by Renee Rodin
I walk along the beach, lost in the propaganda of the picturesque. When I first came to Vancouver I never saw homeless people, nor anyone asking for money on the street or visibly helpless. There was only the Umbrella Lady at the corner of Granville and Georgia, her umbrella held high above her in all kinds of weather. Neck craned, face beseeching the sky, it was as if at any minute she might lift off and fly.
If she were here today, I might join her.
* How to Grow Rocambole Garlic on the West Coast
(Adjust for your growing zone)
– Plant in a sunny spot in the fall before hard frosts.
– Use rich, well-drained soil and dig well.
– Separate cloves of seed garlic but don’t skin them, the largest cloves will produce the largest bulbs.
– Set each clove pointed side up with the tip about two inches deep in soil and about four inches apart from each other.
– Fertilize when spring growth starts, water as needed and keep weeded.
– In June, cut curling ends off shoots to keep energy in bulbs.
– Water lightly or not at all from this point on.
– Pull up towards end of July or when tops begin to brown.
– Air-dry like onions for about three weeks. Save some cloves to replant the following year.
Time Top
When my friend, Canadian artist Jerry Pethick was a little boy in London, Ontario, he loved reading Brick Bradford cartoon strips in the newspapers. One particular image stayed in his mind; as he looked through the archway cut between the living and dining rooms of his house he imagined himself in Bradford’s Time Top, spinning into the future and the past, bringing home artifacts.
Influenced by that memory in 2000, Jerry, then in his early sixties, had the idea to make a Time Top and in 2003 he received a public art commission from Concord Pacific, a Vancouver developer. Sadly, soon after he was awarded this grant, Jerry died of cancer. Margaret, his wife, decided to take over the contract and see the piece through to its completion.
Using Jerry’s detailed instructions, moulds were made to be cast in bronze at a foundry on the Sunshine Coast. Margaret said watching the workers in their gauntlets, coveralls and masks by the oven flames, she felt as if she were thrust back into the twelfth century. The Time Top was then submerged underwater at a nearby marina in Gibsons for the process of accretion to occur. A low electrical charge was put through it constantly in order to attract barnacles, mussels and minerals to adhere to its surface. As Jerry had envisioned it, the Time Top would look like a relic from the sea and, because it was to be installed permanently outdoors and exposed to wind, rain and birds, its appearance would always be in flux. After a two-year period of accretion the Time Top was deemed ready to be hauled up.
The tides on August 2, 2006 were high enough that the Time Top could be towed on a barge to Vancouver., where it would be installed on the shores of False Creek. Friends of the Pethicks and others involved in the project, as well as locals from Gibsons, were gathered at the marina early in the morning just after sunrise. As it was slowly hoisted up by a crane we were all on tenterhooks wondering what the Time Top would look like. It came up perfectly intact, covered in a patina of marine life and transformed by a delicate mottled beauty that only nature could have created. It was then positioned onto a barge to be pulled down Burrard Inlet.
On a boat accompanying the barge were Margaret and Jerry’s son, Yana, and his young family, and others who had been at the marina. The captain of the boat was also a jazz festival organizer and his partner, who catered the affair, was a professional clairvoyant. The sun was bright, the music mellow, it was a magical ride across the water which culminated four hours later as we sailed under Vancouver’s Granville and Burrard Street Bridges. We were a flotilla arriving home in triumph with our treasure.
On the banks of Yaletown to welcome us with enthusiastic waves and hearty cheers were several other friends of the Pethicks, people from the arts community, as well as the public. With bated breath we watched as the crane gradually lowered the Time Top on to its relatively tiny pins. Everything had to fit down to the inch and it did. Then its crowning glory, a clear transparent dome, was placed on its very top. The Time Top was home.
We celebrated by feasting on food Margaret had bought from a nearby gourmet deli and that evening we reboarded the boat to sail into the middle of English Bay for the August fireworks. The installation of the Time Top had been spectacular, but it was exciting to be so close to the constellations of colours exploding in the sky and great fun to be around the many awestruck kids on board.
It had been a long day and night. The captain had been letting people off at various spots in the city and by the time the last of us arrived in Kitsilano we were a motley crew of some twenty adults with half a dozen children in tow, all exhausted and in need of our beds. We trudged up from the shore lugging bags dripping with hummus and tzatziki and suddenly found ourselves at a yacht club in the middle of a chichi cocktail party.
The agitated manager of the club charged over to us, shooing us with his hands, as if we were diseased pigeons. He yelled, “Go back to where you came from, you can’t be here.” Margaret gathered herself up as imperiously as the situation demanded and declared, “We will not go back to where we came from.” And on we marched through the martini-sipping crowd up to Point Grey Road where there were terrific traffic jams because of the fireworks. But everybody managed to catch a bus or taxi to their homes or to wherever they were staying that night. There were many out-of-towners.
Margaret was staying at my place just a few blocks away from where we’d disembarked and we laughed as we walked home about the preposterous incident. Jerry had made public art to be seen freely by land and sea. We had landed on the shore of a natural body of water which is supposed to be public and been told we were on private property.
The next day we went to Coopers Park, west of the Cambie Street Bridge, to see the Time Top. You come upon it on foot by rounding a corner and there it is, a happy surprise awaiting you. Because of the accretion, the Time Top looks like an ancient artifact. Due to its shape, resembling a light bulb sitting on three legs, it also looks gently alien, perhaps a space ship that beckons to you in a friendly way.
We sat for a while on a nearby bench and noticed the reactions of the passersby. Older adults got a kick out of it because they recognized the image from their comic strip reading days. Children immediately wanted to clamber on it to play. All seemed amused and bemused by this new/old feature that had appeared on the shore.
Jerry had been a larger-than-life figure and his absence has left a huge hole in the universe. When we climbed down the rocks onto the beach to touch it, Margaret knelt right into the Time Top, peeked up through it and said, “I can see the sky.”
Googling the Bardo
In 2002, Noah Meyer, my son, gave up his job as a Manhattan computer programmer to live on the beach in rural Phuket, Thailand. There he met and fell in love with Chompoonut (Jeab) Kobram, who had moved to the more prosperous south from her home in Buriram, Thailand, the most depressed part of the country.
Jeab had a daughter by a European man who’d returned to his homeland without acknowledging paternity. As is common in Thailand, a country high in poverty and low in prospects, Jeab left her baby, Cherie, with her parents in order to find work. After rigorous training, Jeab became a certified scuba-dive master, a good job in Thailand, where aging parents depend on their grown children for support. Noah adored Cherie, whom he got to know through visits, and intended to adopt her.
Jeab and Noah had been living together for almost two years and were engaged to be married, when her former boyfriend, Sam Van Treeck, a Belgian ex-pat, reconnected with her. Van Treeck and she had split up before she met Noah, whom she told, “I’m glad he no longer hates me.” Van Treeck was phoning mainly for advice. Jeab said Van Treeck was having trouble with his wife, a woman from Laos.
Jeab’s scuba-diving diploma arrived in the mail in
June 2004 while she was away on a trip. In the middle of the afternoon on June 25, she phoned to tell Noah she was returning home the next day. He was to call her early that evening to make arrangements to pick her up either at the bus station or the airport. His next calls to her cellphone went unanswered and he spent a frantic night trying to reach her by phone and email.
The following day, Jeab’s uncle came from Bangkok with the newspaper; Noah saw Jeab’s lifeless, semi-nude body sprawled out in a photo on the front page. She was in Van Treeck’s condo in Pattaya. Police estimated that she was killed soon after she and Noah had last talked. Though the article reported forty-eight wounds, we were to learn from the autopsy that she had been stabbed 134 times, her throat had been slashed, and there were signs that she had been tortured.
Newspapers reported that nothing had been stolen from the apartment and that police believed the murder was not the result of a robbery gone bad, but was more likely a murder committed during a fit of rage. It appeared that Jeab had fought her attacker; hair found on her hands and blood and tissue from under her fingernails were sent for forensic testing. Newspapers also reported that a building security video showed that Van Treeck was in the apartment building at the time of the murder and that this information had been confirmed by witnesses.
A few days later, Van Treeck was arrested as the prime suspect. He said that he discovered Jeab’s body once he got home from his job as a tourist guide. He maintained his innocence, but police remanded him in custody to face charges of murder.
Later, in July, while Noah was staying with me at my home in Vancouver, we heard that after Van Treeck had spent seventeen days in jail, the Belgian embassy in Bangkok helped him make bail. We read in a Thai newspaper that Van Treeck’s father Marc, a well-known Belgian musician, had made a champagne toast to his son’s freedom and declared, “The bail proves he’s innocent.”
Then I received a private phone call from a case manager for Asia at Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. She said she thought that Van Treeck would be allowed to escape the country because such is the privilege of Western murderers of Thai women. Thailand has never been occupied, but it has been colonized by the West, upon which it is dependent for tourism. She said our only hope was to get as much media attention as possible, because it would bounce back to Thailand and might embarrass the government into detaining Van Treeck. Before Jeab’s death and since, newspapers have reported incidents of Western men finding ways of leaving Thailand after being accused of killing Thai women.
My main concern was for my son, who was focused but traumatized. Even so, Noah continued to work hard to bring attention to the case. But with the call from Ottawa I suddenly felt that I needed to get involved.
We were grateful for immediate coverage by Vancouver’s weekly Georgia Straight and soon afterward by the Asian Pacific Post. But all other media I approached were indifferent to what they construed as a “Third World story.”
There had already been a lot of publicity in Thailand. Jeab was beautiful and the murder sensational. Jeab’s mother, Sa-nga Phanbuatong, told the Bangkok Nation that Van Treeck had been asking her daughter to get back together with him. “Chompoonut turned him down as she was in a new relationship. My daughter said that he was very upset about the refusal and he had tried many times for reconciliation. I think Sam Van Treeck might be the person who killed my daughter out of jealousy and anger as my daughter did not want to get back together with him.”
Jeab’s family, impoverished rice farmers, has neither resources nor voice in their own country; they considered Noah their son-in-law and relied on him to obtain justice for their daughter.
My family is Canadian, so I appealed to authorities in Canada, as well as those in Thailand and Belgium, to have Van Treeck put on the Interpol list to stop him if he tried to cross a border. Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs responded with platitudes and the statement that it was “a private matter between a Belgian and a Thai citizen”—as if Jeab were alive to sue Van Treeck. The Belgian consul sent me an email warning me not to talk with the press.
In the fall, just before evidence in the case was to be presented in a Thai court, Van Treeck fled to Belgium. A major trading partner, Belgium has a one-way extradition treaty with Thailand; they can have criminals returned to them, but they never send their own citizens back to Thailand.
As far as I know, except for the Phuket Gazette and Pattaya News, no Thai press covered Van Treeck’s escape or its aftermath. A warrant effective for twenty years was issued for his arrest, but it is only good if he returns to Thailand. A series of hearings was held without him.
In Canada the Asian Pacific Post published another large article, which was followed eventually by an extensive feature (“Justice Delayed, Justice Denied”) in the Vancouver Courier. With the silence by all other media in Canada and the censorship in Thailand, the media in Belgium made do with Van Treeck’s side of the story.
Van Treeck’s parents organized a press scrum and a hero’s welcome for their son’s arrival at a Belgian airport. For weeks he was on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines, boasting about having survived seventeen days in a Thai jail. Van Treeck never said how he had left the country, but he did thank the Belgian embassy in Bangkok for support. Thai papers said his passport remained in the possession of the Thai government.
One of the many Belgian journalists who wrote about him called me to say Van Treeck had brought his Laotian wife to Belgium to appear as a “good family man” for the media. Some newspapers reported that Van Treeck’s wife had arrived in Belgium a week before he did.
In November, his family held a benefit, raising over 75,000 euros, during which Van Treeck announced, “Everything is for sale in Thailand. I’ll use the money to pay back my bribes for escaping.” Around the same time, he sent Noah an email advising him to “keep looking for Jeab’s killer, he’s out there.”
Several Canadian lawyers told me about the complications of international law. In the end it seemed that our only recourse would be to sue Van Treeck for “wrongful death” and that would mean hiring a lawyer and paying for a trip to Thailand to investigate. It was all prohibitively expensive.
When, in November 2006, two and a half years after Jeab’s murder, Thailand sent evidence and transcripts to Belgium and petitioned them to prosecute Van Treeck, a Belgian journalist called me to say, “Until now we were sure Van Treeck was innocent because naturally we stand up for our own.” Belgium accepted the Thai petition and agreed to prosecute, but Van Treeck remained free.
The more time went by, the more muddled things seemed.
As reported by Tom Sandborn in the Vancouver Courier, “Even setting aside the intricacies of bail procedures and extradition treaties, the murder of Kobram is surrounded by puzzles. Early press coverage from Pattaya indicated that the police had a wealth of forensic evidence, including blood, fingerprints, hair and tissue. But as early as September, stories about the case featured police spokesmen refusing to comment on the forensic evidence, and more recent stories suggest the evidence was inconclusive.”
Jeab had lived to be twenty-three but it is as if she never existed. If demographics are destiny, Jeab was devalued to nothing because she was a woman of colour with no money and no power. Her erasure was not an isolated incident. All over the world more women die due to domestic violence than war. Countless women have been killed. Countless numbers of their murderers have gone free.
In December 2005, a British tourist, Katherine Horton, was murdered in Thailand. To avoid discouraging tourism, Thai authorities apprehended, tried and convicted her killers in under a month and the news was publicized internationally.
In the summer of 2006 another Thai woman was killed. Her accused British boyfriend was given bail and went on the lam. There was little publicity. The only difference between him and Van Treeck is that no one knows where the British boyfriend is.
Jeab’s death no longer defines my life. But it is as close as yesterday when something triggers
me into thinking about it. No amount of scar tissue can cover my anguish about her terrible death, or my anger about the grinding injustice that followed.
No amount of time can eradicate my anxiety. Such evil does not fade away. It is hard to let go of expectations of justice, of any kind of justice. It is hard to get to grief.
§
The news spread through me sickeningly. Noah was on the phone, telling me in a voice so flat it was airless that his fiancée had been stabbed to death. “No,” I shrieked, but then gathered myself up to concentrate on my son, who told me “I’m sleeping like a baby,” and I knew he was in deep shock.
He didn’t want me to go there. He’d be home in a couple of weeks, after organizing a memorial for Jeab and a trust fund for her daughter, Cherie. Schools are free in Thailand but uniforms and books are not. Her future was now his focus.
I’d recently spent a month with Noah and Jeab in Thailand. She was strong, proud, a feminist, exceedingly bright and very attractive. People gravitated toward her.
Before going on the trip I had experienced inexplicable dread. I’d had to take anti-anxiety medication just to get on the plane, and needed it the whole time I was there. The dose, enough to topple an elephant, only took the edge off, and even after I returned I remained afraid but didn’t know why. As soon as I found out about Jeab, I stopped taking the pills; they had prevented nothing.
Violence is the spine of news—the Montreal Massacre, Vancouver’s Missing Women, BC’s Highway of Tears. It has surrounded me, swarmed me, in movies, books and songs, but this was a direct hit. A thousand times I had heard the story of possession and destruction in the name of love, of a man destroying a woman rather than letting her go. Yet this was the first time I was really hearing it. It was unreal, unimaginable.