my help. I wandered. The clothing donation tent was very busy sorting through donations. I rifled through the sweaters and found a really nice periwinkle-colored fleece jacket that fit me. It was what I needed to wear now that the wind was increasing and although there was no mirror to admire myself in, I knew that the color was perfect.  I picked up a broad scarf, too, big enough to cover my head and neck. Whatever clothing surplus there was, items not appropriate for the winter needs of the camp, were being bagged and sent out to other communities on the Reservation. Across the road there was a roped-off enclosure with all kinds of stuff in it. There had been a protest encampment that was raided a week before on October 27th, and these were the possessions of people who had been arrested or who had fled. The “North Camp” also known as the "1851 Treaty Camp" had been erected in direct line of the pipeline construction on land owned by DAPL. Demonstrators were praying as the police sprayed pepper-spray and made arrests. Their belongings, tents, clothing, sleeping bags, had been rescued and here were being neatly folded and sorted until the owners came to claim them. I gave a little help there, but the wind was growing stronger and changing directions, so it was difficult to fold things.

It was then time for the Direct Action meeting and I went looking for the place where it was supposed to be held. Directions were  vague; there were no longer signs pointing the way and I had to ask for directions. But when I got there, the meeting had been canceled. Places and times for meetings seemed changeable, but I still managed always to show up at in time for another experience. (Later I was told that whenever there was a Direct Action planned  the trainings would be canceled. ) I happened to be near to my own tent so I thought to just hang out by myself. The strong wind had blown my tent into a slanting position, so I removed the poles and and flattened it so that it would not be blown away completely. Nearby I saw a small rodent, a mouse, a vole, or a shrew nibbling on grass seed on a stalk. I got up close to watch it, but I scared it, and it burrowed into some flattened grass, but not very deep. I reached out and touched its back between the blades of grass with my finger, and stroked its fur. This little guy is the real native here, I thought, who might set the example on how to really prepare for winter.

After I had dismantled my tent, I looked across the creek, across a big grassy field at a hill about a half mile away. I saw that the crest of the hill was covered with a line of uniformly dressed military-outfitted police. Below, there were about 30 people climbing up the hill. I saw a line of people on horseback riding up behind and around the persons climbing. I wished that I had brought binoculars and a telephoto lens for my camera. I could see well enough to guess what was going on. There were demonstrators attempting to occupy the hill. From behind me I heard someone at the open mike shouting, “Tell those people to get back here! This is not a sanctioned action!” and I saw people rushing off on foot to the hill to bring the protesters down, but not before I saw the police, whoever they were, rolling canisters of teargas down the hill, upwind from the people.

taking the hill photo here

It was not clear to me what a sanctioned action meant; who did the approving? Who was invited or who would one ask if one volunteered to go along? How were the rest of us in the camp to know, if only to pray for this demonstration? There were only a total of five of us watching the Action from a spot that seemed to have the clearest view. I took many photos, and there were both an airplane and helicopter circling the hill. Within a half hour there were several pickup trucks full of people returning to the camp from the Action. They all looked triumphant, but I still don’t know what happened. I read later that the hill was a burial site.

I was still thinking I wanted to move my tent and camp somewhere closer to the main circle, food, coffee, for convenience and was scouting for a possible site. My current area had now blossomed with more tents, and a teepee, and I got friendly with the car-full of men that came up from Colorado who camped near me, but they would be leaving tomorrow. I was not fully motivated to move, simply because I didn’t think there would be a better spot; I questioned my reason for moving. I wasn't going to be staying more than a week, and I would be a stranger anywhere inside the camp. I was afraid that “Somewhere else” would not necessarily be a better place. I was having a similar kind of indecisive stalling to that which I had before I made the commitment to come to Standing Rock in the first place.

Whenever I didn't have another inclination, I ended up at the Sacred Fire. There was always a prayer, a song, a story, an announcement, and bottled water.  I posted my message on the dry-erase message kiosk that I was going to need a ride to Bismarck on the coming Thursday, but how could anyone find me? My cell phone did not work and my tent was set up in a vague non-descript location. Probably in a few days, my tent location area would have its own name, I could have even given it one myself. Maybe that little body of water had a name. In the meantime I wrote on the board that they could leave a message for Monica in the lost and found box. I went up to the fire and met up with Elsa, a woman who was at the morning orientation meeting. She had taken a room at the casino and invited me to come and have a shower. We had a car ride with Henri, a school teacher who lived in San Diego. I offered to buy us all dinner at the buffet. I got some clean clothes and toiletries and joined them for the ride. At the Casino, we heaped our trays with food and took a table. There was a group of people at the next table, one of whom began conversing with us. He was a young Indian man, very articulate in Indian and business matters regarding the pipeline. We introduced ourselves and he told us his name was Freedom.  He told us that his mother, sitting right there at the table next to us being interviewed, was LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, the same woman who had loaned out her land for the Sacred Stone Prayer Camp. Freedom could rattle off business names, figures, statistics, treaties. I asked him if he wrote, and he said no. But he was quite a good talker! When LaDonna got done with her interview she turned to us and said hello and we all shook her hand. On our way out of the restaurant I overheard someone say that someone had been arrested that day.

We went upstairs to take turns showering.  Henri told us he was camped at the Two-Spirits Camp. One  way to describe "Two Spirits" in Western terms is “Native LGBTQ” although that is not an accurate description. Two-Spirits also have a sacred, spiritual and ceremonial role in their communities. When we rode back to Oceti Sakowin I asked if it would be OK if I moved my tent to the Two-Spirit camp. Henri said it should be fine and I said I would be over tomorrow to check it out and get permission. Henry dropped me off near where I thought my tent was, but my area had grown in population and in the dark I didn't recognize the place. I was actually about a hundred yards from my own tent, within an area of family camps with horses. Still without a flashlight, I found my way. Yurts, teepees and big canvas tents had randomly been erected around my tent. I did not recognize my own “neighborhood.” I was feeling even less“at home” here, and yet still trying to figure out why. Moving was becoming more of my personal inclination. I was glad to be clean, though, and I put on my pajamas. Before I dropped off to sleep I could hear that some young people had taken over the microphone and were rapping and singing.  I thought to myself, this is kind of a nice pow wow.

Monday November 7, 2016

When I woke up, it was cold, and windy again. I tried to gauge which direction the wind was coming from. It kept changing directions, an "all-directions wind" I call it, but the prevailing wind direction was different from yesterday. I put on my day clothes, and collapsed my tent again to prevent it from blowing away. I went to the Sacred Fire as I did first thing each morning at camp to participate in the morning prayers. I was always inspired by the praying, even when the prayers were not in English. Before the sun came over the hills, the Lakota medicine man always gave thanks for a new day in which to become a better person. Someone took the microphone and scolded the kids for rapping the night before because the words were political. "This is not a pow wow!" he said. "This is a prayer camp."

The fire to cook the coffee on was started each morning with a few coals from the Sacred Fire. Coffee grounds and water were boiled together in a big pot cowboy style, 5 gallons at a time, and then the mixture was strained and put into giant plastic thermal dispensers. I have no idea how many times a day coffee was made but it always tasted fresh. During the morning praying, while it was still dark,  people always gathered to get coffee. This morning while the dawn was breaking, I busied myself tidying up the big table set up with cream, sugar, cups, spoons and snacks. It was almost always in a state of disarray. There was no running water to wash with; all the water was brought in in plastic bottles, in half-pint to 5-gallon sizes. The garbage was under some control, but it was filled with plastics: styrofoam cups, plastic spoons and water bottles. This was not a sustainable situation, and I felt that  people coming into camp to visit or stay needed to be told to bring their own cups and spoons. While I was busy wiping down a table,  the person at the microphone making prayers announced that a dog had come into the Sacred Fire circle. This was a strictly prohibited, and more than once I heard remarks on “dog soup” although I selectively brushed it off as a kind of joke. "Please come and get your dog," our morning emcee announced. Someone picked the dog up by the scruff of his neck and brought him through the kitchen area out a back doorway through the lattice fence, and tied it up to a post. One of the Firekeepers in a very hushed tone commanded me to follow and get the dog out of there, “before it got killed.” I wasted no time in untying and walking off with the dog. It wasn’t the creature’s fault it had come into the circle, and it was wearing a collar. It was someone’s pet.

The entire camp was covered with frost that looked like a light snow had fallen. I walked praying, as I was now in the habit of doing, to find its owner. I would not be able to take a dog home with me or I needed to find someone who wanted it. Many people I passed stopped and remarked how cute the dog was. It was very distinctive looking, with short legs and a spotted coat, as if it were a mix of Dachsund and Australian sheep dog. It was hungry and eating everything it saw. Then two Indian men came up to me and said what a cute dog it was. Could they have it? I said yes, and one of them remarked aside that he had only had “puppy soup” twice that year. I let the dog go with them but I was very uneasy and sure I had made a stupid mistake. I walked back to the coffee kitchen. About 5 minutes later the man who had taken the dog from me came through the back door of the kitchen and I turned around to find the dog tied up again to a post. Again I took it away, this time running faster, farther, until I found a camp with dogs in it. I asked a woman there if they could take care of this one, and she pointed to a horse trailer at the top of a hill, and said “The owner was looking for it, she is up there at Hunkpapa Camp.” I marveled that n a place with thousands of strangers it was possible to know the owner of one dog. It was not yet 9:00 in the morning, here I was being frantic while other people were still sleeping. Was I doing the right thing if I might be keeping a dog from becoming part of a ritual sacrifice for medicine? I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. If that Firekeeper asked me to take the dog away it meant that I was trying to do the right thing by saving the dog. The Hunkpapa camp was a circle of tents around one big red horse trailer. I walked around shouting that I had a dog and it belonged to someone. Finally someone inside a red tent called out sleepily, "Does it have spots?" I said that it did, and she unzipped her tent door, and the dog went right inside. I didn’t know if the Hunkpapa Sioux ate dog and I didn’t know for sure that this dog would end up in a pot, and I had not complained about the deer meat that went into the venison stew I ate the other day.

(At this writing, over a month later, I saw a photo online of someone walking that very dog in the snow, so I know it did not end up in a “medicine soup.”)

9:00 AM Community Meeting. I brought up “dogs” as I was still shaken. I didn’t talk about the incident or ask the vital question if there would possibly be a dog killed in Oceti Sakowin; Johnnie the moderator simply addressed the subject that everyone had to keep their dogs under control. It didn’t answer my concern, but then I didn’t state my issue directly. I came here to help a people keep their way of life, and that might mean that I would have to defend some customs that I saw as unseemly and unnecessary.  This was hardly different from any other religion. I was going to have to just sit with this topic until I felt I could ask the right people in the right situation.

Since I had already been to the orientation meeting I was able to stay at the Community meeting and hear what other people wanted to say. A Sioux woman lawyer stood up to speak.  She recited a list of treaties that DAPL was in violation of.  She also told us that she had received a death threat.  I saw her tears and felt her fear.

She walked around the circle and shook hands with each one of us.  She looked into my eyes and I gave her a hug. There were a few other people with ideas about how to make the camp more sustainable. One person mentioned “Net Zero” building; another said she wanted to make composting toilets. Someone else wanted to install rocket stoves. These were all subjects I knew something about. I wanted to be in on the conversations and help out in construction. I also knew that I would not have very much time. If we were going to suggest something that would improve the camp, we were asked to make a realistic dedication of time to see it through. It was an issue that was filed under “Honesty”; we had to be honest about our ability to commit. At the end of the meeting two men stood up to speak. They were two chiefs from Arctic tribes, Inupiat perhaps, but the name that I heard was one that I did not recognize. One spoke only in the language of his people while the other translated into English. They expressed joy in being able to support the Standing Rock Sioux in their fight against the pipeline. They had donated a portable winter building and had brought it on the plane with them. It wasn’t easy, the chief said. The people at the airline wanted to know what he was doing with this big thing. He told them he was taking it to a pow-wow.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the shelter. The meeting was about to end and I found Elsa again. I approached the person who brought up the topic of Net-Zero building. He had come all the way from Australia. We walked over to the construction that was going to shelter the water truck, but before I could find out what he would suggest could be improved in the design, he left the site and I never saw him again. The building was right behind the  Portland, Oregon Two-Spirits camp which was identifiable with its big rainbow flag. I approached the “leaders” - two women named Candi and Dandelion, and asked if I could camp there.

They asked if I was Two-Spirit, and up until this time I thought it was just a blanket term for LGBTQ. Then I learned that the title Two-Spirits are specifically natives who identify with more than one gender and fill a sacred, spiritual and ceremonial role. I knew a little bit from the movie "Little Big Man," in which a Cheyenne male character called Little Horse wore women's clothing and was not expected to fight. A traditional two spirit must be recognized as such by the Elders of their Indigenous community. I am not native, so my position could be as an Ally and yes, I could set up my tent with them. I felt accepted and free to make myself at-home.

                                                  photo of two spirits camp here

Elsa wanted to help me move my camp and up until now I had felt paralyzed with indecision to move and although I really had not brought a lot of things with me, up until now I had no place better to go. It occurred to me that I might have been lonely where I was, and this was an unfamiliar feeling that was not simple for me to identify.

We went to my site and packed up my tent, sleeping bags and everything, and walked it all over to the Two-Spirit camp. We sat around and socialized for awhile before I set up my tent. There were about twenty persons living in that camp who identified themselves as having two gender spirits. They had their own fire and their own kitchen. For my short stay here I was going to get a little bit of schooling in the language of Queer Politics, as well as more Native American spirituality. I made an announcement that I would need a ride to Bismarck on Thursday and someone said that if I didn’t find a ride he would give me one. This was a very generous offer. Someone else said that he was going to pick someone up at the airport Thursday at 2:30 and I could get a ride with him.

Very soon after I got my tent set up I went to get some lunch at Winona's kitchen, a small mobile Native kitchen connected under a tarp to a travel trailer, which served Indian soul food. I ate all my camp meals there. I ate only when I was hungry, and ate everything on my plate. I'm not even sure if I ever met the person known as Winona. Someone told me they made fry bread which is an Indian treat: dough that is flattened and  fried like a do-nut, and can be served with sugar or fruit, or savory with meat and taco toppings. I made a pest of myself asking at every meal if they were making fry bread, but the fry bread specialist had been away at a funeral. For lunch they were serving a delicious chicken soup.

                                                                                                                          Photo of winona's kitchen here

After I ate it was time for me to go to Direct Action training which was beginning at 2 PM near the Red Warrior camp. There were about 80 people in the workshop. The facilitators had experience from all over America with civil disobedience demonstrating and protesting. The first thing they told us was that every great American social movement such as civil rights, women’s suffrage, and ending the Viet Nam war  had been achieved through peaceful civil disobedience, marches, sit-ins, and included people getting arrested and risking injury and imprisonment. This teaching showed us how to avoid getting hurt, how to communicate with and not antagonize law enforcers, what to do if we get arrested, what to do if we get maced, and how to keep the demonstration going on for as long as possible. We were invited to add our own ideas. Then we had a mock action. We locked arms, sang, and walked very slowly. The meeting went on from 2 PM until the sun was noticeably sinking in the west.

After I got done with my training, I went back over to Winona's to help out before supper. I did a little chopping preparation, a little dish washing, and I realized how really difficult maintaining a clean kitchen would become once the temperature dropped below freezing. It was already nearing sundown, since we had turned back the clocks an hour, and the temperature was falling. There were other helpers. The one I struck up conversation with was named Jesus, a young musician from Los Angeles who kept helping me out by keeping a pot on the fire to heat up water; it was necessary to continually have hot water for cleaning dishes. There were a few very large pots  including one that had been used for the chicken soup that I had eaten for lunch. The pots had quite a lot of grease in them and it was REALLY difficult to get it off as the water kept turning cold before I could finish washing the pot. Winter was going to be challenging in ways that we could not now foresee.

After I got done washing the big pots, the cook announced that she would make fry bread. There were three different people involved in this endeavor, each with a different approach and recipe creating an amalgamation of the quintessential fry bread recipe: flour, water, powdered milk, salt, yeast or baking powder, warm water, sugar, and everything was measured by eye.  Mixed together and allowed to rise for about an hour, the dough was shaped into little pillows and dropped into hot oil until it turned brown.  I feel lucky to have made fry bread with some "pros."  As my personal reward I took away an empty pretty Blue Bird Flour Bag. Blue Bird flour is milled in Colorado and is  the preferred brand by makers of home made fry bread. The menu that night was real home made menudo, buffalo soup, and a wild blueberry compote. There was a long line for the fry bread.

I ate a little bit of everything and went back to my tent to go to sleep very early. The people camped behind my tent were either throwing lots of tobacco on their fire or smoking a lot of cigarettes. I was being  “smudged" all night.

Tuesday November 8, 2016

It was very cold that morning and I wanted to stay inside my sleeping bag for as long as possible before I would inevitably have to get out. “KIKTA PO! KIKTA PO!” came over the public address system. I went to the main circle as usual for the morning prayers and coffee. Today someone had brought some half and half!  Prayers and songs went around as usual, and as before I felt something in my chest where my heart resides when I looked at the growing rosy glow on the horizon. “Thank you for another day.” This morning the microphone came to a woman, who took on a more remonstrative tone. She had heard of or seen alcohol being consumed in the camp. “If you are here to party," she said, "you should go home. This is a prayer camp.” She had overheard some cussing. “This is a sacred place. If you hear someone using bad language or gossiping, please remind them that we are praying. I see some gang kids wearing their colors. This is not the place for that. If you are not here to pray with us, go home.” It felt as if she were correcting her own misbehaving grandchildren instead of a bunch of unmindful white adults. In fact a lot of the camp was Indian and young.

There was a lost and found box at the table on the “stage.” There were announcements of found items: keys, wallets, phones, a love letter. Someone, an anonymous donor, had paid for the release of cars that had been impounded from the raid on a North Camp ten days ago, and all that was needed was for the owners of the cars to take a ride with someone who was offering a lift and they could go and get their cars. I didn’t know much then about the raid but I have since learned that it was a violent assault on a camp named “1851 Treaty Camp,” a reclamation of unceded Sioux territory from the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty.  The camp had been set up in protest on October 23rd in the direct path of the pipeline on land that had been recently purchased by DAPL. Four days later, 300 police in miltary riot gear conducted the brutal attack using mace, tear gas, beanbag guns, and noise concussion devices on the unarmed  camp and arrested 141 people.

There was another announcement about a delivery of wood stoves and tents. Volunteers were needed to help unload them, and help to set up the tents. Elders needed to get into the winter tents.

I started to walk away but someone who was talking on the microphone was talking about the annual sundance ceremony.  He mentioned dog, sacrifice,  medicine, and soup in one sentence. It must be true. But again I didn't ask anyone.

I went over to Winona’s where they served up some bacon and eggs and home fries. She always had a thermal jug of sage tea and another of mint tea in addition to fresh coffee. I kept forgetting it was Election Day.

                                                I stopped again at the donations tent to help a little bit, and there I saw a man from the back wearing a beautiful vintage plaid woolen bathrobe, obviously picked up here at donations. I wanted to comment that it was beyond fashionable,  but I didn't. Soon I had all the boxes sorted and neatly displayed so I went back to my tent. I spent the rest of the morning with the Two-Spirits erecting a winter army tent and covering the top with heavy plastic tarps. This was expected to be their supply tent. They already had a heavy canvas tent set up with luxurious beds and colorful blankets. It had an outlet for a stove pipe and they were planning to get a wood stove for inside. Around the larger camp I was noticing that firewood was being used up very quickly although the weather was still relatively warm. There were no forests nearby and wood was being imported from as far away as Washington state and was being trucked in.

Elsa came to find me, and invited me back to stay over at the Casino, and I packed up and made up my bed and offered it to anyone who might want to sleep in it. We went to the Medic tent to meet our ride. On the way over, I found my dish-washing buddy Jesus walking down the road wearing a long coat: it was that same beautiful vintage plaid bathrobe I had seen earlier.  I told him he had impeccable taste. He was giving away beads from a necklace that he loved and had broken. I gave him a hug sure that I would see him again. We got to the Medic tent only to find that our ride had already left. Elsa told me that there were several people who had reported lost dogs… We each hitched another ride--I got a ride with some Lakota Indians who had come from Pine Ridge in South Dakota and Elsa rode with another family--and we arrived at the Casino at the same time. We enjoyed another buffet dinner, I used the pay phone to call Howie and I took a shower and put on my pajamas. I plugged in the computer, propped up the bed pillows, and sat myself under the blankets. Elsa flipped through television stations on the monster wall TV to find out how the election was going. It took awhile before we found a station that was showing the news.

I wrote on Facebook: “I could probably write a short book about all this,” as I looked up at the TV  to see Donald Trump ahead in the race. "In spite of the downgraded intensity of conflict, I attended the Direct Action training, so now I know how to be a peaceful protester, a skill I should have learned a long time ago. I have heard from several people that 2 LOCAL COPS HAVE TURNED IN THEIR BADGES AND QUIT THE POLICE FORCE,” over mistreatment of Water Protectors who had been arrested.  While I still had my computer on, I did a search on Sioux eating dogs, and I found that sometimes a young puppy was killed and its meat boiled to be consumed as part of a special healing ceremony. It still didn't sit well with me and I wasn't sure how to include this in my diary. To the Sioux, the dog is/was a sacred animal. By the time I quit the computer and turned off my light, Trump was just about to become officially elected as our next president. I had a feeling of disgust, but I was finding resolve in my recent surroundings. There had always been a lot of work to do in our country, in our communities, in the world, but now it was clear we were going to have to roll up our sleeves and do more, work harder and become unified.

Wednesday November 9, 2016.

Elsa had to leave for the airport at 5:30 AM. I was awake and she turned on the TV and Trump was announced as the winner of the election. I was kind of in shock, but Elsa seemed more affected by the news. We pulled ourselves together and exchanged phone numbers. I was frantic, thinking maybe I should ride with her to the airport and rent a car to drive back in. But the clock was ticking, there was no time to be indecisive, and it was time to say goodbye to Elsa. I took a relatively long time writing emails before I would check out. I went downstairs to breakfast and put in another call to Howie. I got dressed and took my bags downstairs and hailed a ride. The person who opened his car door to let me in was named Ray. He was an Indian originally from Lame Deer Montana, now living in Seattle. He was friendly, and we exchanged camp observations. I found that I was not the only person who had ideas that one of the camps ought to become a permanent public site for educating people.

Ray dropped me off right at my tent, and I changed into work clothes. I had in mind to go over to Sacred Stone to see what was going on with the “Wagonagons.” I crossed the bridge over the river and it seemed that the Rosebud camp, another camp near the Sacred Stone camp,  had grown as well. I saw a dome-shaped sweat lodge structure, made of bent saplings and covered with blankets. A sweat lodge ceremony is something like a sauna, used for physical and spiritual purification and is usually conducted in groups. Stones are heated in a fire, and brought into the center of the lodge and water is poured on the rocks, creating steam. I went over to talk with a woman who was sitting nearby. She was a water-pourer, a person who has been trained to conduct the sweat lodge or inipi ceremony. This was not her lodge. That is, there was someone else who scheduled the sweat ceremonies, probably the person who built it. She ran women’s lodges here, in addition they held community mixed lodges. While we were talking a young Indian came up and asked if he could use the lodge for his family who had traveled from Chicago. He had a water-pourer among his travelers. They had encountered some trouble along the way and wanted to sweat and pray about it. She directed him to come back and talk to the person who maintained the lodge. After he left I took my leave of the woman and wandered some more. I strayed from the well-used road and walked through the tall grass toward a patch of trees. I needed to enjoy some alone time and admire the landscape and the beautiful weather. I laid down among the trees, not really engaging any thoughts. I needed some open meditation for a change, letting go of my judgments, plans, and any notions about what I thought that I had come here to do. I had not really been closed to going and demonstrating, just to the idea of getting arrested, having to come up with bail money, court dates, lawyers, and all the other possible hassles. I had still been daydreaming about carrying a big sign to that front line that had printed in bold letters, “I am your Aunt. We are family. Don’t shoot,” or some words to appeal to the militarized police to put down their weapons and join the side of protecting the people instead of the pipeline. While I was laying there I looked across the large stretch of grass to the hillsides beyond. I could see large pieces of that monstrous construction equipment: earth movers, backhoes and bulldozers. And suddenly I saw moving dark shadows across the hillside. I squinted. BUFFALO! There were about 200 of them moving as if one morphing silhouette. I watched for awhile until they moved out of sight over a hill.

It was time to pick myself up and move on to my mission of finally making myself useful. I found some people erecting yurts. There was one person laying out lines for their sites along a Kaballah tree-of-life plan. It seemed like a tedious detail given that in preparation for winter, the time had already come to move inside. Elders, women, and children were being urged to take shelter in the large army tents, teepees and yurts; our summer tents would be useless against the imminent wind, cold and snow. It seemed to me like a better idea to place the yurts according to the landscape contours, and in close proximity to amenities, and to get them up as quickly as possible. They were not my yurts so instead of handing out my common sense critique, I pitched in picking up cow dung and sticks off the sites that had been mapped out already. I piled them up under a tree for future use as fuel. Although I thought it was very resourceful as an idea, I could see that this small pile would keep a few people warm for at most a few hours, even in the most fuel efficient wood-burning stove.

                                                                            yurt interior photo here.

I hadn’t been working for very long when a truck with a couple of people in it came along and the driver, an Indian man, stopped the truck and got out. Then he shouted, enunciating his words very clearly, that there were going to be four women’s sweat lodges later that day, to honor, comfort, pray with and heal women who had been arrested and traumatized during an action. The place of the lodges and time were not given. Of course I was going to go, but for now there were cow pies to pick up and I still had not made my way back to Sacred Stone. If the fires for the lodges were not already started it would be a few hours before the ceremony. I worked on. The group laid out a giant plastic tarp that was going to be the ground cloth.

Soon another pick-up truck drove up with a driver delivering a message: the roadblock had been cleared and there was a possibility of a raid on Oceti Sakowin camp.  We had been warned about rumor mongers, so I didn’t regard his words as an actual emergency. I asked the driver about the women’s sweat, and he said they had already lit the fires. I stopped my work and hitched a ride back to the sweat lodge that I had passed on my way over. In my hurry I had dropped both my skirt and my blue fleece jacket somewhere. There was no time to go back to find them. At the lodge site there were a few men there building a fire but they told me the women’s lodge was going to be on the other side of the river, at the Oceti Sakowin camp. I crossed the bridge again. First I did not want to miss the ceremony, and just in case there really was a raid, I did not want to be caught away from my tent and my belongings. I stopped by my camp and told the people there would be a sweat ceremony and then went to the clothing donations tent because  I was required to wear a skirt into the lodge. There were plenty of sweaters, jackets, hats and scarves but no skirts. Instead I was furnished with a clean bed sheet which I would wrap around my waist.

At Oceti Sakowin, no one seemed aware that there might be a raid. I was not going to raise alarm. And no one could tell me exactly where the inipi, the sweat lodge, was going to be. It was growing late and I didn’t want to miss it. I passed by a large dumpster and saw that some of the garbage needed to be sorted from the recycling. I pulled out some plastic water bottles and put them into the recycling bin. I found cases of unopened canned vegetables in the dumpster. I was horrified. I checked the expiration dates. They were all good. A man was throwing his trash into the dumpster. We got to talking and I told him about the cans of food I found.  He suggested that they may have been from the camp raid and were possibly contaminated with mace. Then he expressed that he felt really awful, and he was beginning to cry, about the election I surmised. I asked him if he needed a hug, and he said yes. I gave him a deep heartfelt hug and told him not to fear.  He told me he was on his way to a Sustainability meeting. I knew I belonged there; this camp was not in any condition to be sustained over the winter and I could add a few ideas that would be simple to implement, but I was going to the lodge. I had a purpose. When I got back home I would be attending a lodge on Long Island a day later with some people I used to sweat with. I was going to connect these two communities with their prayers. My input and learning at a Sustainability Meeting would simply not be part of my Standing Rock experience. This was, after all, a prayer camp.

The lodge location was not well known, there was to be a lot of walking back and forth to find the right person who could direct me to it. And still the site was not exactly where I thought it would be. I ended up there just in time anyway. There were about 60 women waiting outside of two lodges with two fires burning. There was a male guarding our space facing out in each of the four directions. I heard one of them talking about a line of vehicles he could see far away.  I felt a little apprehension, but not fear. If there was going to be a raid I would be inside of a lodge praying.

Four women water-pourers were going to lead the ceremonies; each had come forward when the call for a women’s lodge went out through the camp and each came from a different tribal tradition. As we stood waiting the leaders prayed at the same time, each in a different language, smudging their pipes in the smoke from burning sage. There were going to be two rounds for each lodge, one round for each group of about 15 women. When it finally came time to go in, it was very crowded. I had once experienced a panic attack during a sweat lodge, in fact it was the last time I had gone to an inipi ceremony. I had no reason to panic but I rationalized that I was supposed to understand and have some empathy for people who suffer from extreme anxiety. How can I have compassion for people’s misery if I have never felt it myself? In this lodge, I had to sit cramped, I fidgeted a lot, I was right up against the rock pit, I realized that my “skirt” was polyester and I feared it might melt onto my skin! It was time for the rocks to be brought in, and it was getting hotter and hotter.  The leader gave a teaching, prayed, we each took our turn with a silent or spoken prayer.  It was a relatively short round. After we got done with all the rounds, and I was walking back to my camp, I heard people all around the camp yelling. I looked up and there was an Eagle flying over our lodges.

Back at my tent, I took off my wet clothes and put on some dry things and went over to Winona’s for dinner. Tonight they were serving lengua, and venison stew. The cook made fry bread again. After supper I lingered by the Sacred Fire as usual. Someone told me that the youth were very angry at the outcome of the election. I wished I could stick around, hang out with the kids, sit by the drum for one more night but I was tired and went off to bed.

Thursday November 10

I was awake early and went to the fire long before the 6 AM wake-up prayer. I heard two different packs of coyotes calling, howling, singing, from the south and the west of the camp. A few camp dogs joined in. Around the fire there was more storytelling, some personal stories and some Indian stories. I gave away my pouch of tobacco to an elder, although I doubt he was much older than myself. The Old Man who took the microphone every morning for the wake-up call that I felt inclined to call “Grandfather” was in fact younger than my young parents. It was starting to become obvious to me that I was becoming an elder myself.

I had brought my Minidisc digital sound recorder concealed inside my jacket pocket to the fire circle. I wanted so badly to have a recording of the prayers, possibly to marry with some of the photos I took. The recording attempt failed. I rationalized that it must have been for the right reasons: I was supposed to be here now, and fussing with electronic equipment was divorcing me from this moment, especially doing it without permission.

This would be my last time hearing the morning ceremonies. I had been feeling a bit empty and ineffectual for not participating in a Direct Action, or building the Wagonagon, or washing more dishes. I didn’t eat a lot of food, but I handed over money at the kitchen. There was no donations jar. No one ever asked me for a cent. There were many hands pitching in, and none of the work seemed hard. I couldn’t say why, perhaps there were so many hands willing to do the work that it all evened out. We were constantly being reminded that this was not a vacation, but everything made it easy to be leisurely, as if on a religious retreat. The firewood took work to chop, and great effort to get it here, as there were no forests nearby and very few trees. But there was always someone who came forward and picked up the axe and chopped.

At the coffee station, I found that a couple of cases of ceramic coffee mugs had been delivered, and though I had offered to give my beloved enamel coffee cup to Odie, a Firekeeper and coffee attendant, he wasn’t going to need mine. I was really relieved that I could keep my travel mug that had been with me for 35 years at least, and I hoped that no more styrofoam cups would be used ever again in this camp.

While the regular morning prayers were going on, and as the day was growing brighter, an Indian couple laid out a colorful blanket in front of the fire. The man knelt down and produced a long stemmed pipe out of its deerskin fringed carrying bag. He held it up toward the sun, and the altar and the fire. The woman then did the same with another pipe. There was an announcement that we were having a pipe ceremony and that anyone who wished to participate should form a circle, men on the west side, women on the east. The Pipe Ceremony is the most important ritual to many American Indian people. There were more prayers, the pipes were filled with tobacco which is a sacred plant to many Indians, and we were instructed how to handle the pipe, hold the wooden stem in the right hand, the stone bowl in the left. The sacred pipe parts represent the male and the female, and a pipe ceremony joins the two in a ritual that brings the male and female together. The pipe, called a “Chanupa” in the Lakota language, was going to be given to each of us four times, separate pipes for the men and women. There was a teaching in English, I wish I could remember all of it, but the part I remember most went something like this: “Depression comes from living in the Past; Anxiety comes from fear of the Future; we must live fully in the Present.” Then the pipes were brought around. I made my own prayer, I inhaled the smoke and blew it to the sky.

After the ceremony was finished I went back to my tent and changed into my day clothes. I saw the person named Rudy who had offered me the ride to Bismarck and we firmed up our departure plans. I went over to Winona’s for a breakfast of eggs, sausage, potatoes, and tea. I chatted with a cook named Karen. She said that the regular cook had injured her ankle and I offered an Ace bandage that Elsa had left behind. I went to my tent and brought it back. I said I was flying back home tomorrow, and thanked them for feeding me, and I asked Karen what message she would like me to take back to the people back home. She paused for a moment and then said, “Tell them that We are Prayerful People; We are Peaceful People; We are Powerful People, and we will win this with Prayer.”

                                                       winona kitchen banner photo here.

Back at the Two-Spirit Camp there was a photo-op, videos and interview with some media. They got me into a few photos, and pretty soon it was time to leave. My driver, Rudy, looked South American Indian, Peruvian? and spoke Spanish with his girlfriend, Sarah. I told him that I was not going to need my gear and he said an elder who was flying in could definitely use the two sleeping bags, and if I wanted to leave the tent he could give it to some Dine (Navajo) that he knew. Then I handed him my down jacket and it fit him so I was happy that was getting a new home, also. I also gave him my bag of Italian Roast coffee that I never got around to using. I told him to make it strong! Sarah and two other of their friends were coming along with us to Bismarck. There was a mention in passing that they could use a shower and I told them they could use my shower at the hotel. As we were loading the van, I noticed that it had New Jersey license plates. “Hey, I’m from New Jersey! Where are you guys from?” and Rudy said he lived in Jersey City, and his three other passengers were from all around the New York Metropolitan area.

Rudy's van was a vintage luxury touring vehicle, complete with a television set and a VCR, imitation wood interior and built in beds. We drove to Bismarck listening to a CD of Andean flute music. I hadn’t heard any other music except Indian songs and big drums since I had left a week ago. They dropped me at the hotel and went to the airport to pick up their friends. I requested extra towels from the concierge, took my luggage up to my room and returned to the lobby to wait for them. I went back to reading Marquee Moon. They returned with an Elder named Zubin, a Tewa who lived in New York City and his friend Fire, an Iranian woman. We all went up to my room and they took turns showering. It was as if the Oceti Sakowin Camp was continuing in my room, with more Indian stories. Zubin was about 62, was my guess, from popular music references that he mentioned. Among other things he told us that when he was a young boy his grandmother told him a story about a web that covered the Earth and made it possible for everyone to communicate with one another. Rudy admired my ribbon shirt that was hanging on the back of my chair. I should have asked him if he felt like it was appropriate for me to wear it at any time. I had only seen them worn only by Indian men on dressy occasions, but I liked the style. I had made mine to wear during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City.

After everyone showered they invited me to come with them and eat dinner, so we found a Mexican chain restaurant nearby that I was able to say I liked. We ate our fill while sharing more personal stories. Paul McCartney’s song “Maybe I’m Amazed” came on over the dining room’s sound system, and I started singing along. I wanted to sing it to Howie when I got back home. I was feeling all around grateful for having made the journey and being there and for the support that I got from all my friends, and yes, amazed at everything.

They drove me back to my hotel and we said our goodbyes, I asked at the hotel front desk for a wake-up call. I went to my room and collected my dirty clothes, and washed them in the hotel laundry. I took a shower and turned on my laptop to send a message to Howie. Then I went to bed with my book.

Friday November 11, 2016

I didn't sleep well, knowing I had to be at the airport to fly out at 6:20 AM, I picked the wrong pillow to sleep with, but I woke up before the hotel wake-up call. I was having a vision of my entire trip looking like a wound that was healing up, with teepees sticking out of it. I realized it was quickly becoming a memory, that might fade too fast into forgetting, but nevertheless would become part of me. I looked at the cut on my hand that I had gotten while I was still at home. It was healing up well, and I told myself that the scar it would leave would always be a reminder of my visit to Standing Rock. I packed and looked around my room, said thanks for giving me a place to rest for the night. I went down to the lobby and grabbed a couple of hard boiled eggs and an orange; I didn't know when I would have a minute to buy something to eat, and waited for the 5 AM shuttle ride to the airport. The driver told me he was a Swede and that he had lived his whole life in Bismarck.

Bismarck is a small airport. There are only about 40 planes flying in and out each day. Right in the middle of our  security check line there was a display of a triceratops skull and other fossils inside a big glass case. Going through the security check I had to unpack my carry-on bag that holds all my electronics all over again. After I passed through the scanner, I saw a man with his shirt off and hands overhead, a security officer holding a scan wand along his body was yelling to him to put his clothes back on but the guy was just standing there frozen with his hands high above his head. Of course I wondered what was going on. I saw that his bags were being examined by hand, slowing mine coming down the conveyor belt. When he picked up his bags I could see that his hands were shaking. I got my backpack again, and I had to repack it. (I believe this is where I lost my Minidisc microphone.)

By the time I got to my terminal, and I saw that the man with his hands in the air was seated in the waiting area. I sat down next to him and asked if he was OK. “You looked very shaken up back there.” He proceeded to tell me that he was at Standing Rock two days before I got there, when the Water Protectors were crossing the river, got maced and shot at, the same scene that I saw on the television the night before  I left. He told me it was very scary, and then the following day the circumstances were the opposite--prayerful and peaceful--the day when the clergy showed up. He told me that he had been camped at Sacred Stone for the past week. I asked him if he needed a hug, and he said yes, and so I stood and held him as strongly as I could. I was becoming used to putting my heart next to other people's hearts, something I had never done before. It was time to board our plane and I said we could talk more when we got to Denver. After I seated myself on the plane, I immersed myself into Marquee Moon again. I was on my way home.

When I landed in Denver and got off the plane, the shaken man was waiting for me. He was visibly much more relaxed. He told me he was a farmer in California and we exchanged phone numbers. We then parted ways and I went to my terminal.

On my flight  to Newark I sat next to a man reading a book authored by Glenn Beck. The world in some ways had changed over the last week, and I could see that there were going to be reactions and backlashes. The chasm of a divided America could become deeper and I don't know that it can be bridged. I see that there are two sides of this gap: one cares only for itself, and the other cares for everyone. Debate is futile. Neither is in the majority, but the side that cares for everyone and the planet is the one that needs to be fostered and that is the work we have to do.

And I had a message to deliver  from the people at Standing Roc

Hindsight

*********

These are thoughts that were percolating inside me and I did not articulate until this writing. I do not mean to detract from the issue that an unwanted pipeline is set to go through what were legally Indian lands. Since the arrival of the Europeans, the Indians have been fighting to live on and protect their land, and preserve their dignity and way of life. Indigenous people all over the world have similar struggles. The bigger picture  and the message the native peoples have been trying to tell us is that we are abusing our home, our planet, stripping it of its resources and dumping poisonous waste into our own necessary elements of air, water, and earth.  We are disrespecting our fellow human beings, our relatives.

We use petroleum consumption as a commodity. If we don't buy it and use it, it loses its demand and also its value in money. This does not necessarily mean the drilling and transport and refining will stop. The United States government currently subsidizes drilling for oil and natural gas with $4 billion per year in taxpayer money. We waste a lot of the fuels that we use, no matter what the source. Our cars idle in traffic with us at the wheel (also wasting our time.) We heat up our homes, schools, and workplaces when we are not in them. We heat rooms that we don't use. We leave our electrical appliances running. We throw away food, we run clean water down the drain as if it were endlessly available only because we have the money to pay for it. If we stop using oil, and natural gas, we don't need pipelines. It is only in these last hundred years that our demand and consumption are so high, and because these fuels are cheap to use, we feel free to waste. The same is true about our use of water, food, and manufactured goods.

Which brings us back to the issue: Water. It would be extremely difficult to avoid the vast watershed of the Missouri River in the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and that fact should have been considered a long time ago. Even a small leak in this pipeline would be a major catastrophe that would affect over 2,000 linear miles directly along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Every break in every pipeline is expensive, dirty, and disastrous to the ecosystem that includes all the lives that would be affected farther from the shorelines. Not just the drinking water, but farm irrigation and wildlife would be impacted. The People of the region have cause to raise protest against the construction of the pipeline under the Missouri River. It is not a matter “if” but “when” a breach will occur.

The Standing Rock Tribe's successful fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline takes more than prayer: the Sioux have treaties, lawyers and public opinion on their side.  A Cherokee medicine man once told me that you can pray for corn all you want, but it helps if you plant the seeds. After I got home and began to write this diary, I decided I needed to write a direct letter to President Obama stating that it was necessary to stop this pipeline; I sent the letter in an email. The following day the Army Corps of Engineers has denied easement for the Dakota Access to construct the pipeline at its present route.

Franks White Bull's statement that the  camp would be closed in a month was partly true. The Army Corps of Engineers issued an eviction notice to Oceti Sakowin camp in early December, but it was worded that no force would be taken, that it was simply to notify the people there that emergencies could occur at the camp but the Army COE would not be obligated to respond.  The Standing Rock Tribe also asked the people to leave due to the coming severe cold weather conditions, and they removed the portable toilets which the tribe was paying for. They were replaced by sustainable composting toilets. Also, in accord with what White Bull said, the matter lies with the courts. An Environmental Impact Statement is being prepared by the Corps for alternative routes.  For many this appears as a victory, but for many the battle is not over. In a few short weeks president-elect Trump will take office, and there are fears that he could reverse the decision and grant easement to DAPL. For some, any pipeline at all is not acceptable. Meanwhile, there are about a thousand people remaining at camp committed to the pipeline resistance. The Dome is still the center of the community.  Winter has come with its snow, wind and subzero temperatures and has at least 3 more months left, testing everyone who is staying to remain focused, united, and constant. The Water Protectors are setting an example for the rest of us to speak up,  be heard,  be peaceful,  be resilient, and  take action before it is too late.

[tiozambia]

Climate change reality on hydropower: Zambia must innovate

…as a nation we cannot operate in a silo while the rest of the world innovates. The sun is still shining. It is time to mitigate and adapt.  By Eng Geoffrey Chishimba Chiyumbe Hydropower became an electricity source in the late 19th century, a few decades after British-American engineer James Francis developed the first modern water turbine. In 1882, the world's first hydroelectric power plant began operating in the United States of America along the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin. Today, hydropower and thermoelectric power make up 98 percent of the world's electricity generation. These two most common forms of power are also the most water-intensive, which makes them extremely vulnerable to drought, competition over water resources and other water shortages. Hydropower is the most dominant renewable and low carbon energy source generating about 16% of the total world electrical energy. Hydropower generates energy from water and so  any change in natural water circle caused by the climate change had and will have impact on the power generation (Dams convert falling water—mechanical energy— into electrical energy. Without water as in drought, there is no energy source to convert). The effect of climate change on hydropower is mostly influenced by the change of the river runoff. The change of precipitation and temperature are the most driving factors. Increase of the extreme climate events and enlarged erosion furthermore pressures the hydropower production. Increased temperature causes stronger water evaporation from the earth including from all water surfaces, streams, rivers and lakes. The evaporation reduces available river water, but at the same time more evaporated water origins in more precipitation. In 2016, the World Energy Council warned, "we will start to see the effects of water scarcity on energy supplies in the very near future." The effects are already starting to show, as evidenced by Kenya and India's droughts and subsequent power plant curtailments. This issue is not unique to one country or continent; power plants from Asia to Europe to Africa to the Americas are suffering due to water scarcity. It is a global problem. According to the World Preservation Foundation one third of the world’s major rivers and lakes are drying up, and the groundwater wells for 3 billion people are being affected. Assessing climate change impact studies conducted on the Zambezi River Basin, Dr. Richard Beilfuss, a professional hydrologist,   said the Zambezi is expected to experience “drier and more prolonged drought periods”. Over the next century, rainfall is expected to decrease by between 10 and 15 percent over the basin, according to several studies cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There will be a significant reduction in the amount of water flowing through the river system, affecting all eight countries it passes through. The water that feeds the river is expected to decrease by between 26 percent and 40 percent in another four decades, the study observed. In Zambia, we are still experiencing the ravaging and devastating effects of drought - Food production dropped, leaving millions of people without access to sufficient food. Some villagers have lost more than 50 percent of their livestock. Amidst the human tragedy of this drought, an unexpected actor faced impending shutdowns and economic losses due to water scarcity – the energy (electricity) sector. Indeed we see that the loss of rivers, lakes and underground water reserves are impacting the livelihoods of millions of people, hitting animals, farming and electricity production, as well as threatening to exacerbate climate change further through the release of CO2 and methane. Despite intense rainfall, world’s water supply is decreasing. Studies find that drying of soil due to rise in temperatures is not letting much water reach rivers and reservoirs. It is established that the main cause for the drying up of the lakes is drought caused by climate change impacting the inflow to the lake – resulting in significant reduction in water levels. Increased diversion for irrigated agriculture, the building of dams and reduced rainfall over the lake's surface, are also named as contributing factors. Cutting down of trees is also a problem causing the drying of soils in our catchments. Plants absorb water from the soil and evaporates it to form clouds. Deforestation leads to cutting down of trees and as a result less water is absorbed from the soil and this disturbs the water cycle. The formation of clouds becomes difficult which leads to reduced rainfall. Where once these were moist before a storm event allowing excess rainfall to run off into rivers—they are now drier and soak up more of the rain, so less water flows into our rivers. And drier soils means farmers need more water to grow the same crops. There is an undisputable evidence of ground water basins losing more water than being naturally replenished by rainfall. We have dry and diminished rivers all over Zambia that can be seen by many bridges constructed years ago after independence, to span a body of water underneath, today only service dry lands, where water once flowed. In 2014, while still working in South Africa, I read a disturbing report that Lake Mweru Wantipa, which was the main stay of the people of Kaputa and now Nsama district through fishing activities was drying at a very fast rate. I did my grade two education there at Kasongole primary school then, whilst under the guardianship of my maternal grandfather Dickson Chishimba, popularly known as Kapeyeye, who was the chief under Mukupa Katandula. Many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, but scientists prefer to use “climate change” when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems. Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events. In trying to harness the amazing power of moving water, we are confronted with increasing temperatures, lower water flow and alterations in the rainfall regime, factors which reduce total energy production from hydro power plants. So therefore with rising temperatures arising out of climate change, more water is evaporating from soils, in turn making the soil absorb more rainfall. Experts have wondered why despite the above studies and findings, Large dams are being built or proposed, typically without analysis of the risks from hydrological variability that are already a hallmark of African weather patterns, much less the medium- and long-term impacts expected from climate change. “None of these projects, current or proposed, has seriously incorporated considerations of climate change into project design or operation,” noted Dr. Richard Beilfuss. Dr.Beilfuss, including other experts, have suggested that countries in the sub-Sahara African region must focus on improving existing hydropower capacity rather than investing in new infrastructure. “Adding new or more efficient turbines is almost always much lower-impact than building new dams.” Countries should also consider alternative sources of energy generation. Would it then be reasonable and prudent in view of the above to continue as a nation,   investing heavily in new hydro power plants instead of investing in alternative sources such as solar? The bible has serious wisdom concerning this. Luke 14:28 - 30 says. “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?  For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘this person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ If today in 2019 we are unable to meet electricity demand due to low water levels in our main water reservoirs,  are we going to  have enough water then  to ‘fuel' the future hydropower plant  we are planning to heavily invest in today,  with an average life span of 50 to 100 years? We must avoid ridicule. We have suffered enough mockery as decision makers for failure to plan timeously with insight and foresight. We need to allocate time to consult exhaustively on serious matters that affect the nation, especially ones with large capital outlay requirements. There are sadly some leaders who have been resisting new technologies but insisting on hydropower for their relevance in the sector. We must face reality and put national interest ahead of self. In Bemba we say “Icabu chakale chilabunsha”(one can’t resist change lest you drown). It is time to metarmophosize into butterflies by introducing new renewable energy technologies and innovations. As a nation we cannot operate in a silo while the rest of the world innovates. The sun is still shining. It is time to mitigate and adapt. Generation mix is the future. Renewables future is feasible with currently available technologies, including wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, biomass power, geothermal, etc. The power plant of the future will be fully connected, more efficient, and operational more hours of the year. It will process more data, be more flexible, and still play a vital role in the future of the global energy mix. And Zambia will not be left lagging behind. The writer is a Zambian Professional Electrical Engineer, Energy Consultant and Project Management Specialist with over 23 years post qualifying practical experience attained from Zambia and South Africa and beyond. Chairman and Team Leader for Zambia Electricity Reforms Task Force 2017-2026. Currently as Country Director for Trans Africa Projects (TAP), a subsidiary for Eskom, a South African power utility. He can be contacted on mobile +260976840325 and email: chiyumbegc@gmail.com   Read the full article

[hellochaoticcollectortheori-blog]

Cu Chi Tunnels – a memorial place of Vietnam

According to The New York Times, Cu Chi Tunnels in Vietnam is one of the World’s coolest places in Southeast Asia. During Vietnam war, the suburban Cu Chi district of Ho Chi Minh city was the site of hundreds of these tunnels as a network of elaborate underground passageways to move supplies, communications centre, troops, equipment. Nowadays, Cu Chi Tunnels is the well-known underground destination must visit in Ho Chi Minh city.

1. Cu Chi Tunnels history in Vietnam War

Located around 43 miles northeast from downtown Ho Chi Minh City, the peaceful tunnels are preserved as a war memorial. This place is also one of Vietnam’s major tourist attraction.

Booby trap in Cu Chi Tunnels – a scary place

Back to the Vietnam War, the tunnels were built over a period of 30 years. In the late 1940s, it became one of the most famous war battlegrounds. As a result, the whole area became a “free-fire zone” and was carpet-bombed in one of many American “Scorched-earth” policies at that time. This underground maze played an important role in The Viet Cong’s resistance against the American forces. People literally squatted down and moved in in the dark and use very simple hand tools to dug for 30 years.

Meeting room, where Viet Cong Soldiers had discussions during the war

2. The structure of Cu Chi Tunnels

When you visit the tunnel system, you will understand how Cu Chi Tunnel Vietnam is very complex. They not just housed the factory workers assembling weapons and war equipment but also citizens as well. Other than that, the system stocked firearms, food and materials, smoke-free kitchens, hospital for wounded people, shelters for women, children and the elders. In some tunnels, entire villages could be found hiding. Within three layers of tunnels for its own manifest function, the tunnels played as the village under the ground.

Cu Chi Tunnels system

3. Main activities

If you are curious to see what underground life was in Cu Chi Tunnel Vietnam war and how to experience a Vietnamese soldier’s life. This place is a feature of Cu Chi where most of the historical stories happened during the war. You can crawl through some of safer areas of the tunnels, view command centers and booby trap. Other than that, one of the most interesting experiences is to try cassava served with sesame. You will see how dishes are made from the famous non-smoking Hoang Cam kitchen. It will be more tasty when you try cassava with a hot cup of tea. These are food and drink which Vietnamese soldiers used to have almost every day during the war.

At the end of the tour, if you have time and would like to have more outside experiences, there are some activities including shooting game, swimming, walking, cycling near the lake. In addition, if you want to get a bit more adventurous joy, there is also a firing range where you can shoot a famous AK-47 rifle, MK16 or other guys.

Cassava and sesame – popular dish in Cu Chi Tunnel

[johnsimon]

The area that is now known as Syracuse wasn’t much of anything more than two centuries ago, but that all changed in the early 1800s. It was inevitable to many, as the land was level, it was near numerous salt supplies, and it would be the perfect spot to connect the eastern and western parts of the state. John Wilkinson thought the village looked quite similar to a city over in Italy, so when it came time to name it in 1820, he gave it the same name. It was then that Syracuse was born, and it became a city once the village and the nearby village of Salina merged.

Hotels, shops, factories, and more appeared everywhere, and it continued to grow with the expansion of the railroad and canal system. The city grew, even more, when the industrial plants arrived, but things have evened out in recent years.

If you have never been to Syracuse before, you do not know what you are missing out on. There is so much to see and do in this magnificent city and you will have a fabulous time from the minute you arrive until it is time for you to leave.

You will want to consider staying at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown Hotel (100 East Onondaga Street, Syracuse, New York 13202) because it is rich in history. This hotel originally opened as the Hotel Syracuse in 1924, and while it has undergone some restoration and renovations before being reopened as a Marriott, you will find that it still has many historical components amongst the modern amenities. The rooms are so incredibly spacious yet cozy. The modern design and neutral color tones make the room feel like you’re in your dream home. I never wanted to leave.

You can begin your day with access to Breakfast in the M Club Lounge and later enjoy a delicious dinner at Eleven Waters, which is one of the on-site restaurants. This restaurant uses local ingredients and flavors and creates delectable dishes that you can enjoy in a modern but rustic setting.

Dinner at Eleven Waters

I started dinner with the Smokey Mozzarella Meatballs, which is a mix of Bacon Brisket, Tomato Cream, and Basil. The appetizer makes your mouth water as soon as they’re placed in front of you. They were prepared to perfection and recommended for sharing or if you are really hungry. The bacon brisket gives it a great kick in flavor. The meatballs are quite juicy and savory.

For the main course, I chose the Steak Frites with Au Poivré, served with an addictive Brandy Peppercorn Sauce. I remember going to bed after dinner, dreaming about how amazing this sauce was. My steak was served medium-well and paired nicely with a glass of Lamoreaux Landing Cabernet Franc, NY.

Marriott Syracuse Downtown Hotel also hosts other dining options like Shaughnessy’s pub, Barbershop Bar, Cavalier Room, and Cafe Kubal.

You will find that your options at Marriott Syracuse Downtown Hotel are endless, but you will feel right at home just like past guests that include John Kennedy, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Charles Lindbergh, Bob Hope, and more.

If you happen to be staying at the Marriott during Winterfest, you will be able to join in on the Ice Block Party with Fireworks! It is a family-friendly event that features food trucks, street game activities, and a DJ spinning music from all genres. Despite the freezing temperatures, I had the best time mingling with the locals and taking in the amazing view of the fireworks. Check out, syracusewinterfest.com for more information.

http://xojohn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/syracuse-winterfest-xojohn.com_.mp4

During your time in the city, you will want to spend some time in the Erie Canal Museum (318 Erie Blvd E, Syracuse, NY 13202) to learn more about the entire Barge Canal System. The permanent exhibits include the history and construction of the canal, a full-size replica of a line boat, a canal town, and murals.

Another excellent museum to visit is the Onondaga Historical Association Museum (321 Montgomery St, Syracuse, NY 13202). You will learn more about Onondaga County, the dinnerware that the Syracuse China company produced, and the Underground Railroad that went through the Syracuse region.

You might want to start one of your afternoons in the city with a stop at Anyela’s Vineyards (2433 W Lake Rd, Skaneateles, NY 13152). The Nocek family began their winemaking journey over in Eastern Europe three generations ago and now they produce their wines as they look out over Skaneateles Lake. You can take a stroll through their vineyards, meet their dog, Lexi, and taste test any of their delicious wines before buying a few bottles to take home. I highly recommend doing a wine tasting, for the ultimate experience. This way you can figure out which wines suit your taste buds and which ones you want to take home. Pricing for tastings is very affordable, starting at $5. Wine Tastings are first come, first serve, so get there early. One of my favorites was their signature 2016 Elation pinot noir.

If you are at a loss for things to do in the evening, you can always venture over to the DESTINY USA Mall (9090 Destiny USA Dr, Syracuse, NY 13204). It is the largest mall in the state with more than two hundred and fifty places to eat, shop, and be entertained. If you don’t feel like shopping, you can always take a spin on the indoor go-carts, Merry Go Round, or get physical in a game of laser tag or rope climbing. The mall is a great spot for groups or independent travelers. As large as it is, expect to spend a few hours there. After I was done shopping and taking in the sites, I ended my time at the movie theater.

There are plenty of restaurants to choose from in Syracuse, so you won’t need to worry about going hungry. However, you might be a little overwhelmed with all your choices.

Glazed and Confused (211 N Clinton St, Syracuse, NY 13204) is the place to go if you are craving a donut of the unusual kind. The donuts at this shop are made in small batches, so they are always fresh and tasty. You can always order the basic vanilla cake or cinnamon and sugar varieties, but why do that when you can order one like holy cannoli, pardon my French toast, and no sleep till Brooklyn. They even have doninis, which are flat like paninis and served on top of a classic cake donut. My personal favorite is the Dizzy Pig (a maple glazed, bourbon, sugar, candied locally cured bacon donut). SO GOOD!

Modern Malt (325 S Clinton St, Syracuse, NY 13202) is a classic American Diner that can be found in the historic Armory Square neighborhood and they serve everything from breakfast to sandwiches and burgers to dinners. They are definitely the place to go if you want good food in an amazing atmosphere. I couldn’t resist the Lobster Benedict (Butter poached lobster, chive biscuit, arugula, poached eggs, hollandaise, chive). I washed this delicious meal down with hearty Bloody Mary. Modern Malt was pretty when I visited on a Saturday morning, so get there early.

The original Dinosaur Bar-B-Que (246 W Willow St, Syracuse, NY 13202) opened its doors in Syracuse in 1988 after spending five years on the road serving food at fairs and festivals. They began as a quick lunch and dinner bar-b-que place, but within two years, expanded to add a full bar, full-service dining, and live music. They now have eight other locations throughout the Northeast, but this original serves the best bar-b-que around. You don’t go to Dino’s for a dainty salad, you go to pig out. That’s what I did and I have no regrets! I settled for a combination platter with St Louis Ribs, Pulled Pork, and BBQ Brisket. The only word to describe my experience is magical. The OG location was ridiculously busy on a Saturday night, so expect a bit of a wait.

The Mission Restaurant (304 E Onondaga St, Syracuse, NY 13202) is in the Old Syracuse Wesleyan Methodist Church that was built in the 1840s. That church played a vital role in the Underground Railroad, and while that history has been carefully preserved underneath, the restaurant serves hungry customers above. The restaurant uses local products and everything is made from scratch, all day, every day, when possible. The menu features Pan-American cuisine, which is a combination of Mexican, Southwestern, and South American specialties that all include Latino ingredients.

A stop at Al’s Wine and Whiskey Lounge (321 S Clinton St, Syracuse, NY 13202) is the perfect way to end an evening in Syracuse. This is a premier bar in the city and they serve a large selection of wine and whiskey from all over the world. If you prefer beer, then you can choose from any of their craft beers as well. The nights are always full of live music, friendly games of pool, and whatever other games people are playing that evening. I was overwhelmed (in a good way) by the many bar options. I’m sure you hear “there is something for everyone” often but this time, it actually true! Locals love to hang here and catch up after a long day at work or to unwind on the weekends.

Syracuse is a wonderful town that has been around for a long time and has seen many changes. However, the city is always ready to welcome a newcomer like yourself and make sure that you have a fabulous time while you are there!

While visiting Syracuse and the numerous historical sites, I wondered if there were any haunted history or trails, and there were plenty. Just in time for Halloween, visitors can check out these local spots for a spooky good time. Starting with a site I mentioned earlier, the Erie Canal Museum. At the Museum, paranormal investigations, ghost hunts and guided haunted history tours (10-60 participants) are available by reservation. Docent-led history tours include the recounting of paranormal activity that occurs. The facility can be rented for private events. Erie Canal history tours are also available daily.

Erie Canal Museum. Photo by Amityphotos.com.

Other locations include:

The Landmark Theatre – The historic theatre, built in 1928, has had people talking of hauntings just years after it opened. After falling from a balcony to her death in 1930, Clarissa’s spirit has been haunting The Landmark. She often appears as a pale apparition in a white dress at unexpected times to workers and guests – especially those not following the theater’s rules.

Opportunity: The theatre hosts a ghost hunt each October. Guided tours (of any size) by reservation; guided psychic tours (up to 20 participants) also available.

Landmark Theatre. Photo by Amityphotos.com.

Wayside Irish Pub – The original building or “Munro House” was built in the 1800s – and reports of ghostly activity date back to the 1960s. There have been numerous reports of the apparition “Sara,” believed to be the young girl who hung herself on the third floor. Poltergeist-like activity is attributed to a friendly ghost named Harry. Other spirits include the Inn’s original owner, Squire Munro, and an unknown traveler who died in the building. Reports from employees and patrons tell of a male figure dressed in a soldier uniform, and shadowy figures in the basement. Patrons and bartenders have felt “touches”, “pokes”, and “cold” spots, and it’s not unusual to have a female patron complain of having her hair tugged on with no one around her. Glasses fly off the bar without explanation, pictures drop off the walls, and an orb may show up in photos taken on-site.

Opportunity: Sip on a favorite beverage, enjoy delicious pub fare, ask the friendly staff about their haunted history. Stay a while and have your own haunted experience. Professional paranormal investigations are allowed by appointment, with management approval.

Wayside Irish Pub. Photo by Amityphotos.com.

13 Curves on Onondaga Hill – Over 60 years ago, a brutal, terrifying car accident occurred on Cedarvale Road, just 10 miles southwest of Syracuse. Since that fateful day, it has been said that the road, which is known better by its nickname, “13 Curves,” has been haunted by the souls of those who died in this tragic accident.

Opportunity: Take a beautiful and scenic drive along 13 Curves – a long, winding stretch also known as Cedarvale Road just west of the city of Syracuse – it’s a hotbed for paranormal activity.

Split Rock Quarry – Split Rock, a hazardous munitions plant, unexpectedly exploded in 1918, brutally killing more than 50 men. Today, the Quarry is nothing but rock with an old piece of machinery left called the Crusher. Visitors have reported the sound of footsteps, voices in the distance, and the revving of the Crusher’s engine—which hasn’t run since the horrific blast.

Opportunity: Investigate the ruins of Split Rock on your own. Snowshoe, hike, and bike the former factory site, explore the abandoned tunnels and experience the cold spots firsthand. BE SAFE: Quarry is an abandoned location in the woods. It is highly encouraged that you do not venture in alone and that any visit is at your own risk. Appropriate footwear is highly recommended.

We hope to catch you in Syracuse in the very near future! Check out the gallery below for more personal photos from my trip to Syracuse.

Your Guide To Experiencing Hospitality, Good Eats, and Historical Sites in Syracuse, NY The area that is now known as Syracuse wasn’t much of anything more than two centuries ago, but that all changed in the early 1800s.