TERRY: I kept holding him back and he kept looking at me and, when that happened, I put my head on his shoulder and said, “Okay, now it’s no longer a funeral, it’s time to leave.”
It was too much even for her. I took Terry’s hand and said, “Let’s go.” I think Senator Lott had already left. A bunch of us evacuated pretty fast. We took a great deal of heat from the Democrats and their staunchest supporters, like Franken, for doing this. I respect Paul Wellstone, I think he accomplished some terrific things and fought for a lot of great causes. But for his fellow Democrats to stand up there at a memorial service and tell people not to vote their conscience? That really crossed the line. I felt used, violated, and duped.
I had the option to pick a replacement senator to serve out the remainder of Wellstone’s term through January 2003. And I went so far as to declare that I’d accept resumés for the position from everyone except Democrats. Privately, I was planning to appoint whoever won Wellstone’s seat on election day. They’d get to Washington ahead of all the other rookies, which would give them seniority. When the winner turned out to be Norm Coleman, the Republican mayor of St. Paul, whom I’d defeated for governor, this would still have been fine with me.
The reason I changed my mind was because, when a debate was held between Coleman and Mondale shortly before the election, they wouldn’t allow Jim Moore of the Independence Party to participate. Moore was the candidate from the governor’s party, which was obviously as much a major party as the other two. So I said to myself, “That’s how they want to play? Well, then watch and see what I’m going to do.”
Headline: MINNESOTA GOVERNOR APPOINTS SENATOR
As if the 107th Congress had not been sufficiently unpredictable, Gov. Jesse Ventura confounded its final days today with his appointment of an independent interim senator who refused to say whether he would vote with Republicans or Democrats....
“I know where the Capitol is,” Mr. Barkley said. “So I know where to tell the cabdriver to take me.”
Asked what he would do in the Senate, he said, “As much mischief as I can.”
—The New York Times, November 5, 2002
On the day before the 2002 elections, I appointed my state planning commissioner, Dean Barkley of Minnesota’s Independence Party to complete the remaining two months of Wellstone’s Senate term. The Democrats and Republicans hollered that I’d finally appointed a crony. But I had good reasons. Dean had run for Congress in the past, so it wasn’t a case of my sending someone to Washington who had no experience. He’s the man who got me excited about third-party politics in the first place. Now I had appointed an independent U.S. Senator!
Dean came to me and said, “What do you want me to do?” Normally I would have replied, “Be the independent, don’t play their game.” Had he been going into the Senate for six years, I would never have given him any other advice. But in this instance, for a brief moment in time, Dean would be the swing vote in a Senate that was deadlocked 50-50. Whichever party could sway Dean to their side would prevail. So I wanted him to go to Washington and prove how an independent could bring home the bacon for Minnesota.
So I said, “Play the game, Dean. Get the pork. We need some things done for the people of the state. So get everything you can in exchange for your vote.” That’s just what he did, on a health care reimbursement that had been languishing for several years, and some other things.
Health care is something you think about driving in Baja. I only drive by day, because the two-lane highway is so narrow. There are no shoulders on parts of it, and often you’ve got semis coming right at you. Lots of times the curves aren’t well marked and, should you go airborne, the landings would tend to be very quick and very fast. It’s actually a death-defying experience.
An eerie feeling comes from seeing all of the religious monuments along the side of the road, sometimes as many as three or four to a mile. “Terry, do you think all of these mark places where drivers have had a fatal accident?” I wonder aloud. “You start looking at them all and think, God, I’d be safer driving the triangle in Baghdad! How can there be any population left?!”
Later, we come to learn that, while some of the monuments do indicate a person died there, the majority are simply how the Mexican people honor their dead. Toward dusk, many times they are lit with candles. Yet neither Terry nor I have ever once seen anyone lighting them. We know that families must tend these little sacred spaces—but how? When?
I tell Terry that my goal is to continue driving the Baja until we finally see a burning monument with someone standing beside it.
It’s at Santa Rosalía where the winding Highway 1 finishes its nearly 130-mile journey from the Pacific coast over to the Sea of Cortez side. In San Ignacio, due to the missions, the architecture has a strong Spanish flavor. But when you start down the narrow streets of Santa Rosalía, you’re surprised to see all these French colonial-style houses with the wood frames and the long verandas. There’s even a French bakery. And a church that was designed by the French architect Eiffel himself—the same man the Eiffel Tower is named after! Turns out the church, made from prefab iron panels, was originally shown off by Eiffel as a model for inexpensive, ready-made mission churches. It was shipped in sections to Santa Rosalía, from a warehouse in Belgium, and reassembled here toward the end of the nineteenth century.
All this French influence comes from the fact that a French mining company bought the mineral rights to this area in 1885 after huge copper deposits were discovered nearby. They ended up bringing in a copper-smelting foundry by ship, building an eighteen-mile-long railway, and more than 375 miles of mine tunnels. Not to mention a labor force of Yaquí Amerindians and a couple thousand Chinese and Japanese who were told they’d be able to plant rice. (They nearly all left when they found out that rice wouldn’t grow in central Baja.)
Anyway, the French smelting went on into the mid-1950s, when the company sold all the facilities to the Mexican government. Driving through Santa Rosalía today, you still see the old mining locomotives all repainted and looking like monuments, amid the rusting smokestacks and abandoned warehouses.
It’s like much else you encounter in Baja—always the unexpected. Our next port of call will prove no disappointment along those lines.
CHAPTER 11
In the Eye of the Hurricane
“The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened aren’t talking, and the people who don’t, you can’t shut ’em up.”
—Tom Waits
We’ve been looking forward to seeing Mulegé. It is said to be a charming small town right on the Sea of Cortez, filled with palm, mango and banana trees, a mountain range on the horizon, and the desert on both sides. We’ll find scuba centers, and kayaks, windsurfers, and mountain bikes to rent. I was really starting to miss my wave runners.
Reading Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez as we approach, Terry comes to a passage describing how his crew had bypassed Mulegé because they’d heard that “there may be malaria there” and “the port charges are mischievous and ruinous.” Maybe we should take that as an omen.
Mulegé is built around a wide arroyo formed by a river that feeds into the Sea of Cortez. So it has an abundance of water, which makes it an ideal place to grow figs, dates, and other crops. As we are about to learn, though, all that water can be a curse as well as a blessing.
Driving through Mulegé almost makes us physically sick. A couple of months earlier, Hurricane John devastated the little town. About a thousand homes, among a population of only 3,000, have been wiped out. An incredible deluge—twenty-five inches of rain inside of twenty-four hours—poured down from the mountains into the valley. The river rose fifteen feet and flooded pretty much everything and swept it out to sea. Not only did the storm flood the roads but it picked up jeeps as if they were toy cars. It collapsed sturdy brick walls, and left houses in pieces. Now most of the people are living in a tent city while they set out to rebuild. Because the sewer systems are da
maged, there is still a threat of diseases like cholera, hepatitis, and dengue.
We find out all this at a gas station from an American who brought down a truckload of supplies to help the people. “But I thought hurricanes like this didn’t usually hit the Baja,” I say. The man shakes his head. “Used to be true,” he tells me. “But this year, there were three of them, although not as bad as the one that hit Mulegé. The weather’s changing. You can’t depend on anything anymore.”
Mulegé is the Baja’s version, on a small scale, of New Orleans after Katrina. It’s a known scientific fact that ocean heat is the main ingredient for forming hurricanes. A new study recently came out showing that hurricanes and typhoons have gotten stronger and longer lasting over the past thirty years, by a factor of about 50 percent! This can be traced directly to a rise in the sea surface temperatures. And that, of course, is all about global warming.
Terry and I had put off seeing Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, for a while. To be truthful, like a lot of Americans, I was living in some denial about the consequences of global warming. I didn’t want to know how bad it might really be. When we finally watched the film, it was every bit as grim a scenario as we’d imagined. The earth’s climate is close to a tipping point, about to become warmer than it’s been in a million years. Temperatures are going up steadily, the glaciers and polar icecaps are melting, the sea levels are rising. And our kids are looking at a very scary future.
Al Gore doesn’t think it’s too late. The United States, with all the fossil fuel we burn in our cars, offices, and homes, sends more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country. Gore says we need to impose an immediate “carbon freeze” on our emissions and, by 2050, reduce these emissions by 90 percent. That obviously means moving to many forms of alternative energy. We also need a carbon tax, and could put aside a portion of revenues from it to help low-income people meet the challenge. We can’t build any more coal-fired power plants, and we need to ban incandescent light bulbs and switch over to fluorescent.
After seeing Gore’s film, and then the human tragedy of Mulegé, I’ve become a staunch advocate of doing my part to help slow down global warming. For one thing, I would highly recommend that all new homes, no matter where they are, have included in the mortgage a type of solar-power system that at least works as an auxiliary.
And here’s something I would come to find out from a solar expert in Mexico: When we aren’t watching our televisions, if we would simply unplug them, there would be no energy shortage in the U.S. We have about 220 million television sets. All of them use stand-by power. But have you ever had a manufacturer tell you that, even if you’re using the remote to turn them off, they’re still using units of power and draining energy?
When I started unplugging all three of my TV sets, I watched my power usage drop by an amp and a half. I was amazed. Before you push the “on” button, all that’s required is a few seconds to walk over and plug in the TV. By the time you’ve gone back to your chair, it will have warmed up enough to have your picture. Think of how much energy this small gesture could be saving! (Plus, you could have some fun with it. Remember the movie Network? Before shutting your TV down for the night, switch over to Fox News and shout out, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”) The fact is, if all the televisions in America were unplugged for eight hours a day, the energy savings would be more than 3,800 gigawatt-hours.
The Bush administration would rather keep its head buried in the sand and keep subsidizing its friends in the oil, gas, and coal industries. They’ll stop at nothing to downplay the impacts of global warming. When a study came out saying that polar bears are endangered because the sea ice they depend on is disappearing, the White House insisted this has nothing to do with a changing climate. The U.S. negotiators managed to get rid of language in a recent United Nations report that called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. This administration’s policy on global warming is: Don’t talk about it.
The environment isn’t the only area that the federal government is suppressing or manipulating information about. It’s happening with prescription drugs and public safety. Nearly two thousand scientists trying to do their jobs researching air quality and other health issues said in a survey they face “an epidemic of interference.” What ever happened to the public’s right to know?
Mum’s the word, I guess. Ignore problems and they’ll go away, and we can go on with business as usual. Of course, when the government spreads lies to justify invading a country—in order to get more oil and gas to pump into the atmosphere—what else can you expect? I know where the buck stops: at the door to the White House. I just wonder how far the deceit might go.
Seeing what happened to a place like Mulegé brings Terry and me back, in memory, to another tragedy. The one that occurred when I was governor: September 11, 2001, the day the Twin Towers came down in New York.
I remember it was a warm, clear day at the State Capitol. Within an hour of the attacks, I ordered the opening of Minnesota’s Emergency Operations Center in downtown St. Paul. It’s been used in the past as a command center, generally for severe weather events. At 10:30 that morning, I arrived with my commissioner of public safety, Charlie Weaver, to brief the media. I told them I’d put the National Guard on alert, and secured some public buildings in the Twin Cities.
I said, “The tragic events of this day are staggering to the sense of security, peace, and calm that we in Minnesota and the United States are used to in our daily lives. This is a time of great shock, great sorrow, and great concern, but this is a time we must be confident that we can meet the very difficult challenges put forth by these senseless and tragic acts.”
It was the primary election day, and I wasn’t about to call it off. We weren’t going to panic. Now, more than ever, I felt, was the time to show the power of democracy.
Sometime within the first six hours, I also called the CIA guy who’s based in the region. As governor, I was commander in chief of the Minnesota National Guard. I needed to know if the CIA had any “intel” as to whether Minnesota was a target. Could we be hit? What should we be doing? He told me, “We know nothing more than you do right now.” Months later, when I ran into him, he said, “You were the only governor that bothered to call me that day.”
We were the first state to hold an official memorial, after 9/11, that next Sunday morning. I give credit to Senator Coleman, who thought of it first. He called me and said, “Let’s have a memorial at the Xcel Energy Building in St. Paul.” I said, “No, let’s do it outside, on the front lawn of the Capitol, because a building won’t hold enough people.” I ordered my staff to begin organizing what we called “Minnesota Remembers: A Memorial from the Heartland.”
It was heart-rending. The crowd exceeded all expectations, even with a drizzling rain falling. Over forty thousand people showed up, every kind of person you could imagine. We had Native Americans there, medicine men pounding drums, right alongside honor guards who represented the policemen and firefighters and military. It showed that, at heart, we were all one. It still chokes me up to think about it.
The ceremony went on for more than two hours and I was the last one to speak. I remember I had on a leather National Guard bomber jacket. I looked out upon hundreds of flags fluttering in the breeze, and dozens of people embracing each other. I told them, “I stand here today humbled but comforted by your presence. That’s what family is for, to share with each other the hurt, the sorrow, and the sadness.
“We will overcome this tragic moment,” I continued. “We must and we will move forward. We will move forward in fairness. We will live together with tolerance. We will extend our hands to the people of the world in solidarity and unity. We will pit honor against dishonor. We will promote good against evil. And finally, we will together restore our sense of freedom by conquering this enemy! We will do all of this and we will not fail!”
We also passed out three-by-five condolence cards, and asked people at the me
morial service to write whatever they wished on them. Terry and I would then personally deliver these to the citizens of New York. We brought the cards with us when Governor Pataki took us down to Ground Zero.
This was almost three weeks after it happened. The smoke was still billowing from the wreckage. Governor Pataki told me, “You’ll see steel I-beams three or four blocks away, mostly from when the planes actually hit.” He went on, saying that everything from the Hudson to the East River was covered with several inches of dust for the first few days. Everything. The ground, all the plants and trees, all the buildings. It was as if you were walking on the moon.
When we got our first look at the devastation, Terry was overcome. I walked over and put my arm around her. They found the bodies of several firefighters in the debris that day. Every time that happened, all the clean-up work would come to a halt and everybody there would stand in silence while the firefighters carried out the body on a stretcher under an American flag.
TERRY: The first thing I noticed was that the streets of New York were deserted. There were sometimes two or three people at a time; it wasn’t like before. The closer we got to Ground Zero, it was weird, there was almost like a thing in the air—you started feeling very afraid and very sad, at the same time. When I saw the devastation, I could not comprehend: Why would anyone want to inflict this kind of damage on someone else? What kind of hatred could the hijackers possibly have, to give their own lives to kill other people like that? And innocent people . . .
Later in the year, Terry went back to Ground Zero on her own. She worked there for ten days, for the Salvation Army. We kept this very quiet, the Minnesota media never learned of it. The people she was working for didn’t know who she was. She was Terry from Minnesota.
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 20